Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

Some change is good, some change is bad. Change for the sake of change is the rallying cry of the moron. No change of any kind is the terrified denial of assholes.

As with almost everything in life, context is key.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Probably Final Fantasy. The original, 2, 4-10, X-2, 12, Tactics, and Mystic Quest is a dozen games. Honestly can't think of any other franchise I've ever played a dozen games in. Most never even break a half-dozen.

In theory, the closest competition I can think of would be the WWF/WWE games, but only if we count the SmackDown/SvR/2k games as part of the same series - and even then I think I only played 6 or 7 games before the SmackDown versus Raw games turned to shit (and I've never been able to stand the over-simmy/multiplayer-heavy 2k games) and I stopped playing them. Halo stopped at 7 games for me because the franchise is crap now that 343 is running it, and I've never really been into CoD or the various 2k or EA sports games that release one a year, so those are out for me as well.

With Mario and Zelda, they kind of stopped being in the running because I lost almost all interest in both the moment they went 3D, and nothing since has ever really changed my mind, so those stall out around 1995 or so. Zelda only gets 4. Mario's fuzzy as hell (depending on how you actually quantify what constitutes a "Mario" game), but even that only tops out around 10 or so for me (2 Donkey Kongs/Mario Bros/4 Super Mario Bros/Super Mario World/1-2 Mario Karts) - and I'd probably argue against lumping all of those together as a single franchise anyway.

Usually, every time I fall in love with a franchise to the point where I'd buy every release, I either stick to the main titles and don't bother with spin-offs (especially ones on different consoles), they either stop releasing them as the developer goes out of business or just starts working on other projects, or the franchise just slowly turns to shit and I stop wanting to buy their games any more.

At this point I'm not sure I'll ever get to a dozen titles in any franchise, in spite of the fact that I haven't bought a Final Fantasy title since 2006 and likely never will again.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I don't play on PC, I tend to avoid multiplayer with strangers like the plague in most games, and I kind of loathe the premise of anarchy-style play, so very much no.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Technically, none. Before that, one.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

It was obviously missing Sho'nuff.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

dedbus posted...

will most likely go unresolved or a draw like any other major ip face off.

Kong won in the first one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kong_vs._Godzilla

So they could do that again. Or they could have Godzilla win to "even the score" (and because most Americans don't really give a shit whether or not King Kong wins as "our guy" at this point).

Or they could even do the thing some movies have done lately to pander to the Chinese market, where you film multiple versions of scenes and play the different versions in different places... so you can film an ending where Godzilla wins that is part of the Japanese version, and then have Kong win in the American/English version.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

By not caring about the movie and not really talking to anyone or reading anything about it.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Metalsonic66 posted...

Lokarin posted...

Weird... something Stargate related

---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

I wasn't as into Under the Red Hood, but it certainly had some cool moments.

I felt like it handled the story better than the actual comic it was based on. Which is kind of rare for these animated movies.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

FM radio
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Got to be honest, that's kind of a terrible picture of her. She looks better in pretty much every other picture of her you can find on the Internet.

Personally, I preferred her before she had the boob job and got her tattoos, but that's a battle I know I'm never going to win these days. ~shrug~



HagenEx posted...

I don't understand how you can get a rhinoplasty and it still comes out asymmetrical and crooked.

She claims she's never had nose work done, just the boobs.

Up to you whether or not you actually believe that.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

ultra magnus13 posted...

The ones that help everyone else up.

Nah, those guys are pussies.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

Which is neat, but if somebody is tracking down just one DC animated film, it should be Crisis on Two Earths. James Woods was an incredible Owlman.

I'd agree that one was pretty good as well.

On the topic, I'd probably also recommend Under the Red Hood.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

The ones who knock everyone else down.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Njord posted...

What is PotD like these days, politically?

"Shit"
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

You should try to track down Gods and Monsters.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

T3 only felt like a terrible movie at the time because we were comparing it to the first two movies.

Compared to most of the movies that came after it, it's a masterpiece.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Yes, lots of them.

Never read Sorcery (assuming you mean THIS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery! ), but my understanding is that they mostly just have the same pros and cons as the Fighting Fantasy series in general, so if you like that, you'll probably like Sorcery.

