Ninety-Three
-
Content count
785 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by Ninety-Three
-
-
Dude. Some of your criticisms come off as simply not wanting to like this show, and looking for excuses.
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?
-
I get why Jessica couldn't kill Kilgrave, but I don't remember Simpson or Trish putting up much of a fight over it and realistically, how are you gonna get a legit confession that's admissible out of that guy? A taped confession in some sort of torture cell will probably not hold up in court
And obviously if you put him in a courtroom he'll just talk his way out of it.That was why it bothered me so much that Jessica wouldn't kill him, her plan had an obvious hole in it, and the plot just didn't address that at all. What, are we supposed to believe that no one involved in the plan noticed this problem?
Also, Jessica's strong enough to kill people? Then what was up with the scene where they kidnap Kilgrave, his thugs come after them, Jessica fights them, and she loses because they keep getting up and fighting after she hits them? She fought like every human-level martial artist in movies.
Heck, when they realized they were being tracked and risked losing Kilgrave, none of them even considered going to plan B: kill him before he gets away.
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:
Kilgrave himself didn't unnerve me because he too suffered from the same "the writers are forcing him to be an idiot" problem, which made him hard to take seriously. At one point they were talking with the Kilgrave Victims Support Group (that he would carelessly leave so much evidence already strains credulity), and my immersion shattered when a guy said that Kilgrave approached him on the subway and made the guy give him his jacket. "Wait" I thought, "why is Kilgrave on the subway? Why doesn't he have a chauffeur?" It seems like a socially omnipotent mind controller should never be stuck taking the subway.
Little things like that added up to create a picture of a villain whose actions advanced the goals of the plot rather than the supposed goals of the character. He wasn't a chilling sociopath, he was at best, an RPG character taking the Chaotic Evil option for the lulz, and at worst not a character at all but a walking plot device with "villain" written on his forehead.
For instance, other than to enable the plot where Jessica finds him and almost succeeds at kidnapping him, why is he getting photos of Jessica delivered to him in person? Has he heard of email? Hell, the U.S. Postal Service? Anything would be both more secure and more convenient than attending an in-person meeting.
-
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?
-
I obsessively looked through the thread, couldn't find it, was about to call you a liar... then realised it was actually on this page. goddamnit.
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?
-
The wait for this game is beginning to get hard, now. I'm wasting away hours in Rocket League just trying not to think about eventually playing FireWatch With Me.
EDIT EDIT: HOLY SHIT THAT'S MY LET'S PLAY SERIES NAME ALL OF YOU GTFO I CAME UP WITH IT FIRST.
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.
-
The only way it could get worse is if the horizon was a color: Red Horizon: Zero Dawn.
Or make it sound more militaristic: Red Horizon: Zero Dawn Thirty.
Like, neither of those seems outside the possibility of what might have been considered.
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.
-
I wrote up a piece on the blog I contribute to as part of our 'best of 2015':
http://www.arcadianrhythms.com/2016/01/ajs-best-of-2015-best-game-with-ashley-burch-in-it/
Re-reading it I really wish I had spent more time editing it but overall I think it says what I wanted it to say.
I find it interesting that you say episode four stumbled. The very end felt a bit twisty for the sake of being twisty, but overall four was my favorite by a large margin. The first three episodes were very slice-of-life, they established lots of characters, but there wasn't really a "main plot". Four was where the game picked a focus (murder mystery) and stuck with it for a while, and we get the benefit of doing so with characters we know from the first three episodes worth of setup.
I agree five was a mess (for so many reasons), but what didn't you like about four, besides the twist?
-
DF-9 was a failure as a project, but that's fine with me. Perhaps they could have been a bit more gracious about the upset over stopping the development, but I've never felt they've owed an apology. I guess the argument is that people feel Double Fine promised, or at least gave the impression that they would make a deep simulation game out of DF-9. They failed, but it is a game. The "Spacebase DF-9 is now released." -approach was obviously putting a nice sounding spin on an unfortunate situation. However, I do think Tim's form post response to all the hubhub was a nice move. It was certainly more honest than what most companies would have done
Was it though? To summarize Tim's explanation:
- "The project wasn't making money so we're ending development."
- "We're skipping beta because we've been doing bugfixing throughout the alpha stage."
- "It's not silently pulling the plug because we're telling you a month in advance and putting out one final release."
- "Sorry about not communicating better. But we didn't tell you about our plans to end development because we hoped we wouldn't have to."
- "We put the game on sale knowing that development would end, because that's just how Steam works, sales happen."
- "We're disappointed too, but we worked hard, we still think Spacebase is cool and we hope you check it out."
What part of that was honest? What information did he actually give out, that most companies wouldn't have? "We're disappointed too" is obvious, plus it's standard PR and "The project wasn't making money" is obvious without him having to say anything. So we've got a mountain of positive spin, one piece of obvious information, and no apology for the big thing everyone's mad about (ending development). That seems exactly like what most companies would do.
I suppose you might say that most companies wouldn't have apologized for poor communication about the state of the project, but when the focus of the anger is on them ending development, that's an awfully faint apology.
