syntheticgerbil

Oh I guess I wasn't clear, I totally hate that they replaced the original models with 3D. The 3D also already looks dated by far. There was no reason to do that, plus you lose a little history in the evolution of special effect as well. I don't feel like being a purist in that case is at all a bad thing. I have the same issues with the special editions of the first three Star Wars. It looks incredibly dated now and it had the added bonus of creating additional scenes that didn't fit. I think if people are going to use CG to update things, it should be like the Blade Runner blu-ray editions where it's just work done to fix little mistakes like the different face for the stunt actress when she is gunned down. Also when they were looking at the stuff from the inside out of the screen, it looked really out of place, like bad compositing just because the elements were obviously from two completely different time periods.

While I'm looking forward to playing Life Is Strange, despite that it means suffering super awkward dialogue (although they still have time to fix this), it seems like the developers saw many recent games and wanted to combine a bunch of shit at once. It feels maybe a little cheap? I see they took Infamous Second Son crammed it together with Walking Dead, sprinkled some Gone Home, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and then based it upon the time rewind sections of Remember Me (the best parts). I suppose none of this is bad but since all of this stuff is in my recent memory, it's a bit strange. Life is strange.

My experience in retail is that people who do weird things like dig receipts out of the trash and try to pick up the item in the store to return it for some cash are so few that it is probably a negligible expense to appease them and go home. It takes a human being with not only a bunch of time on their hands for petty theft but also a certain amount of guts. Most people just don't want to bother that much. And with digital downloads you can track someone's account and see if they have a habit of making a returns for maybe lofty reasons. Also I am very bad. A long while ago I was watching the Alien Quadrilogy boxset and disc 8 was defective and would not play. I had bought it over a year before from Amazon used so I was shit out of luck. I went to a local retailer and bought the boxset again, swapped the defective disc, reshrinkwrapped it at Kinko's, and returned it the next day.

I don't understand how the coat of our vaguely Siamese+tabby cat turned from this: To this:

I can't get this song out of my head from Atilla Marcel. When the mother starts singing it's so great I wish it were like 3 minutes longer.

Can you grind games you don't want for gems?

He can play Kinect games. I cannot finish any Kinect games with my current set up.

Yeah I can definitely see how slippery fairy tales can get. I suppose part of a fairy tale is perpetuating a hostile environment but you wouldn't want to make it too unpalatable. I guess I feel Brothers does a good job avoiding this. Mileage may vary. I still see it as a very important game to play.

Most of this is just a response to Bjorn being especially mad or condescending. He said he was a bad writer. Sorry, nevermind.

As I said, Josef Fares most likely made the game exclusively about brothers because his relationship with his brother (and family) greatly influences this. This is probably lost without seeing how important his family configuration is to his previous work as a movie director since I am going to guess no one has seen his movies except me and people in Sweden and the guy who wrote the article on Polygon. Possibly people Lebanon too. Zozo illustrates this biographical element more than anything (great movie by the way). Not convinced switching the father with the mother would make a difference. I'm just not convinced the spider woman really says anything about woman in particular. True, but maybe that will not always apply? I don't think he made anything harmful intentionally at all. I think he maybe made a mistake in the representation without considering that he was perpetuating the status quo and took a more folklore type stance. It's not that deep of a game. Also Fares most likely was not paying attention to a lot of the criticisms in games at the time since he basically just barged into a studio and wanted them to make his idea with his money and I think did not really give a thought to it. I think it's way off the mark for some of you to say to say Josef Fares is a not a good director or is a bad writer and should be fired. Is it so bad to say the configuration was most likely not conscious and he did not mean anything by it? Also here guys, here's Fares' reply to Anita Sarkeesian on Twitter: I'm sure the next game or movie won't make some of you enraged then.

I didn't miss it at all. It stuck out to me and I thought the wheel was a goofy and fun moment. Just a little bit of indulgence for a bit of humor, so that's good. To each their own I suppose.

