Lurker > MrMallard

I've been playing on and off for years, on PS2 and PS3. The sheer lengths you have to do to get everything is beyond a joke.

First of all, you're not finding all of those Crimson Spheres without a guide. And even if you use a guide, or memorise where they all are, it's way too easy to lock yourself out of getting them. Didn't visit Bevelle twice in Chapter 3 and follow that little sidequest? Missed a sphere. Forgot to talk to LeBlanc right at the end of chapter 4 before advancing the story, potentially activating the cutscene accidentally? Missed a sphere. Shit is wild.

Second, you can't get Episode Complete for all locations without using a guide over the course of the game. There are 5 chapters and like 22 locations in Spira, and some of the criteria to clear each area in each chapter is pedantic bullshit.

• In chapter 3, you need to sell 10 tickets in a row and make a profit doing it. Every customer has a unique, unknown value that decides what value they'll buy a ticket for, and there are people who you have to sell to at a loss to get them to buy a ticket - which you can't reasonably know without a guide. If you sell 9/10 tickets, you've just locked yourself out of 100% completion. The effort you put into the same area in chapter 1 and 2 is all for naught. This is one of the pettiest circumstances in the game, being entirely low stakes, but instrumental to 100% completion. You wouldn't know that anything less than a perfect score locks you out of 100% completion without a guide.
• In order to get Episode Complete in Kilika, you need to activate a series of cutscenes through the Commsphere in chapter 4. You need to activate the right cutscenes, then do a mission, then activate a second series of cutscenes before you fulfill the main objective of the chapter. There is nothing suggesting you have to do that in the main game, and it lacks the same structure as the only other Commsphere mission in the game.
• Similarly, there's a Commsphere minigame in chapter 4 where you have to activate a series of cutscenes on the Mi'ihen Highroad to solve a mystery - unprecedented, unprompted and easily missable. There are 5-7 outcomes of this mystery, with different criteria to activate them. Only two of the outcomes net you an Episode Complete, and the hardest outcome to get isn't one of them. You cannot know which objectives to go for, and what actions to take, without a guide.
• Both missions lack the eye-grabbing "Hotspot" marker that signifies an essential mission in other chapters, and chapter 4 is the shortest, easiest and lowest stakes chapter in the entire game.
• At 99% completion, there are two options to get 100% completion. You can either try and defeat a dungeon full of superbosses, with the last one in particular being a challenge even at the level cap, or you can grind a pointless Chocobo raising sidequest to open a hidden dungeon. The method to opening this dungeon is so obtuse that even the commonly accepted way to achieve this is a time-wasting load of bullshit - and you won't know it exists without following a guide. I didn't know it even existed until this year. So now, at the end of the game, I need to waste HOURS engaging with a side activity that has played next to no role in the rest of the game, and which is MISSABLE earlier in the game unless you complete a series of other quests.
• If you don't press a bunch of unprompted buttons in a cutscene at the end of chapter 3, you can't activate the golden ending - even if you have 100% completion at the end of the game.
• If you don't get Episode Complete for Zanarkand first, the game will lock you out of completing that episode - even if you've met every criteria. You could do everything perfectly, get Episode Complete for every location in the game over the course of 5 chapters - and if you pick the wrong location to begin with, right at the end of the game, you'll lock yourself out of 100% completion due to a glitch.

There's "so linear it hurts", like FF13, there's "open-ended world of opportunity" like pretty much any prior Final Fantasy game barring X, and then there's being so obtuse that at least half a dozen prerequisites for 100% completion are borderline unobtainable without a guide and/or dumb luck. Imagine an RPG where the hero dies at the end because you knocked over a basket of apples halfway through the game - that's what it feels like to 100% this game.

And yeah - getting everything in an RPG is hard and tedious. But most RPGs don't have a percentage metre on the travel screen, and most RPGs aren't segmented in the way that X-2 is. I'm at 99% completion, I've jumped through every hoop, and now I have to either engage with some dogshit Chocobo raising minigame - wasting hours of my life catching Level 5 Bold Chocobos, which is entirely dependent on RNG - or leveling my characters to the level cap and fighting the hardest bosses in the game.

For the love of fuck, don't 100% this game - not even for the trophies. It's all a load of bullshit. Imagine trying to get 100% completion as a kid, without a guide - fuck that.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

I would rank them 1 > 3 > 2, but every movie is at 80% or higher. They're all exceptionally good action movies.

