Lurker > ElatedVenusaur

If your worldview must hold that Trump is uniquely horrible, inexplicable aberration from some "great" "normal", then it follows that Bush couldn't have been that bad.
But really, does it matter that Bush was a horrible, war-crime factory fire that Trump would need a second term to do worse than? He's just so gosh darned charming, painting quirky paintings and giving Michelle Obama candy. The kind of guy you would want to get a beer with!

Kratos the first time you fight him in Tales of Symphonia is really hard, but you can actually beat him. If you do, you get a level 3 EX Gem and a giant pile of experience for your troubles. Of course, you fight him immediately after another boss, so it's pretty tough.

It's great to follow a topic like this, it's almost like going back to when I was first watching the series.
One thing it's great at is that it usually strings out plot into easily digestible little chunks that don't overwhelm, but leave you hungry for more.

Wax Fang!
Majestic a.k.a. the song American Dad used in "Lost in Space" Well, they used the singing part and also used bits of The Astronaut when Jeff and Sinbad are escaping
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B6E0mijV5A

Repetition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fitZ9mnMgTE

DW8: XL features a pretty great story mode for Lu Bu. Guest starring Zhang Liao, Lu Lingqi, and Chen Gong the used car salesman!

sLaCkEr408___RJ posted...

Who thinks that?

Face Off
Con Air
National Treasure
Kick-Ass

He's great in The Rock too.
But he's only great when he bothers to try.

Hillary would handle it better, but our government is systemically dysfunctional, and also the 2018 mid-terms would have been a blood wave, so yeah.

Don't forget the last pandemic!

Nic Cage is great when he tries, it's just that he likes collecting paychecks and is indiscriminate about what projects he does.

Sonic 2. It's simple, really: Metropolis Zone is not good. Lots of BS enemy placement(why yes, I love it when I have to know an enemy is lurking just off-screen on that ledge and have to jump again immediately when I land or lose all of my rings, great design!), those screws that take forever, and 3 long acts of it. It's frustrating and it drags.

Stellaris. Ok, I've explored all the empty space and expanded and am now bordered by random aliens, and now I either deal with the annoyance of waging war on them, or twiddle my fingers hoping the Great Khan fires before he's irrelevant, because otherwise I'm just waiting for the endgame to come so I have something cool happening again. I can count on one hand the number of times I've gotten an L-Gate, and those aren't guaranteed to have anything fun.

Ogre Battle 64- Man, Chapter 1 had a satisfying finish, now let's slog through two boring filler maps for the second time before we get to something new and interesting!

Given what we know about Biden, I would be surprised if he *hadn't* sexually assaulted some one.
Tara Reade's story seems quite credible, and I very much doubt hers is the last story we're going to hear about. Joe Biden has a very long and well-documented history of not respecting the personal space of women, after all.

We def need her to shiv Schumer or clean up after Slimy Andy.

HylianFox posted...

I really wanted to get ToS2 since I loved the first game so much, but once it started getting poor reviews and the general consensus was "this sequel takes the first game and shits all over it" I went ahead and took a pass.

It really suffers from being Tales of Symphonia 2, because the game really fails to to be a sequel, and being shoehorned into that world hurts it considerably. It really should have been a stand-alone game, but probably some suit wanted to put "Tales of Symphonia" on the package, thinking it would help it sell to Nintendo loyalists with fond memories of the Gamecube classic.
Of course, that is far from the game's only issue....

Speaking of Tales, I don't think any of the others belong here, because they generally at least play well, even if the stories are not always the best. Some one brought up Tales of Xilia, and that's definitely a game with serious plot issues. It feels like the antagonist changes a half dozen times, and basically none of the characters leave any impression on me save for Mila. Plus, the whole deal with not seeing crucial plot events if they happen when the main character you picked isn't there is dumb as hell. It basically seems to be copying Tales of Vesperia's plot pattern, but fails. Still had fun playing it, personally.
Also love that the other world is basically set in the roaring '20s, complete with a jazz-inspired soundtrack. Makes me wish Tales games would experiment with alternative time settings.

kayoticdreamz posted...

