Lurker > MrMallard

You might as well ask if The Elder Scrolls 6 will flop.

https://youtu.be/8d3IM8lIASI

inb4 concern-trolling about how cildren are going to die because of this

I think MK11 was a great game.

I really liked how silly and cheesy MK9 was. Then when X came out, all washed out and drab with a shitty "next generation" plot, I was considerably on the fence - I had a friend who wanted to play it all the time, he'd rant and rave about how cool the horror movie characters were and eventually I just got sick of the entire package.

Mortal Kombat 11 is stupid, cheesy fun, like a more polished version of 9. It has some of the trappings of X, takes itself a little seriously in places, but the time travel shit is really fun and I feel like they dipped into classic Mortal Kombat in a way that brought it full-circle. Not entirely happy that the next game is going to be another reboot, since the last three games have been some flavour of reboot, but maybe they'll actually have a setting down-pat to use in future games.

Gameplay-wise, I'm happy. I've actually been playing the Switch version lately, it looks and runs like shit but the fights themselves run fine. I main Baraka. The Krypt is fun too.

I enjoyed MK11 a lot. Augments and microtransactions and all that aside, I don't know how you could walk away from MK11 thinking it was outright bad or some irredeemable piece of shit or something. The worst thing I could say is how it uses four different currencies, three in the Krypt and a premium currency in a cash shop. The actual fighting gameplay, imo, is really fun. I've gotta learn how to play Jax better though, he's my favorite character but I just can't use him effectively in 11.

Australia to the rescue motherfuckers

Yeah, but imagine there's no heaven.

It's easy if you try.

BlueTigerLion posted...

That board for people seeking help for their baldness.

Damn son, leave zithers alone

It was the Politics board, if the serial shitposters who keep getting squashed like cockroaches is any indication of that community board's conduct.

Jagr_68 posted...

Time to hit those indeed pages again.

For what it's worth, I was working 75 hours a fortnight - ten unpaid 30 minute breaks making up the other 5 hours, with 15 minute paid breaks every single day - for over a year and a half. I work at a commercial laundry where everything is done by hand, so it's been immensely physical work; I get tendonitis in my ankles so bad I can barely walk some mornings.

On paper, losing the hours is bad - and I do have a drinking problem which can make it hard to save money, so the more paid work, the better. I'm gonna need to make drastic changes if only to make sure my savings kept growing from paycheck to paycheck. Once my birthday is over (it's next week) I'm gonna stop drinking for a while.

But on the upside, I get a day off every two weeks. That helps a lot with the tendonitis, and it just generally helps me live a more fulfilled personal life. I was working eight hours a day, for forty hours every week, for a year and a half. Now I have some time to unwind and be myself.

Also, since I'm permanent part-time, I still accrue holidays and sick pay. Worst case scenario, I plan out a week or two of holidays, stock up on frozen meals and live like a mountain man while I get a fat paycheck. AND I'm basically last on the chopping block, should people start losing their jobs, behind my bosses and ahead of our casual workers/earlier hires.

So yeah I'm griping that I'm losing money. It sucks. But the actual message in the OP is true as well - I'm looking forward to having a day off every two weeks

GeraldDarko posted...

Trump would just tell them to knock it off, and they'd all go home.

Trump is pals with Putin. Kim Jong-Un as well, to the point of saying he was "in love" with the latter.

The idea that Trump would ease tensions by sitting on the fence and telling both sides to shut up is dogshit.

Remember when Russia began conscripting people and someone blasted a military recruiter in the back with a shotgun Shinzo Abe style?

Murphiroth posted...

User is not currently an active member.

About time, what a nutjob.

Dude was literally named The_Apologist, why did anyone engage to begin with lmao

I remember when Caution999 was just generally farting around the boards, weighing in on whatever took his fancy.

Then someone leaked that he harboured a discord server where he defended and encouraged users to use the n-word, and not only did he go fucking nuclear, it ruined both his general reception among CE users and his generally affable demeanor. He went all in on being a shitposting troll.