I agree that less is more, but I think I enjoyed all the stuff that 3 had to offer compared to the plot of 2. The villain in 2 was one of those snivelling "I'm a douchebag and I'm so powerful that nobody can hurt me! Nyeh heh heh!" types where the entire plot is just them being a massive piece of shit, and that's where you have all this High Table stuff to justify them being a petty, evil prick. There's no momentum because it's one piece of shit driving the plot for the sole reason that he's a piece of shit.

3, at its core, is a prolonged chase movie. Even with its elements expanding upon the John Wick universe, it's a heavy, tense action movie with the chase providing that momentum. It helps that John's actions in 3 explicitly go against the natural order of things, so his actions constitute something extraordinary even within the pre-established assassin universe. Even if it reveals more about the assassin universe, cutting into that "less is more" feeling that purists put on a pedestal, it feels like you're watching something very taboo and unprecedented happening. It's like the first movie is scratching the surface, the second movie is pushing all this "as you know" stuff about the wider organisation, and the third movie is basically "whew we're in completely new territory lads".

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

It's made for a grade-school reading level. It has to communicate a story while being simple enough for a fourth grader to wrap their head around all the dialogue.

Of course it doesn't hold up to greater scrutiny, you're a full-grown man playing a children's game.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

RavingShark posted...

theyve been photoshopping trumps fat senile ass for a while. dont know why anybody would be surprised theyd do his opponent too

In campaign ads, though?

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

It was the original and the best. It also has strong ties to its roots which has let it weather a lot of the turbulence that hit JRPGs in the 7th generation of consoles.

Final Fantasy has seen rot creep in post-X due to Square Enix changing battle styles and gameplay engines between every single mainline entry. Even the familiar elements carry over in drastically different ways. Dragon Quest has maintained a specific aesthetic for decades, and its gameplay has remained classic during some of the most tumultuous times for the JRPG genre. It's like a warm hug from a familiar old friend in a setting where all your other old friends are strung out on the floor or smoking ice in the kitchen.

Even during Square's insistence that turn-based combat is outdated, the series has skewed heavily towards turn-based combat. The music is as pleasant as always, and the dialogue and plot is always earnest.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

It's not the best version of the song by any means, but it did open me up to Annie Lennox's discography both within and outside of Eurythmics.

https://youtu.be/fCP2-Bfhy04

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

It's not the best version, but while we're on Drive-In Saturday - the David Bowie YouTube channel uploaded this 1999 performance 39 minutes ago.

https://youtu.be/qqQ__Jr77WE

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

My biggest David Bowie moment will probably be when I saw this pop up on YouTube on the one year anniversary of his death.

https://youtu.be/xIgdid8dsC8

Also Drive-In Saturday is lit

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https://youtu.be/KrlvgARHdzc

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

https://youtu.be/IvJnF5JRDAs

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

https://youtu.be/8Bkf_X0Uv6g

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

I'm glad to see you're doing alright, dude. Here's hoping that the clusterfuck of Coronavirus after effects don't fuck too hard with you going forward.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

She made her money, and she wants to get out now. Respect

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

MeIon Bread posted...

I think it was tremain. He posted a few days ago, saying he was having severe symptoms and was about to check into a hospital, but I don't remember seeing anything else about it. How is he doing, do we know?

It was. He also said he had trouble with his kidneys which he's been fighting for years.

I hope he's okay. There were times that I directly challenged what I saw to be a doomer-type personality from him, but for what it's worth I didn't think he was a bad faith shitposter. He always came across as a dude who had a super shitty hand dealt to him, and maybe it was shitty of me to be like "don't speak like that, you're letting the trumpers win!".

@tremain07 - are you doing alright?

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RebelElite791 posted...

Obesity is medically and scientifically unhealthy. European norms my ass

Of course, but what constitutes obesity for a Bulgarian person might not constitute obesity for a Polynesian person, for example. The BMI doesn't take muscle into account, and there are cultures around the world where people tend to be built stronger than a brick shithouse - they carry a lot of weight, their bodies take on a lot of weight, but they're healthy, active and live long lives. The BMI doesn't reflect that, since it considers the norms of 19th century European men as a universal measurement of health. So a perfectly healthy Polynesian dude might be ruled as obese on the BMI despite possibly being one of the healthiest people in his weight range.

The angle of the article in the OP is "the BMI is representative of a narrow subset of people, but their standard of health is applied to cultures who don't have the same life experience and lineage of that group of people". Obesity is unhealthy and any race or culture can be obese, especially in today's world of ultra-processed foods and emphasised sugar/sodium content in just about everything. But the BMI is a standard that represents a European standard, not a global one - meaning that people from other cultures could be lumped into being "obese" despite being a lot healthier than a person of the same weight with a different build.

