SecretAsianMan
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Posts posted by SecretAsianMan
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20 hours ago, tabacco said:At least the food isn't a survival mechanism. It's basically just a health refill, plus maybe a temporary boost to some stats.
But yeah, I get it. One nice thing about the Switch for me has been the portability and the system-level mandate that games support preserving their state when you put the console to sleep. It makes it easier to play things for a little bit at a time.
I love the idea of being able to play in bite size chunks on the go. But as someone who lives in the suburbs with no access to public transportation and works in an office in the middle of nowhere I'm forced to drive everywhere so portability is just not a factor for me.
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I forgot that was a thing. As a concept I'm glad its going to exist but I'm just not really interested in getting back into that universe.
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21 hours ago, tabacco said:You never know... I still have minimal interest in the combat sections of that game, but playing it as a purely open-world exploration adventure, it gave me plenty of fun. Figuring out how to sneak around mobs to unlock fast-travel towers or get past mountain ranges turned into a kind of weird meta-puzzle that I enjoyed more than I expected.
The thing I feel like would turn me off is all the additional systems in the game I'd have to deal with, like weather and food and gear. On paper they might sound interesting but in almost every game that has them I end up annoyed rather than entertained.
I mean you could also be totally right but these days my time and budget are limited so I'm much less willing to risk getting something on the chance I'd like it and stick to something I have fewer reservations about.
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Oh man, Deus Ex. I bounced off that game so hard. I had never played a Deus Ex game before Human Revolution and I was quite excited to get into it. The story seemed interesting and it has all the world building details I normally love but I HATED everything about playing the game. It felt so ridiculously clumsy and awkward. Attempting to do anything either in stealth or loud was a comedy of errors as I never managed to accomplish either one with any amount of grace. It could be a personal failure on my part but I very quickly gave it up after much frustration.
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On 5/19/2019 at 3:28 AM, Ben X said:No, we have the Netflix Marvel thread, but any AoS talk is scattered through the Movies/TV Recs megathread.
I considered that but AoS isn't a Netflix show. Although I guess I could rename the thread since I guess I started it (technically I didn't create the thread, I think it was Chris when he started splitting all the megathreads into individual ones and I just happened to have the first post).
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On 5/19/2019 at 3:40 AM, Ben X said:How's the Arrowverse/Berlantiverse these days, @SecretAsianMan (and anyone else watching it)?
To be honest, I haven't watched anything recent. The last thing I saw was last season's awful crossover episode. I got tired of how repetitive every one of those shows are (except for Legends which has it's own unique brand of terrible). The only one I'm considering watching again is Supergirl and frankly I just don't feel motivated to do it.
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2 hours ago, Roderick said:I kinda stopped watching Agents of Shield after the 3rd (?) season, which was the big Hydra/Ward blowout. The ending there felt satisfying and had tons of closure, and I never picked it up afterwards. I'm hesitant about it too. I'm not as much IN the MCU anymore, not like, say, four years ago.
As much as I actually like AoS, if you reached a satisfying conclusion then I wouldn't recommend getting back into it. Most of what follows after that has LOTS of open plot threads that have never been resolved. It's one of the things that drives me nuts because I hate loose ends. When it looked like season 5 was going to be the last one I was mainly bummed about not getting any resolution to those stories. I really hope season 6 at least attempts to close some of the gaps but I'm not hopeful it will.
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It's not a movie but I watched the new Agents of SHIELD last night and we don't have a separate topic for it (that I could find). I don't think its worth making one so I'll talk about it here.
They do their normal thing of throwing you right into the thick of it without really explaining anything so that they can string you along over the season with bits and pieces of information. And even though that sounds negative I kind of like it because it keeps me engaged more than a straightforward story does.
(Contains Endgame spoilers in case you haven't seen that)
SpoilerI already knew Coulson would be back in some form so his reveal wasn't at all a surprise but it's still nice to see him. Coulson may be my favorite character of the MCU. I think it would have been really cool if they could have worked him into Stark's funeral scene but that would have been very problematic.
I think the season is set during the five year interval after the Snap (man I hate calling it that). The last season ends shortly before the Snap if my info is correct and this one is set one year after that. That Snap was very selective in who it decided to keep, namely the entire cast of SHIELD (as well as getting rid of all of Peter's classmates so they could be the same age in Spider-Man). While I think it would have been a very cool angle to explore events during these 5 years, it's clearly not going to focus on that.