My personal favorites are the Lone Wolf books (which you can actually read/play online for free at http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home ). Fabled Lands is also pretty robust, but has the twin problems of a) not actually being finished (they only ever published 7/12 planned books), and b) having no distinct ending or goal, so you'll eventually get bored and just drift away anticlimactically rather than ever actually "finishing" the story.

One question to keep in mind is just how "RPG-y" you want your gamebook. Some border on almost being distinct RPG games in and of themselves (like the Middle Earth Quest books from the 1980s), some are more like traditional CYOA books with a thin framework of RPG layered over them (like the Marvel Superheroes RPG gamebooks of the 1980s), and some mostly just boil down to being a CYOA that has "skills" (sort of like the Legacy of Dragonholt board game).

Speaking of the Legacy of Dragonholt board game, that's something else you could consider looking into. It's basically set up as a CYOA-style read-through with skill options that can influence choices (so if you're running away from bandits and come up against a cliff, you can choose to run either left or right, but if you have a climbing-based skill, you could try to scale the cliff instead). The game generally allows you to succeed at things even if you don't have the necessary skill, it just penalizes you by costing you HP for choices that run counter to your skill set. The game basically comes with a map you can use to decide where to go (about half the game is fairly linear, the other half is sort of "open world"), and you keep track of time (with different things happening in different places at different times). The game is also designed to be played solo, or with multiple players working together (for a sort of tabletop RPG-ish experience without a GM). It's relatively simple, but it can be a nice way to ease new players into the idea of RPGs in general.

Also, if you feel like doing your own browsing, this site might be useful to you:

http://gamebooks.org
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

helIy posted...

i can't think of a single person who is upset at microsoft over mojang

I can't think of a single person who is.

The only complaints I've ever really heard about Minecraft post-acquisition is that they don't seem overly enthusiastic about supporting Minecraft for the PS4, but even that never wound up being as big an issue as people doomsayer'd when the sale first happened.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Could be worse, could be Google trying to buy it.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Having grown up in an era when people actually thought that putting a chain on your wallet was cool, I kind of have to disagree that chains should ever be part of any design aesthetic ever.











A gold old-timey pocketwatch on a chain in a vest pocket still feels pretty cool, though.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Entity13 posted...

IMO, it's less to do with his performance, and more to do with many of his lines and also how abhorrent the movies were that he happened to be in.

Mead posted...

He was ok in the role imo, they just only used him in terribly written films. It wasnt his acting that was the problem.

---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I'm not really against any specific tax, it's when you start to realize that you're getting taxed on what you earn, most of what you buy, where you live (federal, state, municipal), what you pass on to your heirs when you die... you start to realize just how much they're chipping away at you, which can then cause more resentment if you have the impression that the government is inefficient as fuck and most of that money is being misspent and just running down the drain anyway. Or if you feel like a lot of it is being spent on services you will literally never benefit from.

It's basically the frog in the pot scenario - because they hit you with tons of little surcharges and tax here and there it becomes more palatable because you don't really realize just how much you're paying out overall. But if you were charged the exact same amount as a single lump sum, most people would probably flip their shit.

I've been utterly desensitized to this pretty much forever, though, because I live in one of the places in the US with the highest cost of living period, so I've sort of gotten used to the idea of constantly having to pay ridiculous amounts of money for things.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

streamofthesky posted...

Not sure how much he's gotten into music

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_Sex_Party
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zareth posted...

I don't get this whole "position of power" thing regarding celebrities. Like are celebrities only supposed to date / have sex with people who have no idea who they are?

The Internet tends to confuse the idea of "position of power" (ie, wherein one person is literally in an authoritarian position over someone, either as an employer, teacher, etc) with the idea of "power imbalance" (wherein one person is more famous/influential/popular or has more money than someone else). This is mostly because people online are stupid.

A lot of people online also tend to throw the word "grooming" around way more than is warranted, because they don't actually understand what words mean.

Which is kind of a shame, because by overusing those sorts of terms in incredibly sensationalist and inaccurate ways, it kind of devalue them in situations where they actually DO apply. People start getting desensitized to the usual rhetoric, and start to view it as a sort of Boy Who Cried Wolf scenario, and thus stop caring, even in cases where actual grooming is occurring or where someone is actually exploiting a position of power to coerce unwilling compliance.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

streamofthesky posted...

