Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

SpeeDLeemon posted...

and she wants people to yell at him

So she's a shitty person, then?
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Red Dead has its flaws, but it's still a very good game. Detroit has good moments, but is generally a flawed game.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

SunWuKung420 posted...

People who drink long island iced teas love all 4 together.

Long Island Iced Teas generally don't have whiskey in them. They're rum, vodka, tequila, and gin.

Whiskey is more what you get in a Lynchburg Lemonade, which is similar, yet different.

(Though I've actually mixed the two in the past, and it's not an unpleasant flavor, so whiskey CAN work with the others.)

I'd also argue that Long Island Iced Teas are an exception in any case - I strongly dislike rum and gin on their own, but I'm fine with them when they're in Long Island Iced Tea.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Revelation34 posted...

Why not a Flash game?

Flash games are so early 2000s.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

There needs to be an option for "sword gun", which is obviously distinct from and different than a "gun sword".
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

hypnox posted...

I will say this, there is a noticeable uptick in missing people in my state, mostly women and kids. My amber alert on my phone goes off once or twice a week.

So human trafficking is going up pretty dramatically it seems.

Conversely, everyone being locked away at home is dramatically raising domestic violence murders, and the people involved are just hiding the bodies effectively.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

DirtBasedSoap posted...

I dont think most people hate her, shes just really boring.

I feel like this is the real problem. It's not so much that people hate Rey, as much as it is that they hate the poorly-written movies she's in, and she's not really all that interesting character in her own right, so she becomes the target. She's effectively become the living avatar for people's disgust with the sequel trilogy as a whole.

It's the same way that a lot of the dislike and disgust with the prequel trilogy (but especially The Phantom Menace) crystallizes into "Jar-Jar is terrible! He's completely ruined the entire movie!" Yes, he's bad, but a lot of the pure hate against him is just misdirected hate over how terrible The Phantom Menace is as a whole. We could probably say that the pure venomous hate that Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christensen tend to get stems from the same sort of impulse.

It's a quirk of human psychology that we always look for villains to blame when things go wrong. We LOVE scapegoats, because it's always easier to blame a single person or group rather than trying to deconstruct systemic flaws and complex interactions.

If Rey was a more interesting character, people would probably transfer their dislike for the sequels to someone else (probably Finn), but because she's kind of bland, she makes a perfect target.

This is the thing people forget when they try and use the "Well, Luke was kind of boring too!" defense for Rey. The difference being, the original films were actually GOOD, and they also had Han Solo to distract us all from whatever flaws were there because he was being awesome enough for everyone.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Mead posted...

is this from where the red fern grows

Is that a euphemism for menstruation?
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

The trademark system remains a mystery to me. I would still really like to create a cross-media property, but wherever I start, I imagine I'd need to trademark at least some of the characters, etc, possibly just for merchandising.

Trademarking is mostly just for branding.

The perfect example is "Captain Marvel". DC could literally have a character named "Captain Marvel" (aka Shazam), but they could never publish a comic book called Captain Marvel because Marvel owns the trademark on that name.

Trademarks mostly apply to brand names and logo designs, while copyright applies to other intellectual property aspects and concepts. This is why trademark has to be renewed/protected or it can be voided/abandoned, while copyright tends to stay valid regardless of what you do with it, and dates from the specific time of creation of the work in question.

Trademark's also what people are generally talking about when you hear the phrase "confusion in the marketplace" used for cease & desist sort of situations.

This is also the loophole that companies like Disney or Time Warner are going to use when they eventually can't extend copyright protection any longer. Sure, the character of Superman or Mickey Mouse may enter public domain when copyright lapses, but they'll still retain a death grip on the trademark for the terms "Superman" or "Mickey Mouse", so they'd still be able to sue you into oblivion if you ever wrote a comic called "Superman" or that prominently advertises the appearance of Superman in your comic.

In practice it can get more complicated once you start involving International rights and there's always quirks when you're dealing with large corporations who can hire enough lawyers to bend space-time, but at base level it's relatively simple.

If you were going to establish a cross-media property where you'd be likely to market individual characters (like comic books, toys, etc), you might benefit from trademarking every individual major character, but for most creative works you're just fine trademarking the overarching branding and relying on copyright for everything else.



Zeus posted...

Wanted! (the comic) was fantastic, Wanted (the movie) was shit.

My opinion is more that Wanted the movie was bland shit, Wanted the comic is a hot steaming turd that makes the entire universe a slightly worse place simply by existing within it. But again, I kind of hate every facet of Millar and Ennis' style and philosophy of writing.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

ChaosAzeroth posted...

I adore Felix. He's hecking adorable. SAM just cracks me tf up. Yes yell about entering stealth mode. Real stealthy there pal.

