Lurker > NBIceman

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Chilly McFreeze
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Tales of Arise (PS4)

Posted a long review in the game's dedicated topic on this board, but long story short, top 3 Tales game that played it really safe in some areas in order to give the series a much-needed modern facelift in others. Very much looking forward to the future of the series.

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Chilly McFreeze
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Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (GBA)

Fire Emblem, to me, is a series kind of defined by peaks and valleys. The majority of its entries all have one or two aspects - whether it's map design, characters, plot, overall gameplay, etc. - that it does notably better than most other games in the franchise and one or two that it does notably worse.

Sacred Stones bucks that trend for me by just being pretty consistently decent throughout. There aren't any real standout chapters or any that I had a miserable time with. The narrative is pretty standard FE fare, and it feels pretty rushed at the end, but it has some interesting beats, most of which come from Lyon - I know he's kind of polarizing among the fanbase, but I found him to be one of its more compelling villains. And Ephraim (whose route I played) is probably one of its better Lords. The rest of the cast is fine but probably one of the more forgettable lineups all said.

The gameplay ended up being the weakest piece for me. SS does some things I like, like branching promotions (even if that ends up being kinda half-baked and poorly balanced), shops on the world map, and the trainee system... in theory, at least. But it's just waaaay too easy, and that's a big deal for an SRPG where so much of the inherent draw comes from the challenge. Most of my army felt invincible by the end as long as I didn't do something silly like put Syrene in range of a Sniper, and that's with the only grinding I did being for supports (a system which still sucks, by the way). Granted, my Ephraim got very RNG blessed, but no one else was having any trouble either.

Overall, I think it lands toward the bottom-middle of my series ranking, but with Fire Emblem being one of my favorite series, that's not an insult; it takes a lot to make an FE game actively bad to me. Good game.

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Chilly McFreeze
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Super Meat Boy (PC)

I know this game was pretty universally acclaimed once upon a time - have opinions shifted since its release? I ask because I don't really see anyone talk about it anymore, to the extent that I didn't even know there was a recent sequel of sorts. And also because... I don't really think this is a very good game. For a precision platformer, it never really felt all that precise. Even after having finished it now, I still don't think I understand the physics very much at all. I was jumping straight into sawblades right up until the credits rolled because Meat Boy's jumps just never took the trajectory I expected them to.

Look, I can do punishing difficulty; over this last year in particular I've played through a notoriously tough game or two. But SMB's difficulty felt pretty artificial a lot of the time. Bosses who give little to no indication of where they're attacking so that it's literally impossible to beat them in a 1-hit-death game until you've already seen their patterns at least once. Occasional enemies whose movements seem almost random. That one damn level in Rapture where you have to wall jump back and forth across the room repeatedly while missiles fire at you as you wait for the key blocks to unlock. There were just too many occasions where I felt like I just got a little lucky in finishing a level rather than getting a sense of accomplishment from it. Then you've got controls that overall feel a bit slippery if not outright unresponsive at times, not to mention the extremely off-putting Newgrounds humor that had me skipping cutscenes for almost the entire playthrough...

I don't know. Maybe it's just a game that straight-up hasn't aged well in the wake of games like Celeste, because I can see how it would have been an impressive product when it first came out and there was nothing much like it on the market. But here in 2021 when this sort of game has now been done so much better, it doesn't compare.

Glad I played it, I guess, just to have it on my gamer resume. Glad I beat it, which going by Steam achievements is a rare enough feat, especially since it only took 3 and a half hours in the end. But I've gotta be honest... Bad video game.

Edit: Forgot to mention, after all the ridiculousness in the game, and particularly some frustration with the levels in the last world for being way too long for their own good, I somehow first-tried the final boss. Figured that was as good a place as any to wash my hands of it forever.

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Pyre (PC)
This is the best game I've ever played and likely will ever play that I... didn't really enjoy that much. Gonna spoiler tag for safety although I'm not revealing anything specific about the plot at all.