I think it's more that it's the "wrong kind of fame"
Dan is a youtuber and a gamer, so he's not supposed to have groupies.

I honestly think half of the outrage for this kind of thing on the Internet is a sad combination of "Why did this Internet celebrity fuck them and not ME?!" and "How is this nerd getting laid when I can't? Outrageous!" And then the lynch mob has to destroy the object of their resentment because we are no longer allowed to have nice things as a culture.

I've also noticed that Internet sperglords love to whip out the "WOMG position of power!" ethical argument as a criticism of any and all relationships, in spite of the fact concept doesn't actually apply in that scenario.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

IronBornCorps posted...

What deal?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFCdvc9smT0
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Through the entire span of my life, I have never given a single solitary shit about basketball. And I give even less of a shit about NCAA sports in general than I do actual professional sports.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

captpackrat posted...

Steppenwolf?

Both the band and the character are named after this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_(novel)



Zareth posted...

Steppenwolf
Apokolips
Darkseid

Damn DC you suck ass at names.

That's all on Jack Kirby. We can maybe forgive him, though, because by that point he'd spent 30 straight years inventing half the comic characters you've ever heard of, so maybe he was a bit tapped out.

His Fourth World run in general definitely had a ton of names where you go "Okay, either you're really not trying, or you're trying to make a metaphorical statement of some kind."

I mean, that's the run that gave us "Scott Free". Who was an escape artist.



quigonzel posted...

He achieved in getting the ALE in Final Crisis and that story was complete shit.

It was written by Morrison, so that was pretty much inevitable.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

kukukupo posted...

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackDudeDiesFirst

Came in to post this.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Yes, he's Darkseid's uncle. No, he's not younger. Yes, Darkseid is basically one of the most powerful people in the universe, and you basically do what he tells you, or you wind up dead (or wish you were dead).

Steppenwolf was general of Apokolips' armies for Darkseid's father before Darkseid was even born. But Darkseid is basically DC's memetic badass, so it doesn't really matter how old you are. He's pretty much backed the Guardians of the Universe off, and they're nearly as old as the universe itself and have an entire army of Green Lanterns at their disposal.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Only about six years left now before I turn 50, so it's certainly possible. And there are a few people older than me here (some of whom are already older than 50).



Zeus posted...

Does anybody who posted in this topic honestly not expect to still be on Gamefaqs so long as Gamefaqs is a thing? Anyone who was going to quit it would have done so years ago.

We do still occasionally lose a poster or two every once in a while. Discounting all the people who just get their account banned and come back with a new alt and pretending to be someone new.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Dmess85 posted...

there's enough coal in the furnace that the engine is not going to stop for another 45 minutes

So we apparently just wait 45 minutes until the train runs out of steam and slowly coasts to a stop.

You didn't specific that there was an end-of-line terminus, broken bridge, chasm, obstruction on the tracks, or anything else that would require the train to stop as soon as possible, and because it's on rails, it's not like anyone on-board would need to worry about the train running "out of control". So as long as the train isn't accelerating to dangerous speeds and is just traveling at normal speed, everything's fine.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

LinkPizza posted...

It was more like she reminded Ice Man he was gay...

Not really. It's more like she spontaneously blurted out that he was closeted gay apropos of nothing and in spite of the fact that there was literally no evidence of that being true from 50 years worth of prior stories, and with his reaction basically being along the lines of "No I'm not. Am I? Oh well, I guess maybe I am?"

So much so that comic fans pointed out that it came across like an incredibly unrealistic scenario if he was actually gay, but a very realistic scenario of what it would be like if a known telepath actually went into your brain and altered your thoughts.

So your options are basically that either Jean is a sociopath who was amusing herself by convincing Bobby he's gay when he isn't, or that the writing is just so phenomenally shitty that it doesn't really matter because the next writer will just ignore it all anyway. Because of what the books were like at the time, both arguments are plausible.

But it's funnier to just say that she brainwashed him into being gay, because memes.



Unbridled9 posted...

Didn't they also make BB's death significant

So very not.

Ted Kord basically got shot in the head as an almost throwaway plot point in a crossover that makes him look like a total idiot, and feels entirely gratuitous and pointless. It pissed fans off even before it became obvious that it was done solely to make room for a new Beetle.