Yeah, but Felix's introduction is basically as a random character just hanging around near your ship, and you can easily walk right past him and never speak to him at all. When you DO speak to him, he offers no real motivation or reason to take him along, other than out of pity. You can like his personality or find it funny, but from a narrative perspective, it doesn't really make much sense to bring him along. It's basically just "Here are some more jokes" rather than really telling a story, comedic or otherwise.

In SAMs case, he's just in the closet on your ship, and you may not even realize he's there or that you can fix/recruit him if you don't investigate. And Ellie starts out as an NPC that is just asking you to do a sidequest to sneak into a dangerous area to talk to someone who might be biologically contagious in some way, and only after you're done does she reveal that she's recruitable. But even then, all she really says is "Let me come along, I hate being in people's debt", but she doesn't really offer any overwhelming reason to accept her offer.

In some ways that kind of parallels companions in New Vegas (you can potentially miss Boone completely, Veronica kind of hides her skills and just asks to travel with you without really giving you a reason to want her, and the various personalities conflict enough that you'd almost never recruit all of them in one group unless you're literally just trying to "collect them all"). But there are much better ways to introduce characters (for all of Bioware's faults, they're very good at this). Don't just plop a character down and go "Well, I guess you can recruit this guy if you want, up to you." Make the player WANT to recruit that character via story and scene. Show me why I would WANT to have Felix in my party. Have a scene where Felix shows up and does something cool, or saves me from getting jumped by some guys, or helps me break in somewhere, etc. Give companions a chance to shine BEFORE I recruit them, then give me the choice to recruit them or not.

I recruited them all (because it feels like the game wants you to), but if I played Outer Worlds the same way I play New Vegas (and RPGs in general), I'd have recruited Parvati and maybe reactivated SAM (but would never really take him along into combat), but my ship would be really empty otherwise.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Blightzkrieg posted...

Reminds me of Ayn Rand's Harry Potter

I always get a perverse sort of pleasure out of stories retold in the style of a completely different story/genre. Like the "Star Wars retold as Shakespeare" books, or the Shakespeare/Lovecraft crossover. Or Green Eggs and Hamlet.

And now I'm suddenly realizing how many of those types of stories revolve around Shakespeare.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

helIy posted...

i don't have opinions

i have facts

Facts, more like farts.

Because they stink!

Get it?

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

Lokarin posted...

I haven't seen much of it, but there are people saying it's as good if not better than New Vegas

Those people are blatantly lying to you.



ChaosAzeroth posted...

I enjoyed it. I think part of the issue comes down to overhype. I didn't have over the moon expectations, I just expected it to be fun and not a dumpster fire. It delivered higher than expected by some for me.

I think my main problem stems from what I expect out of RPGs (including past Obsidian RPGs), especially ones that are blatantly advertising themselves as basically being "NEW VEGAS IN SPACE" (and it very much was - they absolutely hyped the New Vegas ties in most of the ads).

The game starts out giving you almost zero reason to give a single shit about Welles or what he wants you to do. Character creation gives you backstory options (for minor stat boosts), but in the vein of the game trying to be LOLOMGCOMEDY most of them are incredibly lame (and calls into question how you're even capable of being the hero Halcyon needs to save it when you're clearly just as much of a loser as everyone else seems to be). You're dropped into a world and left to your own devices, which would almost make sense if the map was an open-world sandbox (the way New Vegas was), but Outer Worlds is very linear and mostly on-rails (so there's no point to that type of opening).

Your first quest is to find a ship to get off the starting planet... in spite of the fact that you're given almost no motivation to WANT to find a ship and get off the planet at all, other than the game telling you you have to. This sets the stage for nearly every quest that follows, where you're basically just doing what someone tells you to do, with almost no initiative or personality of your own. The only choices you ever really have are whether you want to be "nice" or "asshole" (but with no effect on anything either way).

If anything, it almost feels like the only real way to play through the game is to just play as much of a clueless idiot as the game seems to want you to be, and play a low INT character and turn the whole game into comedic farce (and then just crash the Hope into the sun in the end to turn the whole story into a futilely nihilistic tale of how nothing will ever change for the better and you should never hope for the future because human stupidity will always ruin everything).

Most of the characters you meet are one-dimensional jokes. Your first companion (unless you completely avoid Parvati) is likeable but dull (and she seems to exist solely to annoy the sort of players who want romanceable PCs, and to silently judge murderhobos). Most of the other potential companions are people you would NEVER, EVER invite on to your ship in a million years (the drunk, the homeless jerk kid, the asshole priest), because in addition to their negative personality traits, they give you almost no reason to WANT to have them along. Nyoka might be the exception - you know she's a badass hunter. But Felix is a shit, Max doesn't scream useful or trustworthy, and both SAM and Ellie are easily missable if you aren't in a "COMPLETE EVERY SIDEQUEST" mindset. Literally the only reason you recruit them at all is "because the game says they're potential companions and I need to collect them". Again, it's hard to believe that the people who wrote characters like the companions in New Vegas also created these lackluster one-note jokes.

