Udvarnoky

I don't know if I agree with that. Psychonauts is particularly story-driven in a way that isn't true of most platformers, and I'm unconvinced there's a "type" you can compare it against. Which of course is what makes it special. It embeds story in the gameplay itself at times, like when you drop down the sewer in the black velvet level and find it filled with high school bleachers. I enjoy that the whole "the story is great but the gameplay isn't" canard is still in full force, but I've never really agreed with it. Gameplay is more than a control scheme, and the controls were rock solid anyway.

Hot dog!

Their country song parody is horrifyingly accurate:

Where are my fellow Mr. Show fans? Netflix dropped With Bob and David on Friday and it is great, though sadly only four episodes.

I suspect that the scanners were marginally improved compared to Monkey Island 2, and that they did more touching up in general once digitized. That and the deliberately very different art style compared to MI2 would explain how you wind up with something so different despite a similar production process.

What I'm seeing isn't quite at Pattton Blu-ray levels. They've smoothed it out but not to the point of wax. Plus, F5 to toggle.

An image of such magnitude, Mixnmojo got updated.

I wanted to like The Gift but despite excellent performances (especially from Bateman) and my general fondness for this sort of intimate thriller, the silliness of the villain collapses the whole thing. For some reason multiple-paragraph spoiler text isn't working for me, so forgive the pluralized tags...

I got a chance to see the I Am Chris Farley documentary, which gets broadcast and made available on VOD tonight. I found it disappointingly effusive and guarded, in stark contrast to the excellent and unflinching The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts that was published several years back, and which interviews many of the same people. There's a strong sense that the Farley Estate influenced the heavily sanitized, even sappy, slant of the doc. The interviews still make it worthwhile, but this is the whitewashed documentary you would expect them to have made in 1998, not nearly twenty years after the fact.

It's difficult to articulate how disappointed I am with all of you that this video has not appeared in the thread yet.

I actually didn't even consider using the point 'n click controls when I played through the remaster. You'd think I would have at least tried out of curiosity. Maybe when I get home.

Geeze.

JPIII isn't great, but it's not garbage. It's just a straighforward monster movie without any of the tinsel. The main problem with it is that it doesn't have a proper ending because they ran out of money. I consider it better than The Lost World, despite the latter's almost infectious batshit-ness and its score (still the best of the series). The Lost World is such a thematically confused movie that it's kind of infuriating. I'll take the pretense-free JPIII if those are my options.

I find it weird to look at it in terms of "deserve." The Lost World was pretty unaccountably cruel as well, and to non-villain characters. Also, I believe she's literally the first female character to be eaten in one of these films, so maybe they were just making up for lost time? See, that's the real gender politics of the flick! Aside from naturally loving the first movie to death as a kid, I've never held the Jurassic Park franchise in particularly high esteem. Including the first one, they're all very dumb, very polished monster movies with a much better cast than its characters deserve. I enjoyed this one for what it was, and what it was isn't a depreciation from the others.

That someone would go to such lengths to cause me anguish is a noose around my soul: [media=] [/media]

I've been playing the remake slowly, and enjoying every bit of it. I'm about halfway through, and relying purely on memory to get 100%. Sadly, I'll probably be able to pull it off. I'm noticing a lot of new dialog and other hints that were not present in the original game, but even considering all of that the game is, like you said, very much free of handholding. If you're not an actively curious player, you're missing out on a ton of the game's content, and some of its best. The sidequests must make up fifty percent of the game. Majora's Mask has as much kinship with The Last Express and Psychonauts as it does with the franchise it belongs to because of all the avoidable character content, though at least in this game you can always start time over and track down those moments, whereas in the other games, if you missed your lick, it's over with. It gets brought up a lot, but this game is really sad and tragic when you shadow the NPCs through their various stories. Captain Viscen fails to win his argument in favor of evacuation, dooming the city guard to remain at their posts when the moon falls. The end credits sequence quietly reveals that the Deku corpse encountered during the game's prologue is the Deku Butler's son. Romani gets a brain wipe, etc. While I don't think any of the games following Majora's Mask quite match the pathos it was able to wring out, I do believe the series upped the ante a bit in that regard and I think Majora directly influenced that strength.

It's necessary because the showrunners have repeatedly stated that they want the show to consist of seven seasons. Also, just as Book 3 is incredibly dense, Books 4 and 5 are comparatively meandering. I think even combining those books together (which many do, for chronological purposes) leaves you with something with less narrative propulsion than Book 3 by itself. My expectation is that Season 5 will roughly consist of a combination of Book 4 and 5 with a lot of fat disposed of, and dip a bit into unpublished territory. This leaves two seasons to cover the two unpublished books. That's all very roughly speaking, of course, because we're at a point now where I think the show's really going to go off-script, even if it's going to arrive at the same major signposts that the literature will.

Never read the novelization, which I appreciate as a curio but which I've always heard really bad things about. It's my impression that it's a bloated equivalent of what Jo Ashburn used to do way better in-house for the hint books. Very pleased to see that GOG has been including them as bonus features in PDF form. In addition to authoring The Dig novelization, I believe Orson Scott Card did or contributed to the Loom rewrite that was necessary for the CD version.

My photographic memory of every square foot of the N64 game is allowing me to delight in every minuscule difference. It was probably a smart choice for them to move the Song of Soaring stone right to the entrance of the swamp. I also think it's funny that the witch is actually acknowledging that you're going to ram into the giant Octoroks during the swamp door as it's about to happen.

Yes, VGA Talkie Loom is the version available on Steam and now GOG.com.

So since you're replaying Loom, are you going to check out the voiced version this time? Pretty sure I manipulated you into playing the EGA version the first go round.

The thing about the voice acting for the special editions is that while it's pretty much impeccable, it's like you said: there's an awkwardness to voicing text that wasn't intended to be heard. I've decided I just like the availability of it; there's a continuity-based comfort to knowing that there exists recordings of Dominic Armato saying all of those lines.

House of Cards Season 3 discussion:

I actually just finished House of Cards Season 3 as well. Despite sticking with it, I'm fairly cool on this show. I like the scenery-chewing performances and the handsome production values, but it's so aggressively self-serious despite being consistently preposterous and utterly insight-free about Washington. This despite the show ostensibly being, you know, about Washington. It's a big bloated soap opera, sleekly made. I find the UK version to be way better. It's leaner and, despite the lighter tone, meaner, because it's actually making commentary instead of dodging it. The UK version doesn't dick around about what Francis represents: each episode begins with Ian Richardson's rich old white guy lionizing a portrait of Margaret Thatcher. The U.S. version, on the other hand, doesn't seem to actually have anything to say, yet it spends exponentially more time saying it. It's just kind of trashy and hollow, which I think would work better if it would embrace the campiness instead of acting like it's a prestige drama. All that said, Season 3 was probably my favorite, because the conflict was better and it felt overall less meandering than the previous two. This really shouldn't last more than one more season, though.

Hold on, now. Let's keep this civilized. Source: Mario taught me typing.