Lurker > MrMallard

One more bump, I want to watch a laid-back and charismatic person enjoy themselves playing some Pokemon games.

Why not wear a skirt, TC?

I have this account and an older account I stopped using years before I used this one. And even then, I used that first account to rate, review and archive games I owned.

This would do fuckin nothing to me.

Rob Schneider's career is being a bit player in Happy Madison films, and it has been for the better part of 30 years. And his beliefs, to my knowledge, amount to antivax hysteria.

Maybe he's making some bold stance against the far right or whatever, but somehow I significantly doubt that's the case.

I bet you're the same kind of person who wants the Pokemon anime to get rebooted with Red instead of Ash.

Still lookin

Not looking for like Chuggaconroy or someone's Any% Sleeplocke All Shiny run or anything like that. I'd like to see just a chill, laidback stream with a casual player, ala Vinesauce or Snapcube.

I'm watching a Pokemon Blue stream, so if there's a good Pokemon Crystal stream out there I'd love to hear about it.

Lard and hairspray.

I was just thinking of that show Fresh Off the Boat with Randall Park, and how that felt like a launching point for the rest of his career. Good for him, I hope the show does well.

I thought this topic would be about like a high-budget ensemble comedy movie though, like a comedy show with blockbuster-level production and funding as opposed to a comedy show about Blockbuster Video.

I thought it was Yeez

Noumas posted...

how is the game? Is it good?

I like 999, ghost trick, and of course the ace attorney series.

What system to play it on if its good I have a ps4 and switch and vita

The first game is good. You'd be happy regardless of the platform, it's an upscaled Vita port. Gameplay is fantastic, doesn't change based on hardware as far as I can tell

MFBKBass5 posted...

This topic is depressing.

is no one here happy with their lives?

damn I feel guilty being content. Literally has been the best few years of my life so far.

Nah don't feel guilty. Feeling bad that there's shittiness in the world doesn't help anyone, it just makes you feel worse. There's no point.

fwiw my post does have a more optimistic outcome. I've had a shit go of it so far, lots of bullying and depression and alcoholism. I lost a lot of really good friends last year, I can safely say that between May 2021 - May 2022 was the worst year of my life. But things are looking up.

I like my job, as tough as it can be on me at times. I'm moving into a new place. I have savings, I have prospects and I have kept in contact with some people who I now consider good friends of mine.

My life beforehand was wasted in a really demoralising friendship, in a household where I had to walk on eggshells all the time. I knew as early as 23 that my twenties were wasted - it wasn't going to get better for me. But that's the point where I made the resolution that my thirties were going to be the best years of my life. Fuck the twenties, shit sucks. Thirty is where it all works out for me.

I'm 27 now, and I'm beginning to get my shit together and move forward. I'm starting a new chapter of my life, right now - getting 27 off to a good start. I'm going to be plagued by trauma and shit for the rest of my life, and moving on doesn't mean that what I've been through is less shit than it has been. But for as bad as things have been, I'm finally getting to a point where I think I can be happy with my life, and with myself.

So like yeah I made a pithy comment about how shit went downhill from the age of 5 onwards. Still stand by that. But things are getting better right now, and I realise how much I have to offer going forward. I fully expect things to go to shit at some point, but I'm strong enough to keep this strong new foundation of my life, and I don't think I'm gonna lose it all and go back to a life where I had nothing going for me.

TheContrary posted...

wasn't he selling out American soldiers that Putin/Russia put bounties on in the Middle East

Remember when he went to visit Seal Team Six, but he tweeted from their location and leaked where they had been operating for months?

Nah, shit got bad at 5 years old and everything from that point on was various stages of not-good. I didn't really have a chance.

lennethsoki posted...

Keffals did some messed up stuff, criminal even depending on how you look at it.

It... kind of made me sick to watch and read about it :/

Like what?

Phantom_Nook posted...

I'm sure his fans have no problem with that.

What happened is that the Quartering hijacked some film buff's Twitter thread to bemoan the state of leftists virtue-signalling about how Hitler was bad. Sort of like "wow we get it leftists, you don't need to drum it into everyone's heads like we're morons! stop repeating the obvious, not everything is a Nazi!".

The issue being that the thread he hijacked was about the film buff guy talking about a black and white movie he enjoyed, a troll saying "that was one of Hitler's favorite movies apparently", leading to the film buff guy replying "fuck Hitler". The Quartering acted like this was a triggered SJW pissbaby comparing Trumpers to Nazis, but it was a short conversation specifically about the historical figure of Adolf Hitler, in response to another user directly invoking that guy's name and history.

