Ben X

Copy the one from last year?

I think he got mucked about a fair bit on the last one, which may also be a contributing factor.

Anyone watched Punisher? I don't think I can be bothered unless the general reaction is that it's the best yet, which I haven't sensed elsewhere.

I watched Spider-Man Homecoming (and realised during it - perhaps not for the first time - that the "homecoming" title is a reference to Spidey returning to Marvel) yesterday, and Thor Ragnarok today. Homecoming was fine, but it was another Marvel movie that made me think "yeah, I see what you're trying to do here and you almost hit it", like Ant-Man going for cool heist caper or Winter Soldier going for old War spy thriller. It's often the aggressive overlapping with the MCU that scuppers it, which felt like the case here. The end credits had more youthful, anarchic energy than the rest of the film put together, and Spidey doesn't feel well-defined as a hero - he's more like Iron Boy here. It felt like a solid springboard for a great sequel though. Ragnarok, meanwhile, was not just a good MCU entry but legitimately a fantastic film. I saw what it was trying to do and it fucking did it. I haven't enjoyed a Marvel film on its own terms so much since at least Iron Man 3. (I also previously caught up on Dr Strange - fun if disposable - and GotG Vol 2 - an even bigger mess than the first film.)

We need all the usual asset-sharing and team-building threads up! I really don't think I'll be around to do anything this jam - unless I find a couple of days to cobble something together - and perhaps not even to play through as many of the entries. But I'll try!

I loved LoG and Psychoville (which was just Shearsmith and Pemberton, btw). Inside No. 9 ranges from brilliant to okay. I couldn't get the Christmas special out of my head for months. Speaking of LoG, they're currently filming three new episodes for the anniversary. I would normally be worried, but the other stuff they're doing now is still generally fantastic.

Ah, brillo, will take a look. I'd discovered that it was on Soundcloud but didn't think there'd be a way around the no-download setting (why the fuck do podcasts do that anyway?). Thanks!

That Directors Cut one sounds very interesting, but there doesn't seem to be a way to download it outside of iTunes. Way to understand how the internet works, DGA.

Well, it's not like any Trek series (possible exception TOS) really gets going for a fair while, so I think the more pertinent question may be "why does each Trek series take so long to figure out what it is?" I agree with everyone that Disco is definitely picking up now. The mid-season finale (I assume) was cracking, at least for the first half.

Re. the never saying bye on the phone thing, Dan and I wrote a short script when we were 16 or so, which listed some movie cliches (gussied up as the Ten New Commandments, all directed at Hollywood scriptwriters). The phone thing was one of them! Here's the full list (it's all pretty obvious/tired observational comedy, but hey we were only 16 and also the ten commandments conceit caused us to scrape the barrel a bit): Also, what is the deal with airline food?

Well, the 'gifts' still rank about the same as George Clooney shitting in Richard Kind's cat litter tray, to me, but the stuff in that article is gross, hadn't seen that.

He sent 'out of the wrapper' condoms and a live rat; I'm going to assume it was a reared-from-birth trained rat in a cage, not some rabid rat he captured in a sewer. He's also since said that on set, everyone was laughing about the gifts and were "thrilled to get them." It's a load of PR/media bullshit, and I think it's a bit silly to start marking down other films simply for having him in them because of it.

Warning: reading that thread, you will get very tempted by projectors.

There's the Home Theater thread, which might be more appropriate if you're not asking about gaming tellies? I have a 42" plasma telly. I used to have my gaming pc plugged into it but it's now my 1080p laptop and blu-ray player only, for watching tv/film and a little browsing. I'm dreading the day it breaks.

Wow, that is pretty awesome! I don't have a few of the powers he's using there, though. I guess maybe I needed to be more thorough with hunting for runes, though I did try to get the ones I could unless I couldn't figure out the other way into a blocked room or whatever. The blinking into mid-air for kills is a really good idea, though, I hadn't thought of that. It'll be a big help with the tallboys, I was stupidly always looking for higher ground! The stuff about having to force yourself to go about things the fun way is something we talked about elsewhere on the forums - about whether designers should "protect players from themselves". I think they should.

