Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

InfestedAdam posted...

On a different note, how much of a different experience will Awakening be if I import my Warden from Origins instead of starting from scratch? Does it matter if my Elven mage died after defeating the Archdemon?

Not much. You play as an Orlesian Warden who is brought in to rebuild the Ferelden branch of the order post-Archdemon. All of the quests and story are more or less exactly the same, and most of the major characters interact with you in exactly the same way.

(Mechanically, a Warden imported from DA:O will likely have better gear and stats than one starting fresh, but it's not a huge handicap.)

The only real difference is that a number of NPCs will be a bit ruder to you in conversations (no one in Ferelden trusts Orlesians due to backstory historical reasons), whereas if you play as a Warden from DA:O everybody is a bit more polite/grateful to you because you're basically the "Hero of Ferelden" who saved the country from evil.

The one downside (at least in my opinion) is that you CAN'T set up a scenario where you play as an Orlesian Warden but have the game reference your Warden from DA:O (assuming they died). If you play continuing off a save file from DA:O where you died, Awakening just mysteriously has you alive again with no explanation and puts you in the main character role, while playing as a new Orlesian Warden just has everyone be vague as hell about who/what the DA:O Warden was and what they were like (ie, none of your previous play carries over at all).

If you start with Awakening and then upload that save file into DA2, it treats the flags for DA:O as if you were a female Dalish Elf who died (which is also one of the three preset options in DA2), but it can also cause a couple of dialogue bugs in DA2.



InfestedAdam posted...

I'm loath to sacrifice Alistair so might opt to use Loghain if I can figure out how to recruit him without pissing off Alistair.

You can't. That's an either/or choice. If you pick one, the other one leaves/dies.

If you make Loghain a Warden, you will literally be forced to either have Alistair executed or exiled. If he survives, he basically leaves the Wardens and becomes a drunk, and you can find him in the tavern in DA2.

If you don't want to sacrifice yourself, and don't want to lose Alistair, the Dark Ritual is your only real option.



InfestedAdam posted...

Of course there's also Morrigan's option which I guess based on the DLC is the canon choice?

Not canon, no. The DLC works equally well regardless. The initial assumption works whether or not the game assumes you're looking for Morrigan with ill-intent or out of friendship (or love, if you romanced her), and whether or not you did the ritual. It also takes into account if/how you handled Flemeth in the main game.

That being said, the DLC actually has the most impact narratively if you play a male Warden who romances Morrigan and does the Dark Ritual with her (and that carries over into DA:I to some extent). Though I'm too fond of playing a female Warden who romances either Alistair or Leliana to benefit from it.

(Tangential Side-Note: romancing Alistair, letting Anora keep the throne, doing the Dark Ritual, and staying together as a Warden couple has TERRIBLE consequences in DA:I - once I figured that out I absolutely refused to ever play the save file I have where those conditions all applied.)


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

Basically, BioWare is just another in the endless line of studios EA has raped and murdered over the years. At this point there's nothing of value left there, and while they might keep releasing games for years to come, and keep cashing in on franchises we used to love, odds are they're never going to produce anything worth playing ever again, and they'll eventually be gutted and have their staff redistributed the same way EA does every time.


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

Chiming in late, but I agree with the sentiment that DA:O is always worth replaying, but DA:I really isn't very good and you'd be better off skipping it entirely.

I always disagree with people who shit on DA2, though - it's a much better game than most people give it credit for. People crap on it for not being DA:O, but considering it had half the development time and BioWare had already given up all pretense of wanting to make actual RPGs by that point (see also the shift from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2), it's surprisingly better than it has any right to be.

Inquisition is like the worst of all possible worlds, though. They tried to cover every base to please everyone, and wound up producing a mess that pleases no one. Not helped by their openly admitted infatuation with Skyrim during its development process, which resulted in them mostly incorporating all of the worst aspects of Bethesda game design philosophy into the game without any of the offsetting charm that makes playing Elder Scrolls games tolerable (people who accuse DA:I of feeling more like a shitty MMO aren't entirely off the mark - that's mostly the Bethesda creeping in).

Nor does it really help that the DLC for DA:I reverses pretty much every single major decision you make in the core game, making it a more or less meaningless waste of your time if you care about the narrative (which you presumably do, since you're asking if you should play the other games first). By the end you've basically accomplished jack shit of lasting value, so they can start the next game

(And honestly, the whole "Dragon Age Keep" thing is pure bullshit. They easily could have incorporated Varric's whole prelude and presetting story flags into the game itself akin to how Mass Effect: Genesis worked, but EA wants to push Origin so they slaved the whole thing to their website, which becomes absolutely worthless the moment EA decides they don't feel like maintaining the website anymore - which is a problem Saints Row players may already be familiar with, since THQ basically broke the character uploader from SR3 to SR4).