Daisy clearly has much better control over her powers but I can already see her attitude and tactics causing major problems down the line. Jemma becoming hard and dark in her search for Fitz is kind of a nice turn.
There's not really enough info to begin speculating on where the season is going so I'm not going to bother just yet. I do hope they at least wrap up some loose plots though.
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Life
in Idle Banter
Thankfully, it ultimately ended up being a false alarm. We'll need to keep an eye on her but she's ok. I appreciate everyone's concern and support. It really does mean a lot.
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Life
in Idle Banter
I'm really stressed right now. My wife and daughter are in China visiting my in-laws and my daughter has developed a medical condition that may require surgery. They're going to see a specialist in the morning (which is night for me). We'd rather have it done here if need be but that means it'll be at least a couple days, not even counting the time it will take for the doctors here to examine her. The other issue if it needs to be done right away is the way health care in China works, you have to pay for everything up front. I don't know if my insurance here will cover this in the first place, but I guarantee they won't pay for anything up front even if it is covered. I'm not sure I'll be able to to pay an up front cost in addition to flying out there myself.
Right now I can't do anything but wait until they can see the specialist. I don't know what to do. I hate this so much.
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8 minutes ago, Ben X said:SpoilerYeah something similar to Iron Man reflecting his beam off of Cap's shield in the first Avengers or Thor banging his hammer on Cap's shield (sensing a theme here) in the second would have been cool.
In other news I just saw that the one person I couldn't identify during Tony's funeral scene was actually the kid from Iron Man 3 which is an admittedly nice touch.
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SpoilerI like the girl power moment. It's actually one of my favorite scenes in the film. I agree it's really contrived but I'm also a sucker for the whole "good guys line up" trope.
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Galaxy was a huge surprise for me. I was totally expecting to be blown away (-ign.com) by it and was really disappointed that I wasn't. Again, I don't think it's bad it just didn't work for me in a way I can't fully explain. It's entirely possible I'd have a different opinion now. I actually wouldn't mind the opportunity to try it again.
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18 hours ago, jennegatron said:at the very end Peter is using the ship to search for her, scanning to try and find her because he loves her, but she is not the Gamora of his memory. I assume that's what GotG 3 will be about, is reuniting Gamora with the team
the 2 deaths I was most interested in coming into this movie were Loki's and Gamora's because they were killed before the great dusting. I think that the Loki time travel pranking show that they listed on the Disney streaming service is probably the Loki we saw get the tesseract and he's still dead in the MCU timeline. Obviously Gamora's back but at the expense of Black Widow (whose movie will be a prequel.)
I liked that they used a measured hand with deploying Captain Marvel. Having her helping and protecting all the other planets gives her a purpose for not being on Earth. I like that she is the one Thanos headbutted and just no reaction. Similar complaints get leveled at her as Superman, and I thought they pretty elegantly sidestepped much of what people don't like about characters like that by deliberately bringing her back in. I like that they communicated her power by single handedly sinking the giant ship and having all the guns turn on her tells us that she alone is a bigger threat than the entire army of heroes and warriors on the ground. I assume someone called her, but because Dr Strange didn't know her before dusting, she had to fly back on her own rather than be summoned by a space wizard.
Where did Nebula end the movie? I honestly don't remember where she ends up. Was she on the GotG ship? Did she disappear with Gamora?
SpoilerI get what you're saying about Captain Marvel and I agree a heavy hand would have been worse, but I'm just not satisfied with the explanation. Her being "away" to patrol space doesn't feel like a good enough reason. She gets summoned (somehow) for the big battle royale but why was she not called in for the arguably more important task of getting the stones? If she had been there for that then maybe the entire final battle wouldn't have happened (which of course is the real reason she wasn't). I think the scenes that show she's a badass are good but then she gets knocked aside with a quick shot by Thanos and is just gone for the rest of that fight which really undercuts the rest of her scenes. Granted Thanos was using one of the stones (power I think?) to deliver the shot but we've seen other, less powerful beings take hits like that and keep on coming.