Likewise, you might have a culture where people are typically leaner due to their diet and climate, and what might constitute "obese" for them will fall within a healthy weight bracket for the European standard. Unhealthy is unhealthy, but the BMI isn't a global measuring stick. It's a rough guide for a broad population of people in the 1800's, adapted in the early 70's as an indicator of personal health for all individual people.

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I mean, if the bodily norms of one culture are held up as the global image of an ideal body, then it can be seen as one culture's norms dictating the norms of other cultures. The shape of a healthy body can be shaped by the native climate and diet, and the European standard isn't going to apply to every other continent or culture.

Europe already has a history of white supremacy through their centuries of colonisation, pushing the European standard onto other populations through genocide - physically through mass extermination, as well as culturally by suppressing language and culture that doesn't fit the norm of the invading country - so it makes sense that people see the BMI as an expression of that. Unless you meet the standard that was set by a bunch of 19th century Europeans, the modern medical community will consider you to be unhealthy. Considering the baggage that's tied with European norms being shoved into other cultures, you can see why people would question the validity of the BMI when applied to all cultures.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

Keep in mind, Trump depended Epstein until the bitter end. In the span of a month, during which Epstein was convicted, Trump went from "he's a good friend, great guy, had some younger girlfriends" to "I never spent much time with him, always got bad vibes from him".

Ghislaine Maxwell has been named by Epstein's victims and documented working with him in a close capacity for years. There's no way in hell she's not involved in this, and there's no way Trump could reasonably say "she's not guilty, she never knew any of it was going on, #witchhunt".

The fat orange prick is probably just bummed out that he has to kill another child rapist without getting caught.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

Don't get spayed, catboy

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

jeffhardyb0yz posted...

fucking lmao

Big_Nabendu posted...

Wat?! There are literary women everywhere! Put down your phone and go say hi.

You're right. I should start reading Jane Austen and talking to the women in those books! It didn't even occur to me that there were literary women to hit on :)

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

At a baseline I could survive falling down the stairs. So yes.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

I fucked up the title of the last thread, mb



The conversation lasted another 3 messages, 2 of which we just sent emojis at each other, then she unmatched lmao

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

Am I wrong in thinking Silicon Valley is in California? Why not tax the rich fuckwits moving millions of dollars around the tech industry?

Seriously, I doubt most of the big movers and shakers don't pay enough tax already.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

More than I'm comfortable with

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

This is an absolute travesty of a team, dude. No wonder you're having trouble beating Wattson.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

And nothing of value was lost

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

Rikiaz posted...

That Beirut got hit by a missile and got extremely defensive and upset when people were posting all the news that it wasn't a missile.

Jeez, he really shit the bed on that one

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

Wattson is Hoenn's Whitney. Honestly, no hate - Emerald was the last Pokemon game I loved, even if Wattson was bullshit.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

Just wanted to apologize for getting ass-blasted like I did, it was 3am and I was in a shit of a mood like you wouldn't believe.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

It's funny to see the Americans come out of the woodwork in this topic, like y'all haven't had the most coronavirus deaths in the world and basically reopened with the mentality of "people are going to die and we've just gotta live with that".

Please, tell me how good New York is going when there's 10 dead New Yorkers to every dead Australian. You can shitpost about how archaic and draconian our lockdown are, but they're happening so our hospitals don't need fucking freezer trucks to store all the people dropping dead from a viral infection.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

I'm sorry to hear that. I'm mostly hoping that shit doesn't get too bad over here in NSW.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

For a sec I thought you meant mustard pickles. Yeah, I hate those dogshit pre-sliced sandwich pickles too. But when the mood hits me, I can eat a whole jar of dill pickles in 10 minutes. Brine, leftover dill and all.

Mustard pickles are interesting, it's like a sweetish, sourish sandwich spread. You have it with some ham, and it's awesome.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

Can't wait for some dumb shit to try and compare this to punching Richard Spencer.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

Chadwick69 posted...

This is like saying pepe the frog is racist.

Pepe the frog wasn't racist to begin with, but he was co-opted by racists and used to promote white supremacist imagery. It's the same way far-right dipshits adapted the circle game. Not everyone who makes the OK sign or likes a Pepe meme is a piece of shit, but there are racists who signal their white supremacist beliefs in photos by doing the circle game and dressing it up in irony to try and get away with it, and there are people who make image macros of Pepe in a Nazi uniform accompanied with "ironic" statements that reflect neo-nazi sentiments.

The symbols themselves aren't racist, but they are co-opted by racists and used in racist contexts.