I'm around 75% through this, I think. I just did the bit at the masquerade ball where you and your mask fit in so you can chat to guests, pick pockets and sneak around for clues. That was fun (although once you're spotted doing something naughty before you work out your target's identity, you're basically screwed). I'm enjoying this, but not as much as I feel like I should be. I'm having a tough time figuring out why, though. I think it's the weird balance where it acts like it wants to be an RPG, but then you pretty much get forced into combat. And that would probably be fine - it's how I'm playing now - but the combat is let down by the AI, I think. Basically, you trip an alarm, you get a line of four guys running straight at you and then they just crowd in front of you and wale on you. So you either just shoot them one by one, or bullet-time stab them one by one. I really have to force myself to use the more outre powers like death-by-rat. (I've also never had a need to possess a rat or dog.) It's basically a less successful version of the Bioshock or Jedi Knight combat. The blocking mechanic is great, though; I wonder if the combat would have worked better with sword and magic only, no other weapons. Perhaps fewer but tougher enemies who will chase you over rooftops and such, and maybe actual ammo for each power so you can't just spam one over and over. And the RPG stuff is generally pretty dull, too. It's a cool setting, but the meat and bones of it is the usual trinket-hunting, diary-reading and politics-discussing. The only interesting character I've met is the 6 year old girl. There is an impressive amount of detail and the design is generally great. It's nice to have new stuff show up in the hub if you bother to keep an eye out - one time I discovered the tech nerd spying on a maid having a bath - and little things like chucking a body in the water and watching the fish rush to their dinner are fun to notice. You also do often feel cool, when you pull off a mid-air kill or successfully repel a couple of swords and deal out finishing moves while they're stunned. It's not a bad game, it's just a mix of two genres and is merely satisfactory at both.

I'm seeing silhouette nipples at least: edit: spoilered in case silhouette statue nipples and silhouette statue sex acts are NSFW

Alec Meer at RPS writes about how he enjoys the wonky stealth: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/11/02/wolfenstein-2-stealth/ Sounds like a nightmare to me...

Okay, I'm enjoying this again now. I've levelled up a fair bit, and quite early, so stuff is feeling a bit more satisfying now. My general strategy is to sneak around as much as I can, collecting runes and what have you, but as soon as anyone spots me, kill 'em all. Stealth is far too difficult and unrewarding to be worth the effort; for example, you're normally fine to loudly and leisurely empty an area of enemies without worry of reinforcements. The other thing to get used to is that basic combat is no use if you have more than one opponent on you, so at that point it's best to either bullet-time your way through the fight, or get to high ground then summon a gang of rats to eat them. I'm still doing a lot of standard RPG scavenging, which isn't always the best, but the setting is great and they pack a fair amount of interesting content in there to find. The wolf-hounds are as wonderfully designed as the rats, too. I just wish there were a way to knock them unconscious without sleep darts. I've had to kill far too many of them.

Ha, yes. "This is crypto-insanity, Max!"

I'm kind of not enjoying Dishonored so far. I'm getting annoyed by stuff on both the RPG side (e.g. confusing objectives) and the combat side (e.g. long reload times), plus the two aspects are constantly at odds with each other. I'm very much getting a Dark Messiah vibe where they want me to do lots of cool and clever stuff but then make it really fiddly to pull it off.

I suddenly imagined a story about an autistic savant who is able to solve the cryptographic puzzles without using a computer and the various people trying to make money off him/stop him. Basically the Rain Man Las Vegas sequence for a whole film.

Goddammit, editor, stop restoring my previous content! Ok, so EYE and SS3 are on the bench, waiting for any co-op-portunities. Here's the thread for the latter. I'm not sure if I'd realised there was a SS2 and that it was so different aesthetically , but frankly I could have done with a bit of that in either of the Sam games I played. The thing everyone remembers about Serious Sam is the bomb-head guys. Why not have some other silly enemies, and a setting other than 'yellow' while they're at it? Anyway, I'm progressing slowly through Dishonored. I'm going to go FULL SPOILERS so anyone playing along for the first time please be careful when reading (but also please tag spoilers for me if you're going to post about your experience!). So I've now realised why the rats look so good in this game - they're plot-relevant and also have some mechanics revolving around them. They swarm around the place, reducing bodies, living or dead, to a bloodstain in seconds (an amusing puzzle was having to distract them by flinging some corpses their way). Also, apparently I'll be able to possess them at some point. The design is all still very nice, lovely character design with the big Olly Moss hands, and a pub setting with a rebel drinking a pint of ale while he spoke to me that almost made me exit the game and head down to my local. I also noticed a food item labeled "Pratchett Jellied Eels", which was a nice nod. I've been through the standard 'mystical zone with floating bits of walkway and what have you' section and have started picking up some cool powers like dash and 'heart which guides you to pick-ups and also tells you secrets about whichever character or place you point it at'. It's all fairly linear so far, but I assume it'll open up a bit. Dark Messiah wasn't that open, but I get the impression this leans closer to immersive sim territory. I found the very first stealth-or-fight option they presented me with to be impossible to stealth through, but apart from that everything has felt pretty sturdy - even rope-climbing! Also the block mechanic seems pretty forgiving. I think maybe it will always block but you have to time it correctly to daze the opponent, which feels like a good way to do it.