About the only reason I can't say that DA:I is the worst BioWare game ever made is because Mass Effect: Andromeda exists.

I was a huge fan of the franchise prior to DA:I. Post-DA:I, I pretty much have no desire to ever play a new DA game again.


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

Lobotomy_Jack posted...

Not gonna bother reading any of the responses. I'm just going to agree. I will however quote some They Might Be Giants lyrics instead

You should have just quoted your own signature, and then stepped back to really think about it.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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TLR_ posted...

I don't mind the concept of durability systems, but I felt like BoTW lacked a lot of what made them tolerable.

To be fair to them, BotW used durability for reasons which are different from why most people use them.

The general reason for durability systems is to tie them hand-in-hand with maintenance, either as a resource sink (if you have to pay for repairs) or as the basis for a crafting system (if you repair them yourself, especially with "parts"). Zelda mostly uses it to force you to constantly keep changing weapons, because the entire point of the game is supposed to be repeatedly forcing you out of your comfort zone and making you experience new things. It's a design philosophy that pretty much defines every aspect of play.


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

I'm going to refrain from offering opinions about the idea itself, and instead ask if you've ever read either of these (and suggest that you may want to read them if you haven't):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Dracula_series
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Fred_Saberhagen#Dracula_sequence


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

Yes, congratulations, you've finally understood the joke everyone else got months ago.


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

Metal_Mario99 posted...

I didn't like anything about "Breath of the Wild".

DarkKirby2500 posted...

I'm not a fan of durability systems in general.

Both of those.


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

Strip club, here you come!


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

TsC_PoLiTiKz posted...

Aw, how cute. Liberals trigger conservatives so badly that we're all they think about other than their delusions!

There's so much irony in this post, I think it's actually started to rust.


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

Redskins, though I mostly stopped caring about them after Snyder took over and kind of ruined them.


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

Zeus posted...

Final Fantasy2389 posted...

RIP Thuy Trang who played Trini Kwan in MMPR.

Also my thought.

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

Betty's brain in Veronica's body.


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

Lil69Leo posted...

I wish Canada would just tell you to fuck off and sell everything to China instead. Watch your country collapse.

The problem there is that the global economy is so interconnected at this point, if the US economy completely collapsed, it would basically take both Canada and China with it.

Conversely, if China's economy went boom, it would take the US with it.

This is actually why, post-WWII, there's been a dramatic decrease in major military action, and most conflict is either more localized or privatized - for the first time in human history, large-scale military action has now started to hurt the aggressors more than it benefits them.


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

Doctor Foxx posted...

It's polite to know your neighbors.

Yeah, but "polite" is Canada's gig, not ours.

Most Americans hate or secretly resent our neighbors, or at least go out of our way to ignore them.


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

It makes sense when you think about it in context. If you assume that abortion and contraception are murder, and that literally every single person in the building is essentially either a murderer or is directly abetting murder, then it's not a far jump to suggest that its immoral to do anything to help those people, or that it's moral to encourage those people to suffer in some way (or, say, get blown up by radicals who bomb clinics), especially if you consider it a judgement from God for it to happen to them as payment for their unforgivable crimes.

I don't agree with the idea (I'm super-pro-abortion, to the point of wanting to abort everyone else's children), but honestly, if you're an atheist (or at least not strongly religious) and pro-choice, you're probably never even going to attempt to see things from that other person's perspective anyway, because no rationale they offer is ever going to be acceptable to you - and vice-versa. Which is why most abortion debates just turn into two groups shouting at each other and no one listening.


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

Sahuagin posted...

for some reason renamed it 'Batalista's Passport' in BG:EE/BG2:EE

It's probably because literally every change made in the EE was pointless and bad.


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

Nightengale posted...

Do you people really not pay any attention to other countries? Not even your largest trading partner? That is nothing if not worrying.

Americans never have. At best, we've paid cursory attention to what we consider our "mother country" in England, and we've always kept an eye on autocratic countries we consider "the bad guys", but we rarely pay attention to anyone else, and we've never paid attention to Canada.

Hell, China is probably the most significant nation in existence right now from the perspective of global politics and economy, and most Americans couldn't name a single Chinese leader post-Mao (assuming younger people even know who Mao was, either).



Nightengale posted...

No wonder your empire is falling as we speak.

Nah, that's a much more complicated discussion, and rooted in a ton of other factors.

But to basically try to sum it up as simplistically as possible, the US was basically only on top at all because Europe crippled itself with two major wars, and US hegemony was doomed the moment modern agricultural techniques and fertilizer was introduced in China and other Asian nations decades ago.