I don't know. The world of Pyre just felt a little too bleak to me. The whole journey is so aggressively zero-sum from almost the very beginning to the end that I kind of always just felt... bad about myself while playing. And I obviously realize that that sort of hollow melancholy is the exact feeling you're supposed to take, which is why I can applaud the game from an objective standpoint for so superbly accomplishing its goals, but it just wasn't for me. I never felt a sense of satisfaction from pretty much anything I did here, and I like my games to be satisfying.

Plus, some of the plot points themselves felt a little too contrived, the main story overstays its welcome just a tad for how little the Rites ever actually differ, I'm not big on visual novel-esque gameplay in general... The whole experience just feels less tight than other Supergiant efforts. It's got all the great art and music and lore that I've come to expect from them, and again, at its core, Pyre is pretty masterful in what it presents. But I think the fact that this was kind of an experimental game that diverges from their comfort style a bit definitely shows.

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Underleveled posted...

Wow, see my review of AHIT much earlier in this topic to see how our opinions differ.

I definitely see where you're coming from with all of those complaints, but yeah, I just can't say I really had the same experience with any of them. The camera was certainly far from perfect but the only times I can recall having issues with it to the point that it impacted my ability to play the game were in some tight corridors in the movie studio chapter. The physics always felt quite smooth to me. And while some hourglasses were quite long to be sure, I never thought any of them overstayed their welcome; I'm very much a quality over quantity guy in collectathons - give me long and involved quests for ~40 time pieces in AHIT over 900 moons in SMO that you get for sitting on a bench.

Certainly think your critiques are fair, but yeah, the game just hit the right notes for me.

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A Hat in Time (PS4)
The first Kickstarter game I ever really followed (though I didn't back it due to being even more broke then than I am now), so I've been excited to play it for a long time while also being a little resistant and wary, because 3D collectathons are mostly big time hit-or-miss affairs to me.

Well, my fears were unfounded, because this one hit. It's about as charming of a video game as I've played in a very long while. Hat Kid is a super cute and likeable protagonist and her movement pretty much always feels good. Level design didn't grab me immediately but hits its stride very quick, to the point that Alpine Skyline is almost definitely my favorite level in games of this type ever.

Can't recommend this strongly enough if you're a fan of these sorts of platformers. I'll be coming back to do the DLC and 100% it someday, but I want to get through Pyre before Tales of Arise comes out in a few weeks and completely monopolizes my time.

Speaking of which, want to shout out Hades again because I finished up all of its 49 achievements the other day and that was quite a journey. Been a good few months of gaming.

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Transistor (PC)

3/4 Supergiant games down now, and while this one was still quite good, I think I'm comfortable calling it my least favorite so far. Bastion just does everything slightly better, I'd say, and I know that may be kind of a lazy comparison in some ways, but Transistor also sort of invites it. I'm very much of two minds on the ending - would enjoy hearing what others thought of it.

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Simoun posted...

Iconoclasts was amazing. I love the story and it made me think about it for weeks. But I will admit the metroidvania part of it just fails.

Yeah, I'm sure it really did resonate with some people and certainly understand why. I just wasn't one of them. Felt like the game was talking at me for ten hours without really actually saying that much.

Furi's story accomplished so much more to me in about 1% of the text, if that. The Beat has one line of four words that's had me lying awake thinking about it both nights since I finished that game. Less is more sometimes.

Strider (PC)

Super, super solid. Nothing groundbreaking from a strict gameplay perspective, but it stands as a wonderful example of how to do a remake well, which isn't to say that it isn't fun exclusively on its own merits, either. Movement is slick and tight and free, which is good, because this game is a whole lot Metroidvania-esque than I realized and so fits in with what accidentally became a bit of a theme for me this month. Hiryu is just as cool of a video game character as any you could name. Fun time.

And with that, I've officially beaten ten games in July 2021, which is a completely arbitrary feat that I will almost definitely never repeat in my life. Lot of good stuff in the last ~30 days.

I've also now got exactly as many finished games in my Steam library as uncompleted ones now, which is also not likely to last very long.

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PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

I also really didn't care for what happened with one of the characters for the end, you probably know the one.

I would assume Royal? Because that was my feeling as well. I went so far as to look up a guide for the part where you have to leave him behind on the exploding base assuming I was missing something, because it made absolutely no narrative sense to me why THAT would be the solution of all things and the end of his story.