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From what I can glean, the blond dude hails from a meme comparing Nordic people to Mediterranean people originating on /pol/. The original purpose of the meme seems to be to mock the sort of Aryan-aggrandising imagery that a white supremacist type would post, with Nordic people being depicted as bucktooth hillbillies compared to strong-jawed Mediterranean types with chiseled features.

This got turned around a bunch, with the Mediterranean man being modified to be the hillbilly against the Nordic type, which took the base Mediterranean face and altered it to be blond and blue-eyed. This culminated in memes where they're like working together and stuff.

The mutation into "Yes" guy happened last year, which has been paired with the tradwife character. The meme isn't tied to that white supremacist piece of shit, at least I don't think it is.

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shockthemonkey posted...

TIL

Hold up, I think I fucked up. The aryan-type dude is still a thing, but I'm pretty sure he's not tied to this meme.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

RebelElite791 posted...

Not familiar with it, which seems like a good thing

You know that side-profile picture of a dude with a dark blond beard going "Yes" in what basically amounts to modern rage comics? Usually paired with the "tradwife" who's gone on to appear in other memes, like a bright and sunny character enabling the ongoing hell of an essential worker?

The side-profile picture is from a YouTuber who talks up Aryan ideals and tends to talk Jewish people down as sneaky, distrustful and bad. The "Yes" image and the tradwife character stemmed from a bunch of delusional, unfunny memes where the guy basically appropriated the rage comic format to play out some blockhead power fantasy.

His fanbase took the images and started making their own - to make fun of how shitty and cringe it was, to my understanding - and the images entered the wider meme vernacular. Tradwife stuff actually took hold in communities like Twitter and Tumblr, where it started to cosy up with cottagecore and stuff like that.

So basically, the "Yes" meme and tradwife both come from a dude expressing white supremacist viewpoints, doing his best to dance around the term itself and frame it in more palatable terms, but basically espousing the same viewpoints of blond, strong Aryan ideal = good, while being persistently skeptical of Jewish people.

Actually, hold on - I think I might be wrong on this. Give me a sec to go over this again.

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Yeah, this isn't news.

The PS1 got 6-7 years, then another few years of support. The PS2 had 6 or so years, and another 4 years of support. The PS3 got 7 years, and support is basically over for that thing - the store is still open, but they are doing nothing with that system and there hasn't been a big PS3 release since Persona 5. The PS4 came out in 2013, and it got 7 years.

PS4 games will probably still come out for another 3-4 years, the PS5 will be the main powerhouse, and then in 2026 - if the PS5 doesn't bomb horribly - there'll be a new console. It's not news, it's a pattern.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

M_Live posted...

Great game

Ehh, 7/10 imo. It clearly had a lot of work and polish put into it, but I liked it in the same way I like an alright action movie that does some cool stuff.

The backlash was definitely overblown though. Shitheads were getting pissy as early as the reveal trailer for a character trait they revealed in DLC for the first game. The narrative was "those fucking feminazi SJW scum are ruining games!" from day one.

Then you have backlash over Dina being Jewish, and not being able to shoot the Torah. Funnily enough, you can't shoot any of the PlayStation consoles you find throughout the game either - and there's no other religious symbol for you to destroy elsewhere in the game, so it's not like not being able to shoot the Torah was a double standard or anything. And dudes were tripping over themselves to say that Abby would never be able to get that buff, there's not enough food, it's unrealistic etc.

And then you had the leaks which framed moments of the game in the worst light possible, including outright lying about Ellie and Dina getting killed by Abby. Shit was stupid, and the over-reaching pissbaby whiners actively drown out people who are actually interested in having a critical conversation about the game.

I liked playing through TLoU2, but I wouldn't do it again. Honestly, I'm getting more enjoyment out of my MGS5 replay than I got out of TLoU2. It's not a bad game at all, and overall I think it's a decent, coherent story that falls off a little near the end. It's a solid 7/10.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

I'm leaving the presidency, abdicating the title, immediately! I refuse to be president any more! Hold me to it!

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

OP is dumb bait but I thought I'd answer anyway.

The issue with exclusives is that by and large, they don't need to exist any more. Console architecture is so similar to PC architecture that it fundamentally doesn't matter what a game is playing on - a PS4 could run Halo: MCC, and an Xbone could run Bloodborne. Everything is made for an engine that can be run by a decent enough piece of hardware - which tends to be all/most consoles + PC. Games have evolved past the technical limitations that arguably birthed console exclusivity to begin with - hardware differences aren't as drastic as the differences between the SNES and Genesis, or the N64 and PS1. Everything is basically a PC nowadays, just with different window dressing and slightly different power needs.