The fact that they wrote Jaime Reyes well as a character, and started winning fans over because he felt more like an actual character and not just an ethnic stereotype wearing someone else's costume, went a long way to defusing that initial backlash.

If they'd made his death more meaningful and natural in the first place, it would have prevented a lot of that backlash before it ever happened. Even more so if they'd introduced Jaime as a new character entirely and didn't feel the need to kill off Ted to make room for him (possibly even in a scenario where you have Ted become Jaime's mentor, potentially generating interesting stories - sort of how Marvel's currently handling the Peter Parker/Miles Morales dynamic).

Introduce a black (or Hispanic, or female, or gay, or whatever) patriotic character and give him his own identity (say, Patriot or Americana or Uncle Slam), and fans won't immediately start screaming about how terrible everything is and how the character clearly sucks. But if you kill off Steve Rogers or turn him into a secret Nazi just so you can get him out of his star-spangled spandex and give the Captain America identity to someone else, and fans are obviously going to get a bit pissy. It's worth noting that one of the very few new comics that came out of the initial New 52 reboot that fans didn't completely shit on was Batwing - which was basically just "What if Batman was the Black Panther?" Fans actually liked "African Batman" (contrary to the usual narrative that all comic fans are racist/sexist bigots), mostly because they didn't kill Batman to introduce him, or otherwise shoehorn him in in a way that came across as overly pandering. His character made sense in the context of the time, and fans embraced that (in the same way a lot of fans really loved "Chinese Batgirl" Cassandra Cain).

It's not helped by the fact that most of these pander-reboot characters are just incredibly poorly written, which just exacerbates the backlash. For every Jaime Reyes, Miles Morales, or Kamala Khan there are a dozen female Thors, hipster Batgirls, and black teenage girl Iron Mans (not to mention characters like "Snowflake" and "Safespace"). A good writer can write diversity legacy characters and win over an audience. Third-rate fanfic writers who spend most of their time on Twitter and Tumblr (which is what most mainstream comic writers border on being these days) aren't going to be able to pull it off.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Mead posted...

If it was up to me theyd stop being cowards and actually kill off major characters from time to time or change them and stick to it.

They tried that in the 70s/80s. Characters would evolve, age, change, and occasionally die or move on. Stories were more interesting because there could actually be consequences to storylines.

But then three things happened in the mid-to-late 80s that kind of ruined that.

1) Writers and artists started coming into the industry who had grown up as comic fans who had their own opinions about what the characters should be like and how they should be treated (during the Golden and Silver Ages of comics, you mostly had writers who had more literary aspirations and grounding and who viewed writing for comics almost like slumming). In a number of cases, this boiled down to ignoring, erasing, or retroactively altering ~15 years worth of stories to make the characters more like they were when they were reading comics as kids in the 1960s. Normally, it would be the job of the editors to rein this behavior in and keep the prima donnas from doing whatever they wanted, but...

2) Marvel's greatest period of success came at a time when strong editorial kept writers and artists on-task and maintained the value of the various properties. But strong management chapped the asses of a number of prima donna artistes who were offended that anyone would dare attempt to tell them how to manifest their genius creative vision, so a lot of tantrums kicked up, and the interaction between artists/writers and editors became much more antagonistic. This was exacerbated later, when a bunch of artists left Marvel to form Image, but started becoming a problem even earlier. After the editor-in-chief of the time period got fired for being too strict (ie, doing his job), later editors tended to be much more toothless (or simply no longer willing to rock the boat), which lead to creative teams taking far more liberties. The upshot of which is that it sort of became standard practice for every new writer to just reset the status quo to whatever they wanted it to be for their run, and then the next writer along would just undo everything they did and reset things to their own preference. Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon were probably the poster children for this mentality in the early 2000s X-Men titles, but they were far from the only ones.

3) Marvel got bought by a major corporation in the mid-80s (which in turn sold it to another major corporation later, and so on), which is the point where the mentality shifted hard away from producing interesting stories and selling comics more towards monetizing the intellectual property. When a comic was selling well (like X-Men), there was now a desire to exploit that by spinning off more titles (X-Factor, New Mutants, X-Force, a second X-Men book, etc), which meant that no character would ever really retire or die so long as money could be made off them (something that pissed Chris Claremont off in the mid-80s - he'd killed off Jean Grey and had Cyclops retire in his X-Men book, but now Marvel higher ups resurrected Jean and brought Cyclops and the other original X-Men back as X-Factor). Worse, because new characters (with unbuilt fanbases) obviously sell fewer comics than established characters, there was always a profit-driven desire to over-exploit older characters and much less incentive to try and introduce or establish new ones. Even if a given writer tries to kill off an older character and replace them with a new version, it's pretty much a given that the next writer will just undo the entire storyline, reset the status quo, and the new character will probably fade away and never be heard from again (if they aren't outright murdered themselves just to get rid of them).