Glad I wasn't the only one let down there!

Furi (PC)

This game absolutely kicks ass. This was another one I'd been wanting to play for a while but always shied away from because the difficulty was so notorious and I wasn't confident in my ability to beat it. But after Cuphead and a few other things from this year, I figured I'd at least give it a shot. And I actually found it quite manageable. It's definitely tough, but it's never unfair, and it always feels incredibly satisfying to win a fight. Died once to the Hand, several times to the Edge, and a few more times to the final boss - everything else was a first try. The Strap, the Burst, and the Song were the standout fights to me, but I honestly didn't think any of them were underwhelming; at absolute worst, they were creative.

I'm blown away by how few folks on B8 seem to have played this game (according to my friends list) relative to some of the other Steam offerings I've beaten, because I personally can't recommend it enough and just wish like hell it was longer. I was worried it'd be a letdown after how much I liked Cuphead, which is a similar game in a lot of ways, but I honestly enjoyed Furi just as much. It's every bit as stylish and challenging and fun and I'll definitely be coming back to achievement hunt a little bit.

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The burning-through of quick games that have been in my Steam library for way too long continues.

Abyss Odyssey (PC)

Short and pretty mediocre. Cool ideas but it doesn't quite control well enough to take advantage of them. Don't reckon I'll ever really think about this game again.

Astebreed (PC)

Also short but much more sweet. Super solid bullet hell, just the right difficulty for its hour-ish runtime, surprisingly great music.

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Iconoclasts (PC)

I played through almost all of this game nearly two years ago and decided to come back to finish it right quick in the name of my recent productivity. Turns out I was even closer to the end than I realized - all I had left was what essentially amounted to an endgame boss rush.

The reason I dropped it back then was because this was an extraordinarily disappointing game that simply collapsed under the weight of its own ambition. Joakim Sandberg, the single-handed man behind the project, created a fascinating world and some really great characters in the seven years he worked on it. You know what he didn't create, unfortunately? A coherent, palatable story and gameplay experience that allowed those elements to shine. It's technically a Metroidvania, but it earns that classification by being juuuust non-linear enough for it; exploration and combat aren't fun enough to justify revisiting areas most of the time anyway. And there are undoubtedly some legitimately profound themes going on in its lore, but it's presented in such an awkward, esoteric fashion that I can't imagine the vast majority of players could ever actually figure out what the hell it's trying to say under the surface.

There's good things about Iconoclasts, but taken as a whole experience it's way too uneven and prone to getting in its own way to the point that even with its crazy long development time, it ends up feeling rushed at the end. Not awful by any stretch, but I think my ten hours could've been better spent elsewhere.

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Hades (PC)

First of all, a huge shout out to @PrivateBiscuit1 for gifting me this game for Secret Santa this past year (alongside Cuphead, which I neglected to mention when I posted about it a few months ago, and Stardew Valley, which I'm obviously getting to eventually). Thanks again for the truly awesome set of games, man!

Anyway, Hades has had a lot of awards and superlatives thrown at it pretty much since the day it released, and it dang sure earned every one of them. It's been a long time since I got annoyed at my daily life responsibilities (work, school, etc.) specifically because they were getting in the way of me playing a video game rather than because they just suck on their own merits, but that was the feeling I got with this one. Incredible experience in every possible way, at absolute minimum a top 25 game all-time for me.

My gamer confidence was a little low after CotM2, but after this game I think I've kinda confirmed that it's indeed mostly just those old-school platformers that give me trouble, because from what I can tell in some quick browsing of other forums and such, I think I made it through my playthrough here at a pretty solid clip compared to many. Made it to the Hades fight on my eighth escape attempt, beat him for the first time on #15 after a couple very close calls, then did it again on #17, and then rattled off eight in a row starting on attempt 19 to finish the main story, including at least one clear with each weapon and a couple different Heat levels thrown in for good measure when I got ambitious.

