Duckman

You said, "as a game in the genre it is supposed to be in 2/5, because you like the lore 4/5." I get liking the lore. I'm just sorry it's a 2/5 shooter... I don't like putting up with cruddy mechanics and gameplay just to get the lore. The same can be said for Total War: Warhammer 2. I love the lore but if you look at the implementation they largely fail to account for the difference between elite armies and horde armies. They cap all armies at 20 units and they don't make it much easier for Skaven and Greenskins to get more armies than their elite counterparts. At least fro Total War it is more a nitpick than a seriously bad game.

I just want to point out that the fact that so many people excuse them this way is the reason that GW continues to turn out [big bad swear word]e games. If anyone held them to any kind of standard they could turn out *good* games with the same lore... On the tabletop, on the computer, in pen-and-paper...

Anthem (demo) - 4/5 (with some specific reservations) Anthem is a looter-shooter in the vein of Warframe, The Divison and Destiny. It's a Bioware game being published by EA. The game itself has some really high points and some rough edges. The loot aspect of the game seems about right from what we saw in the demo... Your loot improves your characters but not in huge leaps and bounds. There's an open-world aspect, a storyline and Strongholds that are mini-raids (team size does not change). You can select difficulty which makes enemies harder (specified changes in enemy hitpoints) and improves loot. CONS and Caveats: * Flight controls on PC are bad. They can be tuned but they're still not particularly good. * Stability issues under load during demo. These improved during the second week of demo but were still there. Bioware claims they are resolved in prod release. Caveat emptor. * EA is the publisher and that means mtx and probably a debacle. The cash shop was not visible during the demo. Both companies have avoided talking about cash shop or only talked about it with hand-waving generalizations which can pretty easily be demonstrated to be bollocks (really, you spent years developing the game and promising free DLC content and you're not sure how you're going to monetize it 2 weeks before go-live?).

Sadly, Romans, I can no longer invite you over to liquor you up. We moved about 18 months ago to central Mexico and spent a year there and then when we were working on a visa for our second move the company put a kibosh on it dragged me back to the states. We're over on the Ohio Pennsylvania border outside Pittsburgh these days. If you get bored and take pity on me sometime, send me some cider. 🙂 I learned to be a scotch snob years ago and as such turned my nose up at bourbons and whiskeys (as a college student all I had been able to afford was cheap stuff which was not worth going back to). As such I learned to drink good stuff neat or to crack it (which involves a drop from an eye-dropper or more likely sticking a finger in a glass of ice water and shaking a few drops into your drink). Anything else is intentionally diluting based on how much I intend to drink.

So, do you guys drink your Bourbon neat, rocks or mixed? When drinking scotch I generally take mine neat with ice or water on the side but with whiskey and bourbon I tend to make a mixed drink like an Old Fashioned (or a variant like maybe orange bitters instead of bitters and an orange peel or simple syrup instead of a cube).

I think he posted a pic of all his painted orcs in his reply. 😉

The problem I have with his presentation is what is left unsaid... Taste in music is a personal opinion. Whether you like pop or country or classical, nobody is going to fault you for having a personal opinion (well, ok, I will make fun of you for listening to country but still, that's an opinion). Personally I think there are a lot of people out there who don't listen to pop specifically because we like more complexity to our lyrics. I know for a fact that a lot of the music I listen to is not compressible at the level of the lyrics. (Musically it is compressible which is a dichotomy that he spends little time examining, repetitive music with unique lyric...) The other thing to think about is what the label lazy applies to... The artist or the listener... While it may be a lot of work to come up with the right version of catchy to make a top-10 hit, the point of all his data reduction is that repetitive is easy to listen to... it rarely challenges the listener in any way (lyrically or melodically). This allows us to ask the question whether or not being in the top 10 (a musician's goal and a financially rewarding one) equates at all to reaching people (also often a musician's goal but not necessarily financially rewarding at all).

By the way, I should add that once you have this down and can cook steaks that you like just as simple steaks, you can do all sorts of things to compliment it. Some options: Make french onion soup (let me know if I need to post a recipe for that) and pour it over the steak, cover with cheese and toss it under the broiler for a moment. Chop some fresh basil, mix it with parmesian and top the steak as you put it in the oven. After you have finished the steak, remove them from the pan, and toss in a full thumb of minced ginger and a couple of cloves of minced garlic and stir until they are browned. Then grab 1/2-1C of red wine, deglaze the pan and add a teriyaki glaze (you can grab this in the Asian section at most markets), and reduce until you have desired consistency. Then add the steaks back (basically as soon as they have rested).

Not my work or words but: https://cheftalk.com/threads/finishing-a-steak-in-oven.41684/#post-214702

Actually, that same argument is why I liked Ready Player One as much as I did. I knew the movie was going to pale compared to the book (the rights to all the things mentioned in the book would have been insane) but I thought that they did reasonably well trying to bring it to screen. There were some obvious edits which catered to the visual medium that I didn't like but at the same time there were some things that were much more powerful since they were visualized so I guess I would call that a toss-up. I haven't seen Rampage because I generally don't want to support trying to make up a story around a video game. I just see it turning into the reductio ad absurdum case of explaining why we have to run back and forth with planks that we carry on our shoulders to bounce a ball back up off the ground like some insane Japanese gameshow contestants. If you had a real story you'd sell it on its own merits instead of trying to tie it to a property that would garner nostalgia.