Most of the companions improve somewhat if you do their sidequests, but that's complicated by the fact that have of them are terminally buggy and you can be permanently locked out of them if you're not careful (which mostly involves you having to pre-plan hours ahead using wikis that will spoil story elements for you). And even then, half of them aren't necessarily ALL that improved. And Parvati's feels incredibly forced and kind of lame in concept (even if it's sweet in execution, and the character as a whole is absolutely saved by the fact that Ashly Burch is a great voice actor).

The ending choice mostly just feels like "the correct ending" and "being transgressive for the fuck of it ending". You're given almost no reason to ever side with the corporations other than for the lulz (and probably after saving your game and then reverting back to play through "the real ending" after you've had your fun). Because they were so interested in trying to make their ideological point, they forgot to actually write a worthwhile story.

The worst part is, ALL of this feels like things that could easily be fixed if you just had someone who gave a shit to read the plot over and do a few more revisions before rushing off to finish the game. Give more of an intro scene to establish motivation (or have NO intro scene at all and slowly establish motivation through gameplay). Develop better companion introductions, and give the player reasons to WANT to recruit them beyond "because video game". If you've given Welles more personality and the player more opportunities to interact with him narratively, you can then more effectively emphasize the idea that maybe you shouldn't trust him, and if you make the corporate side anything other than a completely lost cause, you could potentially establish reasons why a player might WANT to side with them. Allowing for more player choice and flexibility overall is the only hard part (because that requires time, manpower, and money that Obsidian clearly didn't have), but that would have gone a LOOONG way towards making the narrative actually worth something.

Outer Worlds felt like sitting down and expecting to read a novel, and then discovering that you accidentally picked up a comic book from the 1950s. It can be silly fun, but it's shallow as fuck, silly rather than clever, and ultimately somewhat unsatisfying and unmemorable.

Even outside of the narrative, gameplay is overly simplistic and occasionally awkward, and the VATS-replacement time-dilation feels forced at best and kind of crappy at worst. The music is generic as hell. The scenery looks pretty and has a fair amount of variety, but doesn't really mean much.

For all the New Vegas comparisons, Outer Worlds feels more like it's trying to be Borderlands 2, but is falling short of the mark in pretty much every way.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Lokarin posted...

Outer Worlds Vs. Greedfall

Both were disappointing.

Greedfall feels like it should be a much better game than it is, with a ton of potential and sort of moving into the niche Bioware used to fill, before Bioware transformed into hot liquid shit. But for all the hype it's essentially bordering on being an indie game, which means it kind of looks like shit and it was never going to be all that elaborate or deep because the studio couldn't afford to work that hard on it.

The dialogue trees - which people sort of latched onto as a huge deal beforehand - basically boil down to "Do you want to know more?" and "Do you want to accept this sidequest?", with almost no meaningful choice or ability to really affect the world in any way. It's a mediocre RPG telling the story it wants to tell, and while I enjoyed it to some degree (and 100%ed it), it's not a game I would ever feel compelled to go back to ever again.

Meanwhile, everyone went in to Outer Worlds expecting New Vegas IN SPACE, but we all forgot that Obsidian has been spiraling the edge of bankruptcy for years now, so they were going to be producing content more like an indie studio than they were the Obsidian of old. The end result is a game that feels unfinished - it's an interesting enough setting and a workable starting concept, but the companions all seem pointless and bland as fuck, the story is paper-thin and barely bothers to give you a reason to give a fuck about anything other than "Do this because the game wants you to", the plot is very much "Point A to Point B to Point C" railroading with your only real choice being whether or not you feel like doing sidequests. You can see the New Vegas mentality/sense of humor/flavor, but it comes across more like someone trying to do a mediocre rip-off of New Vegas than something made by the same team with the same level of ability and skill.

Again, while I've played New Vegas almost a dozen times (and felt like I was playing a very different character with very different backstories and adventures each time), I have zero interest in ever playing Outer Worlds ever again (I couldn't even be bothered to 100% it the way I did GreedFall). The only thing Outer Worlds really makes me feel is "I wonder if this would be a better game if they'd had twice as much time and ten times as much money to make it".

Ironically, both games kind of lean so hard into their respective underlying themes/morals and in such blatant, ham-fisted ways that it starts to feel preachy more than insightful, and thus kind of annoying. Yes yes, we get it, capitalism bad, grr. White people are the devil, Europe bad, etc etc. Now say something CLEVER about it. Outer Worlds is especially bad about this, as it feels like they have one joke that they just keep telling over and over and over and over again and the punchline is "CAPITALISM IS BAD!", but GreedFall doesn't really put much effort or complexity into its viewpoint either.

Neither game is terrible, and both can be enjoyable if you turn your brain off and have zero expectations or prior experience with RPGs in general, but they're both kind of disappointing if you've played much better games before, or expected more from them from all the pre-release hype or reviews that made them sound way better than they actually are.



Lokarin posted...

What's your biggie of the year?