European/Western ascendance happened solely due to a period of unnaturally increased resources (which allowed for the development of an industrial base), and US ascendance occurred because the US had all the European/Western benefits without suffering the setbacks of two world wars to its infrastructure, but global parity in terms of agriculture and industry is now allowing population to become the key factor (like it was for 95% of human history), which makes Chinese and Indian ascendance almost inevitable.

(And the main reason why China seems to be skyrocketing while India seems more handicapped is because India is still too fractious to present a truly unified position, whereas China is much better able to leverage its gains.)

Which is why I always laugh when US politicians talk about making things better or attempting to reverse downward trends - our government actually has very little to do with most of those problems, and has very little power to reverse any of them. We basically stole affluence and got away with it for 50+ years, and now the bill is finally coming due.

But yes, those factors aside, most Americans still couldn't give a shit about foreign politics most of the time.


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

streamofthesky posted...

It's pathetic watching all these posters flock to defend Metal Mario's blunder by claiming that not knowing who the former prime minister (he was just in office a few years ago for fuck sake!) of our neighbor and one of our closest allies is some point of pride.

streamofthesky posted...

They know about the leaders of our neighbors and closest allies. They're feigning stupidity to protect MM after his fuck up, based on a hive mind mentality.

You seem obsessed with the idea that people are only trying to stand up for MM, but I have no idea who he is and couldn't give a single fuck about him, and I'm still going to agree with everyone else.

Most Americans neither know nor care who the current government of Canada is, supreme leadership or otherwise. Most Americans probably couldn't even tell you that the person in charge IS a "Prime Minister" (as opposed to a President, or Premier, or Chancellor, or whathaveyou), let alone who holds the office (or who USED to hold the office). Americans in general are EXTREMELY disinterested in other people's politics, and have been for decades. It's part of the egotism that tends to make other cultures see Americans as self-centered fucks.

Sometimes we care just enough to know who the British Prime Minister is (though just as often we don't), and most of us know Putin (we've been sort of hyper-aware of Soviet/Russian government since the 40s), but most of us would be hard-pressed to name any other European or Asian leaders that aren't constantly touted as direct enemies (like Jong-un). And Americans in general are incredibly dismissive of Canada as anything more than "America Lite" or "America's Hat" or "The 51st State", so the idea that there's anything worth paying attention to north of the border is almost inconceivable. The only thing we care less about is who's in charge of Mexico.

Hell, most Americans can't even tell you who their own representatives or senators are in Congress, let alone who's in charge in other countries.



streamofthesky posted...

It's even more pathetic that they make such claims, when you realize every single one of these sycophants know exactly who the current prime minister is, since they berate him on this site weekly.

I couldn't tell you who the current PM of Canada is if you held a gun to my head and threatened to pull the trigger if I didn't answer.

Hell, the only Canadian politician I could think of off the top of my head is "the one who got busted for drugs and being crazy not too long ago", and even then it took a few minutes of really hard thought to remember his name was Rob Ford (and event then, I still had to double-check to see if I'd remembered correctly).

And honestly, whereas I could probably name three people who've been PM of Britain over the last 40 years, I'm not sure I could name a single person who has been PM of Canada over the last 400 (well, other than Harper, now, solely via context clues). But I wouldn't have been able to name him yesterday, and I'll probably have forgotten him again by tomorrow.

And I'm generally well-informed and have a better memory than most of the people I know IRL. I'm not sure I know a single person (out of hundreds) who could correctly identify the current Canadian PM either by name or pick him out of a line-up if their lives depended on it.


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

Rayneworks posted...

Either way it's the first time I've ever seen just one vote on the results page, which chance-wise is still the same.

Yeah, but the point is, probably at least a dozen or so other people (if not more) ALSO only saw one vote on the results page.

Basically, the results page accurately reflects YOUR vote, but it doesn't accurately reflect the sum total of all potential votes it has received since the poll started.

Again, there's a more complicated technical explanation for how it works, but I forget exactly what it was. But it means that, in spite of the fact that you THINK you were the first vote (and you may have been), you may also NOT have been.


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

To be perfectly honest, I've found myself more and more conscious of the gender/sexuality of the main character in games lately, but part of that is because I mostly only play story-heavy RPGish games these days.

But even then, my main concern is being annoyed when I can't play as a female character. This occurred to me while I was playing Horizon: Zero Dawn - being forced into playing Aloy (as opposed to a more personalized create-a-character) bothered me less than being forced to play as Geralt in Witcher 3.

(And it has nothing to do with who my character is potentially having sex with, since I play most female characters like lesbians anyway. Or at least bisexuals with a heavy bias towards girls.)