The upshot of all this means that nothing ever changes, and never will.

It's made even worse these days, where the movie studio is the main profitable arm of the company and the actual comic books are almost afterthoughts, because no one in charge really cares about the stories being told in the comics at all. So they have no problem dictating that the comics just mimic story points established in the films (like Spider-Man having to spontaneously develop organic web-shooters in the comics because of the Sam Raimi movies, and then losing them and going back to mechanical ones once those movies were done, or having Pepper Potts come back into Iron Man after 40 years of being completely gone, because she was in the movie and therefore had to be in the comics, no matter how little sense it made).

At this point, the idea of an evolving continuity will never happen. Not just because all of those prior issues are still in effect, but because no writer has an interest in reading 70+ years worth of previous comics to know what the continuity is supposed to be. So they just write whatever they feel like, and the next guy will do the same, and so on, and so on.

DC has only really avoided this problem by constantly rebooting their entire universe every decade or so (which is arguably an entirely different and possibly worse problem). They did a bit of a soft reboot in the early 60s (which led to Earth-1 versus Earth-2 stories), reset everything with Crisis on Infinite Earths in the 80s, reset everything again with Zero Hour in the 90s, then soft-rebooted a bit with Infinite Crisis in the 00s, hard-reset with Flashpoint/The New 52 in 2011, and then soft-rebooted again with Rebirth. So there are technically like 8 different versions of the mainline DC universe at this point (not to mention hundreds of parallel universes and alternate realities), all of which have slightly different versions of the characters and their stories, which is incredibly fucking confusing.

Basically, comics are stupid.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

HornedLion posted...

If experts are correct, GameFAQS Karma will be the new Bitcoin in 2022.

Man, if this was the case, I'd be so much more pissed at all the times back in the day when I didn't bother logging in (especially in the first year or two), so I wound up losing thousands of karma I should have had during the karma boosts.

I'd also be kind of annoyed that I haven't really kept up with using any of my alts, so none of them really have anywhere near as much karma as they could.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

FatalAccident posted...

honestly if andromedas story and cast were a bit more engaging, it might be the best game in the franchise cos combat was fantastic

Story and cast weren't even the biggest problems with the game. Tons of bugs on release and piss-poor art design is a large part of what hurt it. Fix those two and get a better VO director to slap around some of the lazier dialogue issues and it would have done wonders.

It would never have been the best game in the franchise, though. But it could have been an acceptable new direction for the franchise that fans embraced rather than something that gets clowned on so hard that it essentially becomes a poisoned well/dead end.



dragon504 posted...

Bleh, adding ammo to all of the guns in the form of heat sinks was stupid as hell.

Adding it as a mechanic was fine. The narrative implementation of it was the issue.

Every race in the entire galaxy switching from self-cooling guns to ammo-based heat sinks in the span of two years, and basing their tech around a universe heat sink template, is quite possibly the most unrealistic thing in the entire franchise (which is saying a lot). Even BioWare was aware of this, which is why they had Conrad basically point out how stupid it was in ME3, and all Shepard could really do is tell Conrad to shut up rather than justify it in any real way.

It made sense to shift to it if you're trying to shift gameplay from RPG with TPS elements to cover-based shooter with RPG elements (because you keep resource management as a gameplay factor but don't have combat slowed down by forced cooling pauses or have people like me mod all their guns with heat-dampening mods that render heat management effectively nonexistent), but it was something they couldn't retcon away the same way they did other things (like regenerating health, loss of all prior skill levels, and different ability load-outs) by just pointing out that Shepard's a cyborg now.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I tend to use ketchup, relish, and mustard, depending on what I'm eating. I don't use a ton of condiments, though - too many people use it to completely cover up the taste of their food, which kind of defeats the point.