If I was a hipster, I'd probably say something like "Disco Elysium".

But in my opinion 2019 was a blasted wasteland of terrible game releases. When you ignore ports, rereleases, remasters, and remakes, there's almost NOTHING of value that came out in 2019.

RDR2 might have to win by default due to lack of anything resembling competition. And I don't even LIKE RDR2 that much, because I feel like it went waaay too deep into simulation and railroady storytelling that keeps me from really enjoying the story or characters the way I did with RDR1. But it was still better than pretty much everything else.

I feel like I spent most of 2019 playing games like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, and games I had left over from 2018 or earlier because there was nothing coming out that I cared about at all.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I didn't watch the show because I kind of hated the comic.

But my opinion might not mean much because I dislike Garth Ennis in general. I kind of lump him into the same category with Mark Millar as edgelord writers. They always feel like they're trying way too hard to be rebellious and counterculture in ways that mostly only appeal to teenage boys. And that only really seems mature or well-adjusted to teenage boys.

The scene at the end of Wanted kind of sums up that sort of style for me. Mark Millar clearly thought it was the coolest thing evar, but it just makes me think the character (and the writer) is a try-hard dork.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

And no, I don't count the Switch as a handheld.

You should, because it's more handheld than it is console.

It's essentially a handheld that can be docked, not a console that can be played on the go (like what they were trying to do with the Wii-U).

It's why, when it first came out and they were like "No, it's not a handheld, it's the replacement for the Wii-U, not the 3DS", I was like, "Yeah, calling bullshit on that one."
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

If NIN wasn't on that list, I'd say "none of the above".

But Downward Spiral was pretty awesome. Even if I did kind of like a few of the songs from Pretty Hate Machine more.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Monday's never been pizza day for me. Years of school burned into my brain that Friday is pizza day, and as an adult I'm more likely to order a pizza on a Friday or Saturday than any other day just because that's when the socializing happens.

By some strange quirk, Sunday sort of accidentally became "Chinese food day", when my girlfriend spontaneously realized one day that almost every time we randomly ordered Chinese, it was almost always on a Sunday for some reason.

Other than that, I tend to think of Wednesday as "spaghetti day" and Tuesday or Thursday as "taco day" (again, because of years worth of unoriginal and unadventurous school lunch plans), but not so much that it actually encourages me to eat those things on those days or prevents me from ordering/eating those things on other days.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Muscles posted...

People really like FDR? The dude who had Japanese internment camps? The dude who turned Jews away that were fleeing from Germany in WWII? FDR was one of the most racist presidents but is still loved somehow. I don't get how liberals can defend tearing down statues of racists, and non racists who did nothing to deserve it, like Grant, but still love FDR despite his hatred for black people, jews, and asians.

He was right 30% of the time and he was a Democrat, therefore they haven't stopped jerking off over him for 80 years.

Also, you forgot the time when he was mad because the Supreme Court told him he couldn't do something, so he wanted to change the law to increase the number of justices so he could flood the court with loyalists who would rubber stamp anything he wanted. The threat of which terrorized the court into being less antagonistic in the future, for fear that he'd push to fuck with them if they dared block too many of his proposals.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Someone I know used to rent property to Section 8 rentees (basically, the people who can't afford to pay their own rent for various reasons, so the government supports them). He said they were the best tenants he had, because they rarely made much fuss, and he never had to worry about the government checks not coming on time or not cashing. While the people paying with their own money tended to be bigger assholes about maintenance issues, and he'd occasionally have to dog them a bit for rent if they were late.

There will always be horror stories (and the horror stories will always be the ones you're most likely to hear because they're the ones people are most inclined to rant about), but there's certainly money to be made if you own extra property and are willing to put in the extra effort to keep the cash flowing.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Sephiroth C Ryu posted...

After all, he literally got stuck in his bathtub once

That story is and has always been bullshit, and even people at the time knew it. It's like the whole George Washington cutting down the cherry tree thing - it was never entirely meant to fool people who knew better, but the made-up story was more interesting than the truth so the truth was effectively erased and the only thing people remember any more is the lie.

This is why we need better education in schools. Preferably a class that does nothing but debunk stupid stories like spinach being a super-food (a story based on a single typo and perpetuated for nearly 100 years, and the reason why it basically gives Popeye superpowers) or the horseshit about how humans only use 10% of their brains.



TheWorstPoster posted...

Millard Fillmore was the best President.

Damn it, you're infringing on my gimmick. -I'M- the one who gets to nominate Millard Fillmore for best President discussions. Because then I get to post the link to one of my favorite books:

http://www.amazon.com/Remarkable-Millard-Fillmore-Unbelievable-Forgotten/dp/0307339629
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

ClarkDuke posted...

since the unemployment rates around 11%, will you be getting a job to show your support for trump?

It probably wouldn't help. Unemployment rates are a fudged statistic - they usually only record the number of people who are actively collecting unemployment, or who have become unemployed within a specific time frame.