That doesn't mean that exclusivity isn't justified - if a company holds the rights to a property, they can keep it confined to one system as a "draw", or to preserve some sort of integrity they perceive the original game to have on a platform of choice, or just because it's "theirs". Stuff like PC developers who don't port to consoles, or companies who bankrolled a game's development and/or acquired a studio to create games for their own platform specifically. But the understanding is that there isn't really a major technical reason for anything to be exclusive to one platform any more.

So when there's a game that can (and will) be ported to everything under the sun - PS4, Xbone, Switch, PC, mobile - and the only reason it's not appearing on everything is because a company paid for timed exclusivity, it feels cheap and fake. It stirs up "console war" bullshit for a product that ultimately won't play into console war bullshit in the future, prolonging a stupid tribalistic internet slap-fight in the hopes of stirring up some vocal fanatics for some extra cash in the short term. And then they launch on everything else anyway, basically amounting to a second launch day for a wider audience and a second wave of profits. It feels very cynical and dishonest.

There's some nuance to this situation, in that companies like Sony and Microsoft might bankroll some of a game's development in exchange for timed exclusivity. That falls into "the business owns the franchise/game and can release it however they want" - look at Cuphead for example, Microsoft bankrolled it but now it's on Switch and PlayStation years after release. That was their call. But outside of that, there's no reason to time an exclusive. Publishers and developers have a wider marketplace to release their products, and it feels kinda manipulative and shitty to go "well we're not releasing a game on this console for a year, but eventually you'll get to play the game on your platform of choice". In cases where a company has specifically paid for exclusive publishing rights, for the sole purpose of saying "Fist on PlayStation/Xbox", there is no good reason not to release it on everything at the same time.

Corporate ownership matters, and hardware differences matter. When neither of those things exist, there are only two outcomes - developer/publisher preference, and anti-consumer business deals that exist solely for the money. That's an entirely artificial reason for exclusivity, and it's bullshit.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

Why don't you eat grass when you're hungry? Different plants taste different, and some taste disgusting. Same with rocks.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

Honestly not a fan of Setsuka, she was my least favorite character in SC3. I'm waiting for Rock.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

I made a Nick Cave thread a couple of weeks ago asking for suggestions. Wasn't too flash on most of the suggestions, but I managed to crack into Ghosteen which was nice.

Well, I got a Nick Cave recommendation on my YouTube, and that led me down a rabbit hole into Murder Ballads. From the first song, which is basically an early 1900's horror story, to Stagger Lee, which is so violent and vulgar I was genuinely taken aback, to Where The Wild Roses Grow and Henry Lee which has a feminine voice to complement Nick Cave's deep crooning.

I feel like I'm going to drive Henry Lee into the ground, because PJ Harvey and Nick Cave's vocals are so perfectly matched and it's such an irresistibly smooth song - like holy shit. Are there any other artists with vocals like this? Nick Cave doesn't always do ballads, but there has to be someone with a voice as deep and crooning as his who does focus on ballads. Like holy fuck.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

Christ, I can't believe the PS1 turns 45 next year.

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

coh posted...

The left can't meme

This meme was made by a bot. Being a random pairing of images, this picture was made free of political bias.

shnangyboos posted...

Liberal humor.

This meme was made by a bot. Being a random pairing of images, this picture was made free of political bias.

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a banger today from Shitpostbot5k

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Are you proud to be a Mayonnaise American?

I've heard that a lot of shirtless scenes for guys involve diets of almost nothing and severe dehydration. There's an account of one of Hugh Jackman's shirtless scenes as Wolverine, and apparently he could only shoot within the span of an hour before he felt like passing out.

You've also got steroid abuse changing the male standard for attractiveness. Look at Hugh Jackman in X-Men 1 vs The Wolverine, his veins are popping out of his neck and his chest and shoulders are completely different. Look at Sylvester Stallone in the first Rocky movie vs the later Rambo sequels, or the Expendables. It's not natural.

Bodies like this are unattainable outside of starving yourself of food and water to dangerous levels, and to maintain a jacked look like that over the course of a career, more often than not, guys end up turning to steroids. The reason we don't talk about it as much is because we put dudes like Stallone on a pedestal.

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LameFAQs posted...

Ted Mosby from HIMYM came to mind. I dont recall him in anything else.

He's done some directing work since then, if nothing else he got to direct a couple of Rachael Yamagata music videos.

I don't really watch/like her music videos for the most part, but hey - he's getting work.

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Jerry_Hellyeah posted...

Fuck all ya'll saying Michael J Fox like Teen Wolf wasn't the shit

Family Ties too!

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