Poll of the Day > Geekmasters: Now in 4D

(+) Yeah! (+)

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Ehh. To be fair, the original games didn't have a plot because they were released at a time when it was almost impossible to integrate plot into games due to technological limitations. And we as an audience accepted that lack of story because we understood there really wasn't much alternative, and we'd never really seen story-intensive games to contrast it against.

I get what you're trying to say, but this is false. Text base games have plots, and they predate Mario by a decade. Even then, Zelda and Metroid came out right after Mario.

The issue is, you're looking for Mario games to provide something it never did, and never said it would did. It was always a game about platforming, with saving the Princess a giant McGuffin just to get to the end. Where the Goombas come from, why mountains and cloud have eyeballs, and other aspects of the game are still largely unexplained today. Mario never promised a story, and expecting it at this point is like being mad that Ridge Racer isn't an FPS.

Hell, I'm not even sure what story one could even put in that would matter at all, since it'd still have to be framed around "get to the end and save the thing." That's why we have Super Mario RPG and the Mario & Luigi games, for those that want Mario with a story. But the core Mario games have always been gameplay driven.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But that was 30+ years ago. Since then, games have evolved, technology has improved, and plot has become integrated into most games to at least some degree. We've grown more sophisticated as an audience, and we tend to expect more out of games than we did in the past. We demand they do better because we've SEEN other games do better.

Again, not true. If you NEED story to go with your game, that's fine. There have always been games for that. Likewise, games that get acclaim to this day like Shovel Knight or Limbo are no more sophisticated story wise than Mario. And that's fine, since there's clearly an audience for games that are more about the gameplay/adventure/experience.

Basically, you're conflating game evolution with personal taste. The aforementioned games and franchises have evolved tremendously from where they started, but if Mario ain't your jam because you need a story, then that's on you, not Mario. And that's fine.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Also worth noting is that the rest of the game certainly plays a role in just how intolerable something is. For someone who loves everything about BotW except weapon breaking, they'll likely be willing to overlook it in favor of everything else. But for someone who is already ambivalent about most of the rest of the game, weapon breaking may seem like a far greater sin, because the rest of the payoff isn't worth the annoyance.

Hence my post-I would HOPE there's more to it than that, since in the grand scheme of all that is the game, that is pretty minute. It's not like the game is broken and you ever run out of weapons. That's why I'm asking, since if that mechanic alone is a deal-breaker, that's fine. More power to yah. Just seems out of the normal.
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CyborgSage00x0 posted...

I get what you're trying to say, but this is false. Text base games have plots, and they predate Mario by a decade. Even then, Zelda and Metroid came out right after Mario.

Yes, and text-based games also didn't have platforming. Or graphics, in their earliest versions.

The point is that, when you have limited technology, you are forced to choose which aspects matter to you and which you're willing to do away with to free up space/resources. But we now live in an age when those limitations don't exist for the most part, so now it's more of an aesthetic choice than anything. And people who want specific things are less likely to tolerate those things being absent because they KNOW they COULD have been included, whereas in the past, there was more leeway because the medium as a whole was capable of less.

In the same vein, we don't judge movies today by the standards of the silent film era, nor do we judge books by the standards of the time when everything was written in cuneiform on clay tablets. The capacity to do more tends to go hand in hand with the expectation of doing more.



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

The issue is, you're looking for Mario games to provide something it never did

Not really. But what I am saying is that someone who DOES want games to provide more than they do is not inherently wrong. And if that's the reason why Mario games don't appeal to him, then he's perfectly justified in feeling that way. Wave is basically ranting about why he doesn't like/care about certain games, and venting over it.

Though to be perfectly honest, considering "narrative" is pretty much my #1 selling point for games these days, and I play very few games that DON'T have one (other than Minecraft, I have a hard time thinking of ANY recent game I enjoy without at least some solid narrative or characterization), I have a hard time disagreeing with him. In the absence of narrative, Mario gives me almost nothing worth caring about.

But really, there are multiple reasons why Nintendo hasn't made a single game in the last 25 years that I've even remotely given a shit about. Lack of narrative is really just the tip of that particular glacier. I can't say there's ever been a point where I said to myself "I won't buy the new Mario game because it lacks story". I have countless OTHER reasons why I have no interest in ever buying a new Mario game. Or Zelda game. Or Metroid game. Or...



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Hence my post-I would HOPE there's more to it than that, since in the grand scheme of all that is the game, that is pretty minute.