Glad we are in agreement.

But I guess one thing is debt of America is in such a league of its own that I remain shocked it hasn't crashed yet.

I do agree that looking at Japan can be a good window into our future, but sadly both sides seem to be content with endless spending

With that said I don't know what will finally cause us to default. I have some theories but that's not for gamefaqs.

That said, American culture has no will to dial back the spending, from private citizens to small businesses to big corporations to all Levels of government
... No one wants to stop spending

That's because you're not conceptualizing America's role in the global economy correctly. The dollar is the international currency of choice and is by far the leading reserve currency. If you want to have a safe, reliable place to store cash, U.S. treasury bonds are the ticket. The United States has a large and increasing debt load, true, but it always makes the payments on time(and thus its debtors get their sweet, sweet profits) and also it's immortal.
Holding the United States "accountable" for its debt would destroy the world economy(it would make the Great Depression seem tame), because literally everyone invests in Treasury bonds. This is why the markets freaked out back when the Republicans were threatening to not increase the debt ceiling: it would have essentially been the U.S. defaulting, and if the U.S. defaulted, nobody would be able to make it pay.

In any case, in the midst of an unavoidable economic depression, the impetus of which is a pandemic which necessarily requires some degree of social distancing and limiting business operations (I mean, unless you don't care about human life), now is not the time to worry about the deficit. The time was when the economy was doing relatively well and could have easily absorbed some combination of spending cuts and tax increases.

If true, maybe we should fund them more?

Final Fantasy 2 is weird. The NES version is grindy and also really broken and poorly balanced(Death and Toad having effectively the same effect but virtually nothing outside bosses resisting the latter is pretty hilarious). I feel like being so hard on a NES game is a bit much, but even ported versions arent great.

Tales of Symphonia 2 is really bad. It has this neat idea of having you command monsters, but it doesnt do a lot with it. Also Emil makes pre-haircut Luke seem well-adjusted and therere all those beloved characters from the first game who are so much more interesting being reduced to guests with fixed levels and equipment and generally just...not being involved much.

Yall need to be more mindful of TC. Its pretty impolite to be discussing massive spoilers all around him in his watch topic. Let him enjoy the ride.

The goal is to save the electorate from having to choose between what flavor of rapist they prefer. But, of course, the Dems have sunk so much time and effort into propping up Joe Biden's corpse they could never bear to admit their error.
Just remember: Joe Biden is the guy they chose, the cudgel they used to crush dissent. This is exactly what they wanted.

monkmith posted...

as they should? its irresponsible to give huge tax breaks to the wealthy and big business, only to follow it up with more huge tax breaks and safety nets. time to responsibly spend that money helping the people that actually need help now.

Just LOL if you're serious. They already gave out the money they wanted to.
Now that that's done, it's time to concern troll about the deficit while shoveling American workers into Mammon's gaping maw.

I'm an "essential worker", so I'm still working. Mostly been buying somewhat more expensive beer and food than normal.
I also had to cancel a trip, so I have that money coming back in too.

It's decent. The sequel is much better, but the original is definitely a good deal at that price.

The show uses its long first season to gradually unfurl its premise: what the Crystal Gems are, who/what Steven is, how they work, what they do, their capabilities, etc. etc. It can feel slow and disjointed, but it builds a strong foundation for when the plot really takes of.

Because most people only believe in things so long as it is convenient for them to do so.

uwa ej posted...

I don't see the point of this topic. We all knew the economy would suffer from the shutdowns but it would be even worse without them. The economy was going to tank regardless.

Yeah, it's incredibly intellectually dishonest to pretend the economy would be fine without social distancing. Also really disgusting.

The best experience I had of the game was following a LP of the NES version where the LPer broke the game over his knee and Toad'd the final boss through a convoluted application of several things that aren't supposed to work, but do, because the NES version is held together with bubblegum and prayers.

Coastal_elite posted...