CE is one of those places where you can't really trust users at face value. Everyone has multiple faces, and most GameFAQs users have alts y'know. Sometimes you make a judgement call on a person and it ends up in the toilet - it happens, and you've gotta accept that and move on. Otherwise you're gonna spend way too much of your time second-guessing yourself.

Good news, I get a day off work every two weeks STOOGE

I take the $1000, because a comparatively small win is better than a total loss.

Is there an episode where Ross and Monica's dad makes soup?

LincolnDuncan posted...

is Boston Legal the one that's basically just Star Trek reunion time?

Kirk and Odo, and apparently a few other bits and bobs too

TomClark posted...

Jimmy is a fucking treasure, though. I always get emotional when he turns down the cash settlement in favour of getting the little girl surgery instead.

Boston Legal is a great show. It went a bit too off-the-rails in season 4 when some cast changes meant that the wackier characters started to outnumber the "straight man" roles, which knackered the balance and meant that the jokes didn't land as well, but it pulled it back for S5, which had such a satisfying ending.

I can see what you mean. That being said, I thought season three's lows were the nadir of the show and season four pulled it back with the addition of Katie Lloyd.

The most divisive part of the show is probably Jerry Espenson. I haven't seen his actor in anything else, but I know he's a good buddy of James Spader and they've acted in a lot of other things. He gives me that vibe of "able-bodied actor overacts a disability". That being said, I like Jerry as a character - it just feels a bit like the show doing jazz hands and going "Asperger's!!" whenever Jerry does something that strays significantly from the norm.

Whether that be one or two notable cuts supplemented by an original score, ala Jak X, or a soundtrack that predominantly consists of licensed music, like EA games.

For me, one of the greatest licensed OSTs in gaming is Life is Strange. Burnout Revenge also goes hard as fuck.

It's trashy, preachy, pretentious and hammy. And for the most part, I absolutely love it.

The parts I dislike the most tend to be around season three where there's two weird incest plotlines and James Spader's character picks out that a woman is pregnant by smelling her hair from behind. This is also the show where that same character faces the supreme court and wins, and later gets married to William Shatner's character. Third season is trashy, most of the show is total gold.

Mikayla Tyson

I remember when he sued a YouTuber names Apollo Legend for some stuff he said on YouTube, they actually met just before the lawsuit and Apollo was wearing like a stupid Billy Mitchell cosplay with like an obvious tape recorder to joke around that he was gonna record what Billy Mitchell was saying. We're talking a tape recorder that's like twelve inches tall and two inches thick with a physical microphone you can hold in your hand, Apollo took a picture with Billy Mitchell where he's holding it in his hands. It was clearly a gag.

Pretty sure Mitchell sued him because he feared for his safety or because he believed Apollo recorded him with a covert recording device or some bullshit. A lot of people were like "Mitchell is a shithead but if Apollo recorded him that was a stupid move". Then the stuff about the cosplay and the tape recorder came out and Mitchell got dunked on again.

Whether you liked Apollo Legend's videos or not, it's sad that he killed himself. It wasn't the lawsuit, though I'm sure it couldn't have helped - according to Apollo in a video announcing his suicide, it was something he was always planning to do because he lived with chronic pain. The shit that went down with Billy Mitchell was always gonna stick in my mind, but obviously with Apollo's suicide that incident is gonna stick with me for a long, long time.

Tax fraud

So Sly 4 unfortunately doesn't hit the highs of the original PS2 games, and I'm glad to see other people disagree with one of the big story twists because I've hated that shit for years. I used to have this friend who'd just be the biggest contrarian whenever I disliked something, like I'd mention I hated a song and he'd play it all the time almost as a reaction - when that part of Sly 4 happened, he was just like "no it's fine the game builds up towards this twist people online say it all the time just because it's negative doesn't mean it's a bad story element", shit like that.