And hence my post, where I very strongly disagree with you about it being "minute".

It's a significant issue. Whether you consider it a major problem or not says more about you than it does about the game, but it's very much integral to multiple aspects of gameplay in ways that can't just be handwaved away. And if someone says "Yeah, it's annoying enough to be a dealbreaker for me," they're not wrong to feel that way.

Keep in mind, a LOT of people - including people who otherwise love the game - freely admit that the weapon degradation has a significant impact on the experience. It's not really a minor aspect of the game or something that can be completely ignored or bypassed (even the unbreakable Master Sword has a cooldown mechanic that means you can't use it 100% of the time).


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CyborgSage00x0 posted...

games that get acclaim to this day like Shovel Knight or Limbo are no more sophisticated story wise than Mario.

Limbo, sure. Shovel Knight has significantly more story than most Mario games, though.

As for the Zelda weapons thing, that is definitely something that turns me off from the game. I still want to play it at some point, but when I played a bit at a friend's house I immediately noticed the weapon issue. Many weapons only let you attack a handful of times before breaking, and the game doesn't even automatically switch to the next available one. You have to press a button to bring up a mini-menu and select another one.
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Now, I haven't played a Zelda game since LttP but to be fair, any number of weapons in previous entries are both under utilized outside of specific puzzles, and basically interchangeable. You can't throw swords if your hearts aren't full, but you have the hookshot and the wand...might gloves and bombs...I think I get what the devs were trying to do there in BotW.
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Oh, and here's yet another RP-ish question for y'all.

If you were trying to come up with poetic-sounding descriptions for various races (like "The Stoneborn" for Dwarves or "The Fae-Blooded" for Elves), what would you use for humans?

As previously discussed, humans are sort of middle of the road and bland as fuck compared to other races in fantasy, so it's hard to pin them down with just one title. I was thinking of something revolving around either "resilient" or "adaptable" (or some fancy synonym of same), but I couldn't really think of any good phrasing for it.


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Blank Scrabble tiles? The mutable? Wet clay?
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Blank Scrabble tiles? The mutable? Wet clay?

If I was going to go that route, I'd absolutely use "Tabula Rasa".

Which is actually a pretty damned good suggestion, honestly.

Along those same lines, something like "The Unbound" or "The Unfettered" could easily work as well.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Blank Scrabble tiles? The mutable? Wet clay?

If I was going to go that route, I'd absolutely use "Tabula Rasa".

Which is actually a pretty damned good suggestion, honestly.

Along those same lines, something like "The Unbound" or "The Unfettered" could easily work as well.

I get what you're saying, but mankind is hardly unfettered. If anything, as resilient and adaptable as mankind is amongst the other standard races of fantasy lore, Man is obsessed with it's short lifespan and it's legacy, especially when 95% of the race lives and dies within 20 miles of it's birthplace in any context.

From the lowliest peasant to the highest king, Man as a whole has legacy anxiety.
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That's not really being fettered, though.

But I specifically meant in the sense of being unbound by fate. Your destiny is your own to make, etc etc etc. Free will is the measure of a Man, and other such cliches.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

That's not really being fettered, though.

But I specifically meant in the sense of being unbound by fate. Your destiny is your own to make, etc etc etc. Free will is the measure of a Man, and other such cliches.

Give a Dwarf or an Elf the lifespan of a Man, and they'll be a demigod before they die.

Give a Man the lifespan of a Dwarf or an Elf, and they'll waste 700 years trying to find the secret to immortality. I may be the outlier in that I don't subscribe to the tenacity of Men amongst the other usual fantasy races.
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Still kinda bummed that Toys R Us is gone, although I probably stopped there more during the closing months than I had any other year in recent memory (because it was out of the way, usually priced higher, etc). Going to miss their occasional clearances and exclusives. Mostly started to think about it because last night I was adding some clearanced out Mystery Minis from Gamestop and Wal-Mart (all things considered, I was good this time -- limited myself to just one from each) to my shelf and was looking at some of the TRU exclusives.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

I don't know how Nintendo manages to put so much joy into a game, but Simon Belmont, King K. Rool, 900 music tracks, over 100 stages, and EVO style competitive settings...the new Smash is so hype.

Simon Belmont is a pretty nice inclusion. Oo Would be nice if we got Dracula, though.

The Wave Master posted...

about Dmasj

Is that an acronym or a weird autocorrect?

The Wave Master posted...

