Orv

You disable or kill them. Why is that a question? (Neil DeGrasse Tyson.)

That guy? For shame.

/r/molestingdolphinswithharmonicas seems more accurate.

Man what thread did we even discuss Con Air in? Either way, another convert!

I can walk you through anything you need to know about Dark Souls, Badfinger, so come to me if you want to experience a great game. Also yeah, GiantBomb has a Best Game of This Year From Last Year category and it works just fine.

As someone who typically does not go in for biographies, auto, elaborative or otherwise, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power is fascinating.

You really shouldn't.

...

Life of Pi: Gorgeous and something else. Touching? Poignant? Entirely unnecessary? A good movie. E: Just realized what it reminds me of. Secondhand Lions.

That's not remotely the same thing. Wasn't this thread about Christmas at one point? Mods, name change please.

The upbeat version I won't defend, but what is your problem with it on a general level? And don't give me the "Star Trek theme shouldn't have lyrics!" bullshit. E: I will also note that my tribunal of Incredible Star Trek characters would not be complete without the existence of Enterprise. Garak, Q and Shran.

Stargate (1 and Atlantis, U is best left off the table) are soap operas to the max and I love them.

I dislike Enterprise for a lot of different reasons than I think most people. I really like the theme song, a lot of the plot arcs are great (though I would have also been happy with nothing but day-to-day stuff like TNG), and the characters are some of my favorite in the canon of Star Trek (Phlox, Malcom). That said, it reaches too far. It tries to be the BSG reboot before its time, something darker and more internal conflict driven and Star Trek has never really been about that (barring V, VI and VII and anyone who likes those movies needs their head checked for holes). I like Enterprise well enough, but not enough that I'm ever going to purposefully watch it again.

It's never coming out! Aaaahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaahahaha!

I got the entire series of Enterprise! Ugh.

Bah slumnug.

Hot pads, advil and not moving a lot are my secrets to not having killed myself via my back yet.

We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you.

That section was more of an overview of the big arcs in the trilogy but I mostly picked things from the first game. Woops! Though to be fair the Geth/Quarian and Genophage issues are settled later on in the trilogy as well, they're just some of the bigger arcs to me.

What you have to keep in mind with me is that cinema is basically where I go to just enjoy something for a couple hours. A film has to be really, really bad for it to be anything worse than an "Eh" from me. So in essence, for me, "Quite enjoyed" is maybe a 5/6 out of 10, because it's hard for me to not enjoy a movie.

I'm gonna be unorthodox again this year and give my overall GOTY to My Experience With The Mass Effect Trilogy. As you're all well aware by this point, Mass Effect is something I don't hold a lot of love for, both as games and as an IP. It's not necessarily that I've come like or appreciate them more than I already did, with Mass Effect 2 being one of my favorite RPGs of all time. What I have stumbled onto is a deeper appreciation for video gaming in general, and I think, a more varied nuance of hatred for stupid things. Mass Effect once to me represented a drought of intelligence and novelty in storytelling with a remarkably solid second act. Kind of like Henry VIII, or Inception. The first ME remains a horrendous game to play, but I'm willing to give it a lot of concessions in that vein because of what it was attempting to do during a downward slope in PC RPGs. It's not particularly fun to play in a mechanical sense, but it gives an overall impression of gravitas and sly knowledge of what the player is expecting. Unfortunately it also gives an overwhelming impression that somewhere between KOTOR 1 and Mass Effect, BioWare shed anyone with a semblance of literary sense or even the simple ability to discern when a character really needs to shut the fuck up. I scoffed initially at everyone's insistence that ME1 is a detective story and to an effect I still do. I get where the sentiment comes from but I would tie ME1's analogy wagon to another horse. I think perhaps a noir/tragicomedy would be more apt, and I think that fits better with the overall plot of the Mass Effect universe at a macro level. In the rush to control the genophage, to stop the Quarian/Geth conflict, to help the Illusive Man, coerced or otherwise, it's a very long joke with a very painful gutpunchline. ME is not a masterpiece of storytelling or worldcrafting, but it is a modern tragedy in more ways than the story alone. It's deeply saddening to me, after having gone through the series in such a concerted rush, that it came down to what it did. Mass Effect 2 is still not the masterpiece I would like it to be, but it comes gut-wrenchingly close, and similar to AC2 over AC1 is a marked improvement in almost everything but what matters. ME2 swiftly violates and abandons any preconceptions you might have about this being your story, and carries on with a rollercoaster of equally sagacious and devastating choices and consequences within the scope of the game itself. The overall story is weaker, with less of a focus on the end of the goddamn universe and more of a focus on interpersonal relationships that hold no bearing on the larger world. However, despite the missteps in a few of those relationships, the exploration of the majority of them is in many ways a coup of video game story. Not since "Heya!" have I so wanted to strangle a video game character as I have Jack. That said, the focus on Cerberus and the problems of humanity rather than playing space cop strike a heavy blow against what could have been an utterly enrapturing game. Mass Effect 3 has automatically engaged fetch quests and can go fuck itself for a wide variety of reasons, but primarily that one. The Starchild is vomitously offensive to anyone with a brain or who has been awake during the course of the last two games. War Score is a mechanic that, much like the final missions of ME2, didn't need to exist, much less effect your story in a meaningful way. Mordin is dead, you bastards. Yet beyond all of that, is the ending. The ending of the first Assassin's Creed, a series of games with an eerily similar quality arc, was decried as monstrous, villainous, a crime and offense against sanity. Mass Effect is the button prompt heard round the world, but certainly out of proportion. It's a choice that puts a final rubber stamp on the coffin of player agency in the Mass Effect universe, and smacks heavily of a rush job. Alternatively, the writing staff was murdered and replaced with a panel of heroine addicted prepubescent sea otters. Whatever the reason, it should probably be classed as a felony. Is it a betrayal of everything BioWare's black grimoire stands for? Hardly. Is it the most missed and scorned chance for greatness gaming has seen? I struggle to think of a better candidate. The Mass Effect games for me now parallel some of our greatest tragedies. The ending of the trilogy is the scorched corpse of Chernobyl, the destruction of choice not unlike Odysseus' choices in his voyage home. Mordin is Carl Sagan, too wonderful and gone too soon. The volus adept you meet in ME2 is an analogy for the Cold War. I'm struggling to be offensive without crossing a real line here so I'll end that series of analogies. Suffice to say, I was wrong about Mass Effect, but I was also so, so right.