That old big boxy beige style brings me back.

Yeah it is pretty redundant in the way of Metal Gear writing. Not sure if it is maybe an English language barrier or not. It's not like I'm not fully on board with that, I just have a problem when Brothers is specifically singled out as having "the same problems with gender representation that a lot of shitty games have." when it doesn't seem to say much of anything about either gender besides it's about two brothers. Sometimes a game is just not going to represent women. Doesn't mean it's Far Cry 3 however. If you guys want a game about a spider woman who eats boys, I don't know what to say. It's not even the same game or premise. Nor would it even contain any of the same functions in terms of simultaneously controlling two boys. I already explained myself twice. I don't know what else you want from me. You say in a paragraph before swapping genders is like putting make up on a pig and then you want the genders swapped. This is all just kind of volatile at this point, but I'm glad you feel like I need all caps to understand things.

It's because you seem to think every game must hit some kind of percentage. It's just never gonna happen with every game. I don't feel like in Brothers it necessarily means much on how the gender is distributed. Basically what's important is the two boys. You can't expect every game to fit this mold and games have been coming more diverse than years. It's not always a bad thing. As far as I can tell nothing harmful was done except it didn't conform to a checklist. Almost all of the genders could have been anything and the townspeople and such seem mostly arbitrary. Are you mad the reason that the younger brother is afraid of water because someone drowned and it could have been written as a fear of some sort without involving a death or are you mad it's just because it is a woman? If it were the dad would it have been A-OK? The dad is the damsel in distress the whole game and is the motivation for the adventure, not the mother. Should the dad have drowned and the mother played the damsel in distress role? Is that going to patch up the fridge problem (even though that is not the motivation for the adventure but an aspect of the younger brothers characterization) or is the shorthand of a drowning accident just poor writing to you? It could have been a game about sisters, but I think it should be considered that a part of this probably comes from Josef Fares' own close relationship with his older brother, a leading actor in almost all of his movies and had escaped from Lebanon with him, and so that's probably what he would relate to most. It seems like what people want to fix this is to just redistribute the genders, and since they are so interchangeable that says to me it doesn't say much about patriarchy or gender at all. Even the spider girl didn't say really anything about relationships and it could have been another boy they befriended and it wouldn't have made a difference either. I'm not going to agree about all this stuff as per usual I suppose. I will stick up for the gameplay, it was great fun. The rope swinging stuff was a nice touch that felt very smooth to control. As far as the emotional core not always resonating, I did have problems with this mostly because you are dealing with characters who speak gibberish and the mocap was kind of dumb.

And over an hour after I asked how to sign up, I see windows has sneakily put a little icon down there for me. EDIT: I started searching again for a solution to fixing the start button problem and I finally found a permanent solution so I no longer have to use a batch file to restart explorer and therefore close all my folders. This person also figured out how to trigger it. From here:https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/a007e827-9c50-4cb5-ac4a-6228f900e322/start-button-and-charms-stop-working-in-windows-81 So maybe this will help those of you that encounter this bug. That is unless you were using the little drop down menu to switch applications. I'm forever going to instantly press Alt Tab so I never used it. I also never actually press the start button to go to the app screen, I always press the Win key on the keyboard, but I do like to right click the start button for multiple things when I need to mess with settings. Much faster.

Honestly, Ico is a clunky mess. I can only give so many points for being created in the PS1/PS2 transitional period. It has a good story and extremely pretty but I don't know how you could possibly say Brothers is in any way less refined in terms of mechanics, control, environments, and traversing. And before anyone implies I'm bad at Ico, I did finish the two hour speed run with 15 minutes left to spare. It's really a game of constant fighting against bad controls and terrible combat so that you can get the goodness at the heart of it. Part of the reason I don't care that much that last Guardian is vaporware is because I don't have confidence in that team to make a non clunky and glitchy game. I don't have Shadow of the Colossus PS3 complete 100% despite having finished my first playthrough in 2012 just because I feel dread imagining myself doing all of the time attacks in order to get all of the objects. Why does a game with fickle controls and momentum have time attacks? Such a bad design decision.