And he doubled down again and again, despite the fact that he was being an obnoxious shit-for-brains on a thread that had nothing to do with his dumbfuck little stand against "The Left's War On Nazis" or whatever dismissive term these fuckwits use whenever "Nazi" comes up in relation to the right.

The funny thing about original mystery game franchises is that the first game is almost always a proof of concept, with the second game and beyond building on the framework of that game to greater acclaim.

You guys are saying that DanganRonpa feels like a tech demo compared to the next two games, and despite DR1 being really good, it pales in comparison to later games.

I would say the exact same thing applies to Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright.

Because Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a masterpiece all of its own. The music, the atmosphere, the story and tone - immaculate. I only had the first game for a long time, and it bugged me when people would say "it's not as good as the rest of the games" - because it's a very strong standalone game, and it felt like a mark of disrespect.

But come Diabolical Box and Unwound Future, and honestly - yeah. Somehow, the next two games only get better from there. The last puzzle in Diabolical Box is genius in its simplicity. And I had a hard time accepting the GUI change-up in Unwound Future, but that game is amazing when you get used to all that. Those first three games are absolutely GOATed, but the first game - as tight as it was on its own - is a bit smaller and more contained than the next two games.

And then you have Phoenix Wright, where you go from a strict 5 heart health meter to a bar that gets whittled down depending on the severity of your actions. And the writing in the second game - sans that circus level - is a step up from the first game as well.

Every mystery game needs a proof of concept, and that usually means building the gameplay systems in the first game and expounding upon the writing in the future games. Phoenix Wright and DanganRonpa are both very new concepts for the time they were released in, with DanganRonpa being a more fast-paced, kinetic and stylish update on Phoenix Wright's investigate/trial style of gameplay.

Iridion 3D was one of the first GBA games ever released, and while the game itself isn't fondly remember, the OST is really good:

https://youtu.be/YAXfmIHtk2k

Glad they included that Quartering reply, since he exclusively backs dumbfuck causes to start intentionally inflammatory discourse.

Even then, though, the intention to troll is clear as day. It's another step in the same line as feminazi and SJW, being snide about the MCU being "woke". It's not smart, and crying wolf to attract more negative attention to the community is clearly the intention.

It's pathetic, the same way that Jahan guy calling other people cucks over Andrew Tate the other day was pathetic. I know it's for reactions like this, so they can go "well actually I was doing it on purpose so I won and you lost", but there has got to be something genuinely wrong with someone who constantly aims to be the least popular person in a room and then gloats when nobody likes them. It's fucking bizarre.

I've been moving into a new place recently, and it has been impossible to get electricity connected. The issue is that I share a building with a kebab shop - which would normally be the opposite of an issue, because I live above a fucking kebab shop, but the issue stems from the address. The address of my unit is the same business address of the kebab shop.

So when I go to get power supplied, the power meter is flagged as a business meter. And so it should be - it's the kebab shop's electricity meter.

So what in the fresh hell is up with my meter?

Well, I got the meter number from the real estate, and after work today I got onto a power company to get my shit hooked up. I gave them the meter number and the address - and fuck, the meter isn't attached to my address. It's attached to a building four doors down.

So I google this new address. A bunch of the results are for a telecommunications place, think an AT&T store, but there's one real estate option for a property that's off the market.

I click on the real estate page, and it has a 360-degree photo of my unit.

So my current real estate may have fucked up the address of where I live.

I've already signed paperwork, and I'm getting internet connected in September. If the address is wrong, we might have to sign a new agreement and shit. If they try to con me out of another two weeks rent in advance I'm gonna be pissed.

tl;dr: found my unit on an old real-estate website under a different address, because the one that my landlords gave me wasn't returning an electricity meter that I could use. I might have to sign a new contract and go through all this shit again.

Anthony Fantano about to drop the red flannel

MrDrMan posted...

Games are $70 and an increase at a time where consoles typically see decreases.

To add onto this, the games industry has been making a killing this entire pandemic. Activision made record profits, Bobby Kotick got a $250 million bonus, and then he laid off 150 employees before Christmas. This was a year or two before the whole toxic workplace thing began, too. The richest publisher in the industry made the most money they had ever seen, and they still laid off 150 workers while their top executive made a quarter of a billion dollars.

I have no doubt Sony saw an increase in game sales, too. The industry is still somewhat in the midst of a pandemic bubble. There's no way Sony didn't make money hand over fist these past three years.