@Ish you run that and I will bring an army of Slayers so I can get naked, oil up and flex for you. (I'll pass on making puns with all their song titles because there is just too much ground to cover there.)

"I double-DOG-dare ya!" ?

I didn't keep playing. The dialog was painful after 30 minutes and I really didn't trust the dialog to direct me to anything and I have better sandboxes to play if I am expected to explore on my own and ignore the NPCs. I wanted to go with the Clerics initially.

Pax, I am sorry you cannot read the example I put in my last message so I will state it again. If I was concerned about my reputation with a faction I was given dialog like a 5-year-old and then told to interpret that as a subtle cue that the faction leader really wanted me to ignore his advice and go off and do my own thing. Further, all his dialog up to that point is offering me a choice of doing something now or coming back later and he is judging me for making the choice to come back later because I cannot come back later. That's not, "but I wanted to say something else". That's "here's a series of choices but ignore what I say because I am lying." If you can't see why that gets a 0-star rating you need help. The only reason I gave it 1 star was because it was a promising idea that was then horribly realized.

The spoiler you hid was explained in the initial cut-scene... Where the quote "world of millions" comes from. The point is that I am supposed to be the greatest general of one faction and I am talking to head of another faction and the dialog reads like a fight between 5-year-olds on the playground. "I don't like you and you're dumb!" Nuh-uh!" "Yeah-huh!" Later, I am given a quest option and the guy who presents the option says "this is not what you need to do and it is probably really dangerous for you" and then loses respect for you when you take his advice. If he'd been better written from the start maybe I'd have had context to interpret his advice but at that point, no way do I have context to say "I should ignore your advice and press the envelope because I won't be able to come back (especially since he's telling me I can come back) in order to gain his approval.

After the dumpster fire that Bethesda has been trying to make I am not sure what to think or expect about Starfall.... This is the alternative from Obsidian, the original creaters of Fallout.

For those who didn't see it last night.

All ships are purchasable through in-game currency. The cash sales are just a way to jump (way) ahead on the curve. If you want to play it the entry level is enough and it means that you'll have lots to do (and of course you can always crew on someone else's ship which is my plan if I buy in).

I love that you can drive two to three *days* east to reach the Midwest.

There are ways but the nutshell is a basic investment is $45-$65 (depending on whether or not you want Squadron 42 included for you). Ships are insane and range from $35 I think at the lowest to $1300 (I believe that the Idris is the most expensive thing on the market at the moment).

In the end I have decided not to support Star Citizen right now. It's still a rough Alpha but they have a lot of things in place and there is some promise there. They still have some major tech to work on though and I am not sure they're going to manage to pull off some of their critical systems. The main reason I have held off at this point is that CIG has published their roadmap and they are routinely missing milestones and targets. They may eventually finish these tasks and reach their milestones but at this point I think they are 3-6 months off their targets and that looks to be slipping further and further. I want to wait until I see a clearer path to delivery and an actual product for my money. I will say that the free-fly week has given me reason to continue following the product with hope that it completes so it did manage to change my mindset, it just didn't capture my money.

It won't let me copy the quote. The quote tag is so broken when you try and apply it manually that it becomes unusable. 😝

Apologies for the bad formatting. I was amused by the other thread here where BroG is asking about formatting since this is a case of bad tagging code. I ended the quote before my paragraph about "I owned" and that means that the rest of the "quote" cannot be edited now so I cannot fix the above post to be correct.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/princess-mononoke-dvd-1997/6111356.p?skuId=6111356&ref=212&loc=1&ds_rl=1266837&ref=212&loc=1&ds_rl=1266837&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIz-X7wsf33gIVk1mGCh3aSA56EAQYAyABEgLeTPD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds The rewrite seriously westernized the subject matter. It made Eboshi the antagonist instead of, as Pax put it, the disembodied idea of Hate, and it minimized conflict between Moro and A[big bad swear word]aka. I am not aiming this critique at Gaiman who was put in a bad place writing with existing animation and demands from Miramax that the film be accessible to a US audience. I am just sad that Miramax made the choices it did... See this commentary from Gaiman at slashdot:

They had Billy Crudup, Billy Bob Thornton and Jillian Anderson revoice it. Watching the English language dub with the literal translation of the original Japanese subtitles is like a really bad drinking game. The US script tries to avoid the use of a concept as an antagonist and makes Lady Eboshi the antagonist. It also eliminates any redeeming quality Eboshi has so that it becomes a simple black-and-white film about hero and antagonist. (It also ignores completely the idea that A[big bad swear word]aka is possessed by a demon.)