Definitely not gonna put this one on the proverbial shelf yet - want to at least make it to the epilogue before I call it quits, but July has been such a prolific month that I'm gonna put it on the backburner for a week or two just to see how many more I can squeeze in. And then I think I'm gonna go on a mini Supergiant streak because I played Bastion forever ago but have had Transistor and Pyre just sitting in my Steam library for a long while and I think it's definitely time I get to those.

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Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 (PC)

It's kind of a wonder that I grew up to love video games as much as I do, because I very much got my start in gaming with NES platformers, and I was never any good at them at all. Now, these days, we've got a lot of games being made with those sorts of titles as inspiration, and... I'm still pretty lousy at them. Pretty small sample size and all, but GameFAQs has such games as Celeste, Cuphead, and both La-Mulanas (all of which I've played in the last couple years) rated as harder than CotM2 by the community, and I found this to be notably tougher than any of them on a screen-by-screen or level-by-level basis. But hey, I finished it! And according to Steam achievements, plenty of folks don't, so that's something I guess!

Anyway, as the game itself goes, it's definitely the weakest of the three Bloodstained projects. Hard to put my finger on exactly why, but it just doesn't seem to have the same heart or care put into it. Levels feel less "tough-but-fair" and more "claustrophobic trial-and-error." The music isn't nearly as good, either. And the story (at least through Episode 1, which is all I'm doing for now because the others as I understand it are just the same stages done with different characters) is kind of a carbon copy of the first CotM. It all just feels less inspired.

Still quite solid, to be sure, but as another point of reference, that first one took me one sitting of a little under hours to get through, and this one took about 3 and a half across four sittings, so yeah, just didn't grab me. Glad I did it, but I was ready to be done by the end for sure.

Think next up might be Hades, which I'm incredibly excited for.

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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (PS4)

Metroidvanias were a genre that just completely passed me by as a kid for whatever reason. Certainly never avoided them intentionally - just so happened that I was always playing something else. And to this day, I still have never actually played an official Metroid or Castlevania game.

But I've completely fallen in love with the genre over the last year or two, and this is another great example to add to the list. The lovely music, the interesting areas that never overstay their welcome (well, except for the Forbidden Underground Waterway), the formula that's pretty much been perfected at this point of frequent, incremental improvements to the protagonist... Just a dang good time.

The problem with Metroidvanias is that they really, really tempt my completionist tendencies, but I was able to mostly resist the urge this time. I was very close to 100% map completion when I beat the final boss, so I went ahead and finished that up afterward along with the secret bosses, but that'll be where I stop with this one for now. I know it's still getting content updates so that could certainly renew my interest in maybe going after that Platinum one day, though.

Video game Kickstarter successes are pretty few and far between but I'd say this definitely qualifies. And we even got two Curse of the Moon games out of it as a bonus (the second of which I just now grabbed in the Steam sale and will likely be the next title I run through).

All of us on B8 enjoy ragging (mostly affectionately) on our fellow posters when it comes to their tastes in pretty much every form in media, but at the end of the day, they've never really steered me wrong when it comes to video games. So for everyone who posted in that topic I made a month or two ago asking if this game was worth the buy, thanks for helping me get down off the fence!

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Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 (PS4)

I played the hell out of this series as a kid like so many others, but I always did prefer THPS3 and 4 over the first two, which I think is actually kind of a minority opinion?

Major props to Vicarious Visions for pretty much nailing the feel of those later games and making the old levels look as great as they did. It doesn't feel like it controls exactly the same, but part of the difference might just be my relatively smaller amount of familiarity with said levels, and anyway, after the horrifying Frankenstein that the franchise gradually turned into, I'll take a close approximation any day of the week.

Not a whole lot to really say otherwise. Fun game, glad it exists, glad it's in my collection.

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The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd (PC)

Extraordinarily satisfying. It always takes me a while to get through these games (if you look at my Steam achievement dates for this one in particular you'll see at least two long gaps in playtime) because the combat system isn't my favorite (I find that it's either weirdly unfair or mind-numbingly easy; I didn't take a single point of damage against the final boss with the setup I had) and, more importantly, because I always manage to somehow start them right before something crazy happens in my life that ends up eating all of my free time. But I really, really do adore the series. My two favorite aspects of fiction are characters and worldbuilding, and it's hard to find media that do those two things better than Trails.

