Bjorn
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Posts posted by Bjorn
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We finished Penny Dreadful this evening, and that is a weird show that I both loved and at times disliked so much as to make me want to stop watching it entirely. But ultimately finished it because what it does well, it does so wonderfully well.
I have a lot of thoughts about it, but don't know if anyone else has watched it in its entirety?
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23 hours ago, BusbyBerkeley said:The original BG&E is definitely a 7/10 game. I honestly don't know why people are so excited for the new one, especially after just a cg trailer. Didn't they put out one of those a few years ago anyway?
The original BG&E is one of only a handful of games I've played through entirely multiple times. The characters and world are some of the most charming ever made. I'm a sucker for most games with photography as a mechanic. I love that thematically you're an underground journalist trying to topple a government through exposure rather than being a super soldier.
The actual melee combat is pretty meh, sure. But then, there's a bunch more to do in the game than whack monsters with a stick.
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4 hours ago, DinerGirl22 said:Hi guys, I actually saw a tweet today that kind of blew my mind. I've read the whole thread and don't think it has been discussed. So the gif in the tweet is from the season 2, ep 1, or, in the weird numbering of the episodes, episode 8.
It looks to be similar to Laura's golden orb from episode 8, and is "delivered" to Coop by The Giant. I thought it might be interesting to share here! I hope it's ok to link to a tweet in the post.
Woah, holy shit.
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I got around to finishing the "True Ending" mission last night. The only thing of significance left to do is the Quiet mission that wraps up her storyline.
Thoughts on the "True Ending"
Spoiler
like, no shit, I wasn't playing Big Boss this whole time. Figured that out about 5 minutes into the game. Here, re-play this 45 minute cutscene you've already seen once so we can tell you the thing you already know, and it's just kind of dumb and pointless, because the person you're playing is just a nameless, random medic. It's the most underwhelming reveal in a video game I've seen in a long time. It probably wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't required replaying the hospital scene entirely, with almost no changes except at the beginning and end of it.
This game continues to be the best worst good bad game I've ever played.
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1 hour ago, Digger said:We often saw Laura corrupting those around her, or in the case of James attempting to separate herself to not corrupt. Bobby becomes a drug dealer and kills a man for her, she does things to purposefully hurt him, and says cruel things to him she knows will sting. She recruits young women to be prostitutes, and drugs Donna so that she becomes more pliable and set for a gang rape.
This...this summary is really messed up? It's off-loading a lot of responsibility onto Laura for other characters decisions and actions.
My read of Bobby is that he was already dealing drugs, and that's why Laura started dating him, was to get free drugs. It's crappy, but not evil and Bobby is doing an excellent job of making bad decisions all on his own (and him and Mike are both shown to have some pretty awful controlling and abusive behavior in regards to their girlfriends). Bobby doesn't kill anyone for Laura. He shoots a dirty cop dead when that cop tries to double cross him as part of a drug deal. A drug deal he set up.
I assume the Donna thing you're referencing is coming from the FWWM other bar scene. Laura argues with Donna about stepping foot into Laura's other world, tries to talk her out of it, finally allows it, and then has a total freakout when she realizes that Donna's too fucked up to be consenting to what's happening. It's literally the opposite of what you described.
Who does Laura recruit into prostitution? It's the manager of Horne's Department Store who actively recruits young women who work in the store into being sex workers at One Eyed Jacks. She did jobs with other sex workers, but all of those are women who are already doing that kind of work.
There seems to be this trend to want to take the sins of a bunch of other people around town and ascribe them to Laura (this thread isn't the only place I've seen it). She wasn't evil. She wasn't pure. She was human, a broken, flawed human trying to find ways to cope and get by in the world. She absolutely judged herself harshly, but that's such a reflection of the pain and shame she had around things that were wildly out of her control.
Edited to add: Laura, like many young women, was very well aware that she was heavily idealized by many people in town, including people like Donna and James. Part of separating herself from them wasn't about corrupting them, it was about fearing their disappointment if they ever found out too much about her.
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2 hours ago, Nordelnob said:To answer that, I think more than anything it was her attitude and how manipulative she could be. Of curse in FWWM is was played like she had opposing forces pulling her two directions. Like the maniplative, evil part was Bob taking over, and her good side was just her nature trying to fight it.
How many teenagers have bad attitudes and get manipulative with people in their lives? It hardly takes BOB to explain that.
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4 hours ago, Dinosaursssssss said:I was flipping through some extremely old PC Gamers and found their original review of Beyond Good and Evil; it apparently only warranted a half page review, and scored a 73.
So pc gamers are confirmed garbage.
