Lurker > SeabassDebeste

or he just likes joining #1 seeds

MysteriousStan posted...

Seems this is a prequel as well. Less hyped for that.

oh wow, yeah. that explains the tone too. unfortunate.

oh god the raid happened literally during morgana's birthday party? the timing on that just feels... too over the top at this point if it wasn't already told to us?

no one:

house at fata morgana: 22yo falling in love with a 12yo

ABORT ABORT ABORT

gotenks vs super buu in the anime is great.

pretty good list! awful listicle though, disappointed at the lack of craft put into that

looks all right, but not the overall tone i loved from the first anime

fuck the nets and the lakers and kyrie irving. the fact the lakers just keep falling into situations like this is ridiculous.

top 5-10 db/z fights?

swordsman not really loving pauline is sadness. living the connection between michel and the archangel.

and i'm cautiously hyped for seeing the swordsman's pov, though i realize as he said it'll probably change nothing - i'm not sure even from my pov i'll enjoy it much or that it'll be meaningful, since his storyline arguably had the least pathos to me

so, i actually thought i'd be game-over-ing by not accompanying maria out of her meeting, but it instead resulted in a beautiful conversation with giselle which seemed to confirm she'll be disappearing

i saved it at night and switched to walking maria home (great character, hate the cheesecake character design) and... instead this is the path that resulted in death. cool!

and now we're being kidnapped by the swordsman - and indeed giselle is gone

thanks for the kind words

i'm living through mell's story now. we know this all so it's a retread, but it doesn't feel tedious. instead it feels truly sickening, the way he sees morgana, the way he perceives morgana right before the swordsman attacks her

i might have mentioned this, but morgana's storyline felt almost comically over the top in terms of cruelty. but now than that, it was by far the most abstract storyline, so it was easy for us to distance ourselves from it as it happened

but reliving it makes so much sense as the payoff to this storyline. seeing her through someone else's eyes really amps up the torturousness of it a lot more

it's crushing and kind of brilliant

man, and now this confrontation with mell is resulting in a dialogue choice of stay with mell vs go after nell. for once i'm entirely lost. and after a fantastic scene, too. michel's combination of humor and frankness is pretty amazing

that whole stretch before michel tells nell about morgana is pretty heart-wrenching. i don't think nell talks anything like a nine-year-old or whatever but the emotions expressed are all really honest and for that reason affecting

aww, it's ending 0, a dead end instead of a "real" end.

a dialogue branch point! time to blab about our knowledge to mell and see if i can get myself killed for a bad end!

the tone in this section still feels wildly different from the game at large due to michel's dialogue and giselle's banter

no, but i used to when all i knew him from was commentating UFC

he can't move fast enough to play any position other than center though

what the hell lol

don't they already have an all NBA center who can't realistically play down a position

hmm, i'm not convinced they win a ring if they get past milwaukee, but i suppose they probably do make it to the finals at least.

Emeraldegg posted...

There was a time where they had durant/kyrie AND all those other pieces like allen etc. The mistake imo was trading all that for harden.

they didn't trade all of it for harden. they pretty much unceremoniously dumped allen so that deandre jordan could start, lol. the organization was a mess.

arguably they should have just traded kyrie for harden. but again, if kyrie and harden don't go down in 2021, maybe they have a ring to show for it and they don't regret their decisions at all.

35. Shogun

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20551/shogun

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Area control, player combat, troops on a map
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 120-180 minutes
First played: 2021
Experience: 1 play with 6 players

Shogun is set in imperial Japan, with each player vying for influence for their shogunate. Throughout the game, players muster and feed troops, build structures into their cities to improve life, levy taxes, and of course march into one another's territory for war. The gameplay is broken into a planning phase, when everyone simultaneously assigns each territory they control to perform one of the myriad actions available, and the execution phase, where in a random but partly pre-determined order, each of these actions is resolved for each player's city. Combat is resolved using a cube tower - each player tosses cubes into the tower, and a random assortment of the cubes that went into the tower then come out, and that determines the victor of the battle.