The weapon breaking in BOTW, the lack of a plot in Mario with a Magic Cap, Mario Kart has been the same since 64, and that leaves Octopath as the only gave I'm remotely interested in, and I cannot justify 400 plia dollars for one game. Maybe Metroid Ptime 4 will temp me, but more stages and characters in smash will not.

Isn't the console $300? At any rate, haven't bothered with it since I'm waiting to see what the later models will look like.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Ehh. To be fair, the original games didn't have a plot because they were released at a time when it was almost impossible to integrate plot into games due to technological limitations. And we as an audience accepted that lack of story because we understood there really wasn't much alternative, and we'd never really seen story-intensive games to contrast it against.

Kind of a hollow excuse because text-based plot was always an option and, even at the time Mario games were hitting the NES, you had games with something closer to a plot coming out. That said, why did they ever need much of a plot in the first place?

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But that was 30+ years ago. Since then, games have evolved, technology has improved, and plot has become integrated into most games to at least some degree. We've grown more sophisticated as an audience, and we tend to expect more out of games than we did in the past. We demand they do better because we've SEEN other games do better.

Do we, though? Mainstream platformers haven't drastically improved in term of plot/story over the past 30 years yet it's still one of the most popular genres. And the complaint about the Mario games not having much of a story has been around almost as long as the games themselves, so it's not like the audience suddenly smartened up.

Plus for all the talk of gamers wanting more, we've seen a lot of trends towards retro gaming and franchises with relatively small changes have continually experienced success. (And, in the case of Pokemon S/M, they got knocked when they did try making major changes.)

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And the entire idea of shared pop culture is slowly becoming obsolete, because the children of today are going to grow up in a world where most people HAVEN'T watched the same things or played the same games as everyone else.

Which is a strange observation, since I *thought* you had previously argued that movie theaters were becoming increasingly less diverse which *should* be supporting a shared pop culture.

Even without an increasing number of options, popular movies, tv shows, etc, still stand out and social media has kinda picked up the cultural slack.
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Blargh, missed that we were onto another page and some of my concerns have already been raised and at least partly responded to >_>
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Give a Dwarf or an Elf the lifespan of a Man, and they'll be a demigod before they die.

Ehh. If you fundamentally rewrote every aspect of their culture or upbringing - and even then, still probably not. When you're dealing with races that are pretty much designed to be eternal (dwarves less so, but they're still living a couple hundred years), they tend to lack the dynamic spark that makes humans so innovative/destructive. In most settings, it's kind of explicit that it's our own fleeting nature that makes us so desperate to strive for more, and take risks other races consider borderline insane.

In RP terms, it's why humans can hit max level in classes over a period of decades while it might take centuries for an elf to reach the same levels of skill. And the most skilled elves tend to be adventurers, who travel with humans, and thus start to adapt the human mindset while retaining their own longer lifespans and supernatural potential.

If you reduce it to classical elements, dwarves have the strength and durability of stone, but also possess the inflexible and unchangeable aspects of stone. Elves are more air - their biggest weakness being their inability to ever really focus on a single goal, or to commit to things wholeheartedly, as opposed to mostly drifting through life. Humans are like water - flexible enough to adapt to almost any container, and also able to slowly erode almost anything given enough time (and potentially able to become a raging torrent under the proper conditions).

(And to complete the metaphor, the race that fits fire is probably something like the orcs, who ravage and plunder like locusts rather than creating anything on their own, acting like a raging destructive force that sweeps across the land like a wildfire.)

In most fantasy settings, an elf with a human lifespan basically dies while still mentally and emotionally a child, and a dwarf with a human lifespan dies as the equivalent of a teenager or young adult. Neither achieves anything of note, and their peers only really see them as examples of lost potential.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

Give a Man the lifespan of a Dwarf or an Elf, and they'll waste 700 years trying to find the secret to immortality. I may be the outlier in that I don't subscribe to the tenacity of Men amongst the other usual fantasy races.

In most settings, the humans with extended lifespans either wind up being walking gods, or wind up being the sort of people who bemoan their immortality and regret that they didn't live a normal life and live, grow old, and die with a loved one.

Again, it's a question of keeping that same "never satisfied, always striving" mentality but giving the human centuries to master their craft. That master wizard who managed to reach the apex of their arts in a hundred years is going to go straight past archmastery and deep into shattering the fundamental nature of reality itself and winding up on a first-name basis with gods if they live to be a thousand.

And when you take non-magic humans and give them 400-year lifespans, you get the Numenoreans in Tolkien. Whose downfall was explicitly the fact that their lives kept getting shorter and shorter.