As for why people feel DF promised or implied a deep sim game with a longer development cycle, Tim himself admits in the linked post that the original plan was a five year dev cycle, and their development roadmap (archived, because the original site is gone) reflected plans to put out a much larger game than they did. Yes, the way EA works, the dev might end development where it stands and walk away, everyone knows that's a risk, but the point is that it's a risk, not the system working as intended. When that happens, something has gone wrong, and even though the dev is allowed to do it, they're breaking the implicit promise of continued development. In the case of DF-9 and the roadmap, that promise was even less implicit than usual. At the very least, they could apologize for breaking that promise.
-
I tried this game and did not care for it. I felt like I was constantly running around putting out fires (sometimes literally), and as a result I never got to make any strategic decisions. "Two events and the ship is heavily damaged, guess I'll fix the events and repair the ship." "Uh-oh, three events this week, guess I'm going to spend the entire week doing repairs." "Two events again. But I'm out of food. So I've got to do repairs plus spend the rest of my time making food." My decision-making process went:
1: Fix events.
2: Fill up whatever bar (health, food, ship) is almost empty
3: Decide where to allocate remaining crew
Executing steps 1 and 2 wasn't interesting because it's like playing on autopilot, I almost never made it to step 3, and if I did that meant I was doing pretty well on resources in which case the "rich get richer" design of the game meant that I had already entered easy mode. I guess if you really enjoy doing probability calculations in your head, you could get into the nitty-gritty of the dice game, but I'm way more mathematically-inclined than most, and that does not sound fun to me.
Initial reviews look kinda rough. Sounds like having the dice visible has a lot of people complaining about RNG balance issues.
Funnily enough, I had some RNG balance issues, and they had nothing to do with the dice (which I felt were smoothed pretty well thanks to Research, Rerolls and Assist). Your crew's starting health and dice are random, the severity of all the events is random, the usefulness of the event's location is random, and with all that, the game's systems are a feedback loop designed to kill you for falling behind, or hand you an easy game if you get ahead.
-
I'm not sure which category it belongs in, but I have to give special mention to the title whose developers were just screwing with people: AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. When it came out, there were several sites whose formatting was clearly not prepared for a sixty character title, which I got far too much enjoyment from.
For worst title, I'd like to nominate Horizon Zero Dawn. Ugh. It's a beautiful-looking game about hunting robot dinosaurs in a post-civilization world, and I've heard from multiple people who reflexively dismissed the game having heard the name and assumed that it was another greybrown cover-shooter.
I'll also put forth Dwarf Fortress, which has the four-part title of "Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress".
-
I watched this movie dozens of times when I was a kid, but haven't seen it in probably a decade. Still love it.The army men check corners with their guns. They have those plastic-mould marks on them. Sid has an "Improvised Interrogations Manual" in his room, right after the Woody torture scene. I love little details.The textures were pretty simple (at least a few, like glow-in-the-dark Buzz, were a single colour) but I found the graphics impressive overall. You can see the limitations of their tech in the "toys attack Sid" scene: the car surfacing from sand looks pretty bad, and the water has some ugly seams.They use a lot of cheating (we switch to a different angle and distances between things shift, the characters make an unreasonably specific plan [luring Skud out of the house] as though they could tell the future), but all of it works. None of the little things broke my immersion, the work of good pacing.Overall the movie was incredibly tight, you can't find three consecutive seconds that aren't either contributing to the plot or setting up some comedy. I wish they still made 77-minute movies, just because you have room to go to 90 doesn't mean you need to.Regarding the "Toys are sapient, completely subservient, and that's weird" angle, the best analysis I've heard was comparing to the toys to AIs. They artificially created thinking automota, bypassed the traditional Skynet problems, and now benefit from a utopia populated by robots who are happy to serve humans. I should try to dig it up, it probably described things more elegantly than my restating.
-
Hahaha, organize?
(Note the size of the scroll bar)
-
That is not true. I got the pacifist ending without ever killing anyone.
Oh, that's interesting, the wiki lied to me then. I stand corrected.
-
I think I finished Undertale, but possibly didn't get the best ending, despite shooting for it and believing I would.
You can only get the best ending if you have first completed a non-pacifist route. If you still have a pacifist save near the end, I think you can qualify by turning that run lethal, completing the game, then reloading to pacifist again and pacifisting the game.
-
Turns out the reason you sometimes take damage with Gamma Guts is a weird technical thing that boils down to "Gamma guts does 6 damage, but it hits enemies twice before they damage you. If they're only in contact with you for one frame, then they only take one tick of damage and can hurt you because they don't die." So the trick is to run into them headlong, only a glancing blow (such as from a fast-moving snowbot that hits you edge-on) can penetrate gamma guts + scary face.
-
I'm not sure I understand the criticism. What way could there be to speak of non-speedrun play specifically which wouldn't draw a boundary, and what is the special problematic significance of that line?
I think the point Badfinger is making is "Some people use casual as a pejorative, which taints even the non-pejorative use that speedrunners make of the word". I disagree, but I understand the argument.
Marvel Netflix shows (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, etc.)
in Movies & Television
Posted
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.