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44 minutes ago, JustFlo said:You make a great point, and it's exactly what's bothering me as well. TP The Return is fascinating, spellbinding and 18 new hours of Lynch I never thought I'd get, but it also moves a deeply beloved show into different territory, one I wasn't quite prepared for. And I equally love it and feel dissappointed by it, if that makes sense. It's Lynch after all 😊
After a conversation with the lady this morning, I've been thinking about the relationship of TP and family. Revisiting TP after 25 years is kind of like spending a lot of time with family that you haven't seen much since you were a kid. They've aged, changed, and also as an adult you're seeing things that were present before that you were blind to.
Family is a big deal in not just within the fiction of TP, but in its creation. Both Lynch and Frost have each had 2 family members involved in its creation at some point, I think?
tldr: Twin Peaks is your weird uncle who you loved as a kid but makes you kind of uncomfortable as an adult because you can see things now that you couldn't before.
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2 minutes ago, wonderboy said:Again, it remains to be seen just how reductive or literal of a direction this lore stuff is gonna go. It's possible that interpreting this all to mean Laura is the cosmically pre-destined chosen one is completely wrong. Or only partially true (meaning unclear to what extent real human qualities vs mystic forces determine the outcomes in her life). Again, as long as the human consequences of whatever this mystic bullshit is are portrayed in an honest or particularly moving and interesting way I'll be okay with that. And if it all devolves into some kind of insane cosmic anime (I saw some viewers comparing last nights episode to the End of Evangelion) then I might be okay with that too.
Yeah, I'm honestly surprised at the level of conclusion jumping that happens after every episode. Like, I think collectively we're batting about .150 on actually being right about anything in the show so far, and most of the stuff we've been wrong on has ended up being delightful anyways (like the golden shovels). I'm certainly not ready to declare that the show is about cosmic good and evil from what is still a pretty ambiguous episode.
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8 minutes ago, UnpopularTrousers said:I really liked how the shot of the cicada frog being born remained centered on the egg as it crawled out of frame. I had trouble making my mind follow its movements because I've been trained to pay attention to the big bright thing in the center of the screen. It was compositionally unnerving.
I had a similar reaction to that, particularly waiting for something else to happen to the egg or another frogbug to come out of it.
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1 hour ago, WickedCestus said:And then, uh, well, whatever happened happened! There were like three or four moments where I thought it would end and cut back to something relevant. I checked how long was left in the episode at about 49 minutes, and went, huh, well, I guess that's just that. I didn't dislike the episode; I think it's cool, but I'm not especially crazy about it either. I absolutely did not see it as the lore dump that everyone else did, since I guess I'm not well-versed enough in the lore. A lot of what seemed to be introduced about Bob and Laura does not excite me much; I expected Dale to be in the bubble instead of Laura, because he is way more of an antithesis to Bob than Laura is. Are we just supposed to ignore that Laura is complex? Is all her badness supposed to come from Bob? That just seems a bit too simple to me.
Yes, Laura's "badness" is born almost entirely from trauma caused by Leland/BOB, and at the end of the day is self destructive rather than harmful to others. And her badness is functionally just 1) has sex and 2) does drugs, both as an escape mechanism from the horrible abuse she's suffered. In the grand scale of badness, it's barely bad at all both in comparison to others evil in the show and in the context of her own life.
The immediate dominant response about her seems to be that she's intended to be the foil to BOB, but what I'm more afraid is that she was released as a trap to catch him, a woman designed to perfectly attract his insatiable desire. Which...ugh...idk, I'm not sure what's worse. That her lot in life was accident, or inevitable.
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Something I could stop thinking about during the atomic portion of the episode is how much it felt like an abstracted Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode. All the way down to the design of the Woodsmen and the feel of the Convenience Store as a set. Throw in an ominous narrator to give some explanation, and it's almost a ready made lost Outer Limits.
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1 hour ago, Twig said:The thing about this (which I'm pretty excited about, I love ambition) is that I'm not sure why they couldn't just call it something else, haha. I mean I get sorta that they wanted it to take place in the same world. But it does seem a bit... silly. Given how completely wildly different it is.
I'd be okay with an Oddworld style approach to BG&E. Different types of games set in the same world and keeping certain tone and thematic elements.
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3 hours ago, Merus said:In the first one I had a hovercraft and several adorable orphans
And a doggo.
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I used Cheat Engine last night to knock out a bunch of research instantly. I realized that between the increasing amount of resources and time, I was likely to be done with this before being able to research all the stuff (not counting the gold, online only resource stuff, which is like weeks of research and crazy amounts of resources).
The economy for research is just kinda fucked, it really pushes you towards having to do FOB invasions to even possibly have enough money to pay for everything, since a lot of the top tier stuff runs upwards of a million GMP to research. I don't really want to burn a bunch of hours doing invasions just to get the resources and money to play around the top tier of weapons for a little bit.