If we're assuming a setting where humans stay mostly young and vital for the majority of their extended lives, you're likely getting epic backstory and people focusing on perfecting their craft (or you get vampires obsessed with power and control, and constantly nostalgic about the past). You really only get an obsession with prolonging that already-prolonged life even more if there's a constant encroaching decrepitude, where the human can literally feel the inexorable approach of death with every second that passes.


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WhiskeyDisk posted...

I may be the outlier in that I don't subscribe to the tenacity of Men amongst the other usual fantasy races.

To be fair, humans basically have to have SOMETHING going for them, since they're the main characters in most stories and settings that have humans in them. Yes, we KNOW this is because the writers are human and find it easier to write about characters that are basically "us" as opposed to fictional beings that wind up more being metaphors for different aspects of human personality or experience, but narratively, there still has to be a REASON why humans seem to excel, even when stacked up against other races that seem CLEARLY superior in every way.

In a similar vein, it's like when you hear parables or the like about how strange it is that humans rose to the top of the food chain, when we're basically pudgy meat blobs without fur or claws or fangs or scales or any of the other adaptations that other animals have (often presented as a council of animals talking about how humans suck because we don't have whatever "gift" they themselves possess). When you think about it in that sense, it IS kind of crazy that we managed to win out in spite of being weaker and more fragile and having to invent things like tools and clothes and houses to compensate. But being able to invent things to compensate basically IS our superpower.

Depending on the setting, the explicit thing that tends to separate us from other races is almost always either our excessive inventiveness and adaptability, our constant desperate striving and incapability of ever actually being satisfied with what we have, or our raw stubborn refusal to ever give up in the face of opposition and basically headbutting our way through every obstacle via sheer will and determination. This is usually true for sci-fi settings with aliens as much as it is for settings with elves, dwarves, and the like.

The only other thing you usually see in really depressing and cynical settings by jaded, bitter authors is that the thing that separates humans from every other race is our willingness to fight, die, and kill for even the most minor of things, and our endless history of constantly fighting each other to hone us into efficient killing machines that no peaceful race can stand against (or even understand). But that's much rarer in High Fantasy settings.

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Zeus posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And the entire idea of shared pop culture is slowly becoming obsolete, because the children of today are going to grow up in a world where most people HAVEN'T watched the same things or played the same games as everyone else.

Which is a strange observation, since I *thought* you had previously argued that movie theaters were becoming increasingly less diverse which *should* be supporting a shared pop culture.

I don't recall saying anything specifically along those lines, but if I did, I'd argue that for all that the modern cinema is becoming more homogeneous (in the sense that blockbusters are becoming the norm and there are people who only see 1-2 movies a year so they just stick with Marvel movies or one or two other major franchises), there's still a metric shitton of people who simply don't see those movies, and will lack the capacity to wax nostalgic about them 20 years from now (and that's not even getting into arguments about a lot of modern media being inherently unmemorable, and thus not even inspiring personal nostalgia in the individual, let alone culturally - I watch tons of stuff on a regular basis I'll probably barely remember a month from now).

When there were only three TV channels, pretty much everyone was aware of the given hit show of a specific period, even if they didn't really like it themselves. Even after cable came along and we all had 36 channels, there was still a shared spectrum of experience (ie, 80's kids had a limited palette of shows they could watch, and almost all of us watched Transformers and GI Joe).

Now we're in a world with hundreds of cable channels, dozens of streaming services, and billions of Internet videos. People effectively exist within their own personal entertainment bubbles, and while it might overlap with other people from time-to-time, there really aren't all that many "universal" shows or experiences that everyone within a certain age group share.

Even anecdotally, I can easily say that about 99% of what I watch online on a regular basis means almost nothing to my best friend, who watches almost none of it. And even where we overlap on the 1% or so, most of our other mutual friends would be completely clueless about it. Meanwhile, my friend watches shows on Amazon Prime (which I don't have) and Netflix (which I don't have), while I have channels on FiOS that he doesn't have on Optimum. I go to movies that he doesn't because he has kids - he watches sports that I don't because I generally loathe sports. And when I choose to go to websites or social media that reinforce my existing interests, they are entirely different places from where he chooses to go, and we have almost no interaction or overlap in social media as a whole.

While we still have common ground from stuff we watched in the 80s and 90s, more recent times are a huge cultural divide. And kids today are growing up with that vast gulf but without the prior connections to ground them. Yes, they WILL occasionally have things in common with some of their peers, but there likely won't be massive things that they share in common with most of their peers simultaneously.