Though my preference now is basically always for games that allow me to choose my own identity. I'm much more partial to something like Saints Row 3 or Mass Effect or the like, where I have a degree of control over who I am and what I consider my backstory to be than I am in games where I'm forced to play as a specific predetermined person or shackled to someone else's identity. The more creative flexibility becomes possible, the more I expect it from a game, and the more disappointed I am when one fails to provide it.

It's never really kept me from enjoying a well-written protagonist, though - I still enjoyed being Ezio in Assassin's Creed and Geralt in Witcher, even if on some level I might have enjoyed it slightly more if I was playing as a female instead.



Maximothelad posted...

So many delusional people replying. You do care or you wouldn't reply. Example... would you play as a girl in "the Guy game" ?

Yeah i thought so.

Technically, there are parts of The Guy Game where you DO play as a girl.


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

Technically, you probably didn't - the poll calculates votes in a weird way in the first couple of hours or so of voting, where it caches votes and doesn't immediately post them as results.

So what you probably saw was someone else's vote while yours was still being processed.

They talked about how all this works a while back, but I forget the exact details.


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

If I were exiled there with nothing but the clothes on my back, it might be an issue.

But if I keep my existing net worth, I could probably be a god there.

I mean, fuck, I could sell my house now and buy like 5 houses of comparable size for the same price in Kansas, I can't imagine how much more buying power I'd have in Mogadishu.


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

I'm not overrepresenting TFA. Overrepresenting it would be saying it was awesome, where I generally think it was relatively safe and mediocre.

That being said, I will take mediocre over a painfully inflamed bloody bowel movement like TPM, which seems to make the wrong creative decision at literally every single possible opportunity it can. A lot of the things wrong with the other prequels are rooted squarely in things TPM breaks, which in turn makes it worse by definition.

About the only thing that can be salvaged out of TPM is the music, which is probably because it's the one thing Lucas didn't really have much input on.


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

wwinterj25 posted...

Well at least youtube will never divorce him.

YouTube's been treating most of its creators like a drunken abusive boyfriend lately, though, so that may not be as good a thing as some people would see it as.

I mean, sure, YouTube may never leave, but it's still going to beat the shit out of you every night for talking to that Patreon asshole. And he SAW you with that Twitch bastard. You're going to have to tell everyone you tripped and fell down the stairs again.


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

Solid Sonic posted...

There was talk that he was really married more because he needed some kind of health insurance.

I could believe this - because from what he says, it sounds like she stuck with him the entire time while he was bad, but after he had bypass surgery, started losing weight, and generally got his physical and mental health better than it's ever been at any point in his life, THAT'S when she decided to leave. It seems really odd that someone who claims to love you would stick around for all the worst parts, then leave when everything actually seems to be improving and you're getting your shit together.

Either that or maybe she's one of those co-dependent sorts of women who mostly want their men to be fat/broken/etc because it gives them all the power in the relationship, and him getting better is actually taking away the only thing she ever saw in him in the first place (in which case, he's way better off if she leaves). Or maybe getting better is actually causing him to develop self-esteem, and she doesn't like his personality now that he's actually asserting himself more.



JanwayDaahl posted...

Women can easily divorce with no consequences. His wife has almost certainly gained from his fame and money, and no woman wants to stick around with a fat ugly guy

Apparently the entire situation is the exact opposite of what you're saying. She hooked up with him when he was at his fattest and ugliest, at a point when he had zero fame or money, and now that he actually HAS fame, money, and is in better health and appearance than he's been in years she's leaving.

Also, she's apparently not trying to gouge him for cash or anything on the way out from what he's said about it.



Monopoman posted...

It's funny that people are acting like his wife used him to get famous when the only time she ever appears in his videos is pretty much off camera. She also hasn't started her own Youtube channel or something so she hasn't even tried to use his fame to catapult her into the Youtube spotlight.

Supposedly she's also closed her Facebook and Twitter accounts in the wake of this, so she's actively retreating from "Internet fame". Not that I blame her, because Internet fame is the worst kind of fame - even total anonymity is better.


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

I remember that it existed, but I never actually played it.



MrMelodramatic posted...

No, but I played that dead or alive volleyball game. Young me loved it.

I did have that one, though. I remember being annoyed because I thought that most of the gameplay mechanics were kind of shit, which was irritating because it distracted from the T & A.


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

I suspect that 80% of people here don't even know what that stands for.

They're not actually that hard to get, as far as I know. A cousin of mine had one (he was a truck driver), and so did his wife (she drove a bus), and they were both dumb as a box of rocks.


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

Zeus posted...

Honestly, TFA *was* worse than TPM

Yeah... no.

Also, this is the point where I stop listening and back slowly out the door, shaking my head.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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bulbinking posted...

Among older folks having a familiar names elicits ideas the product will be of similar quality to original.

