Ninety-Three

I am real fucking sick of this attitude. I'm trying to have a good faith discussion, but if someone expresses an idea you don't understand or agree with, it can't be that human beings have a great diversity of thought and sincere opinion, no that person must be a troll. Internet debate is the worst, I quit.

You caught me, I didn't watch this show because I thought it might be entertaining, but because I wanted to not like it. I spent hours watching Jessica Jones because I wanted to not like it. After watching the show I went to an internet forum to look for excuses not to like it. I also go to restaurants wanting the food to suck, and commute to work hoping to get stuck in traffic. I'd respond to your specifics, but I'm not sure how to have a discussion with someone who thinks that instead of being sincere, I am the Grinch of Television.

Having learned that I can buy two 9.4 inch plastic human skeleton models instead of The Witness, I'm not sure I can ever again justify buying a videogаme.

That Errant Signal video reminded me of a problem I had with TBG, which I shall now voice. I've tried to keep things detail-light enough to stay out of spoiler tags. The whole "You are playing as yourself: a human who installed this game on your computer and is now playing it" bit made the narrative very confused for me. As the game goes it becomes increasingly implausible that the narrator would have created and released this game for your character to play. At the end, he starts talking to you in a way that made me feel like he's supposed to be in the room with you, watching over your shoulder and talking with you as you play. It left me wondering what was supposed to be happening in the fiction of the game. Did anyone else run into that problem?

Unspoilered for Gormongous: That episode was just a matryoshka of bad decisions that felt like the writers forcing the characters to act suboptimally to avoid them winning before the season was over. It sounds like you are bothered by the exact same things as me, do not watch this show. Edited to add some spoilery thoughts on why I didn't like Kilgrave as a character:

I have hazy memories of Consortium, which Steam tells me I played for four hours. All the descriptions I heard made me want to get to the special bits of it, but boy, I did not have any fun with it. It started off by dumping twenty thousand words of lore into my glossary. The shooting was awful and the plot seemed to expect me to have read all fifty jillion codex entries to get anything out of it. Hearing from someone who actually liked the game, I'm slightly interested in going back to it, so I have two questions. First, am I really supposed to read all (or at least a lot of) the lore right away? Because there is so much of it, and it's so dry. Second, when does the game get good? I got as far as beating the suit that runs around the ship before, should I keep trying or is not enjoying it by then a sign it's not for me?

Seriously though, if you want the name it's all yours. If you want to use the photoshopped image, let me know so I can make a better one, it bothers me how ugly the C is.

So what you're saying is that we might get a sequel, but never a third Firewatch game?

Nuh-uh, I came up with it in December and even made a lousy photoshop of it in this thread! My dibs have already been called!

How badly does it run? Just with vanilla graphics, Minecraft, in all its unoptmized glory, outdoes even 2015 AAA games for its ability to tax my machine, I can only imagine it being twice as bad looking like that.

So, A Bug's Life. I haven't seen it in fifteen years, and I didn't remember any of the plot. I did not like the way the main plot resolved. As Vainamoinen pointed out, it's like Three Amigos, only done worse. Instead of a heroic redemption and road to victory, A Bug's Life has Flik digging himself ever deeper in his comedy of errors, then just when it's all hit rock bottom, he says a few dozen words about how grasshoppers need ants and suddenly the driving problem of the movie is solved. The victory feels cheap and unearned, and the narrative arc of the movie is totally off. On the technical side, I am amazed that this came out in 1998. The early shots with the camera sweeping over fields of wheat must have represented an insane number of animator and rendering hours. Modern technology still isn't good with water, but this movie figured out a clever cheat. By shrinking the scale down to ants, they mostly handled water as individual droplets, essentially glass beads, which are pretty easy. Sometimes it looks weird and they got some water physics wrong, but most humans aren't used to water at that scale so we don't notice nearly as much. Speaking of cheats, instead of depicting the ground as dirt, everything was dirt-coloured gravel, which is a clever solution to the problem of texturing it. Finally, one design complaint. Usually I'm the sort to quietly roll my eyes and ignore this kind of thing, but something about this stuck with me. Gypsy (the moth) has high-heels for feet. Really Pixar? Really?

Does anyone understand the Throne 1's AI? I'm not sure if it's more than binary, but there is definitely an aggression switch or slider that gets flipped partway through the fight, which makes it shoot way more green balls, and rapidly alternate laser patterns. Normally I see the Throne get more aggressive once all four generators are destroyed, but I have occasionally observed it happening before then. Just recently I saw exactly when the change happened: I destroyed one generator, walked onto the generator, then dug into the wall with Hammerhead, and the Throne started going nuts (and did not resume normal behaviour once I walked back into the normal area). Normally I don't even touch the walls, I wonder if going too far to one side can trigger its aggro switch. After 62 hours of play I took my first death to Throne 2: apparently its death-explosion can kill you. I'm still not sure if Throne 2 is inherently a cakewalk, or if Throne 1 weeds out all the bad runs (the ones that arrive with nothing but a heavy crossbow and Gatling slugger) leaving only strong ones to face 2.

I'll happily use an emulator for things where you can only buy the game on Ebay for $200. I agree that it would be wise to stick to Steam (or at least, digitally available PC games), anything else limits participation based on console-ownership and/or willingness to emulate.

It can always get worse by adding more colons. Give it a couple years and we have Horizon: Zero Dawn 2: The Reckoning: Digital Deluxe Edition. Or maybe the sequel would be Horizon: One Dawn. I think that's silly enough that it has crossed over from bad to funny again.

I echo SBM's comments: I'm intrigued, completion should be non-mandatory, and I have no idea how we'd pick games.