Someone who has never held a job, or who hasn't held an "on-the-books" job in years (or ever), or who's on things like disability or have other exemption status situations, generally won't count towards the unemployment number. In the same vein, people who are considered "officially retired" or "too young to work" won't count towards it either.

In the US, I believe the operational definition of "unemployment" for purposes of measuring the unemployment rate actually has to involve someone over the age of 18 who has actively looked for a job within the last month or is currently collecting unemployment benefits. Once unemployment benefits run out you tend to fall off the grid, and drop out of the numbers.

Ico is basically a non-person, statistically.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Personally, I just question how powerful the hatedom for the game would be if Neil Druckmann wasn't such a grade-A cocknozzle who seems to actively jerk off over how many fans he can alienate in a given day with his shenanigans.

Granted, at least some of it stems from "I was emotionally invested in this setting and these characters and you took a hot steaming shit on both of those things, grr, I am now mad", but his rampant douchebaggery probably helps stir up people who might otherwise be annoyed into a frothing rage.

Kind of like how "What, you people don't have phones?" or "Hey, everything has to be plugged in these days" crystalized the hate against Diablo and the Xbone in ways that might not have happened if sane and rational PR people were capable of reading a room and not throwing rocket fuel onto a raging fire.



But Laura's actually loveable and beloved - I kind of feel like if anyone ever actually tried to go after her for real there'd be at least a few people who would track that person down and beat them to death with a tireiron. Assuming Travis didn't beat them to death with their own limbs first.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

ChaosAzeroth posted...

Hmm once again I appear to not exist.

Whoever is imagining me, imagine better.

Sorry, you weren't really all that interesting of a character, so I mostly relegated you to cameo supporting cast years ago. At this point I mostly just keep you around to occasionally show up in the background of a more important scene to establish a feeling of continuity.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

>_>

<_<

>_>







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

Somewhere, in my house, is the most massive vibrator I was ever able to find.

About 18 years ago, I went as Anakin Skywalker for Halloween. But the joke was that, instead of a lightsaber, I had a vibrator. So I went to a sex shop in NYC with my girlfriend (who is like 5' tall), walked up to the guy at the counter, who is like "Can I help you?", and I was like "I need the biggest vibrator you sell".

So he looks at me, then looks at my girlfriend, then looks back at me, and is sort of doing the mental arithmetic, and is probably thinking "If I sell you this, it might kill her". After a few seconds she sort of realizes what he's thinking and immediately got insanely embarrassed, and started trying to stumblingly explain "It's for a Halloween costume!". At which point I just sort of made eye contact with the guy, smirked a bit, kind of shook my head slightly, and conveyed the idea that "No no, we're totally going to put this in her."

Wound up getting one that's about the size of a Mag-Lite but slightly thicker (for those who don't know how big that is, this was the best picture I could find - http://i.ytimg.com/vi/oM79TSId5A0/maxresdefault.jpg ).

We've never actually USED it as a sex toy, and it's packed away with the rest of the costume, but I do still own it.

Of course, a few years later and I probably just would have bought it online, but I was in NYC all the time anyway, the sex shops were there, and it wouldn't have been nearly as amusing that way.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

Warlocks is almost certainly offensive to some group, whereas the goal is to be bland as possible so as not to offend anybody.

Wiccans would probably be pissed.

)O( pew pew!



Zeus posted...

Because the majority-white SJWs bitching about this name would just bitch about that one, too. You're better off doing nothing in that case.

They should go full reactionary, and change the name of the team to the Godless Savages.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

Everybody is awful these days. It's enough to make anyone crazy.

Everyone's always been awful. We just hear about it more now.

And to be fair, technology in general allows us to express our innate awfulness in entirely new ways, so it can SEEM new, but really, it's just the same old shit wearing a fancy new suit.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Laser shows are mostly shit. If we got rid of fireworks at all, we might as well just not replace them with anything.

Or, like, just have VR headset firework shows or something.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

If we modded everyone on the site that made someone else angry, sad, depressed, or disappointed in some way, there'd be one poster left and he'd spend most of his time just talking to himself.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

No, only most people!
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

GameLord113 posted...

Its going to be something lame like the Generals.

That's already taken.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Generals
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

HornedLion posted...

Its two whole presidents later, AND a half of another

You say that like it's a minor thing, but that's basically 20 years.

Going from your mid-20s to mid-40s is usually a major physical change for pretty much everyone, but it also seems to be more obvious with actresses than it does male actors.

And, I mean, only a couple of years before your earlier picture, she looked like this:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_YcsRkF6yBLI/TRj5IAzwlZI/AAAAAAAAONA/J-SIauAbZYM/s1600/Linda_Cardellini%252Bfreaks%252Bgeeks.jpg
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Revelation34 posted...

Bernie would have won. You don't know what you are talking about.

This is certainly what Bernie supporters believe, yes.



