Nappi

Woo! Congrats! Excellent photos too!

After re-watching the Fast and Furious movies with Giant Bomb East commentary (Film & 40s podcast) and seeing this topic, I decided to give Mystery Science Theater ago. I wasn't that into the first episode of the new season. I think I prefer the more organic friends-on-a-couch dialogue type commentary of Film & 40s to the pre-written single-line quips of MST, which is not a criticism towards MST because that is clearly their thing, just my personal preference. I might still check the second episode, because I do enjoy stupid, bad movies.

Interesting! I have seen the original a couple of times, and I like it a lot. I decided to watch the new movie, mainly because I wanted to know how this kind of thing translates into a western action movie. I went to the theater with lowered expectations, but unfortunately was still quite disappointed. I think Scarlett Johansson did a good job, but the fact almost all main characters were non-Asian while many minor characters Asian was indeed really uncomfortable. The visuals were nice for the most parts, although I didn't much care for the voxel style in the holograms. I preferred The Puppet Master of the 1995 movie to Hideo Kuze. I disliked how they felt the need to spell out every plot point and its implications. I absolutely hated how the movie was filled with unnecessary action sequences, and how they fucked up some of the ones from the original. The spider tank fight of the original was absolutely beautiful in my opinion, with minimalistic environment, calculated and efficient action suitable to Major's character, and enemy that was really elegant in its stationary and intimidating form. The new movie did away with all of that, and replaced it with a totally forgettable standard Hollywood action scene in a super on-the-nose lame-ass setting. I really did want to like this movie, but that was the last straw for me, unfortunately.

Wow! Congrats, Rodi!

I loved how organic, natural and evolving the storytelling in Shit Town was. It did not continue to pursue narratives that didn't have anything in them, and went where it needed to instead. Regarding the running theme.

I mean.. you should be happy. Some people are willing to pay extra for a curved TV, and you got a curved handheld for free. Seriously though, that is a weird problem.

Did you accidentally buy that organic catnip-based laundry detergent again?

Congrats Jake!

Nice! You can definitely see that they had to recycle some assets to get this done. For example, the car at 0:19 is the Pizza Planet Truck from Toy Story.

I wish that this arc would end already, and that the next one would be – or at the very least start off – much more grounded. The suffering game was super boring and (for me at least) kinda gross, and unlike what Griffin said, I did not find the conclusion of that part of the quest "worth it" at all. I also find it very hard to care about anything that has been going on in the last couple of episodes.

Excellent stuff!

I did not listen to the first season of Serial because the subject matter didn't interest me. The second season started of more interesting, but I got a bit bored towards the end. Shit Town is really fascinating, though! I'm glad that they released all of the episodes at once, since while I probably can't listen to multiple episodes in a row, I think I will go through this in the next couple of weeks.

I'm 9 heart and stamina upgrades, and zero dungeons in so far. This game is so good! The fragility of equipment bothered me a bit at first, but then I realized that it actually ties quite nicely with other design decisions – no leveling system, being able to access areas with enemies that are too strong for your, etc. – in trying to make you avoid combat when possible. Link doesn't feel like a character who should go slaying every enemy he lays his eyes on, but if I received XP and better equipment (as opposed to probably losing weapons) with every encounter, I probably couldn't help fighting everyone. The sense of exploration in this game is amazing. Getting to a high vantage point can be tough, but once you have put on some warm clothes and your climbing cap, prepared and eaten some spicy food, and arduously scaled the mountain, you are rewarded not only with the view of the surrounding area, but ability to directly access the areas of interest with your paraglider. The map seems to have a good variety of vast open spaces and more intricate areas, which means that I'm often finding new and interesting stuff, but there are also calm and empty moments which make me appreciate the more eventful things that much more. I can't remember when was the last time I felt this much "present" in a game world. Possibly during the first few hours of Fallout 4 before I started drifting towards demi-godhood. In Horizon Zero Dawn (which was a great game in many ways), for example, I never really learned to appreciate the game world. The different biomes (snow, desert, forest) did not really impact the the gameplay or my experience at all. The environment never felt like a challenge either, and pretty much the only consideration when I was planning my route to the next objective (apart from the occasional narrow mountain pass) was the enemy sites that were marked on the map. Also, I killed my first Guardian using shield bash. Felt pretty damn good!