Speaking on behalf of older folks, the opposite is usually true.

Hell, I assumed in advance that the Clooney Oceans 11 was just going to be a shitty remake of the original Oceans 11 when it first came out, and was pleasantly surprised upon seeing it that it was actually watchable.

That's rare, though. Other than the 1980s Thing remake and the 1980s Fly remake, I have a very hard time thinking of ANY remake, regardless of who they cast, that was significantly better than the original version. Almost any time someone does a remake or "re-interpretation" of something that was previously popular, the new version is qualitatively worse.

(In theory, I could probably throw the traditionally famous versions of movies like Ben-Hur and Wizard of Oz into the mix since they weren't the first versions of those movies ever made, but in those cases I kind of consider them more separate adaptations of the same source material than outright remakes. Though in that case, I suppose The Thing would also be disqualified on similar grounds, since it was an adaptation of an existing story.)

This raises an interesting question, though - ARE there any remakes that were better than the originals? By which I don't mean more financially successful (which is the only metric Hollywood actually cares about), but in terms of artistic merit and entertainment value.


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

Oh, also forgot to mention - the only really strong opinion I have about The Last Jedi at the moment is that I'm pretty sure that most of the sorts of people making Change.org petitions about how it should be officially removed from canon probably need to be sterilized and locked away for the good of the species, because honestly, they're just dragging the rest of us down at this point.


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

Zeus posted...

tbh, I nearly nitpicked that semantic myself, but I knew what he meant and thought I'd leave it be =p

I knew what he meant, too, but I'm pedantic as fuck.

I mean, let's be honest, pedagogy and pedantry is like 90% of my online personality.

The Wave Master posted...

P.O. if you have seen The Last Jedi I would be interested to hear your opinions

I haven't, and may not for a while (while I saw Rogue One in theaters, I actually waited until DVD/On Demand to watch Force Awakens last time around). Though I am sort of making at least somewhat of an effort to avoid spoilers - for example, I mostly skipped over any post in this topic so far that I saw mentioning it - so I have no idea what most of you think about it or said about it (other than Knives and Cyborg, their stances seem pretty obvious). But I'm also not super-bothered about it, so if I wind up accidentally catching some here or there I won't be overly annoyed or anything.

That being said, it might be worth noting that I'm about 97% sure that the Internet is childishly overreacting to the movie, and that most of the people whining about how terrible it is are probably wrong, because I have a very low opinion of fandom and the Internet in general. I suspect I'll probably enjoy it well enough when I finally watch it, mainly because the franchise as a whole has long since fallen off any pedestal I might have once put it on. All I really ask from my mediocre space fantasy at this point is to not be as terrible as the prequels (and I suspect that the people rabidly screaming that The Last Jedi is worse than the prequels are being hyperbolic and insane, because it is almost scientifically impossible for anything to be worse than The Phantom Menace).

So while I tend to instinctively think Knives is probably right in that particular tete-a-tete with Cyborg, I can't actually say anything definitively until I actually bother watching it.



(I've mostly gotten terrible about watching movies "on release" these days - almost nothing interests me enough to make me want to go out of my way to see it. Hell, I still haven't seen Thor: Ragnarok yet, and honestly, I kind of want to see that way more than I do Star Wars at this point.)


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

Raganork posted...

I want to write a book from the perspective of the antagonist, since I love writing villains so much

That may be difficult, since in any given story, the person it's about/from the perspective of IS the protagonist.

People confuse "protagonist" and "antagonist" as being synonyms for "good guy" and "bad guy", but they really aren't. They're more like "person the story is about" and "the person/thing opposed to/providing conflict for the person the story is about".

If you want to write a story from the perspective of a villain, then what you're writing is a villain protagonist, not an antagonist (and in a villain protagonist story, a "hero" is often the the antagonist, unless it winds up being an "evil fighting against even worse evil" sort of story).


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

I dislike both games, each for different reasons.


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

Doctor Foxx posted...

Why would the corporation Google be any more trustworthy with this than any other ISP?

Because people still remember a time 10 years ago when Google was supposedly "the good company" - when their company motto was literally "Don't be evil" - and imply that they were deliberately more ethical than other large tech companies like Microsoft.

Of course, to anyone paying attention, those times are long fucking gone (if they ever really existed in the first place), because Google is constantly doing shady shit these days. But reputations are slow to change, even in the digital age.

So yeah, there's still a lot of rubes out there who seem to have the impression that Google would be consumer-friendly even in a scenario where they have all the cards and can pressure you into whatever predatory situation they might like.

Ironically, a lot of those same people who still love Google will happily shit on YouTube and everything it's been doing for the past few years, yet never seem to connect that to the fact that Google owns YouTube in their brains. Because if there's one thing the Internet is REALLY good at, it's doublethink.