Wow, so much Brothers hate. You guys are nuts about the gameplay, it was incredibly smooth and fun, made me think of the Ubisoft Prince of Persias without all the fighting. Maybe you just have to kind of like that stuff? I can't imagine it's any fun if you don't enjoy things like Another World and Heart of Darkness. Also I found it very clever that you can finish the game with no achievements or trophies whatsoever and that every single one of those are linked to easter egg type stuff. Games in general don't creatively make use of trophies that much. It's just another layer to a game that thinks somewhat differently. If anything since it's one apparently of those must plays regardless of genre, in my opinion it's much less offensive to hide something novel in an action platformer than throwing innovative stories in a FPS staring at a gun all day. I also don't get the criticism with the lack of women and that the women that are in the game are fleeting or evil. It is called Brothers. I know we are all super sensitive to this stuff these days, but you don't need every game to fit the mold. There's no possible way for the damsel in distress trope to ever disappear, it just needs to utilized less. It is still open for utilization.

I just watched Jalla! Jalla! since I am like the only one in the world who played Brothers A Tale of Two Kitties and then is taking his time to import all of Josef Fares movies. It was pretty straight forward but very cute and well acted. Pretty great for the guy's first directed movie on an obviously low budget. Not as good as Zozo but that's fine.

Win 8.1 is great, but the damn start button is broken all the time, so I want to upgrade just because of that. So idiotic. Where do I got to sign up?

Hm, I don't think David Lynch understands how cocaine works. Laura first takes it right before bed, then later asks Bobby for some so she can sleep. It is a drug for doing the opposite of sleeping.

A Tale of Two Kitties you say?!

Hah, okay, I was thinking maybe it was the same because it was one long page of text on possibly Geocities with screenshots and probably some dancing monkey gifs. Also I think it had a MIDI song playing in the background.

He was fucking brilliant. But he was always great on Skins. Speaking of Skins, it was so good up until that three movie Season 7 set. What a bummer the series ended on that note. Not gonna bother with Inception, I hate Nolan stuff. I suppose I may end up watching the other two but so far, I've seen overtly mediocre performances. Plus guys, it's not like I don't understand what he was going for with Mad Max, the silent warrior is not a new archetype to me. I'm saying he failed. And since the overdubs were brought up, it was a bit bizarre sometimes the movie would revert to American's Funniest Home Videos with him. I think the movie would have been much stronger had his character been axed completely and just titled Road Warrior Fury Road and made it about Furiosa completely. I guess there's a franchise to make money off of there, but Mel Gibson's not back, so it's not a huge deal in my opinion. But I guess at the end of the day, it's not a deep film and the draw is the action and stunts, so whether or not the performance of the actors was amazing or not, it's more important that the wreckage is stellar.

Saw the new Mad Max finally. Lot's of great stunts and lots of fun. Theron was great. The kid from Skins did an amazing job with the war boy character, didn't expect there to be another character arc like that at all. Also that robot arm was very convincing. Just one thing, how can someone let such a bad actor be the main character? Like you could get James from Twin Peaks and get the same result. Every other major character in the movie showed Tom Hardy up. Dude just mumbled and made blank stares like he was an idiot 2nd grader trying to solve a math problem. Does everyone just like him because he was Bane and franchise nerd culture is big? Is it just because he's sexy? He did the same thing with Peaky Blinders, everyone was so hyped that he was going to be in Season 2 and he just came in and mumbled a lot and acted vaguely menacing, wasting precious screen time that could be devoted to much better characters played by much better actors and actresses.

Was it your website that went on a ramble about the life and times Blackbeard in the middle of talking about Monkey Island or am I thinking of some other Monkey Island page?