Like, on that note, I'm pretty sure this game confirmed that I'm the biggest dork in the history of the world, because when I stumbled upon a few books in the Hermit's Garden talking about Liberl's economy, of all things, not only was I legitimately stoked to read them, I was outright disappointed that they were as short as they were.

Anyway, in what I imagine is a common story among franchise fans, Kevin Graham immediately went from a guy I had no real opinion of whatsoever to being far and away my favorite character in SC's ending, so I was stoked to find he was the main protagonist of this entry, and he didn't disappoint. Just got better and better as the game went on - he's very easily a top 10 video game character for me at this point. The whole cast is great, though - I will never cease to be astounded that this game's party is made up of 16 (!) members, and I actually like all of them to at least some degree. What an accomplishment. It could almost be mistaken for something of a fanservice game on its surface, what with its litany of reused areas, a chapter that lets you fight against a bunch of folks that there would otherwise never be a story reason to, and its letting you actually play as such names as Julia and Mueller that have been such badasses in prior games. But look, that's the kind of fanservice that'll always be A-okay with me, especially when it culminates in my boy Alan effing Richard showing up about ten minutes after I actually thought "Man, it'd be awesome if Richard was playable in this one, but there's no way they'd get that crazy."

But that wouldn't be a fair classification anyway. This story very clearly has an incredible amount of care and heart put into it, just like the other games did. The main narrative meanders a tiny bit at times but is always compelling and extremely well-written, the side stories range from great to tremendous (with one "appalling" thrown in there that I had to make a separate topic about and that will forever stay with me), and the ending is perfect in just about every way imaginable.

I'm very much looking forward to the Crossbell duology, which I'll probably wait to play until the official translations come out now that they've been announced. I've still got a hell of a backlog to keep me busy until then.

Character Ranking with not a ton of thought put into it: Kevin > Richard > Agate > Estelle > Olivier > Ries > Mueller > Schera > Kloe > Joshua > Renne > Anelace > Zin > Julia > Josette > Tita

Also, Kevin/Ries >>>>>>>>>> Estelle/Joshua

People who claim video games aren't art can, as my buddy Steiner might say, get in the bin. I'm gonna miss this world and its characters like crazy.

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Yeah, that's about the range I figured I'd be going down in. Glad I managed to get a couple in that you liked!

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Cuphead (PC)

What a treat this was. I don't really think there's much I can say about the game that most don't already know. It's stylish, creative, challenging, and tons of fun. The only thing I didn't enjoy was Rumor Honeybottoms. She walled me hard, and I swear sometimes I got stuck in a no-win situation through no real fault of my own just due to all of the randomness. Everything else was a pure delight.

Werner Werman, Brineybeard, Wally Warbles, Cala Maria, and the Devil probably make up my top 5 favorite bosses in some order or another. I imagine I'll likely go back every so often and see about bumping up some of my ranks and grabbing a couple extra achievements, but I probably won't make it a priority just because there's so many other games to get to!

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Did you nominate this for FL81s topic?

I did! One of my go-to noms for these sorts of topics - pretty much everyone seems to enjoy it to at least some degree. Glad that held true for you!

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Yeah, Hands That Thieve is my favorite, but most people would call Everything Goes Numb or Somewhere in the Between their best. Really can't go wrong with any of them.

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rwlh posted...

I need to check them out. I was pretty impressed with Receiving End of It All. Is there another song you'd recommend by them?

My favorites are The Littlest Things, Point/Counterpoint, and With Any Sort of Certainty. So in addition to what you got from Owl there, you'll have plenty of options.

Like he said, though - you can't go wrong with most of it. They have a pretty consistent sound, so if you enjoyed Receiving End, I would imagine the majority of their stuff will land pretty well with you.

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Nice to see Streetlight do well here. Somewhere in the Between and Hands That Thieve are both among my favorite albums.

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Kenri posted...

Spyro: Year of the Dragon (via Spyro Reignited Trilogy, PS4)

Definitely better than Spyro 2, definitely still has a lot of the same issues where it pauses the actually fun gameplay to make you play some shitty minigame/vehicle segment. At least the Sparx/Agent 9 levels were decent. I did 100% this one but it was right on the edge of being not good enough for me to bother; the awful skateboard sections alone nearly made it not worth it.