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

TheCyborgNinja posted...

The story sort of loses its appeal when they eventually found the kid's corpse...

Technically speaking, they always had her corpse. She was one of the ones with the main group, her sister was the one that was "missing".

Though, of course, by "missing" we just mean "buried in a slightly different place nearby, which the Soviets were fully aware of the entire time", so not strictly missing in the traditional sense.


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

The Wave Master posted...

Where is everyone?

I've been playing Horizon: Zero Dawn now that the complete edition finally got released with the DLC, because I hate buying piecemeal games, and am willing to delay my gratification.


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

Technically, that describes Professor Xavier. And his other weakness is stairs.


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

Do kids really learn code? I mean, the average general majority kids, not whatever kids wind up getting interested on their own and choosing to specialize in it (like people have been doing for 50 or so years).

Because it seems to me like we're in the phase of computer ownership now where most people neither know nor care how their computer works, and would have absolutely zero interest in coding (and even less need to know coding for anything significant at the base level, which is all 99.44% of users really do anyway). I feel like the window (no pun intended) to teach coding as some kind of universal skill has long since closed.

Sort of like how, in the 1950s, it was sort of seen as a badge of manliness to be able to work on your own car, and now most people in the US couldn't change their own oil if their life depended on it. Most people can do most of the things they want to do most of the time without knowing a single line of code (and there are always other people to harass when it becomes important), so the interest isn't there.

Back in college I coded my own web page (or more accurately, pages - I made dozens of them) from source code in Notepad (even when web editors were a thing, because code always seemed more flexible to me), but I don't think a single kid under 18 could make a web page today without easy GUI editing or do-it-yourself helper programs to do all the under the hood work for them.


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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

Depends on the season.


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

Zeus posted...

Although it pretty often begged the question *why* Terra was kept around, other than Beast Boy crushing on her pretty hard. The thing that made Gambit exciting by contrast was the is "he or isn't he" which I don't really recall being present with Terra although, in fairness, it's been a considerable amount of time since I read that story arc.

Oh, I agree that's kind of questionable in that story, but I'd attribute that to the fact that it was DC (and pre-Crisis at that). In other words, it was a setting where most heroes were stupidly optimistic to the point of suicidal behavior, and you could easily see a team of heroes going "Well, yes, she's kind of a bitch and not overly likeable, but we have to open our hearts to her and help her redeem herself, so that she doesn't go bad." An even more understandable motivation when you remember that the Titans of the era were basically a team of misfits themselves, and thus far more inclined to want to give another misfit the benefit of the doubt.

It also doesn't help that the storyline was SHORT, though. People who are used to comic stories dragging out over a dozen issues these days (or even people who remember her storyline being dragged out across the entire season of the Teen Titans cartoon she appeared in) hear about this amazing story with a great reputation from "the old days", and don't realize the entire thing from beginning to end was like four issues. There was barely enough time for her to establish herself as part of the team or give them a reason to trust/care about her before it was time for her to betray them. In a longer narrative, they might have worked to make her more sympathetic or hidden her true loyalties from the reader more.

(In contrast, when DC did the same thing with Atomica as a lead-in to Forever Evil, the reveal took about twice as long, and they went out of their way to make her as likeable as possible before pulling the rug out on the reader, because there the goal was to fool the audience as much as the Justice League itself.)

Gambit was always just some dirtbag who met and tagged along with Storm (in spite of Storm having no real reason to trust, like, or keep him around) until she hooked back up with the rest of the X-Men, at which point he basically joined the team more out of inertia than anything else.



Zeus posted...

While comics are a highly derivative medium, playing major things so close has a tendency to cheapen things because you're constantly drawing mental comparisons. Or, at least, I wind up drawing mental comparisons.

Trying to copy or set up ironic echoes is pretty standard in comics, though. Whether it's done deliberately for one of any number of reasons, or is done more on the sly in the hopes that the readers won't realize, it happens so damned often that very few writers see it as a negative when plotting out new stories. If anything, it's probably seen as a strong positive. Even moreso these days, with Marvel recycling the names of old crossovers (Secret War, Contest of Champions, Civil War II, etc) and referencing the plots of old stories in the movies.

It's always a question of how stories are handled, though. The Watchmen are literal carbon copy versions of existing characters who were pasted into a much deeper story that people apparently liked and which had something of an effect on the industry going forward (note understated sarcasm). The Squadron Supreme was literally just the Justice League with a thin coat of paint, but used to tell a really interesting story about just how far heroes will (which DC blatantly ripped-off in reverse years later when they did Identity Crisis, and which was somewhat more subtly ripped off years earlier in the Justice League cartoon with the Justice Lords).