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I never played Peacewalker, so I can't really speak to it, but otherwise I pretty much agree with everything you've said Syn. Pretty much every character is awful, and they only get more awful as the game goes on (barring Quiet and maybe Code Talker).
As for my spoilered part, I've finished Mission 35 and done a number of the Priority side ops (there are a lot more Priority ops in the back half than there are in the front half). Once you cross over to Chapter 2, you start getting 3 missions at a time, 2 are entirely optional remixes of earlier missions and one is a new mission. I think 35 is just the second of the new missions. But I'm not sure what all is triggering new cutscenes, as some are definitely just happening from my completing side ops.
On the Skull Face car ride, it struck me as an attempt to recapture the Snake Eater ladder climb from 3, but was just kind of dumb, because instead of just being this thing that happens, it follows the massive exposition dump from Skeletor. Which feels like that dump only needed to happen because most of the plot is hidden away in cassette tapes, which are very easy to skip. idk, I laughed at the car ride because it was ridiculous, but not because it was ridiculous in a good way.
There's stuff about Kaz and Ocelot that bug me a lot. Like, Ocelot doesn't even feel like he should be in the game. He should play a foil to Kaz's paranoia, but that only happens a couple of times and most of the time he seems totes willing to go along with it. But I'm guessing some of their behavior is explained by what I'm presuming is the true/secret ending, which I'm just guessing at, but I'd be shocked if I'm wrong.
SpoilerThat Big Boss isn't really Big Boss, you're either playing a clone or someone who underwent cosmetic surgery to look like the Boss as a decoy. Something something parasites probably explain why he has Boss' memories. I'm assuming that Kaz and Ocelot have some knowledge of this.
Also, Huey is a completely garbage character. Everything about him is the worst forever.
That seems to be the kind of defining thing with MGSV characters, it just makes them all worse than they've ever been. Maybe that fits with Kojima's generally "war is terrible and makes everything and everyone terrible" themes, but generally the games have had more kindness for the main cast.
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Yeah, I actually like her humming as well.
On 6/17/2017 at 9:43 AM, Twig said:I liked the humming, to be honest. Could've been less repetitive, though. But it humanized her in a way so few other things did, besides the ending (which I still liked about her, even if she's a fucking terrible example of female characters). U:
I really didn't think this game could have made me hate it more in terms of how it handles women, but I keep being consistently proven wrong. Big ole list of spoiled gripes since gerbil might not yet be to some of these.
SpoilerIn the episode where you rescue Code Talker and have the fight with 4 Skull snipers, they're women and the camera zooms in right on one of the asses of one when it introduces them.
Quiet just doing a stripper dance in the rain for the hell of it.
Kojima's awful "you will be ashamed of your words and deeds" crap. The whole justification for Quiet being naked is that she's got the parasites that she needs to breathe and photosynthesize and shit. And then you get Code Talker and if you listen to the tapes about him, learn that he's 100+ years old because he's got the same parasites and also photosynthesizes his food, but the wrinkly old ass man with liver spots sure as hell isn't prancing around mostly naked.
In Chapter 2 stuff, when Quiet jumps into the poison pit to rescue the kid's medallion, the camera lingers on some bouncing boob physics as Snake hauls her out, burned to shit from the risk she took.
Snake and Ocelot letting Kaz torture Quiet for funsies. Despite her being an integral part of their ability to defeat Skull Face and cure the parasite in the rest of Mother Base, sure, just torture the shit out of her. I'd have given anything to put a bullet in Kaz at that point (and quite frankly, after that, she could have been a hundred percent justified in murdering every last one of them).
It's really hard for me to think of any game that I've loved as mechanically as this one, and despised for its dumb as fuck plot and character handling. And I even think some of the plot is good and interesting in terms of Metal Gear bullshit! Just so much bad stuff draped off it.
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Hahaha, holy shit that video's good. That first fucking kill I was not ready for. I knew you could use air drops like that, but I hadn't ever messed with it.
This game is so good when you feel like you're lording it up. I used the box transfer stations to put myself into the middle of a base to do a side op of extracting one soldier. Summoned in a sand storm, took out like five guys, extracted the guy I wanted, shot out some lights, and box transferred back out right as the storm was ending. It's probably been the single most lordy mclord moment I've had.
Edited to add: Weather Modification is hilarious inside the fiction of the Metal Gear. Like, there's nukes, mechs and designer diseases all threatening to destroy mankind, but oh, hey, this one mercenary force has somehow figured out how to make the weather do its bidding. No big deal.
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Haha, I really can't wait for you to get through Mission 31, I wanna talk about how dumb the overall story is in this, but I won't worry about spoilering a bunch of stuff, I'll just wait until you get there. It's really amazing how good the gameplay is, and how good some of the individual plot moments are, but man is the overall plot definitely Metal Gear.