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Zeus posted...

Even without an increasing number of options, popular movies, tv shows, etc, still stand out and social media has kinda picked up the cultural slack.

Not really. For all that there's a perception that everyone is plugged in and constantly, there's still tons of people who aren't really all that overly engaged in social media as a whole. Or who are spread out across dozens of different social media sites with different cultures and different focuses and different shared experiences.

Even as a simple example, Reddit is a very different place than Twitter, which is different from Facebook, which is different from 4chan. Even here on GameFAQs, there are major differences between PotD, CE, RI, and various gameboards - and it's easy to stick to just one of them while never interacting with anyone on any of the others.

And even for people who ARE engaged in the exact same social media experience (for example, let's say Twitter), you can spend the entirety of your life never interacting with tons of people, never experiencing whatever content they're consuming or memes they're passing around, or having much of a shared experience with your entire generational cohort. Sure, SOME of your peers are going to have shared experiences, but more likely, you'll have less and less in common with everyone, at least in the sort of ways that build pop culture as a phenomenon (and which fuel in-jokes and references in future media).

If anything, this might be part of what's behind the growth of online communities over the last decade or so, where fans of specific content wind up hanging out in forums/chats dedicated to that content, or going so far as to have real world conventions or meet-ups - the only way to have someone in your life to talk about specific content with is to go out of your way to find people who share interest in that content and trying to relate to them via that lens, rather than simply interacting with people in your life and trying to find shared experiences to compare.

Also keep in mind that the Internet tends to give an illusion of popularity via the artificial "loudness" of voices. Even the most popular of media that constantly gets praised (giving the impression that literally everyone is watching it) rarely pulls ratings beyond a fraction of the greater whole. Game of Thrones? Around 10 million viewers, tops. Breaking Bad? Never drew more than 2 million until its final season, once the hype got so huge that people tuned in more to be part of a "phenomenon" than to actually watch the show. And most other "iconic" shows are way less than that.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I don't recall saying anything specifically along those lines, but if I did, I'd argue that for all that the modern cinema is becoming more homogeneous (in the sense that blockbusters are becoming the norm and there are people who only see 1-2 movies a year so they just stick with Marvel movies or one or two other major franchises), there's still a metric shitton of people who simply don't see those movies, and will lack the capacity to wax nostalgic about them 20 years from now (and that's not even getting into arguments about a lot of modern media being inherently unmemorable, and thus not even inspiring personal nostalgia in the individual, let alone culturally - I watch tons of stuff on a regular basis I'll probably barely remember a month from now).

Sure, and there were also people who didn't see Star Wars. You're overstating a lot of the shared pop culture in the past while understating the shared culture today.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

When there were only three TV channels, pretty much everyone was aware of the given hit show of a specific period, even if they didn't really like it themselves. Even after cable came along and we all had 36 channels, there was still a shared spectrum of experience (ie, 80's kids had a limited palette of shows they could watch, and almost all of us watched Transformers and GI Joe).

Now we're in a world with hundreds of cable channels, dozens of streaming services, and billions of Internet videos. People effectively exist within their own personal entertainment bubbles, and while it might overlap with other people from time-to-time, there really aren't all that many "universal" shows or experiences that everyone within a certain age group share.

Even anecdotally, I can easily say that about 99% of what I watch online on a regular basis means almost nothing to my best friend, who watches almost none of it. And even where we overlap on the 1% or so, most of our other mutual friends would be completely clueless about it. [....]

While we still have common ground from stuff we watched in the 80s and 90s, more rec
ent times are a huge cultural divide. And kids today are growing up with that vast gulf but without the prior connections to ground them. Yes, they WILL occasionally have things in common with some of their peers, but there likely won't be massive things that they share in common with most of their peers simultaneously.

While there are certainly more *options* than ever before, that doesn't mean that all media is being consumed equally. And you're wrongly attributing your past and current media consumption patterns to changes in overall media availability, overlooking that child *always* have relatively limited variety in media consumption while adults have vastly greater variety.

Children growing up today are most likely going to view and engage in much of the same content as their peers. For starters, there's less overall content available -- because the vast majority of entertainment is geared towards adults -- and their consumption is curated by adults. They also have greatly diminished access to alternative media sources (because they rely on adults).