The sega 32x period was a fascinating story:

* Sega freaked out because of the Jaguar and 3D0 *and* they were also butthurt that the SNES was winning
* Sega of Japan decided to pursue the "brilliant" idea of simply upgrading the GENESIS so it can be called 32bit and so it could handle more colors, it'd basically be a bit more powerful than the SNES
* Sega of America said that was stupid, but Sega of Japan insisted.
* Sega of America said that if they were gonna go that route at least they should make it an add on to the genesis so it's cheaper and they can have backwards compatibility
* Sega of Japan agreed, but secretly developed the saturn too.

Basically if Sega of Japan had its way we'd have gotten a system weaker than the 32x as the genesis successor. Sega of America was the cause of the 32x, but at the same time Sega of Japan sneakily worked on the saturn, pitting 2 divisions of the same company vs each other.

Pretty stupid huh?

The crazy thing is that that was how basically everything went: SoJ and SoA were basically butting heads constantly, and it's amazing to me Sega ever managed to function at all.

Learned a lot about the Saturn from this topic. My understanding of the N64 is that it was, on base-line, more powerful than the PS1, but a lot of its power was invested awkwardly, and then there was the matter of storage space: a N64 cartridge could hold less than 10% of the data of a PS1 disc.
This made making cross-platform games and porting stuff to the N64 a nightmare.

Numenor posted...

There is a far simpler solution to the DC issue than granting it statehood. Cede the city outside of the Federal District triangle area, the Pentagon and the other Federal compounds back to Maryland and add their population to that state.

It's "simpler" if you ignore the will of Washingtonians and Marylanders, yes.
https://www.marylandmatters.org/2018/08/20/retrocession-the-feasible-solution-for-d-c-voting-rights/
Just 19% of Washingtonians and 28% of Marylanders support retrocession. To many, like you, I'm sure that sounds like a sound argument, but I favor the radical notion that what people want actually matters.

pistachio12 posted...

It's up to the people of Puerto Rico to decide, not those in the states. Some people don't want to become a state as they see their identity as a separate entity from American. Some don't want to join because then they'd be forced to follow all laws and rules of the United States which can be detrimental to them.

Regardless of this, Puerto Rico should have more protections established for it as a territory of the US and they, like other territories, should be able to have a vote in government.

The bigger question is when will the residents of D. C. be acknowledged?

I know D.C. was hopeful that a big Democratic win in 2016 would allow it to claim statehood, but, welp. Now my sense is that the courts will come up with some tortured logic to deny the city self-determination. D.C. really wants to be a state very badly and has been working on it for decades. They even have shadow senators!
Puerto Rico is more ambivalent about statehood, though it seems likely theres enough support to make it happen. There just isnt much urgency and less enthusiasm from Democrats. Part of it is sheer racism, part of it is the feds preferring to pretend Puerto Rico isnt their problem, but inertia is probably the single most powerful force in our government.

Sonic Adventure music is cheesy as hell, but it's catchy and full of character, so it works really well.
And is really likeable.

The Great Gatsby *is* pretty great!
In any case, this is really goddamned dumb.

FFVII was first. Aeris dies, or so you may have heard.
Other games that got to me...
Life Is Strange
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
Disgaea

I think there may be a few others, but that's what I can come up with now.

I'm still rocking the Bernie bumper sticker I got late last fall. It'll stay there until it dies or I get a new car.

I love that show, and always will. They did a brilliant job of tying things up too, IMO.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Lolth can curse individuals but typically you have to piss her off personally somehow. It's not unheard of but not exactly common. The enforcement for their culture comes from the priestesses in their religion and that Drow have a hard time in the light so they tend to stay underground which makes it difficult for them to escape the religion and they're not really going to find many welcoming arms elsewhere.

I think the funniest drow-related scene is when they invade the Dwarven kingdom ruled by Drizzt's BFF Bruenor and some of them end up outside fighting, and they see the sun rising and they try to blot it out with magical spheres of darkness.
R.A. Salvatore managed something good like that now and again.
I also vaguely remember a random orc paladin or something. I read so many of those books. They were mostly dumb.