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Zeus posted...

Also an issue for me, with the occasional exception of games where the name really never comes up or I just decide to go with a preset.

For me, the name always comes up, because the name shapes the character concept, which in turn shapes the character's personality, which in turn shapes what I want them to look like when I'm tweaking sliders in the character creator, and all of which plays a role in how I'm going to play them in the rest of the game (assuming it's a game where I have choices or have any power over the story at all).

Interestingly enough, I've noticed that has a few odd quirks of its own in practice. Like how, if I'm planning on doing an entirely dirtbag "Dark Side" run where I'm going to murder my way through the world and just be the nastiest asshole I can (probably to get some sort of "EVIL" achievement or to be a completionist and finish multiple paths through the story), that character will almost ALWAYS be male (and will almost always have sinister facial hair). But my default go-to first character (and most common character) for any RPG is almost always female, and I tend to play them far more good-natured and noble than I would ever actually be in their situation.

I also have a tendency to throw a pair of glasses onto characters when I'm given the option, which is about my one sole concession to putting "myself" into my characters.



Zeus posted...

Me and Skyrim, although it has some really shitty graphical elements.

I'm not sure it's actually possible to make an attractive character in Skyrim (at least unmodded). The closest I ever came was a Nord who looked vaguely Italian.

I have the same issue with ESO - pretty much every race is unattractive by default, with the Nords seemingly the only race you can really tweak actual prettiness out of.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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TheThirdDay posted...

Um... Am I the only one who actually read the sticker?

It says, "the inspiration for the Netflix original film." Which is accurate.

That's basically what the topic title says, so pretty much everyone here is aware of that, yes.

I don't think Bunny was outraged by the statement being inaccurate, as much as by what it implies.



Zeus posted...

To be fair, even the reprints from *before* the movies had terrible covers.

I have the 1973 ones on that page. They came in a gold-leaf box that had Feanor-created elf-runes all around it. It's pretty kick-ass.

They sort of set the standard for me as to what a GOOD cover for that series should look like.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Zeus posted...

I'm not sure it was necessarily done as punishment, because Anthem was only too happy to see them leave since they never valued the Hardyz or understood their gimmick. I think it was just a crass attempt to capitalize on getting extra money, since TNA had tried doing that beforehand. TNA had long credited itself with getting their gimmick over and felt that it deserved a slice of that pie, trying to get some of their indy and merchandising money. Not that I blame them, because there was a lot of money floating around.

I don't really think it was about money. Mainly because I can only assume that even the Anthem higher-ups were aware enough to understand they couldn't really DO anything with the "Broken" concept themselves without the Hardys, which meant they had no real way to profit off it directly. And "trying to get a slice of merch money" doesn't really feel like a potential motive, partly because preventing the Hardys from using the gimmick meant that merch sales would inevitably decline anyway, and partly because it doesn't seem like any sort of profit sharing on merch or just allowing Impact the right to sell Broken merch was ever discussed as a compromise at any point when it was still in contention.

Plus, when the rumors suggested the WWE WAS willing to throw money at Anthem to get them to give up their claim, Anthem still didn't seem to want to play ball. If it was JUST a money issue, I would think they'd have grabbed for that deal (especially considering their apparent financial woes), rather than going all-or-nothing (and winding up with nothing, which is what happened) on it.

I get the impression it was more about the same motivation that is behind why Vince can be incredibly petty about allowing guys to use their own name in the WWE or take aspects of their gimmick there out of it when they leave. Namely, it's more of a vindictive move to punish people who leave, and to make sure they can't transition their success to the benefit of your competitor company. Which is a logic I understand in principle (especially from Vince's perspective, because it's an attitude he developed around the time that WCW was still a very real threat), but at this point I'm not sure how anyone can actually think that Impact and WWE are even "rivals" in any realistic way, or believe that whatever minor rub the Hardys could have brought with them into the WWE would have seriously detracted from TNA/Impact's viewship than was going to happen regardless.

A lot of behind-the-scenes news and rumors that come out of Impact seem to imply no one there knows what the fuck they're doing and things are incredibly unprofessional in general, so I can absolutely see the entire scenario being rooted in little more than a dickwaving grudge by execs who thought they could get away with it, only to find that they'd bitten off more than they could chew.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

I would just *love* to hear your thoughts on Speedball/Penance.

I thought Speedball was lame from word go (he was basically a 60's flavored superhero who didn't really fit in the 1980s marketplace).

Penance was eye-rollingly ridiculous, but in a lot of ways it was relatively palatable, because it always felt like something of a deliberate parody of those sort of grimdark edgelord sort of characters from the 90s, and because they saddled the gimmick on to a character I didn't give a single shit about in the first place, I could sort of step back and view it objectively. It felt like THEY knew how stupid it was, so we could all laugh about how stupid it was together.