If I remember correctly Nebula is with the Guardians/Thor at the end. She's definitely at the funeral, which is what made me notice Gamora's absence. I'm sure this will get a continuation in Guardians 3, but what I'd like to see more is the payoff of the Adam Warlock teaser at the end of Guardians 2. I thought he'd be a big part of Infinity War considering how integral he is to the comics version of the infinity stones.
2 hours ago, Roderick said:About Captain America's time travel adventures: it is implied that he didn't "return" to the original timeline by jumping back. They try to get him back, but he doesn't show up. Rather, he's sitting a ways away on a bench, as if he's been waiting there for them to appear. As in; he never left the same timeline and just waited it out. (Otherwise he should be wearing his spiffy quantum realm suit, and would've appeared near the device Hulk was operating.) This does, in a big way, undercut the whole time travel system.
Again, I understand why they'd do it like this, because it is the most emotionally satisfying end, but it comes at the cost of blowing up the system.SpoilerIt's more than implied he remained in the past, he's shown reunited with Peggy Carter and has a wedding band on his finger at the end when he passes the mantle on to Falcon. It does open up a huge can of worms such as the fact that up until he sits on that bench there are in fact TWO Steve Rodgers in this world, one of which has knowledge of all the events that lead up to this.
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6 hours ago, jennegatron said:given that there's a Spiderman movie this summer it's very possible that they explicitly address it. Also it seems, from Peter's telling of what he remembers to Tony, that they remember being dusted, so it may just be the joy of reuniting after a mutually traumatic and confusing event.
SpoilerYou have a point and it could very well be given some throwaway line in Far From Home, although the previews also showed a bunch of the other significant characters from Homecoming (such as Flash and their version of MJ) in the same group. I can buy both Ned and Peter being dusted but when you start using for every character it feels far too convenient. But again it's not especially important except to people like myself who spend more time thinking about such things than they should.
3 hours ago, BigJKO said:I thought the time travel stuff was executed pretty well. They explain that you can't change things in the past to change their present. Any change that happens just creates a new branch (essentially introducing what will probably be a multiverse thing years from now) The only wrinkle The Ancient One puts on the story, is that these branches *also* matter. That the people living on in those branches aren't meaningless, thus they need the stones back so they can actually fight the evils of the world, such and such. It's hand-wavy, but they spend a lot of minutes from an already long movie to make it fit together, I thought. Captain America goes back in time and spends his days growing old in a new branch of time, which has no effect on the MCU movie branch, then returns to his actual present. Loki disappearing with the stone in one of the time branches, the stone is still there in that branch not breaking Tilda Swinton's "get the stones back" rule, just not the same place as it was in our MCU movie branch.
It's convoluted and contrived, but the movie spends time explaining its rules and it *does* follow them. The only question I have left, because I wasn't paying attention to it, is where is Gamora. Was she on the ship at the end? I agree they just hand-wave Black Widow away because they don't want the can of worms of "can we just bring back all the dead Avengers, then?"
Oh, and I *loved* this movie. As a massive Marvel nerd by now it was everything I wanted, honestly. Love you 3000.SpoilerGamora is totally not in the ship at the end (I think one of the screens is scanning for her or something?) She also wasn't at Tony's funeral. The last scene I remember her in was when she kicked Quill in the balls (either that or during the scene where all the women form up), then she's just kinda... gone. I mean granted, this version of her doesn't know any of the other Guardians but I can't recall a single person even asking what happened to her.
I still don't buy their time travel and I don't agree they follow their own logic but that's going to lead me into a long diatribe that's better left unsaid and I've already been nitpicky enough for a movie I don't even dislike.
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SpoilerNed being in the half went away then came back did occur to me, but I got the feeling that scene at the end where he and Peter reunite seemed more like Ned was relieved his friend who was gone for 5 years came back. I doubt it will ever get addressed though so there's really not much point in speculating.
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SpoilerCompletely agreed about Captain Marvel. She's supposed to be their ace, the big gun with the power to stand toe to toe with Thanos. But she pops in the beginning to minor effect (apart from saving Tony/Nebula), disappears to patrol space or something, the comes back and does... nothing yet again. That movie could have been basically the same without her (I'm sure there's some equally convenient way that Tony and Nebula could have been saved, like the remaining Asguardians who later resettled on Earth).
I have some issues with the little side trip to 1970 in that I think it was kind of unnecessary and didn't really buy the payoff but I'll let it go.