But you saw it with the chronic scalping that Sony made no effort to stop, and with the game price increase. As long as they kept that money boat going and kept someone, anyone, feeding them streams of revenue - fuck everyone else.

This article from August 2021 talks about Sony's quarterly profits. That was a record-breaking quarter for them, and they made 2.5 billion dollars across their entire corporate empire. The stated reason is "the rise of streaming and on-demand downloads due to the pandemic".

https://www.reuters.com/technology/sony-posts-26-rise-q1-operating-profit-pandemic-led-ps5-demand-2021-08-04/

So I really have to ask.

Why in the everloving name of fuck do they feel entitled to gouge even more money on this console, which is already a significant money sink?

It's anti-consumer. Like I said before, a PS5 costs about as much as a budget mattress, which I know because I'm in the process of moving and I'm buying a mattress next week. We know Sony are making a fuckload of money already. They already made their games $70 each - we're seeing $100 game releases here in Australia. They must have made a metric fuckton of money from scalpers happily eating the cost of the machine to sell at an upmarked price after bleeding the retail ecosystem dry of them.

And yet they still want more money.

I was interested in getting a PS5, but Sony can eat shit.

Abso-fucking-lutely.

teep_ posted...

Now think back to Hiro said that Makotos's kids and his own kids would have the same mother

I saw that in LostForest's topic, lol

80/80

Irony posted...

Junko is hot as fuck. Execute me mommy

I like her freckles at the start of the game.

Also the real Junko's fratbro mood is fucking hilarious.

teep_ posted...

Did you see the bad ending?

I did see the bad ending. Felt really fucking weird, but I think that's the point. Apparently the team didn't think about how Toko died in that ending, so one of them said that she exploded. I feel like it'd have more to do with Byakura plowing Aoi though, something really sad.

dotsdfe posted...

The Chihiro thing is something that will be debated for the rest of time, unless DR1 randomly gets remade. There's an absurd amount of discourse around that character and their gender. I've seen them called a cis male, non binary, and trans by different people. Sadly, the way the character was handled just wasn't the best, even though they're one of my favorites for the first game.

Regardless, stan Sakura, she's iconic.

Oh yeah absolutely. It's just such an unfortunate sort of baggage that overshadows who the character was, and it felt like a cheap and lurid twist that robbed the character of their voice on the topic. I get that it's a hot button issue, but for as much as I genuinely love Chihiro, the way it was done in the game is such a shitshow and I hate that.

Sakura is fantastic though. A part of me views her as something of a gag character, but this is an over the top caricature that the game builds up into such a fantastic and fleshed out character. I love Sakura.

Seriously, my headcanon is that her and Aoi fell in love. The game teases at that in that sort of classic L-Class way, where it isn't actually them being gay but just teasing at how close they were. But man fuck that, these bitches gay. Good for them, good for them.

Honestly, Toko's breakdown into openly horny sadomasochist was one of the most upsetting parts of the game. Like damn, I get that she's partially a serial killer, but that shit was really upsetting.

teep_ posted...

Good to see you had a good time with it

The last case is always a long one, so in future I'd recommend taking a break if necessary, it can really wear you down

The future games turn up the anime shenanigans to 11, worth bearing in mind. They're also vastly better than 1, to the point where in some ways it feels like a tech demo (though still a very good one)

If there's any franchise that should dial up the anime shenanigans, it's DanganRonpa. I heard the term "maximalist" recently from the director of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, and that's been on the forefront of my mind as something I'm very into. The first thing that came to mind about this game was "maximalist". This game throws everything at you. If it gets wilder than this, I'm gonna be really happy.

And yeah, I'll keep the length of the final case in mind. I'll pace myself better next time, it was fine until I began binging multiple cases lol.

Kajagogo posted...

Yea, it was dumb to get rid of the best designed character so early.

I read that Leon and Sayaka were the templates for the male and female characters, so the team got sick of going back to them when they wanted to make a new character and decided to kill them off first.

Leon looks like a Nomura character. Reminds me of Reno from FF7 or Axel from KH.

Hate to say it, but what a load of shit.

$700+ was already too much for a console. Now it's $800? I'm dropping $800 on a fucking bed in a week or two. Fuck that, I could get a good chair or a decent TV for that much cash.

I would rather buy a PC for a little more than that, because most of the games on PS5 end up on PC anyway and there's so much more functionality. That's a real bummer because I was thinking of getting one after I'd moved into my new place.

Shitty news.

I'm making this topic because LostForest has moved onto dagnab romper 2 in their thread. I'm gonna hold off on the second game until it's on sale, mostly because I'm moving and partially because I'm already a tight-ass.