What a glorious assortment of mechanics. Shogun isn't just a straight-up combat game like, say, the Game of Thrones board game. You get points by controlling landmarks that people actually have to create, and on your turn, if you've got enough territories, you're expected to build up landmarks. The taxation also adds another layer of complication, a currency that needs to be checked. And man, that cube tower is fantastic in how you know that the cubes that go in will eventually come out... but you don't know when they will, and which cubes will come out first.

One of the most important aspects to the feel of the game, though, is the structure of a round itself. Like in the Game of Thrones board game, there is a planning phase, where you assign which order you will do for each action. However, the order in which these ten events occur is randomized each round. On top of that, you only know the order of the first five events, meaning the final five events can occur in such an order that you can't actually execute your build step because taxation hasn't happened yet. This type of "commit to a plan without knowing how the steps leading up to it go down" is uniquely murderous for my analysis paralysis (AP) and helped to make for a super-long game.

I'm not sure if I'll ever get to play Shogun again. It's random, confrontational, and kind of rough around the edges. If you don't know the geography of Japan, the locations' names are a bit hard to remember and read off your little markers. But for that one play, what an experience.

i mean, if your team gets swept in the first round either way, then sure, you'd rather have dudes playing hard than egomaniacal superstars loafing around

but the reason you got kyrie and KD to begin with was because you (rightly) expected more success, and if they were staying together you'd still expect more success than you could out of a dlo/jarrett allen/levert core

so it's mainly a sour grapes remark. they were right to blow it up for superstars, just things broke poorly for them.

36. Stone Age

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34635/stone-age

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Worker placement, resource management, order fulfillment
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 45-90 minutes
First played: 2021
Experience: 1 play with 2 players

Stone Age is a worker placement game set in theoretically caveman days, where you try to maximize your victory points. You do so primarily by going to spaces where you collect resources (sometimes with the help of a die) and then going to other spaces where you can claim markers with victory points. Periodically, you will also need to feed your clan of workers or face starvation.

I'll just be honest with you - I remember very little of the details of Stone Age. I played it once at a meetup, and it was the last game of the night, after a brain-burner. It was a 2-player game and I think we might have managed the game in 30 minutes flat, we were blazing through the actions so fast.

And that right there perhaps shows one of the strengths of the game: in one of the strengths of the worker placement mechanic, it's incredibly fast to make any individual action. By reputation, Stone Age, along with Lords of Waterdeep, is considered perhaps the best gateway game in its genre. And the fact that it could be taught and played with such breeziness, while still maintaining those classic eurogame trappings, is why it's up here.

I'll probably have to relearn the game from scratch next time I play. But the teach will still only be five minutes, and I'll still be able to tear right through it. What's not to like?

okay so some thoughts through doors 6-7 before we head off

- who the fuck comes up with all these creatively cruel storylines? doors 5-7 specifically have some almost comically sadistic events.

- really eager to see the connection between WHG and morgana, which i'd predicted, but which morgana denied (and which michel had accepted)

- again, i don't know that i'm the right one to speak about it, but the way this game uses trauma and cruelty to advance and bind its characters together is really impressive. rape-as-backstory can come off as exploitative (and the art for giselle can lean that way too) but for example, i loved how michel's threatening of giselle caused her ptsd... which then made michel recognize her as a kindred spirit.

- a weird reverse twist is that that wasn't the real giselle. i never really thought that giselle would feel that way, but i accepted it since the story usually unfold in the worst possible way. i wasn't that impressed with michel = michelle as a "twist'" but the pathos of the storyline really sold it to me - it wasn't about surprising me, it was about why michel is the way he is and why it's so amazing he hasn't gone the way of morgana.

- speaking of which, i love that morgana is so unable to understand michel. years alone with him, and she still can't get her head around his non-penchant for cursing the people who wronged him. give the dude a break, he's not buying!

- really just hoping nothing gets worse sure to door 8 after how optimistic door 7 ended. but i'm not gonna trust this game...

more to come!