Mead posted...

He should legally change his name to Bone Dracula

I'd definitely vote for him if he did this.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Do we get to spend years making fun of how lame it is the way we did when they changed the Wizards?

People have gotten used to it now, sure, but there was a metric shit-ton of jokes when it first happened.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Zeus posted...

I finally watched an episode of The Toys that Made Us.

If you find that interesting as a concept, you should check out Toy Galaxy (ToyGalaxyTV) on YouTube. They do a lot of longer videos about 80s cartoons and the toy tie-ins that they were built around, and include some surprising stuff even if you think you already know the background of a given show.

You'll mostly want to look for the "The History of..." playlist, as they have a lot of other videos that are mostly just about toys and modern figure releases in general, so just looking at their entire video list can be a bit cluttered.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Gaawa_chan posted...

I think that's more applicable to the Numenoreans, the literal "men of the west", especially with the Atlantis reference, which some morons tend to weave into their revisionist history as being some sort of White Utopia, lol.

Yeah, they both apply. But it's worth remembering that the main reason the Numenoreans are the way they are is because they're the "elf-friends" (and they basically lose most of their specialness when they STOP being elf-friends). They may be the Men of the West, but the elves are (mostly) from even farther West.

Also, if you're going for the over-the-top racism argument, you can always point out that the "Black Numenoreans" are the bad guys "from the south", and then willfully misinterpret what that actually means.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Black_Crusher posted...

My boss is way into 5e and from what I've seen (admittedly, not much) it certainly is. There seems to be a lot less restrictions for everything.

I actually avoided D&D for years because the early systems always seemed so needlessly overcomplicated (and 3e expanded way too far and added too many "options" so it wound up feeling massively cluttered), and because I came into RP via other games that always seemed to have simpler or more effective systems.

I finally gave D&D the time of day during 4e, because it was different enough to get me to reconsider my apathy towards it. And then 5e came out, which feels like the best of all worlds, with the flexibility of earlier editions combined with the simplicity and elegance of better-designed systems.

Part of the success of 5e is definitely the fact that it's more accessible than most of the earlier editions, which makes it easier for newer players to just pick it up and play. That, combined with the rise in streaming games makes it more enticing to the "normies".



Gaawa_chan posted...

What's funny about this is one could easily argue that the elves are more analogous to Jews than dwarves, what with being the chosen star children of Illuvitar and all... they even have-leave the garden-familial betrayal-horrible period in wastelands-etc events in their history.

The elves don't really ping any other traditional Jewish stereotypes, though. While "dwarvish" is literally based on Hebrew.

The various elf languages fall more into what someone might classify as the Celtic fringe with a bit of Finnish thrown in for good measure. And their culture was always sort of influenced by that, with additions from a lot of Celtic and Germanic myth - they're kind of a deliberate fusion of the Tuatha De Danann and the "Light Elves" of Norse myth.

Other fiction or RPGs might change the inspiration for elves to other things (the elves are VERY MUCH a fusion of "gypsies" and Jews in Dragon Age, for instance), but Tolkien's elves really don't map to Jews all that well.

If you REALLY want to push the "Tolkien was racist, therefore all fantasy he inspired is implicitly racist" argument, Tolkien elves actually come closer to the racist ideal of the "Aryan". Which combines with the inherent "West versus East" motif to glorify Western European cultures against the rest of the world.
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I feel like Dan Snyder is petty and stubborn enough to shut the team down entirely and scorch the earth before caving in to pressure. He rarely seems to give much of a fuck about anything, especially if he thinks he can get away with it. And he's smart enough to understand that the people complaining about the team name aren't the people paying for tickets or buying merch anyway, so catering to them really doesn't benefit him at all.

Sponsor or league pressure could potentially force him into doing it against his will, but it could just as easily result in him spitefully digging in his heels because he's really good at making money even when the team is kind of shit (see also, the LA Clippers).
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Philoktetes posted...

Remember when people had physical media collections?

I still do.



Philoktetes posted...

I remember when the first thing you did when you went to a potential friend's home or apartment was check out their collection of books, music, and movies.

I have literally never done this, over the span of 40+ years.



Philoktetes posted...

If they just had basic mainstream stuff, that was a potential dealbreaker.

I don't even have just mainstream stuff, but if I knew someone who ever did that, I'd pretty much immediately call them hipster trash and accuse them of being a douche. That would be more of a dealbreaker for me than anything any given person would actually have. Which I wouldn't know anyway, since I never really looked at what people had.

I can actually think of more friends who are fans of things that are hot garbage than I can think of friends that have hipster tendencies. So I know which group I've self-selecting out of my life.





But considering who posted this topic, is this just troll copypasta anyway?
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That almost looks like someone's arm coming out of a sleeve, with either alien skin or a really elaborate tattoo.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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I've always sort of been tempted by the premise of it, but from everything I've heard the combination of vastly overcomplicated controls and mostly boring gameplay has sort of discouraged me.