Be warned, DR1 spoilers will be unmarked. Please don't go beyond this game because I am planning to play the rest.

So - I liked it a lot. I love gaudy, excessive things, and DanganRonpa is nothing if not excessive. It's like if Ace Attorney was set in a Persona game, and everything's on crack. I love how colourful the designs are, literally and figuratively.

The one downside to the game - and this might sound douchey as fuck - is how easy the cases ended up being. Case 1 was a worker, I didn't know anyone's names and I was gunning for Byakura. Case 2 was basically everything awful in the world coming to pass. Case 3 and onwards became pretty straightforward. That was good because I felt empowered as I was playing and it let me get better at the actual gameplay - I actually got good at the rhythm game portion. But it was also kind of cumbersome when it was clear that Sakura killed herself.

The one big complaint I have is that the final class trial is way too long. The exposition is tiring and the switching tones of Junko was really jarring. I was already hitting burnout, I had a really long play session the previous night and the words were starting to lose the voices if that makes sense. DanganRonpa only just overstays its welcome. Only just.

My favourite case, despite the burnout, was Sakura's one. It dragged, but the emotional shit was on point. I don't care what any of y'all motherfuckers say, Aoi and Sakura loved each other. They should have gotten out together.

Another downside is that I was around Tumblr when DanganRonpa got big, so Junko's memeification clued me into the greater mystery. Mukuro's corpse clearly had her red nails, so I thought if nothing else Junko's corpse had been desecrated. Not the game's fault, but still hindered things.

I have some stuff to say about the characters.

First of all, Chihiro. I don't think a lot of thought was put into the character. They transitioned to living as female because they were sick of being called weak "for a boy", and presumably lived publically as a girl before coming to Hope's Peak. This decision reads like Chihiro going "I'm so weak I might as well be a girl", which is kinda sexist, and it feels like they didn't think of the trans angle in service of having a big shocking gender twist that comes out of nowhere for the sake of having a big shocking gender twist. That's kind of ass-backwards, and I think it was done at the expense of Chihiro's character rather than in service of it. Not intentionally, but that's what it ended up being.

I can somewhat see Chihiro's story as someone who decided to transition, but then realised that they were treating the wrong symptoms of their unhappiness (because personal issues tend to be co-morbid with other personal issues and you usually don't get it right on the first try), and they decided to detransition when they realised what they wanted to do - they crystallised. That's one way to interpret Chihiro's story.

The issue is that the framework to tell that sort of story isn't really built, because the gender angle comes so far out of left field at the end of the trial and it ends up turning Chihiro into this set of talking points that overshadow who they were when you knew them. It feels like a cheap twist that derails the trial to talk about Chihiro as this shocking boy in a dress. It's only after they die and are robbed of their own voice that this facet of them comes out. And this bothers me because I really fucking like Chihiro.

The person you know the entire game, before realising their birth gender in a petty twist after their murder, is so far removed from the talking points their character brings up after they've died. I think the gender twist was a huge disservice to Chihiro's character, though I wish it had been addressed before they died. I love the idea, but I don't think it was done in a positive way and whatever it was trying to do falls totally flat.

Next, Byakura. I didn't like him for most of the game. I thought he had a great moment right at the end, being the last of the Togami bloodline, but I don't go for the petty, bitchy tsundere characters of either gender.

Hifumi made me laugh out loud a handful of times with his voice clips about 2D vs 3D. He's a gonk and a bastard, but I'd love to see him and the group living their school lives. Very much a low-tier character, but man you can't beat him.

I thought Hiro would end up being the mastermind. He's the only character you can't find initially during the last investigation and he keeps running away from you before Monokuma pops up to taunt you. But again, Junko being memed years ago tipped me off to it being her. Otherwise he's just annoying and boring.

So someone mentioned in LostForest's topic that people like to do character tier lists. Here's mine, off the top of my head:

1. Aoi
2. Chihiro
3. Kyoko
4. Mondo
5. Sakura
6. Taka
7. Sayaka
8. Makoto
9. Celeste
10. Toko
11. Junko
12. Hifumi
13. Leon - only because he doesn't have much screen time, I love his design
14. Yasuhiro
15. Byakura
16. Mukuro - again, because she has so little screentime.

I'm gonna play School Mode, and when I'm settled into my new place I'll start playing the second game. It was a solid 7/10 game - great mystery game, incredibly stylish, but it only just manages to overstay its welcome and the cases begin to feel very see-through by the end.

You underestimate my inability to be attractive, TC

ZMythos posted...