(GT is also non-canon. it was an anime made after the popularity of DBZ. super is "recent" - ended its run in 2018)

man, so this section suddenly turned into phoenix wright, what?!

i'm super skeptical of this tone change - beginning to suspect maybe we wind up somehow causing morgana's death? this story ending with us saving morgana feels kinda insane given how it's gone so far.

book 7 is a weird one because it took so many of my predictions, told me i was wrong, and then went back and confirmed them

in any case, i think all the loose ends (other than the painting talking) are tied up

we got our beautiful emotional resolution (yet again) and this time it doesn't seem like it's about to get snatched from us right away

ending 5 with michel and the WHG as a couple was a cool one

not sure whether i should feel dread at this upcoming finale chapter - in some ways an epilogue!

i'm enjoying this chapter

a lot

and even find the story pacing

not so bad

and yet

this manner of dialogue boxes

is wearing on me...

dbz's several-episode epilogue is indeed weird

pretty good rankings! if you separate the 23rd tourney and king piccolo, i have cell over it.

i don't want brown for durant. let him go to the west.

oh man let's gooooooooooooo

i'm biased, obviously, but KG and pierce at least had a signature playoff win and basically proved that they didn't truly belong as contenders against miami.

if this is really the end, then the KD nets have two signature playoff losses and were cut short by injury in all three of their seasons.

wait, there have been three seasons of sailor moon crystal?! i remember it seemed like a week ago that it was new and my fiancee was considering watching it

agreed that a lot of DBZ filler is bad, since a lot of it can contradict canon. the strict definition of "wasn't in the manga" of filler still often hits as a negative. though tbf DBZ is also so legendary that its filler/anime-adaptation has become somewhat canonized.

yeah, i think this is notable in FMAB with hughes in the first half.

i think fanservice definitely doesn't have to be that negative - it has its time and place, and especially if the work is like a reboot or long-delayed sequel or has long withheld something from an adaptation or something. i do think it can get overdone if it's running a joke into the ground or it becomes too self-referential or it feels like it doesn't have anything interesting to say, but overall it can be a very positive thing.

but if it that fanservice is trying to titillate the audience with character's boobs or something, that's almost always negative to me.

i think people are too quick to use the word filler, and too perjorative when doing so - i haven't seen much of sailor moon, but monster/case-of-the-week stuff or breather scenes are often some of the best parts especially of tv shows. climaxes are more meaningful when i spend more time with characters getting to like them when they're in something of a status quo.

oh it actually happened, it wasn't just noise

3 > 1 > 2

i find it almost disconcerting how carefully this game is handling passivity in female characters, sexual assault, transgenderism, and body dysmorphia

like we're taking about a game that still likes titty shots of its leading lady

it's starting to look like it's possible that michel was possibly killed by his own brother didier??

also, this is finally explaining a few things that were missing before

- the name aimee

- what the beast saw when WHG deservingly randomly stripped

- WHG possibly catching feelings when dancing with the maid

- why neither giselle nor the beast actually has see with michel/le b their storylines

so that does add satisfaction

well i wasn't really expecting michel to actually be michelle. it's not a very impactful twisty emotionally

this story, door 7, though, is really hitting well

oh, there's a saintess too. maybe that is WHG? or is it possibly giselle...?

thinking that morgana is WHG, but could be mistaken. in the flashback with mell's past self atm.

master roshi has always been badass, it's being a perv that makes him suck. and that doesn't change in DBS

i think we all essentially feel the same way, which is that it's cool if you want to use any means available to you to complete a game on your own

it's when you go out and start complaining about the experience you got, or bragging about it in some sort of way, that it gets grating

as an interesting note, a few of the board games i play online have QOL stuff that you can't get in real life - an income display that automatically sums a bunch of stuff on your player's mat, or open scoring when you actually tally people's score at the end of the games. the former is relatively uncontroversial (but has some holdouts) and the latter is quite controversial among strong players.

no.

DB super was a sad reminder that not everyone changes with the times.

yikes, pretty grim intro to door 7. nine years old and being used as a party favor...

ah, before i forget - michel's brothers are still a loose end too!

think my enjoyment of this track was influenced a lot by the context, but:

[fate/stay night spoilers] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUs8FEsDUZ4