Though if I ever did get into it, I'd play it exclusively single-player because I'm not a fan of MMOs (which is why I've never really been interested in EVE, either). And I'd only play the PS4 version because fuck PC gaming.

What I really kind of want is something more akin to the old Wing Commander games, or even the space fighter level in Halo: Reach. Maybe with a slight touch more simulation and exploration, but not to the point where I feel like the sort of nerds who used to play Flight Simulator back in the day. Basically, I want arcade-y action, not full-on sim action.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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BlackScythe0 posted...

The world elite will gather to talk about a side character in a japanese light novel?

My first thought was Star Wars Kid:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Kid
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Mead posted...

Its important to me to play as a character I can physically identify with, thats why I always choose argonian in skyrim.

That's the same reason why I'm mad Mass Effect wouldn't let me play as a Volus.
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ChaosAzeroth posted...

The first one I used to do more. I feel less inclined to as of late for personal reasons.

I mostly just go with the female option for characters because in voiced games, the female VA is almost always the better actor in terms of delivering lines.

At least for Bioware games, they also tend to be slightly less stereotypical. With Mass Effect, male Shepard is basically just "space John Wayne" and in Andromeda male Ryder is "space Nathan Drake". The females in each case actually have slightly more nuance, and come across more like actual humans.

Even in cases where the male actor is awesome (like DA2), they're often paired with a female VA who is just awesome in their own right (like DA2), so I wind up picking the female option anyway.

Plus in a lot of cases, the contrast of a female lead becomes more oddly striking, especially in games that were blatantly written for a male main character. In Saints Row, the Boss tends to have a lot of "masculine" traits and shows interest in female strippers, because the game assumes most players are going to be male and they're going to play as male characters. But a female Boss kind of becomes more interesting simply by virtue of being female. She's a crass, sexual, gratuitously violent badass, which goes against a lot of characterization stereotypes.

The same goes for GTA Online - you can pick up prostitutes (exclusively female), go to the strip club (exclusively female), and generally be an insanely violent sociopath shooting your way through heists, various crimes, and insane adrenaline-junky behavior... and you can do it as a man or a woman. Some players who play as female characters just go androgynous or full on riot-grrl where gender barely matters at all, but you can also play it as extremely feminine or even classy women, which then kind of juxtaposes against the nature of the game itself.

Conversely, sometimes the female option feels like it conforms to the expectations of a game. In Fallout 4, you're a parent chasing across the Wasteland for your infant son - Western culture tends to attribute that sort of nurturing instinct more towards mothers than fathers (and the game as a whole tends to transition that nurturing instinct from your child specifically to the Commonwealth as a whole, especially once you start establishing and protecting settlements). In that sense, it might feel more appropriate to play as the female character, and essentially become "Mother" to the Commonwealth (even as the Institute is literally led by "Father"). Sure, you can play as the male character (and in some ways, the game seems to assume you will - the male option is an ex-soldier, the female choice has no combat experience and a law degree), but you may get more out of the game as a female.

Some people have trouble playing a different gender in games because they try to project themselves onto the character, so the character is essentially doing exactly what THEY would do in that situation. But I almost never play games that way at all. I almost always sort of craft a character in my head, someone other than myself, with their own backstory and personality (often tied to their race/class/etc), and then play as THAT person. My multiple Dragonborns in Skyrim or Couriers in New Vegas or Wardens in Dragon Age or Gorion's Ward in Baldur's Gate were always very different people, and none of them were really like ME, per se.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Mead posted...

Thats it Im gonna homebrew the game super racist now

dwarves now commit crimes 1/day, its just in their blood

No no, silly. Everyone knows the dwarves are secretly metaphors for jews. Their lust for gold, long beards, large noses, lack of dexterity, and secretly planning to control the world's media from their underground lairs is just obvious.

For bonus points, Tolkien-flavored dwarves tend to revere their dwarven forefathers, tracing their lineage back to the dwarf lords of old and forming into clans, just like the Jews divided into tribes based on the 12 sons of Jacob/Israel.

If you really want to lean into hardcore bigotry in a fantasy setting, the elves are all camp gay, orcs are thinly-veiled African tribal savages (and probably all want to kidnap and rape human women), and humans are universally racist assholes (though if you like, you can always have a sub-group of humans who are blatantly Native American-inspired hippie druids/shamans, and just have all the other humans - who are white, naturally - be the racist terrible ones). If you have halflings/hobbits at all, they're exaggerated versions of the Tolkien ones, and sort of come across like fat entitled trust-fund kids, and represent all the worst aspects of Eurocentric consumerism and complacency.

There's actually at least a couple fantasy novels out there that blatantly do this as a sort of satire.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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streamofthesky posted...

Ah, the D&D 4th edition credo whenever there was a complaint!
How'd that work out for WotC?