Fortunately, I have gotten used to the layout now and my wrists don't hurt anymore. I quickly settled on playing with the joycons detached from both the Switch and the gamepad frame. I don't know if that helped with the issue I had, but I like that playstyle. Now I only have to get used to A being the selection button.

Mine is SW7334-0495-9606. I also added it to the Google Sheet.

I like the design of the Switch a lot. However, the placement of the right stick is a bit awkward for me, and my wrists got quite tired after 3 hours or so of Zelda. I understand why it is where it is; it just doesn't feel very natural. I hope I get used to it and don't have to buy the pro controller.

I talked a bit about the sense of wonder and discovery I felt with A Link to the Past, in one of the podcast threads: Turns out this game is indeed evoking very similar feelings! Although I know how Zelda and open world games work, and have seen a bunch of gameplay videos of Breath of the Wild, there is still so much about this game that surprises me. I love that Nintendo took 10,000 steps back from their typical overtutorializing and just threw you into this harsh, weird world. Trusting the players to figure out how to combat the cold in the tutorial area, felt so fresh not only by Nintendo's but any AAA studios standards, that it was actually a bit sad. I also love that they didn't go for the Ubi-style "climb the tower to reveal every point of interest in the region" and the detective vision (?). Surprisingly, the exploration feels that much more special, when you actually have to do some exploring. So far this game feels like a giant mic drop, but one where much of the impact is aimed back at Nintendo itself. I love it! As I said in the Slack yesterday, how can a thing that tastes so bad, feel so good?

Yeah, I would prefer a physical copy because they are cheaper and because the storage space is so limited. I assume that the Switch doesn't install the whole game if you have the game card?

I couldn't resist the temptation anymore and bought a Switch. Finding a physical copy of Breath of the Wild turned out to be much harder than finding the console, and so I don't have any games right now. Feels like a quality product, though. I will go hunt for Zelda today after work.

I still have the final mission left, but I think I'm ready to give my impressions. As I said earlier, I usually don't like hectic action gameplay, so I find it quite impressive that this game did not become overly frustrating for me, despite being at least somewhat challenging all the way through. The progress system is really well implemented. Even the lower tier machines remain deadly throughout the game if you are not careful, but because of the upgrades to your arsenal and the skills of both you and Aloy improving, you really feel that you become much more powerful as you progress through the game. When I first encountered the Sawtooth, I decided that I never want to fight them again. Then, about 20 levels later, I attacked two of them simultaneously just for fun and didn't take any damage. It felt awesome. Unfortunately, the mission progression is much worse. Because of the story they were going for, Aloy has to fight more and more human enemies as the story unfolds. None of these encounters were fun or memorable for me. In addition, some of the later boss fights are really boring as well. Deathbringers, for example, soak incredible amounts of damage but have an aiming system programmed by a Hollywood action movie director, which means that one of the simplest (?) ways of dealing with it is to run around constantly shooting fire arrows at it, with the biggest danger being that you get stuck in the geometry, which happens quite often because the developers were big on placing a bunch of debris on the boss arenas. I also wish that more of the machine encounters gave you an opportunity to place traps and make other preparations before angering the giant, instead of dropping you in the middle of the fight, as so many of the skills are centered around stealthy approach. I was interested to see where the developers were going with some of the story elements, namely discrimination and faith, but unfortunately they seemed to take a back seat in favor of the boring-ass Chosen One storyline. I wish the premise was a bit more believable, that all of it wasn't explicitly revealed throughout the story missions but the players had to parse what had happened themselves, and that Aloy wasn't the fucking sole savior of the human race. I played a bunch of the early side quests, but stopped at some point because most of them were not very interesting in terms of either narrative or the gameplay ("He went to gather herbs a while ago, find out what happe.. oh he is standing on a rock surrounded by machi... oh you killed them."). Maybe some of the later ones were more interesting? Anyway, I'm still really impressed by the gameplay and the technical execution of the game. I just wish the story and mission progression had been a bit better.