However, it's also because children are more group-centric than adults. To some extent, this trend continues their teens where choice of music often takes a backseat to concerts as a bonding experience -- unless they absolutely hate the music. (And it's worth nothing that there's *always* been tremendous choice in music yet even today a handful of artists dominate youth categories.)

And, in general, there's *always* been choice. Even the major fads from earlier decades had lots of competitors, but that didn't stop the hits from being hits.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Not really. For all that there's a perception that everyone is plugged in and constantly, there's still tons of people who aren't really all that overly engaged in social media as a whole. Or who are spread out across dozens of different social media sites with different cultures and different focuses and different shared experiences.

And in the 50s and 60s, some homes didn't own a tv. You're never going to have complete engagement. But sure, there *are* disparities in usage (and the perception might be a bit larger than the reality) -- but that mostly comes from a generational gap where young people are much larger users because, to some extent, they grew up with it. Ironically enough, it's a shared culture that you likely don't understand because you weren't a part of it.

The "dozens of different social media sites" argument is a little insincere because there are only a handful at any given moment that are truly relevant. Something like the now-defunct Friendster isn't going to have anywhere near the userbase (or influence) of Facebook or Twitter. When CNN is looking at social, they're not checking the "dozens of social media sites" that only its users have heard of, they're going with Facebook and Twitter.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And even for people who ARE engaged in the exact same social media experience (for example, let's say Twitter), you can spend the entirety of your life never interacting with tons of people, never experiencing whatever content they're consuming or memes they're passing around, or having much of a shared experience with your entire generational cohort. Sure, SOME of your peers are going to have shared experiences, but more likely, you'll have less and less in common with everyone, at least in the sort of ways that build pop culture as a phenomenon (and which fuel in-jokes and references in future media).

Trending features tend to give exposure to those things even if you aren't consuming the same actual content. There's countless entertainment I only learned about via Youtube, etc.

And, thanks to social sharing, people are able to get jokes from shows they never watched. That's something that wasn't possible in the past. Likewise media in general has changed to become more "share-worthy"

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Also keep in mind that the Internet tends to give an illusion of popularity via the artificial "loudness" of voices. Even the most popular of media that constantly gets praised (giving the impression that literally everyone is watching it) rarely pulls ratings beyond a fraction of the greater whole. Game of Thrones? Around 10 million viewers, tops. Breaking Bad? Never drew more than 2 million until its final season, once the hype got so huge that people tuned in more to be part of a "phenomenon" than to actually watch the show. And most other "iconic" shows are way less than that.

...because those are on HBO. You do realize that this directly undercuts your argument about the availability of media diluting a shared pop culture, right? The stuff that's big is -- as it always has been -- things from mainstream media outlets. Things on HBO are on the outskirts of pop culture *but*, I should add, still make up part of the experience. GoT is widely known and referenced in the same way that Tales from the Crypt was a household name despite most homes not really getting it. However, because we're in the internet age, you can't rely on tv viewership numbers unless you're an advertiser (which HBO doesn't have anyway). The vast majority of stuff from networks like HBO is pirated now.

That and initial viewership numbers also don't mean much in an age when people tend to binge shows after the fact.
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Realized I never posted this earlier.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Oh, and here's yet another RP-ish question for y'all.

If you were trying to come up with poetic-sounding descriptions for various races (like "The Stoneborn" for Dwarves or "The Fae-Blooded" for Elves), what would you use for humans?

As previously discussed, humans are sort of middle of the road and bland as fuck compared to other races in fantasy, so it's hard to pin them down with just one title. I was thinking of something revolving around either "resilient" or "adaptable" (or some fancy synonym of same), but I couldn't really think of any good phrasing for it.

The Sodborn? >_>

As for resilience and adaptability, are humans that much better at it than elves? Otherwise, you could incorporate "resourceful" into it. Or maybe "the landshapers" because humans have more of a reputation for changing their surroundings to meet their needs than some of the other races.

Or you could go another route. "Stoneborn" denotes dwarfs' ties to mountains and caves. Elves are associated with forests and natural settings. Men are more fields and grass. Of course, another trait associated with humans is their population tends to grow faster and they expand more, so "Wanderers" or perhaps "Windswept" to evoke an adventurous streak.
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I look at at new game like "Dad of Boy" where Kratos uses an axe instead of his traditional Blades of Chaos to fight enemies. The game narrative explains that he uses the axe because his dead wife gifted it to him before her death.

That's the kind of narrative I'm looking for in a game. I need a reason to go forward, I keep a reason to care. Mario games no longer give me a reason to care, and as I have gotten older a reason to care is just as important as gameplay.