As for the rest, I'm not a fan of horse radish, and I find mayo utterly gross.

I've never heard of salad cream before, but based on Wikipedia telling me that it's basically like Miracle Whip, so that would be a hard no because it would basically just be an alternative version of mayo, and thus inherently atrocious.



Revelation34 posted...

Mead posted...

I like that Guldens spicy mustard

Yep. The only brand I buy for that kind of mustard.

Gulden's spicy brown is my go-to for mustard, but Kosciusko is actually pretty great on Kielbasa.



Zeus posted...

Otherwise where the fuck's BBQ? It's one of the most common condiments yet you've got some weird stuff there (and soy sauce instead of teriyaki?)

I'd argue BBQ isn't really a condiment as much as it is a spice/sauce added during cooking. You really don't dip into it or add it to your food while eating (well, maybe some people do, but most don't). Teriyaki falls into the same category.

Soy sauce theoretically counts as a condiment mainly because there are multiple Asian dishes that you do dip in or sprinkle on food. I've had dumplings that way before (in a restaurant in Chinatown in NYC years ago).
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Revelation34 posted...

Don't see why it matters that much since it isn't them changing Steve Rogers himself. Just a new character.

The usual complaint is that the original gets marginalized or removed to make room for the new. That was one of the reasons for the huge backlash against "female Thor" in the comics a few years ago - the (bad) writing mostly shat on the original Thor to get him out of the way to justify giving the hammer to someone new, who seemed to get the job solely because she was female. And as I previously mentioned, there was backlash when DC introduced a new Hispanic Blue Beetle mostly because they shot the old (fairly popular) Blue Beetle in the head and killed him more or less solely to get him out of the way so the name would be free.

It's not even necessarily limited to race/gender, though - comic fans were PISSED back in the 1980s when Steve Rogers stepped down from being Captain America and John Walker took his place (though fans being pissed was part of the point of that storyline, because they always intended for Rogers to take the name/costume back). The same sort of happened with Jean-Paul Valley replacing Bruce Wayne as Batman in the 90s Knightfall storyline (and again, fans being pissed was sort of the point - you were supposed to be annoyed that this guy was taking Bruce's place, so you'd welcome Bruce back when he returned). And major changes in general can annoy people even if the character themselves don't change at all - the storyline in the 90s where Superman turned into a living laser sort of energy being who could shoot lightning (and later split into two separate people) annoyed a lot of fans, even though it was still Clark Kent.

Comic fans are generally much more open to the idea of "diversity" legacy characters when the new character doesn't hurt the old one. A large part of why fans like Miles Morales and Spider-Gwen is because Marvel didn't kill off Peter Parker to make room for either of them, and they generally co-exist (and interact with each other). A lot of people liked the Young Avengers version of Hawkeye because she actually hung out with and trained with the original (something Marvel has implied they're probably going to do in the MCU as well).
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Mead posted...

lol did she make someone gay?

Iceman.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

EvilMegas posted...

If it's not a straight white dude, its pandering. No exceptions

Not really. Most comic fans were more than willing to accept Kamala Khan (Ms Marvel) when she debuted, and there was a fair amount of support for Jaime Reyes as Blue Beetle (after he shook off the initial hate because DC killed off a popular character in Ted Kord to clear a spot for him as a legacy character). Miles Morales was also a very popular addition to the roster (so much so that Marvel literally took him out of the alternate universe he debuted in and dropped him into the main Marvel universe). Then there's more marginal cases (like the Hispanic Spider-Man 2099 or Spider-Gwen).

The key is generally whether or not a character feels like a well-written character who can be gay (or ethnic, or female, or whatever) as a part of their personality, or if they were created as a one-dimensional stereotype for Tumblr to masturbate over. And whether they're being introduced as a new character, or being shoehorned into someone else's legacy spandex at that original character's expense.

Comic fans are most likely to pull the pandering card when the writing is shit, or when it feels so utterly forced you know it's a callous marketing attempt to try and exploit certain demographics in a vain hope of selling more comics.

Usually, when people try to paint all dissent as "Oh, well, you just don't like women/people of color/alternative sexuality/etc", it's because someone has an agenda and they're looking to demonize criticism. It's possible to think something sucks because, you know, it actually sucks.