The discussion about how Breath of the Wild evokes similar feelings of wonder and of the unknown as the first Zelda game makes me want to play the game even more. I did not play the first Zelda, so I got the experience with A Link to the Past. I was at the hospital* at the time that my parents purchased it, either based on my sister's research or the recommendation of a store clerk. I was getting out in a couple of days, and my parents tried to cheer me up by describing the game, although they had obviously not seen it being played. Therefore, their description was incredibly vague, and probably all based on the the box art and maybe some screenshots they had seen in a magazine, stuff like "Oh, it has bombs and swords and boomerangs and all kinds of things." I had no idea how the game actually played, so in my mind, I basically reskinned Super Mario World, the only SNES game we owned up until that point, with the elements listed by my parents, literally swapping Bullet Bills with flying swords, and so on. When I got home and started playing the game with my sister, who had refrained from trying the game until then, I didn't know at first what I was looking at. The atmosphere of the opening was unlike anything I had experienced before in a video game, and the gameplay was new to me as well. As neither of us were any good in English, we did not know where to go at first. When we finally discovered the secret entrance to the castle, we were so excited. Likewise when we finished the first dungeon and got to roam around in the open world. And again when we discovered the dark world. We spend hours and hours searching for the heart pieces and other secrets, but had to finish the game with one piece of heart missing. I played through the game multiple times with my friend but never got close to the end score of the first run, 200 and something. Only years later did we realize that the number was actually the completion time in hours. Interestingly, I have never actually played A Link to the Past for more than a couple of minutes. I always either watched my sister, her friend, or my friend play the game instead. I'm still not entirely sure why I preferred watching to playing so much in this case, since I played other games a lot. * It was okay. I had a pretty bad asthma as a kid, so I occasionally had bronchitis and stuff like that.

What kind of things are you referring to? I haven't played Zelda, so I can't speak for the comparison, but one thing I have been missing in Horizon Zero Dawn so far is "the grenade rolled down a hill" moments. Granted, I haven't even bought the war bow yet so I don't know what kind of whacky elemental stuff can happen, but so far the coolest non-scripted moment for me was when I rode through a machine territory with my mount, angered them, got stuck on a ledge shortly after, jumped off, and watched as my mount desperately took on the pursuers. I also wish the world of Horizon was less dense, so that wandering into enemy territory would feel more special. As it is, there is a machine site basically every 200 paces, and very few places where one can just walk and focus on the scenery.

Yeah, I know that I can check the weak spots and types of vulnerabilities, but usually don't do that in the middle of the battle. Also, some enemies are so fast and aggressive that I find it really hard to focus on their weak spots, so I tearblast them a couple of time, try to set them on fire, and then fill them with normal and precision arrows. Also, it took me a long time to figure out that it is actually worth owning multiple bows. I don't think the game does a very good job explaining that. I have the hunter and sharpshot bows now, but I guess the war bow would be useful as well? Related to that, what weapon layout did you guys end up using? Or did you vary the 4 quick select weapons a lot? I currently have hunter and sharpshot bows, the tripcaster, and the slingshot equipped, but I'm not using the slingshot very often.

God damn, the battles can be hectic, but also surprisingly fun! Dodging the machines, trying to get a shot in with all of the arrows in case one of them does extra damage, dodging again, hitting the enemy a couple of times, and running for safety feels pretty good most of the time. Accidentally bringing up the PS4 overlay, trying to get Aloy to sprint, failing to drink a potion or consume herbs, and getting one hit killed less so. I also wish there were fewer human enemies. By the way, which armor are you using? I have enough money to buy one of the heavier armors and can't decide between Nora Protector (melee damage resistance) and Nora Silent Hunter (stealth). I have a stealth focused light armor at the moment, but I have no idea how much the stealth boost actually helps in not being detected. On the other hand, it seems that in many cases a confrontation cannot be avoided, so it would be nice to have some damage resistance.

I liked the idea of ominous narrator (for example, how the narrator revealed being in some of the videos), but I don't think the execution was entirely successful. At times I could not help but feel that the book was trying to be a bit too clever for its own good. Are the occasional multiple-universes style sections where the narrator describes how things were in other versions of the story, supposed to refer to Also, is this referring to some specific event I had missed?