Interesting fact:

Different Arceus have different sizes in PLA.

My original is 10'6" and 704.4 lbs.

My shiny is slightly smaller at 9'9" and 654.5 lbs.

I heard it's because the Arceus you can catch isn't THE Arceus, God of the Pokverse. It's actually an avatar of Arceus, a token sent by the real deal. So basically you can have multiple tokens, but only if Arceus offers such a token to two trainers and one decides to trade it to the other.

Basically, that's not God. That's Jesus.

saspa posted...

I like Crash. I haven't liked their other stuff. They went from making platformers to freaking shooters, that's like going from fun to shooters

To be fair, so did Insomniac with Resistance. And companies like Sucker Punch went from cartoon fare to these lofty "concept" games with open worlds and karma meters and shit. That was the nature of the seventh console generation - the one big second-party dev that stuck to their roots somewhat and kept up with one of their 6th gen franchises is Insomniac, everyone moved onto gritty shooters or edgy open world games.

Naughty Dog's biggest boon has always been tech. Crash 1 is a technological marvel, they had to overclock the PS1 to make it work properly. The later Jak games are disputed - I played them all, don't shoot me - but one thing those Naughty Dog Jak games always had was cutting edge tech. We've only seen a return to Jak-tier character shadows kind of recently, and most bigger games still go for the choppy, blurry shadows that you're not meant to stand around and look at.

And while I only finished the first game at the urging of a friend, the Uncharted games do look incredible. They're really railroaded, linear experiences, but fuck me they're gorgeous. Even the original Last of Us on the PS3 holds up incredibly well today.

I'm bothered that they're milking the TLoU license as hard as they can. They're remaking the first game? There are only two Last of Us games. Can someone please make something fun and original again? Something that's groundbreaking and techy in a fun way - like Sonic's Ass, or Jak and Daxter with the kinetic, cartoonily tweened animations.

It's crafty, but it's not cheating. He had the option to do so in every official sense of the term, there was no modding or hacking to the console or software to increase his likelihood of winning. Everybody else had the ability to turn off crossplay as well, so it was a feature anyone could have used - with a clear bias depending on what you're playing on, granted, but the fact that Xbox doesn't have as big of a presence in some of the larger gaming demographics isn't really something they can control.

At best, they took advantage of a facet of the game that they had no control over using options supplied by the developer which were present in every version of the game. At worst, they exploited an unintended loophole in the game's matchmaking. Either way, as sneaky as it is, it's luck of the draw depending on what system you have and it was in no way localised to that one user. Any Xbox player could have done this, but they didn't.

TheHoldSteady posted...

I think the internet will collectively meltdown like it hasn't done since MJ died.

I mean people barely mentioned the Neverland Ranch controversy in the wake of his death and the world collectively went into MJ-mania. There was a second backlash years later after Leaving Neverland came out.

Trump's not gonna die without people pointing out what a scum-sucking seditious cretin he is. A lot of people are gonna get banned or suspended on here, that's for sure. I might be one of them.

Next thing you know, this dumb fuck is gonna be breaking out the skull tweezers and giving everyone a free phrenology lesson.

God, is this some qanon deep state horseshit

Ricemills posted...

who is this guy and why he's important enough that 2 topics were made for him?

He made a troll topic shilling for Andrew Tate, the right-wing grifter and alleged human trafficker, within which he began to openly antagonise people who were calling Tate out for his alleged human trafficking and for moving to Romania because it's easier to beat rape charges. People were saying in that topic that Jahan had apparently said some fucked up things about rape himself, and that's about all I saw before seeing this topic.

Did you pay for Hustler University, TC?

Out of those picks, the only artist I enjoy hearing consistently is The Weeknd.

I've spent my entire life having Eminem played around me by drunk trailer trash adults, so on top of being overplayed and overstated, I associate him with alcoholism and white trash. Drake made a handful of good songs and instantly began putting out mid songs because he could get away with it. I had a friend who was a big Ed Sheeran fan, so on top of his mostly mid output getting overwhelming radio play, I had to put up with someone like actively going out of his way to play Ed Sheeran too.

Otherwise I'm kind of ehh on the whole list. The Weeknd is great, though.

Isometric RPGs are hard to develop. You've basically gotta have a math brain and an eye for isometric visual design to make a good isometric RPG, whereas a boomer shooter is focused more on stylish graphics, open areas for you to move through, and guns for you to cut through the enemy.

I would genuinely say it's easier to conceptualise and develop a boomer shooter than it would be to develop an isometric RPG.