(Like criticizing Carol Danvers Captain Marvel not because she's a woman, but because she's the most boring and irritating version of the character, and pointing out you'd have preferred they used the black girl or space lesbian versions of the character instead. But that would have been TOO MUCH diversity.

Though I personally wonder if people bringing up "black Captain Marvel" is what led to her character being used in WandaVision, or if they were already planning to bring her into the movies at some point even before that, which is why we got the flashback version of her in the actual Captain Marvel movie. Hard to say with the MCU, because they do plan stuff pretty far ahead.)
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Mead posted...

Have you read Jonathan Hickmans run of Avengers?

I'm really, really, really not a fan of his work in general. I hate what he's doing with the X-Men right now, and I thought pretty much every single facet of their new version of Secret Wars was kind of terrible (and I'm also annoyed by Marvel's current practice of taking the names of old popular crossovers and "redoing" them, because it kind of underlines how creatively bankrupt they are as a company at this point). He's not the worst writer they've had there in recent times, but that's faint praise indeed.

I honestly haven't seen much of anything from Marvel or DC worth caring about since 2011. Which is a shame, because they both spent most of the 2000s recovering from the creative void that was the 1990s, and there was reason to be optimistic about a lot of titles. Then both companies basically rebooted all of their major franchises around the exact same time for the significant worse, and haven't really recovered for the last decade.

I can't really speak on Hickman's specific run on Avengers because Marvel's comics line in general just feels like an utter wasteland of bad ideas at this point, so I mostly ignore it (or forget about it after hearing about it). But considering I dislike pretty much everything I know he worked on (including the Avengers issues involving the Incursions and stuff leading up to Secret Wars), I can't imagine he wrote any brilliant storylines that I would love if only I discovered them.

Like I said, though, I get the impression that Marvel's comics at this point are mostly an afterthought, and only exist so they can have different writers (who are mostly just grown-up comic nerds writing borderline fanfiction) brainstorm tons of ideas and throw everything at the wall in the hopes that something might stick, so they can use it as a plot idea in a movie years from now. We're never really going to get the sort of iconic storylines and memorable plot moments (that always get recycled into every version of a character, a la Dark Phoenix) like we used to, because the entire nature of the medium and the value of its audience has changed (which isn't helped by the rush to incorporate plot elements from the movies back into the comics in a desperate pandering attempt to sell comics to the millions of people who watch the films, which almost never works).
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Lokarin posted...

That'd be an interesting piece of trivia - what is the first (or among the first) games with skill trees

Diablo II is generally seen as the main popularizer, if not the innovator (and like I said, most people tend to see it as an evolution of tech trees from RTSes). It'd probably be hard to come up with something prior to Diablo unless it's something fairly obscure and forgotten.

I can't say for sure that Diablo II was the first game to use them for skill progression, but I can't really say it wasn't, either.

(Though depending on how you interpret things, I could probably make at least a weak argument that skill progression in Vampire: the Masquerade worked along similar lines, because you basically choose a Discipline, level up within that Discipline, and some Disciplines have tiers where you can choose which one of multiple options to pick for that level. But that is less of a tree and more a collection of unrelated lines with multiple-choice segments. It might have been an influence on Diablo's design, though.)
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Without knowing where the "certain place" is it's hard to guess at possible causes, but if it's near the sink it could be smell backing up from inside your pipes.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Entity13 posted...

Skill trees existed before FFX.

My immediate thought went to Diablo 2 (which predates FFX). Though an argument could be made that tech trees in games like Civ are the ancestors of that sort of design (where each level up unlocks new options, and each unlock bestows its own benefit), and those really predate FFX.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I'm not Irish-Catholic or a poseur, so no.

If anything, I'd be far more likely to wear orange today.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

It doesn't really matter, at this point there's only about a hundred or so people left still buying or reading comics. So they mostly just shit out ideas in the hope of coming up with something interesting they can recycle into the next batch of films.

But most of their good ideas were written 30+ years ago anyway, so those are the ones they mostly wind up using.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

This is propaganda to push for stricter dagger laws. If the senate doesn't have daggers to stab dictators with they'll just use something else. All it will do is force them to die in a less efficient, more painful manner. Have some empathy. Support the open carry of daggers.

Daggers don't kill people, corrupt senators kill people.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

which is also why I leave my shark repellent at home.

That's going to come back to bite you someday.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family