I'm not even going to try and pick apart all the problems with how they present time travel. That's an aneurysm waiting to happen.
And to clarify, I did still like the movie. I was ultimately entertained by it in the same way I was entertained by 90% of the other MCU movies. But as a big finale, I think it felt rather incoherent and something of a letdown after a decade's worth of buildup. Even the finale of the finale just didn't have the same punch it should have.
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I don't own a Switch so I've never played Breath of the Wild but I feel like I'd also bounce off it pretty hard. And speaking of Nintendo games, Super Mario Galaxy didn't do it for me. I totally see a great game in there but for some reason it never felt right to me. Mario 64 is one of my favorite games ever. Even though I never finished it I enjoyed Sunshine. So 3D Mario isn't an issue for me, I just never got into the groove with Galaxy. I really want to play Odyssey though.
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My Endgame musings
SpoilerI'm somewhat disappointed. I was never especially excited to see it, but it still felt like it didn't live up to the expectations. There's a lot of threads in the movie that don't really feel like they come together all that well.
Then of course there's the many, many plot holes. Loki escaping is a big one, so is Gamora just disappearing. Like did Tony kill her with the rest of Thanos' army? He had never met her so she could have possibly been included in the scope of his snap just because she's associated with Thanos.
Speaking of Gamora, they effectively brought her back to life by bringing her past self into the present. Couldn't they do that with Natasha as well? Fridging aside I felt like the main reason they killed her off was just because they had no idea what they wanted to do with her.
Peter Parker came back after 5 years but shouldn't that mean his buddy Ned is in college by now? Did he stay in the same grade for 5 years?
Why the hell did Nebula not jump back into the present once she was able instead of letting herself get captured? She was able to try and contact Natasha and Clint but apparently couldn't leave once it became clear she couldn't reach them.
How come they struggled so hard at the end? Didn't 6 of them repel an entire invasion of New York in the first Avengers? This is pretty much the same army, right down to the armored space whales. And they're way more powerful now than they were then.
I could go on for quite a while but I doubt anyone wants to hear my ramblings so I'll leave it at that.
One scene I did dig was watching all the Marvel women line up and kick ass.
Also, is snapping a requirement for activating all the infinity stones? Everyone who gets them all always snaps. If that's the case then I could never wield them because I can't snap.
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Once upon a time I tried to get into Red Dead Redemption. I can see what other people might like about it but nothing clicked for me. I wasn't pulled into the story, I didn't enjoy any of the mechanical aspects of the gameplay, and I found a lot of it very tedious and uninteresting. I shouldn't have been surprised because it's a perfect storm of things I really don't like: Westerns, open world games, and Rockstar jank. When RDR2 was announced I felt like the only person in the world that was completely uninterested in any part of it.
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I really want to watch season 2 of One Punch Man but I seriously don't want to get Hulu. I have enough scattered streaming services as it is.
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4 hours ago, Roderick said:Rumors abound that there's gonna be a Direct somewhere this week, and with that hopefully the Metroid Prime Trilogy HD will be announced!
There have been numerous reports that Best Buy has a listing for Metroid Prime Trilogy for Switch in their database so maybe. Those same reports also had Persona 5 and Link to the Past (with a note that there is a separate listing for the Link's Awakening remake).
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I had a dream last night that I was visiting Campo Santo studios and spent the majority of the time talking to Jake about the Harry Potter movies. Except in this reality Harry Potter was more like Mission Impossible and starred Tom Cruise. They were basically magical spies. Instead of elaborate face masks, they used magic spells; instead of gun battles they were throwing fireballs; instead of overly complicated technical stunts they had... overly complicated technical stunts with CGI. I think I might enjoy that movie more than either series.
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I agree that Iron Man 2 is boilerplate and pretty uninteresting but Iron Man 3 was one non sequitur after another for me. I found the entire movie very jarring and hard to stay into for more than 5 minutes at a time. I think everyone in general did well in the roles they were given, I just didn't like any of those roles.
Movie/TV recommendations
in Movies & Television
Posted
I've been slowly watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. While I have a better than average understanding of the technical side, seeing all the mismanagement that occurred is absolutely terrifying considering that we're still doing it (not necessarily in the nuclear industry but certainly in other areas *cough*climate change*cough*).