But that story element - for those who've played it, it's Penelope turning on Bentley - isn't what killed the game. It was the SixAxis motion control puzzles. Like I'll just say that necessary SixAxis controls in any game are a deal-breaker, but in Sly 4 it especially sucks because the rest of the gameplay is totally fine analogue controls that's broken off by mandatory sixaxis motion control puzzles.

In my case, I didn't have a dualshock 3 or a sixaxis controller. I had a third party USB controller. So for a completely arbitrary motion control puzzle, the entire game became unwinnable. And it especially blows because the other three games were full of minigames like the Sly 4 ones, just without the motion controls.

Killzone 2 was another game I had which required a motion-activated move to move past a barricade right at the start of the game. And then there's Metal Gear Solid 4, where you're locked out of finishing the final boss fight in the game if you don't have a sixaxis controller.

I think the fact that we couldn't see any other studio replicate the Marvel formula without falling dick-first in dogshit is a sign that we probably won't see another Avengers-level cinematic event for a good while - maybe not even within our lifetimes.

Other cinematic universes either didn't understand why the MCU worked, or they thought they could ride the coattails of those Marvel movies with a pale imitation of what they were doing. DC are probably the most visible example of this - while the first Avengers movie took 4 or 5 movies to build each individual superhero and establish the sort of world those characters live in, with those settings and stories being totally independent of each other aside from some connective tissue that built towards that big team-up movie, DC tried to blow their load in three movies. Superman was the only DC character to get his own movie, BvS was like The Avengers 0.5 with a rushed Batman introduction and an unexpected Wonder Woman role, and Justice League had half of a cast who you were meeting for the first time in that movie. They built Superman up in MoS, KILLED HIM in the next movie, and then REVIVED HIM AGAIN in their third big movie, and then they never used him again outside of some silly cameos. Consider what happened when the MCU killed off a significant main character like that.

Or consider a cinematic universe which got flushed down the drain after one movie - the Universal Dark Universe, which began and ended with Tom Cruise's The Mummy. One of the main characters is Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll - he exists solely to be like "ooh, Dr. Jekyll!! Wonder what his movie is gonna be like!". It's like if Iron Man got out of Afghanistan in Iron Man 1, then instead of his own standalone plot, Nick Fury recruited him on a mission to save Bruce Banner in the middle of the Amazon jungle. They cast a series of actors years before their movies were scheduled to be made, including Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man - when the Mummy flopped, all of those movies got canned.

Nobody cared about worldbuilding. The Paramount Marvel movies might not have been a-grade material, but they were individual, standalone movies with their own stakes. They each offered a different look into the worlds of these characters, and when the Avengers came out, those worlds collided. Those individual stories formed the foundation of a cohesive whole - and frankly, it shouldn't have worked. Thor, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2 weren't universally praised, they kind of varied in quality and in hokeyness. And then you have the matter of six or seven main characters, each of them vital parts of the movie.

But it's because you had those five movies beforehand, you knew the characters and their worlds, that you could see those paths crossing and go "okay, this is coherent and makes sense".

What context does Dr. Jekyll have in The Mummy that makes him such a vital and exciting part of that movie, except to try and bank on a popular name in the hopes of making a movie about him down the line? Why do we only meet Batman in the movie where he wants to kill Superman? What's the context of Ben Affleck's Batman, why does his entire fucking deal have to be crammed into a movie where he's meant to be fighting Superman? Nobody cares about worldbuilding. Everyone wanted their Avengers moment without putting in the work first.

And then, consider the more recent trend of the "surprise crossover". The Lego Batman Movie isn't just about Batman - Sauron from Lord of the Rings, Voldemort from Harry Potter and the Daleks from Doctor Who are all in that movie! Look at Scoob!, where - to my understanding - the main villain is Dick Dastardly from Wacky Races, trying to save Muttley's soul from hell or something. Are the cameos and appearances kind of interesting and fun? Sure. I would watch Scoob! for that reason, I just don't have a good enough reason to track down a copy otherwise. I got a kick out of seeing Daleks in the Lego Batman movie, even if they were a glorified cameo. Then you have the worst example of the lot, Ready Player One existing as Cameo: The Movie.