Oh, and as for animals and Side Ops, you can still use your cages on side ops, just leave using a helicopter. If I'm close to a helicopter spot, I take the time to extract that way and drop cages. If I'm not very close at all a helicopter spot, then I just bail through the pause menu and don't worry about it. Sadly resupply drops don't let you drop more than 8 cages
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That BG&E2 trailer was fantastic. If it wasn't Ancel helming it, I'd have a lot more cynicism or concern than I do. AFAIK, he directed both Rayman Origins and Legends (not just like his name on it or something), and that gives me a lot of confidence that he can go back to the well of something years later and still make magic.
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45 minutes ago, syntheticgerbil said:Oh okay, I turned reflex off early on for S ranks and never really wanted to bother with toggling on and off. I guess the team production stuff makes sense but I'm not really keeping up with the numbers of materials they make even though I probably should get on that.
However I sort of want to see these extra cutscenes for low morale and not showering. Will this kind of screw up my stats if I let it get bad?
That sucks they didn't find a more intuitive way for anyone to find animals without a guide. There was some stuff on Peacewalker that I remember where people could only get the exact requirements by translating the Japanese guide, specifically the drops for the Monster Hunter missions.
One thing on animals, particularly the cage ones, is just to deploy all 8 (at max rank) every single time you're going to load up on a chopper or finish an mission. It doesn't seem to work by jumping straight to the chopper from the pause menu, but the other two ways it does. I think I'm at 80 percent on the animals list now, and I haven't farmed or tried at all to get anything. Just doing that every mission, sometimes all 8 dumped right under the chopper, has got me that far.
So, are you to Mission 25 yet? I hit it tonight, and one thing I'll suggest is that it might be good if you've got a good couple of hours to play when you hit it. A series of events plays out after it that strongly encourages you to play through the next several missions in a row. I just played an hour later than I had intended because I wanted to power through it. Spoilering the rest in case you haven't got there yet:
SpoilerSo I ended up losing like 200 fucking base people to that damned disease, because I've fultoned everybody and built multiple FOBs, so I had way to many people to try and manually quarantine. I had like 1400ish I think when that sequence started. That's just a brutal series of events if you've gathered a fuckton of personnel.
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The servers were garbage for me yesterday, but I did manage to get a few shots in at doing the event FOB. Those are fucking hard! Most of my runs ended within 2-5 minutes, but I did finally get all the way through one. I finally started using the sonar ability of my arm, which I never use in the main game, and it was pretty handy. I feel blind not having a companion to point out bad guys to me.
I didn't try an actual person's FOB, but I can see me doing that now that I've got through an event one once. The rewards were pretty nice.
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16 minutes ago, Twig said:Raw Fury did in their non-apology, non-explanation for Tim Soret's behavior. They thoguht it was a good example of his attitude. See the last page for the whole quote. It's good. "Good."
Derp, it was at the end of the page and I missed it.
Man, I sure was a lot more willing to write walls o text in 2014 than I am now. Also, time travel message to bjorn of 2014, use some paragraph breaks yo.
Edited to add: The naive defense is annoying. It's a "boys will be boys" excuse.
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1 minute ago, Cordeos said:It was linked in the developers official statement so every outlet that quotes or links it will also link here.
What did I miss? Some dev actually linked to an IT forum thread?
Penny Dreadful (TV series)
in Movies & Television
Posted
The weird thing about it is that it vacillates wildly between handling issues around sex, gender and race in interesting and compelling ways, and then will turn around and just indulge in the absolute worst racial stereotypes like a pig rolling around in shit. And then there's the rather persistent religious overtones, of doing god's work to thwart evil while also showing just what a shit and terrible lot humanity has been left by god. And I cannot tell if there is any intentionallity to that at all. By the end I was kind of half rooting for the forces of darkness, because they were at least honest about wanting to destroy the world, while the forces of good just wanted a world full of slaves and misery where they could plug their ears and cover their eyes and pretend they weren't every bit as terrible as what they were fighting.
And then the ending is...something. Spoilering I guess in case people are watching it or will watch it.
In the end the status quo wins. The British and American empires will continue to grind the world under their boots, which is in some way preferable to either Satan or Dracula doing it for reasons that aren't in the tiniest bit clear. The entire thing about Lilly leading a revolution of battered and abused women is just defused and discarded in a single scene. Vanessa is killed by Ethan. Despite every other goddamned fucking man in the series having some kind of redemption arc, Vanessa isn't allowed one. Lilly isn't allowed one. Justine isn't allowed one. Fucking Frankenstein, who tries to literally turn Lilly into a domesticated, mindless slave gets redemption! Dorian doesn't get redemption, but he returns to his status quo, absolutely nothing is done to him at all. But, the mother of evil can't be redeemed or saved. Which really kind of feels like the message at the end. Women can't be redeemed, and can't be allowed power, under any circumstances.