Duckman

Pax, I didn't see any point in quoting the same passage twice so I didn't.  I told you how it reads.

Your extended passage is much better.  What you are highlighting is that the problem lies in how the game interacts with the lore, not that the game itself is bad but that in being true to the lore it is not really comparable to a modern shooter.  Unfortunately, your summary sentence in the original post really doesn't summarize *that* well.  Makes much more sense now.

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.

6 hours ago, paxmiles said:

So again, 2/5 if you just want a shooter, 4/5 if looking terminators vs genestealers in a 40k setting and as a shooter. 

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?).

1 hour ago, Romans832 said:

If you invite me over and serve it your favorite way, I won't insult you, I drink it your way.

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).

13 hours ago, WestRider said:

Well, from where I sit, you look like someone who's not posting pics in the pic thread

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

11 hours ago, VonVilkee said:

He didn't get to eat as much as the other two, ergo he couldn't grow as big. I loved this movie but some of it was nostalgia I put so many quarters into this cabinet in my youth. 

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.

1 hour ago, paxmiles said:

The game doesn't explain key plot points soon enough.

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:

1) Mononoke's Disappointing Box Office - by RobertB-DC 
Mr. Gaiman, after the time, effort, and research you put into the dub of Princess Mononoke, were you disappointed by the film's performance at the US box office? Do you feel that the film was mishandled by Miramax, or were US audiences not quite ready to have their expectations of animation stretched that far?

Neil: 
Not particularly disappointed, but then I've never equated sales, good or bad, with quality, and Princess Mononoke was pretty much the first ever attempt to release something like that into movie theatres in the US. I took much more pleasure in seeing how close we got to 100% at RottenTomatoes.com than I was ever bothered by its box office.

Do I think Miramax could have handled it better? Probably, in a lot of ways -- for example, there was some silliness in the beginning where, once I'd written five drafts of the script, each word having to be approved each time by Ghibli and Miramax, they gave my final draft to someone to make sure that the mouth movements matched the script, and then cut me out of the loop for six months. The person who did the mouth-flap draft didn't like my script, and rewrote it. His version was what was recorded, initially. They screened it. It was a disaster. Then they called me back in and let me work with the director, Jack Fletcher, and he and I went back and put as much of my original dialogue back in as we could, but it all had to be recorded fairly fast at this point. I was proud of the final product, but wished that I'd been included during the period when everything went wrong: it would have made things a lot easier, and we could have been polishing at the end rather than desperately fixing things.

Harvey Weinstein really wanted to trim it. It's a long film. If Ghibli had let him trim, Miramax might have gone much wider with the film, and more movie theatres might have taken a chance on it -- but then, the audience would have been (rightly) complaining about not having been shown the whole film, as it was made, and I'd probably now be answering questions on Slashdot about whether the restoration of the missing minutes on the DVD made up for losing them in the cinemas...

Having said all that, Miramax didn't throw it away: they released it into the "ten major markets", and if the audiences had come out for it, then its theatrical release would have got much wider. Probably best simply to view it as a step on the way to something...

 

I owned the Miramax US release and was happy that it included the original Japanese language version and the literal English translation.  I watched the entire film (exactly) once in the Gaiman adaptation (note, Miramax uses that word and not translation for a reason).  I started cringing as soon as A[big bad swear word]aka was "infected" (because the concept of demon is too different in Western literature) and didn't stop.

Personally, I don't like adapting cultural films to different cultures for a reason.  First, if you want to watch a cultural film, learn something about the culture so you can appreciate it for what it is.  Second, changing cultural references to match a new audience is painful to those who understood the original references.  Imagine adapting Transformers for an Arabian audience and changing dialog between Shia and Bumblebee to asking why Megan Fox is not wearing her burka.  It's neither relevant to or respectful of the original material and that bothers me.

 

As for Ebert and his ranking, he's commenting for a specific market.  The same market that he touted Avatar for.  Avatar was the worst, derivative piece of drivel to ever hit the screen and it was simply forgiven all those evils because it had incredible special effects and an immense marketing budget.  We discussed it at gaming and when we came to the "monstrous plot hole" we discovered that the 8 of us in the discussion were each talking about a different monstrous plot hole, each of which was equally valid.  I get that his ratings are based on his entire experience with the property which, in his case and based on his comments I am sure includes the original Miyazaki work but at the same time that means that they cannot be taken as strictly representative of the English work either.