That being said, I think those movies are perfectly content achieving what they achieve. Those failed cinematic universes, on the other hand, are malignant and shortsighted. They were never gonna compete with the MCU because they either didn't understand the rules or they decided to take shortcuts.

The MCU up to Endgame wasn't perfect, but it had a lot of variety and it established a lot of different characters and settings. Infinity War and Endgame paid all of that off. The franchise built on itself like layers, and then they paid it all off with Endgame. Unless there's a franchise that's patient enough to build those layers again, which is willing and capable of building that foundation one block at a time, there's not going to be another cinematic event like Endgame.

That being said, the closest thing we might get are the next three Avatar movies. They're taking their time and telling a story that's been in the works for well over a decade at this point. These movies have been in development forever, and somehow Avatar 2 managed to pay off despite everyone writing the first movie off as a fluke - a spectacle as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I saw a fan comic recently where Vegeta got cancelled on Twitter over this lmao

Everyone else in his family just privates their twitter but Vegeta keeps engaging the twitter horde and gets addicted to trolling. Eventually he's not cancelled any more and he misses the attention.

I'm sure this dp topic is in good faith

The Big C. It's a show about a woman who finds out she has terminal cancer, so she leaves her husband and tries to live life her way after being the long-suffering subservient wife and mother for the last 20 years. Granted, she hasn't told anyone else that she has cancer so her actions can come off as insufferable or annoying, but I really liked seeing Laura Linney off her shits making her life her own. Plus, they really do sell Oliver Platt's character as an oblivious, selfish slimeball.

I won't ruin too much of the show, but by the end of the first season she's back together with Oliver Platt and the entire extended cast - those two, their jerkoff son, one of her former students and her brother - start getting into these elaborate sitcom b-plots. Season two has a sideplot where Oliver Platt makes friends with a Russian immigrant and redevelops a cocaine habit he had back in his twenties. Their son has an extended subplot where he starts hanging out with an evangelical youth group and fucks a girl in the ass without a condom because she won't get pregnant. This one is more of a spoiler, but again I wouldn't recommend any of the show last season one so don't feel too precious about spoilers - at one point Laura Linney wants to adopt a baby, and she finds this nice couple who are looking for a family to give their baby to, but it turns out the lady is wearing a fatsuit and they're scamming Laura Linney out of her money. So she drives them out into the woods, pulls a gun on them and drives away after making them take their clothes off, right in the middle of winter.

The first season wasn't high art, but it was a strong, self-contained season. The second season had an emotional through-line with this character played by the non-Hannibal lead in Hannibal, another character with cancer who's planning to run one last marathon. In season three her cancer seemingly goes into remission, so it's a pointless fluff season, and season four is basically a countdown until she dies. The plots in the first season, imo, were a lot more grounded and respectful of her story - then her son starts fucking an evangelical conservative teen girl in the butthole. That's an actual plot point of the show. Show me manic pixie dream girl Laura Linney striking out on her own, not kowtowing to her shitty husband and living the rest of her short life surrounded by a series of wacky misadventures.

you know what else is a symbol

the fucking blue bird

Seasons of Bojack Horseman

Revelation34 posted...

Is that Black Clover?

It very well could be.

I've been holding off on playing the third game, because it's either get the HD-2D game or the shitty phone port they put on the Switch.

Like an energy vampire, but the energy is people talking about how they almost committed suicide. It helps to feel less sad and a bit more motivated, but when you're seeking out other people talking about how they almost killed themselves, it can feel like you're being exploitative of other people's misery.

That's not the intent of course. I've been living in this in-between state where I'm afraid of death but I don't want to be alive for years now, and I'm really struggling with alcoholism. Videos like the Philosophy Tube black star trilogy have been really good.