Overall I'd say:

Spyro 1: 9/10
Spyro 2: 4/10
Spyro 3: 7/10

Always interesting to see the variety in rankings for OG Spyro. I've always been very firmly on the side that thinks they improved with every release, with 3 being among my very favorite games. But I understand why some folks don't care for it as much.

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Steiner posted...

i'm mostly joking but there was that one bayley match!

Nope, too late, you're an All Red Everything superfan.

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All well and good to say she's a project with some charisma that just needs work with the in-ring, but she's been at this whole wrestling thing a few years already, working against and training with a lot of great women, and when joshi improve as workers they tend to do it rapidly and toward the beginning of their careers.

Stranger things have happened, but it's more likely than not that she pretty much is what she's going to be in the ring at this point.

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Fair enough on the mic shots, then. In that case, I'll bow out of the discussion since I have very little else to judge her by.

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I can't comment fully on Itoh because, despite joshi being the bulk of modern wrestling I consume these days, I've never seen one of her matches.

But those microphone strikes from the other day that were posted here... I'd be embarrassed to have put that on TV if I was AEW. Your stuff has to look better than that for me to call you a good TV performer. Maybe you can get away with it when you're wrestling Session Moth Martina on some EVE show or in TJPW in front of a couple hundred people, but not on TNT where you've got nearly seven figures worth of American eyeballs watching.

I don't need everyone to be Kevin Von Erich out there stiffing people into another dimension, but if the little I have seen of Itoh is indicative of her overall work, I'd agree it's not good enough.

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I still think about Bastion's ending sometimes. The sequence that comes from saving Zulf is one of the most powerful moments I've ever seen in video games.

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Performance Center is training sports entertainers, everywhere else is training wrestlers.

Again, Vince has been telling you for years that WWE isn't a wrestling company - just believe him. He's telling the truth.

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Those were worse than that one Gedo chair shot, wow.

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Everyone should celebrate the good and bad of last night's show by watching the best exploding barbed wire deathmatch ever today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSdMiVV_fnQ

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Yeah, but everything the Fiend does is on purpose, which to me adds an extra layer of terrible.

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Everything the Fiend has done is worse than that was.

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Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Golden Deer (Switch)
Played the Blue Lions on release, so I don't have a whole lot to say about this now, but I put enough hours in that I'm counting it anyway.

The Good:
The map design etc. is certainly better in this route, and I enjoy the extra lore it brings to the story because I very much like the world of 3H. Claude is a good Lord.

The Bad:
"Bad" is probably unfair, but it's hard not to talk about these routes without direct comparisons since the majority of the game is so similar between them. This playthrough solidified that I'm a firm "characters over story" guy. Even with all that extra worldbuilding and such, I still preferred Azure Moon quite a bit, simply because the Blue Lions are a far superior cast.

Overall:
3H is a top ten all-time game for me, and I'm glad I went and played this route, but that'll probably be it for me. CF and SS don't hold that much appeal to me, and considering my completionist tendencies drive me to put way more into this particular game than is strictly necessary, particularly on replays, there's too many other games in my backlog to get through.

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I'm just mad VOW beat me to the "Dark was on Tuesdays first!" joke.

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The dude in the replies telling everyone to cry because he liked it.

Sometimes I feel pretty bad about myself as a human being, but luckily there's people like that in the world to remind me that it could be soooo much worse.

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I'll be interested to see what you think of Act III as you keep moving through it. It's got a very different feel from Act IV all the way through - much more raw. The back half has a couple of my very favorite TDH songs, though, and they're decidedly not like the rest of the album at all.

I would... Maybe recommend skipping He Said He Had a Story, though. Subject matter in that one is a little heavy and it's not so good of a song that I'd ever call it a must-listen for the band.

Also, I think it slipped my mind to ever comment on those few extra Savatage songs you listened to. Glad you enjoyed them! I'm sitting here right now trying to remember what Power of the Night even sounds like, and I honestly can't. Definitely not one of their most enduring efforts.