Lastly, it's worth pointing out that there are plenty of fantasy universes that avoid falling into this trap. Like, Mass Effect does a really good job of it. We see all kinds of aliens doing all kinds of things, the only species that are pretty one-note are batarians and vorcha, but even then not entirely.

Ivynn posted...

Has no one brought up that Tolkien once got a letter of praise by Nazis and he told them to fuck off?

I dont think anyones saying Tolkien or anyone else indulging in these tropes is necessarily malicious. Just that its lazy and problematic.

Also, some one mentioned drow and goddamn I almost forgot how ridiculously, over-the-top evil they are. Like, counting Drizzt, there are, like, four drow in Forgotten Realms who arent sadistic psychopathic monsters.
But then therere are a bunch of entire races and countries in that setting that arent much better!

I mean, it is problematic that you have entire races defined basically as stereotypes, even if they're fictional. It promotes lazy thinking, at best.
That goes for any fiction.

Iodine posted...

They have moved to voting by mail.

So the only reason to remove Bernie is to reduce enthusiasm and prevent him from influencing the platform, glad we agree this is a cynical, bad faith action.

CptCompostHeap posted...

Honest question here, but during a pandemic is this really a bad thing if he has no shot at winning? Or does something still happen even if he gets delegates but does not win? It seems like if there isn't a reason to go out and vote, people shouldn't go out and vote.

As I said, honest question. I'm kind of a political moron, I don't know if there are ways to vote from home or if this would actually do anything other than take away votes from Biden but not doing anything else.

Theres more than just the presidential primary going on: its all the primaries for all offices. If they were really concerned about peoples safety, they would move to voting by mail.

The NY Democratic Party loves nothing so much as suppressing primary votes.

It was understandable to want to punish Al-Qaeda for the string of terror attacks they masterminded, culminating in 9/11, but it's not at all clear the Taliban had the ability to restrain them, and certainly there was no universe where the Taliban would allow us to conduct military operations in Afghanistan, so we backed another faction to topple the Taliban so we could go after Al-Qaeda. Classic mission creep.
Of course, the factions we backed were a loose alliance of ruthless warlords mostly outside of the majority ethnic group and completely incapable of governing the country, so we had to "help" them, which mostly involved setting up a failed democracy(you can't impose a democracy from the top down) headed by a corrupt jerk who would mostly let us do what we wanted.
The end result of this is an official Afghan "government" that is incapable of governing and that will collapse like a house of cards as soon as we leave and we've given the Taliban great PR, so they'll probably come out on top.

Octopus is delicious, like squid but meatier.
They are really, really smart though, and the coolest thing is that their nervous system is so completely different than ours.

It's a secret, because they're secret bears and they definitely don't exist!
IIRC, there's an event where characters can be killed and replaced by a bear while hunting.

I mean, it works for Biden, and this way he might not push some dangerous miracle cure thatll just get people killed.

MarqueeSeries posted...

Basically. Its fucking gross that progressives have to share a party with people that willing to bend over backwards to defend sexual assault allegations as long as they dont have an R next to their name

This is what it comes down to. Sexually assaulting women, promoting racist policy, eulogizing Strom Thurmond, etc. etc. are only bad if youre a Republican.
These people arent much better than the other side.

Plus, it has Jungo, a man who saved a stray cat and named it Jungo.

Finally, *clap*more *clap*oppressive *clap*totalitarian*clap* women!*clap*

Irony posted...

Wtf is a tankie besides a Lalafell tank in FF14

"Tankie" a slang term for Stalin apologists and/or people who reflexively support anyone in opposition to American foreign policy as long as they pay vague lip service to leftist ideas, even(especially) if they are also odious.
Personally, I feel like we can probably do better than Stalin.

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All CK2 and most EUIV, HoI4, and Stellaris DLC -50% off, with an additional discount if you buy 3 or more(60/63/65%).