But like, how do you look up people's personal experiences with suicidality and self harm and shit without coming off as this energy vampire, going from one suicidal person to the next to feed on their experiences? It helps to process what I'm feeling, but it can look like I'm fetishizing someone else's suicidality y'know. This helps me feel something, I've gotta keep this kick going. The reason I would do something like that is to help process my own feelings, but there's that very real fear that it comes off as just mindlessly consuming someone else's misery for selfish reasons.

I know mods take down posts about self harm and suicide, at no point in this post have I indicated that I'm planning to harm myself or die. I'm just Going Through It right now, there's no cause for concern. Expressing some extremely difficult and personal struggles is all.

Worked with an awkward guy at a cinema once, it was a situation where I had nothing against him but I just fucking couldn't start a conversation with him yknow. One day we get orders to weed this garden bed along the side of an alley, and he says "hey do you watch any anime"

This was a huge boon because while I had stopped watching it a short while ago, I was still very much into anime. I really liked slice of life shows like Kimi ni Todoke, K-ON and Golden Time, and I had watched the entire run of InuYasha. So this was like a huge in - I said "hell yeah what do you watch"

And he proceeded to describe a show that made my soul die a little inside. It was the most generic, shitty sounding show I had ever heard, I think I could feel my hopes and dreams die and my eyes glaze over as he described it. It was about this magic war where the lead character is an asshole, and he had this magic power where he could stop time and do whatever he wanted for a set amount of time. He was talking about like magic powers having a time limit as this revolutionary concept that added Weight and Stakes and Gravitas to it, and how the main guy wasn't a Mary Sue because he was an asshole, and he described this soul-crushingly boring scene where the guy's magic war unit describe each other in relation to a deck of cards (like Frank is the king because blah blah blah, Jake is the Jack because blah blah blah etc.) and how awesome it was because it showed how well the main character had a grip on everything and shit.

Anyway one lunchtime he said that he thought feminism was a sexist concept in front of our two bosses who were both women. I legit just walked out because I didn't want to be a part of that fucking mess lmao. Fuck that guy.

I watch a lot of YouTube shorts (against my better judgement), and I like to flick through the comments from time to time. I was recently struck by how misogynistic the comments were - like I saw how hard people were criticizing female characters in the depicted shows and movies, but I was like "this is just YouTube shorts users being trashy" until I finally realised how deep it all ran.

Like the Sopranos for example, Tony Soprano is a lot of things to a lot of people but he does a lot of murder and shit. As much as you can relate to him and root for him, he does a lot of fucked up, crazy stuff over the course of the show. And yet you check the comments on any given video and all the upvoted ones are about how Tony is such a badass and how h would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for his scheming, hypocritical bitch wife fucking it up for everybody.

The video that made me realise all this was a short where Tony goes to have a swim in his pool but his wife drained it, as kind of a "War of the Roses" sort of marital row. Probably shitty of her to do, but Tony like full staunches in the way he'll threaten another mobster or something and there's an uncomfortable vibe that he's about to hit his wife. Check the comments - "wow what a bitch how dare she do this to him", "literally every bad thing that happened in the sopranos would have been avoided if she didn't open her stupid fucking mouth", etc.

Like Tony is allowed to be a complex, contradictory character who doesn't always do the thing that the audiences want and they understand as a Deliberate Choice, as a Cinematic Action or whatever the fuck. His wife does something and people jump straight to "this show would be better if she wasn't a bitch all the time".

And it runs across pretty much everything I see in the shorts format. With Family Guy, there's a character in an episode who takes over Lois's life and replaces her and tries to have her killed - the comments are always like "wow Alannah is the best they should kill Lois off and bring Alannah in full time", "Lois is a shrill bitch who ruins everything they should kill her off and make Alannah a main character". Skylar White is another one, I know she has a reputation but I imagine a lot of what people don't like is the character being intentionally cringey like when she confronts Jesse Pinkman early in the show's run.