Quite well, honestly. 4e sold fairly well considering the entire RPG industry was in a massive slump period that could have killed tabletop gaming as a business. It meant WotC's sales expectations, really only slumped when Pathfinder came out as an alternative (and even then, 4e still sold well enough), and brought a lot of new people into the hobby (which is part of what laid the groundwork for the 5e resurgence).

I guarantee you there isn't a single executive in WotC who looks back at 4e and regrets what they did with it. If anything, they're more likely to regret 3e, because the OGL helped glut the market with so many competing products (of variable quality) that it helped suffocate it (similar to the Video Game Crash of 1983 and the Comic Book Crash of 1993). By the end of 3e, there was a very real perception from a lot of people that tabletop gaming as a whole was coming to an end (not helped by the complete collapse of White Wolf, which to that point had become D&D's main rival and which actually sold better than D&D for about a decade).

4e's purpose was to attract new players who really only played video games and had no real interest in tabletop gaming (because there was a perception that the audience needed to grow, because it would stagnate and die without a massive influx of new blood). It did exactly that. 4e brought in players who otherwise would never have played a tabletop RPG. And those players helped prime the pump for the next generation.

5e sort of went back to basics with a more simplified, streamlined version of older systems that would still appeal to the new audience while pulling back some of the old grognards who weren't irrevocably welded to their old editions. That balance of old and new, combined with the rise of online media and gaming streams, has effectively made 5e the most financially successful edition they've ever had.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Black_Crusher posted...

I've seen more than a few people complain that any given game doesn't have the option to be both male or female (or neither) as the reason why they won't purchase it. Times they are a' changin'.

Yeah, but there's a trick to this.

You will HEAR people say "I'm not buying [insert game here] because you can't pick your own gender/lack of gender/gender-queer/non-binary slider option/etc, but then when games come out that allow you more freedom no one ever really seems to use it anyway.

It's like Bioware kind of underlined when they tracked analytics on Mass Effect - no matter how much people praised the fact that you could play as FemShep, or complained that FemShep didn't get to be on the cover (so much so that they released ME3 with the reversible cover), or otherwise demanded alternative options, something like 85% of the playerbase just played as default male Shepard anyway. And that's even in spite of the fact that FemShep's voice acting is like 10x better.

There's a similar trend for races (fantasy/sci-fi races, not human ethnicity). People whined because Dragon Age 2 forced players to be a human character only, and demanded options for elves/dwarves/Qunari/etc, but in almost every scenario where you're given the option to play different races, most players pick human anyway.

One could even argue this applies for replayability/story variance. A lot of players online vocally demand branching narrative, story structure, New Game+ options, and other aspects of gameplay that encourage multiple run-throughs... but something like half the players of any given longer story-heavy RPG don't even FINISH the damned game once (look at story completion achievements for games that track the percentage of people who have the achievement). And even people who do finish often don't bother with a second playthrough. People complained that Telltale Games mostly just give you the illusion of choice but always railroad you to the same outcome, but who cares if you're never going to play it a second time to actually see that for yourself?

The sad part is, -I'm- one of the players who generally plays as female characters, goes out of my way to play as other races, who is willing to play a good story-heavy game with choices multiple times through - and who loves when games allow those things - but I'm fully aware just how in the minority I am, and understand why so many developers don't really give much of a shit what I want.

Why bother to do way more work to satisfy only like 10% of your potential players, when you can half-ass the whole thing and throw in microtransactions and make like ten times as much money?



It also doesn't help that a lot of the loudest voices demanding diversity and options are the Tumblr/Twitter brigade, who generally don't buy the things they complain about even when those things DO pander to them.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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My state's legally required them since this March, so yes.

They're absolutely pointless in my case, though. They don't protect ME in any way, and I stay in quarantine enough that I'm not a transmission vector, so it's not protecting anyone else from me, either.

I'll happily continue to wear mine so long as it means all the other plague-sacks keep theirs on, though. Seriously, fuck the rest of you walking petri dishes.
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I don't really remember Melee coming out, because it wasn't a huge deal at the time for anyone I knew (and I wasn't really hanging out on any online video game sites at the time), and I personally didn't give a damn about the franchise as a whole (not helped by the fact that the N64 and GC were a hard pass for me in general). The only time I ever really remember people talking about Smash Bros as a franchise at all were when people were complaining about how it wasn't a real fighting game because it was too much randomness and BS to be legitimately competitive.

The most I ever remember people talking about Melee specifically and in a positive sense was when Brawl came out, when half the people seemed to be complaining about how it wasn't as good as Melee.

In my case, it doesn't really help that I was already in my 20s when the original Smash Bros came out, and very much on the tail-end of my interest in the fighting game genre as a whole (we mostly played Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and Tekken 2 in college, and by the time Soulcalibur came out in 1999 we were mostly losing interest). By the time Melee was out, I was way past caring about anything it was offering.

If it had come out 10 years earlier (or I'd just been 10 years younger at the time) I might have been more open to it.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family