Then again, I was never into New Warriors at any point, and I didn't really read too many books with either Penance OR Speedball in them, so I'm kind of on the periphery of that situation regardless. If I'd been a major New Warriors fan I'd probably be more annoyed.

(Side-tangent - I still have the first comic Speedball ever appeared it. I suspect it isn't worth all that much :-P )



Zeus posted...

Might have been an interesting angle if he betrayed Sinister instead at the end, but given that the Teen Titans -- the DC attempt to capitalize on X-Men -- had done their whole Judas Contract just a few years earlier, it would just feel like a pale imitation.

Yeah, but that's my point - I didn't really want him to betray Sinister in the end, because I thought he was basically built from the ground up to be a villain pretending (barely) to be good, not a reluctant villain with a heart of gold just waiting for the love of his newfound friends to redeem him from his evil past.

It sort of goes hand-in-hand with why most of his early interactions with the rest of the team involved him being kind of slimy and manipulative, and Wolverine basically being REALLY fucking wary of him (and why Bishop basically wanted to kill him almost immediately the first time they met). Most of which got dropped when they decided they'd rather keep him as a legitimate hero (and which led to the more confusing aspects of the "X-Men traitor" storyline, because it ultimately grew out of his aborted story arc).

On the topic of the Judas Contract, though, it's worth noting that that story worked best in the comics because Terra WAS a complete shit, and WASN'T somehow redeemed by the end of the storyline. Yes, they played it much straighter in the Teen Titans cartoon, but then again, they weren't going to have Deathstroke fucking a teenage girl in the cartoon, either (especially when they couldn't even call him DEATHstroke in the cartoon for standards & practices reasons). Ultimately, it feels like Gambit's story would have been more interesting if they'd played it the same way but with different story beats, not just imitating the story for 90% of it and then just going for a swerve ending.

Derivative isn't necessarily a bad thing in comic stories, as long as you manage to tell the story WELL. The original Secret Wars was literally just a longer, slightly embellished copy of the Contest of Champions from the year before, yet most people barely remember the Contest, and people who do are still likely to give higher praise to Secret Wars. Meanwhile, Secret Wars II was basically an attempt to do a similar crossover with a radically different story, and most people shit on it (I enjoyed it myself, though even I admit that it was the harbinger of the modern "everything is event-driven crossover bullshit" style of publishing that has slowly eaten into the medium like a giant tumor).


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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yutterh posted...

Yeah but they were done fine. I'm talking like the live action dragon ball, avatar, death note, and attack on titan were done horribly.

Yeah, but those aren't problems with the adaptation being "Westernized" as much as they are problems with the adaptation being crap.

Which isn't exclusively a cross-cultural thing. To this day, still the absolute rage-inducing worst adaptation of anything I've ever seen in my entire life was the fetal alcohol syndrome abortion of a movie they made based on the Dark is Rising books, and those were Western in the first place.

Something "foreign" CAN be "localized" and be good. You're just more likely to remember the bad ones because the badness makes you notice the changes more.



Zeus posted...

There's pretty strong precedent for having the X-Men be teens since the original team started out fairly young and they routinely have teenages on the roster. Even when they do stuff like Evo, though, some characters like Wolverine will be adults.

Yeah, but it still gets kind of wonky when you start crossing characters from different generations. Like having Cyclops and Jean be teens dating in a school where they're side-by-side with a similarly-aged Kitty Pryde (who is like 15 years younger than them in the comics), then throwing in other characters who have no real business being there, who've had their characters radically changed to fit the new setting.

Or where all the given heroes and villains are at the same public school with no real explanation given as to why they're all there, especially when they're not explicitly there BECAUSE of their powers.

Most comic cartoons change shit all the time. Even Batman: the Animated Series changed stuff - we're just much more inclined to forgive them (and Superman:tAS, and Justice League) for it because most of their changes were either clever in their own right, or were better than what was actually in the comics at the time.


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

_______ from Dragon Age: Origins.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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yutterh posted...

Now making an adult character now in highschool when he was a country bumpkin, is kind of stupid.

But that happens all the time, though. Like when American cartoons reinterpret the entire X-Men team into teenagers, or something like Ikki Tousen recontextualizes the entirety of Romance of the Three Kingdoms into modern high school girls fighting and showing off 100+ panty shots per episode.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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faramir77 posted...

I'm too busy with Stardew Valley. I keep telling myself "okay, one more day in game", but I can't put it down.

I'm currently in Fall of Year 5. Of my third farm.

I'm basically three trophies away from platinum-ing the game, although I won't, because of Journey of the Prairie King. Fuck that game. Fuck it so very hard.


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