It's the reason why I don't play MMORP'S, at least for an extended period of time, because the gameplay can only sustain my lust for narrative for so long. Plus, I am not fond of forced interaction. My happiness and joy should not depend on another person... I mean I'm already married.

Speaking of my wife, before we met she use to be a hardcore WOW player. She use to tell me about how on work days or rather work nights, she had to do raids at 3 in the morning for her guild. Then she told me how it was a nightmare to get everyone there for the raid, then the mess it was to get them to do their task, and even worse, people endlessly complaining about not rolling snd getting gear.

She was stressed out, and that was years ago. It can't be much better now. No thanks.
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The Wave Master posted...

I look at at new game like "Dad of Boy" where Kratos uses an axe instead of his traditional Blades of Chaos to fight enemies. The game narrative explains that he uses the axe because his dead wife gifted it to him before her death.

That's the kind of narrative I'm looking for in a game. I need a reason to go forward, I keep a reason to care. Mario games no longer give me a reason to care, and as I have gotten older a reason to care is just as important as gameplay.

Why would that give you any reason to care? It's an absolute trifling. However, the new GoW is a great example of a game where I'll just watch cutscenes and boss fights (usually fast-fowarding through them) instead of actually playing the game.

The Wave Master posted...

Speaking of my wife, before we met she use to be a hardcore WOW player. She use to tell me about how on work days or rather work nights, she had to do raids at 3 in the morning for her guild. Then she told me how it was a nightmare to get everyone there for the raid, then the mess it was to get them to do their task, and even worse, people endlessly complaining about not rolling snd getting gear.

Raiding systems (or more specifically coordination) is why I haven't got into a lot of games.
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"I hate people, but I love gatherings."

Gets me evey single time be amuse it's true. I just think I'm done with Hero Shooters, team shooters, and definitely MMO's.

Also, I care ahoutvthat damn Axe because the game gave me a reason to care. The plot made me invested; so it means something, not just another gimmick or plot device.
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Zeus posted...

Sure, and there were also people who didn't see Star Wars. You're overstating a lot of the shared pop culture in the past while understating the shared culture today.

Not really. Because while I agree there are people who didn't see Star Wars even at the height of its popularity, I would still argue that Star Wars had more accumulated eyes on it than pretty much every movie released today that isn't a Marvel film.

The era of "must-see" movies is pretty much dead, and in turn, it's extremely difficult to say "a majority of people have probably seen this film". Whereas 20-30 years ago, it was much easier to reference Star Wars or Die Hard or LotR or whatever and have a very strong likelihood that the person you were talking to had probably seen it.



Zeus posted...

While there are certainly more *options* than ever before, that doesn't mean that all media is being consumed equally.

I agree. But it does mean that even the most popular media is being consumed to a much lesser degree than previously (which is why TV execs keep panicking because ratings keep dropping), and online even some of the more popular channels tend to be lucky if they draw more than a million views on a video (and that's without discounting multiple views per person).

Effectively, if "pop culture" is what you get in the overlapping Venn Diagram of what people are watching, then current culture is basically taking all of those sets and drifting them further and further apart, so there are fewer and fewer overlaps - and what overlaps there are involve fewer sets.

Eventually, you reach a point where the overlap points are either too shallow or almost non-existent for there to be anything resembling universal shared culture.



Zeus posted...

And you're wrongly attributing your past and current media consumption patterns to changes in overall media availability, overlooking that child *always* have relatively limited variety in media consumption while adults have vastly greater variety.

Children HAVE always had limited variety in media consumption compared to adults, but the factor you're overlooking is that children today also have vastly expanded variety in media consumption compared to children 30 years ago.

I've pointed this out in the past, but this is one of the major reasons why the entire concept of "Saturday Morning Cartoons" died out - because kids have very little impetus to get up early on a Saturday to watch cartoons when they have dozens of channels offering them content 24-7 365 (and often their own televisions to consume it on, whereas kids 40 years ago were more likely to have to watch on a "family" TV). Once you factor in Internet videos and video games into the mix, the average child today has more content available to them in a month than I had in more than a year as a kid.


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Zeus posted...

Children growing up today are most likely going to view and engage in much of the same content as their peers.