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You know the song better than I do, so I thought you might have an idea why it felt "classic rock" to me. I'm not the best at articulating musical thoughts!

Ah. Well, if you were more of a lyrics guy, I'd say it was due to that, because a lot of the writing on that album kind of has the classic rock feel of, like, straddling the line between self-indulgence and actual poetic profoundness. Failing that, though, I imagine it just has something to do with the overall general sound of the vocals.

Rishloo definitely takes some influence from, like, Zeppelin and Bowie, but so do a ton of other bands, and it's not as evident as the Tool and Karnivool sound that's also in there. So I wouldn't say it's necessarily a deliberate thing.

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I got serious classic rock vibes from this song, which doesnt really make sense to me (maybe NBIceman has insight into that?).

What kind of insight do you mean?

Is My Chemical Romance one of those bands its cool to hate?

I think they were for a while, but opinions seem to have shifted in recent years. Personally, I'd put Black Parade right up there with some of the best rock albums ever.

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Puma shirt...

...

.....

..........

Panther shirt.

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I still watch wrestling - it's just that lately that mostly consists of indies from 10+ years ago and current Joshi, and I'm much more likely to talk about that in the Discord because it's relevant to slightly more people there.

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Played the first map earlier today and I basically echo everything that's been said here so far. Looking forward to the second map but I'm not, like, itching to get my hands on it or anything, which probably isn't the best sign.

I've been playing pretty much exclusively FE since the year started so far, though, so maybe my brain just has limited tactics RPG bandwidth right now. I'm sure I'll give it another whirl down the line since the release date is so far out.

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"Starring Grampton St. Rumpterfrabble as irascible coxswain Saunterblugget Hampterfuppinshire" is permanently etched into my brain.

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rwlh posted...

I feel like I might have enjoyed the Dear Hunter song more if I was more able to focus on the lyrics. That's not a knock against the song - it usually takes me a few listens to internalize lyrics. The video had lyrics displayed, but I tried to ignore videos when I listened, to not be influenced by anything other than the song.

Also of note: we're out of the bottom ten (twelve, really) and nobody has dropped a song more than once!

I'm very much a lyrics-first guy, so it makes sense there'd be a divide there then!

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I remember walking into my high school basketball locker room the morning of May 4, 2012 and finding two of my teammates, who I guarantee never picked up a comic book in their life and were in general some of the jock-iest and least nerdy people I'd ever encountered to that point, engaged in an extremely lively debate over who was the best Avenger - Hulk or Thor. They'd gone to the midnight opening, which even I hadn't been able to make. It was so weird standing there and realizing that these movies were legitimately making a huge, wide cultural impact, and I'll never forget what a cool moment that was. Crazy to think it's only grown exponentially since then.

Anyway, I'll hop back on the GOTG2 train for the next drop, just because I kinda think even someone who has both Guardians movies as their 1 and 2 would have the first one on top.

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Probably Mia.

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swordz9 posted...

No other pair would be effective because no other characters were really given the development or screen time in fairness. Up to that point the MCU was mostly Iron Man and Cap featuring glorified extras

That's part of it, but it has to do with the fundamental characters themselves as well. Tony and Steve will always butt heads to a certain degree over culpability in the fallout of their actions - Tony has a really hard time living with the unintended negative consequences of the things he does in pursuit of the greater good where Cap really doesn't, at least to the extent that he believes that all the good they do outweighs those consequences.

And that dynamic is born out of their respective origin stories. Even as other characters get more development, it's not really a dynamic that can easily be replicated because those traits are such core parts of them as men.

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I would assume Avengers 2012 next but Endgame wouldn't make my jaw hit the floor.

I'm very, very tempted to go on a Team Cap vs Team Tony rant considering that the writeups lead me to believe I'm in the minority as far as my opinions there, but I don't want to bog down this ranking with that sort of thing.

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I played through Return to Dreamland in the space of one night with my best friend toward the end of high school and it remains one of my fondest gaming memories. Had a falling out with him less than a year after that and anytime I look back on our time spent playing video games (of which there was a lot over many, many years), I think of Smash Melee first but Dreamland a close second. Wonderful game.

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