There's this fucked up pathological undercurrent where users will see a slightly obnoxious woman standing next to an actual fucking murderer and thug, and they'll put the thug on a pedestal while calling the woman a shrill bitch who ruins the show for them. Oh she's upset because her family has to get uprooted to avoid the consequences of her husband's crime? What a lazy, soft, two-timing bitch, she just sits on her ass and benefits from her husband's crime and she has the fucking GALL to complain. Shit like that. The prevalence in YouTube shorts in particular is really fucked up.

I ain't no la li lu le--

Ahem.

I ain't no Canadian.

How is there a one letter difference between tape and rape?

Honey, I need to stick these two pieces of paper together. Can you get me the psychological, material and emotional devastation of an individual or establishment through stripping its entire being and sense of worth through persistent and deliberate torture and reclamation? Oh no, you misheard - I meant the tape.

SiO4 posted...

An Era we ought to forget.

U

I meant to quote this post in #11 but I fucked up

-_rustykranz_- posted...

Who?

U

-_rustykranz_- posted...

Who?

U

The rail gunner missions are pretty hardcore

I was just thinking about this guy. Didn't remember the name, but this is definitely the guy.

At the time of his death, I was very much a hardass. I made a point to mention every shitty grievance I had with him. To this day, I'll defend that - one day I'm gonna die, and I want people to speak their minds whether it be positive or negative. But I'm pretty sure he was in with the CEchat crowd, and after making friends with bokchoi, who I HATED when I first joined CE, maybe there was more to him than I gave credit to at the time.

I don't think he should have killed himself. I understand how he would have thought that was the only way out, sometimes anger and shame become so internalized over the course of a lifetime that one big thing happens and you decide that this, right now, is the reason why you should die. I make a point not to judge suicide because I understand the lengths it takes to get a person to that point. Even if it was over a stripper he cheated with before she moved on and cheated on him, I'm very sad that he decided to kill himself. He didn't deserve that.

I know for a fact that I'd be fucked off every day I saw Prelude post on CE. But then again, I didn't post on CE for like six months recently - and it's much more important that he be alive than dead. I don't remember every point I made about him that pissed me off, but I stand by what I said and how I approached it - and I still think he shouldn't have died. Poor fella.

Kotaku. They're making too many overt, contemporary references to be AI

DirkDiggles posted...

I like the Bee Gees.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNFzfwLM72c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkypZuY6ZvA

No How Deep Is Your Love? For shame, sir.

Jak 2 had the most cohesive story. Mechanically, Naughty Dog was chasing a trend and created an entire superfluous world map to emulate GTA3, and the stuck their foot right in the "edgy bloodthirsty grimdark" pile of shit.

The first game is a fantastic achievement with a genuinely unique and enjoyable game world. Jak 3 was undercooked, but I love the characters and the gameplay refinements. Jak 2 is like an awkward duck sitting in the middle, not a cute hatchling or a reasonably developed swan. The story is undoubtedly strong, all things considered, but Jak 3 refined elements of 2 that were a bit stifling and JnD was just a fantastic standalone open world adventure that didn't need a dogshit overworld system that fucking bites.

Also Seem fucking owns okay, and the fact that no-one can get their gender down is kind of cool.

I'd rather be named dildo. It's a stupid name, but you can at least argue that it gives pleasure to people.

You can use a dildo to hurt someone, but you're never going to see an artificial phallus oversee the mass-murder of an ethnic/ religious minority.

I was thinking about Geras last night. I don't like him a ton, but his whole thing about being a lone golem is sad and I'd like him to be happy. Glad he's back.

I'm not a big fan of the Kameo system because I actually want to play as some characters. I loved playing Sektor in Mk9, even if he is a dickhead character. Bummed to see he's relegated yet again to a trashy, token powerup.

And while Dreadlock Holiday by 10cc is kind of trashy and tonedeaf, that's a pretty good song too