Roderick

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Roderick

  3. Posted

    I finished Farcry 5, and about the ending:

     

     

    Loved it. I was fully prepared for a feel-good, we-saved-Hope-County finale, tonally like when you liberate an outpost. When that first nuke hit, I went apeshit. Everything that came after was so insane, and you ending up with Joseph Seed in Dutch's bunker, the last two people on earth, was both thrilling and sounded like the most disturbing buddy movie ever. Two Guys In A Bunker [but one is an insane doomsday cult leader]. Honestly, I was just laughing throughout the whole thing. It was such an upending to how these games usually end. Then we got the credits and they saved a gospel song about the Collapse just for that moment, when you'd still be reeling from the surprise. I thought it was a fine, serviceable game up until that point, but the ending made it so much more memorable.


    Then I went back to all those articles I saw about it having the worst ending ever, and they're full of shit. Look, they have a point that it's all nonsense. It is. It is nonsense. But there's just no reason to place that entire burden on the ending. If you weren't on board for the nonsense before, why would you expect the ending to magically fix all the problems you had with the game? This ending, in all its lunacy, fits perfectly with its tone. It crowns it. It reaches its peak level.

    Be angry with the wasted potential of Farcry 5 all you want. I hear you. I didn't like a lot of it either. (Those repeating shooter set pieces induced by Jacob were crap.) But damn it if this ending wasn't gloriously unexpected and bonkers.

    (There's another ending, where you leave Joseph be and go, but that one truly is awful. It starts out really strong, but in the last two seconds they hint at you still being brainwashed, and it just feels cheap. Cheap cheap cheap. Should've ended on the awesome note of the moustachio'd sheriff wanting to call the national guard.)

    Also: how funny is it that, within the warped and strange divinity of Farcry 5, Joseph is 100% on the ball, when he asks you to leave him alone? There are two moments where you can walk away, and every time you choose not to, the world just goes further down the drain. First it's a civil war you unleash, then it's the actual end of the world.

     

  4. Posted

    Same feeling here, SAM! Saw the first ep of the Arrested Development S4 remix. Because of the way the story was originally cut up, it still feels a little like a string of snippets woven together. I intuit that further up it'll feel less jarring. And, granted, this may also be because I already know the story and its original structure, so my mind may be screwing with me.

     

    I never really dug S4's structure from anything but a technical perspective, so I'm also hoping S5 will return to the story-a-week format. Story-a-episode.

  5. Posted

    Dosed, about Xenoblade: it's a pretty peculiar JRPG, considering it uses more of an MMO-style of (singleplayer) gameplay. There's a steep learning curve and tons of systems, but I don't think playing other types of JRPGs will prepare you for that. It's more up to your own level of how fast you pick up new systems. If you feel comfortable with that, XC2 is a fine game that'll keep you entertained for a looong time.

  7. Posted

    Cartoon shows and games really put down a foundation for me for learning English. It helped that Holland has a subbing tradition - we don't dub movies in our own language, so we get a lot of pure [American] content on tv. Then it just became the internet in general that further refined my understanding, forums like these.

  10. Posted

    Pretty much all of Ragnarok got stabbed in the back by Infinity War. The whole 'we don't need Asgard, our home is where our people are' line of prophecy is cut short when Thanos outright destroys their ship and wipes out half the population. It makes sense from this movie's perspective, but the Thor films have this thing with prophecy and destiny, and that doesn't gel at all. (And where was Valkyrie?!)

  11. Posted

    The only time it really jumped out at me was in Kill Bill Vol 2, where Bill suddenly has this entire theory about Clark Kent being Superman's alter ego instead of vice versa. That really struck me as off-character, that suddenly this dude we hardly know turns out to be a major comic book nerd. It's so specific that it needed to be set up more in the beginning to sell it.

  16. Posted

    It would be very interesting to have the 'next BotW' feature a more urban landscape. How would that affect the sense of discovery and being out in the wild? Will it possibly encroach on the feeling of Mario Odyssey's New Donk City?

     

    Honestly, what I hope most of all is for the sequel to go off the beaten path and do something weird and funky. Like Majora was. They've nailed, absolutely nailed, the classic thing, and there's so much space they can still explore. Which they already mentioned themselves, by the way. So I would absolutely get my hopes up, just maybe not within the next two years.

  17. Posted

    Stupidly, I have owned three PS4 games for over two years now, just waiting for the console to magically appear: TLOU HD, the Uncharted trilogy and Batman: Arkham: Knightly Endeavors. I will most assuredly get myself Bloodborne as soon as I have time for it, and Monster Hunter World struck my fancy too.

     

    Also, Diderot effect already kicking in: my tv is seriously in need of upgrading to account for all these detailed visuals.

  18. Posted

    You're quite right. I gathered my chances would drop spectacularly if there was one of the following in the running:

    a. A man who also made an effort, but looked more like the character (full beard, possibly tats)

    b. A woman, making an effort and netting the 'outlier' boon

    c. A cute kid going just the right amount of disturbing

  19. Posted

    Well, that's another RTS game after They Are Billions that 3MA has sold me on. The allusions towards this being effectively "Agricola With Warfare" were already more than I needed, but then there was another hour of fun conversation to further impress me. Good job and great cast, everyone!

  20. Posted

    So, I dressed up as Joseph Seed a week ago for a contest for a Dutch gaming store chain, and I won a PS4. Finally, I can play some of the already-classics on it, and of course Farcry 5 first and foremost.

     

    It felt great to be a doomsday cult prophet, by the way.

     

     

  21. Posted

    Speaking of GTA, the hospital mission in GTA4 I strongly remember as an infuriating piece of mission design. Didn't quit, but I certainly wasn't happy and I absolutely threw my controller on a sofa seat in a semi-controlled fashion to vent my anger.

  22. Posted

    Regarding expensive veggies: here in the Netherlands it's not that bad (yet). It's still much cheaper to eat vegetarian, though there is nowadays a host of delicious meat replacement products of high quality in supermarkets. Not particularly cheap, but it makes everything much easier. Honestly, there is a chicked replacement foodstuff that is extremely tasty. It's been a boon to my curries.

  24. Posted

    TCOMI, wow. That was such an important game for me in my teens. I played through it often - though mostly only disc 1 since my second disc had an error [possibly piracy-related]. I bet I can still just about dream the right sequences and puzzle solutions. Ah, to completely forget and be able to enjoy this game freshly again!