Arguable. Yes, small scale peer groups will certainly exist (and always have - when I was a kid, I talked my friends into watching Doctor Who, at a time when the average American kid didn't give a shit about Doctor Who), but that doesn't necessarily extend to the population as a whole. What a group of kids in one school clique up and watch as a peer group that can discuss and share content won't necessarily be what kids in another school, another state, or on a different coast are latching on to.

Yes, there will still be overlapping clusters - and like I mentioned, content itself is currently starting to create cultures around itself wherein diffusion can still occur (ie, people watching Critical Role and hanging out on the Reddit might mention how they also enjoy other online D&D games like Dice Camera Action or High Rollers and encourage others to check them out as well), but ultimately we're likely to reach a point where any given piece of content never has more than a tiny fragment of the total potential audience even aware of it, let alone a large enough fan to fully engage in it.



Zeus posted...

For starters, there's less overall content available -- because the vast majority of entertainment is geared towards adults

The dozens of channels on my FiOS, the hundreds of shows available on services like Netflix, and the millions of videos available on YouTube (even if you only limit it to YouTube Kids) would seem to disagree with you.

At least, compared to the seven or show channels I had as a kid, none of which were 24 hours (not even Nickelodeon), and most of which only really had a few hours of total content available in a given week.

Or the three channels that my parents had, which maybe had a total of 10 hours of kid-centric content in any given week (at best).

And again, that doesn't even get into video games. When my niece is playing Minecraft, my nephew is playing Smite, or my friend's daughter is playing Mario Kart, those are hours spent interacting with media other than TV.



Zeus posted...

They also have greatly diminished access to alternative media sources (because they rely on adults).

Every child I've known of for years almost always has their own TV. Most of them are fully allowed to use On Demand or Netflix-type services in a family room (so their parents CAN occasionally check in and see what they're watching), and most of them have access to either tablets or phones that allow them to watch whatever online content they want (even if they're limited to YouTube Kids or some other kid-friendly monitoring software).

Almost none of them get sit down and told what to watch by their parents, nor do their parents limit them to content or a schedule even remotely restrict their access to the levels I experienced as a kid simply because the content wasn't available in the first place.


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Zeus posted...

However, it's also because children are more group-centric than adults.

I agree. But peer groups don't necessarily span millions and millions of people.

If anything, what you're pointing out would suggest that in the future, we may have thousands upon thousands of smaller pop culture nuclei that overlap and interact occasionally, but which are mostly self-contained.

In the same way my nostalgic stories of ridiculous things that happened in my high school that everybody knew about and still remember (ie, the sort of stories that get brought up at high school reunions) mean absolutely nothing to anyone in this topic (or to anyone in general outside of the 300 or so people I went to school with), the content that smaller peer groups latch onto as kids won't necessarily overlap with the content other smaller peer groups latch onto halfway across a continent.



Zeus posted...

And, in general, there's *always* been choice. Even the major fads from earlier decades had lots of competitors, but that didn't stop the hits from being hits.

Yes, there's always been choice.

But there's never been as MUCH choice as is available today. And odds are, there'll be even more in the future.



Zeus posted...

And in the 50s and 60s, some homes didn't own a tv.

True. And it's very telling that the shared pop culture experience didn't really start to incorporate TV (as opposed to radio or cinema) until a significant majority of the population DID have TV. TV as pop culture is something that really didn't peak until the late 50s/60s, with the 70s -90s being the major peak period so far.



Zeus posted...

The "dozens of different social media sites" argument is a little insincere because there are only a handful at any given moment that are truly relevant.

Ehh. Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter are all major communities. Sites like Tumblr serve as lesser communities, and there are people who spend almost all of their online interaction time in places like YouTube comments or Twitch chat. So you're already fracturing the online social network to some degree. People who aren't online (at least in the social sense) or who gravitate to smaller sites (like GameFAQs) only split it even more.

And like I said, even if everyone in the world was on Twitter, it wouldn't mean much, because the nature of Twitter means that people split off into smaller subgroups and communities without any specific connection to the overarching whole. Things like Gangnam Style going massively viral are the exception, not the norm.



Zeus posted...

Trending features tend to give exposure to those things even if you aren't consuming the same actual content. There's countless entertainment I only learned about via Youtube, etc.

Yes, which itself sort of supports what I'm saying. You're consuming content you might have otherwise missed, which plenty of other people almost certainly did miss, and which may never reach a wider audience. And the time you spent watching it was time spent NOT watching something else, which might be the thing I was watching, or the thing Wave was watching, and so on.

And trending lists only really help create a shared culture if people are already on the same site you are to see the same things trending. And if they're willing to check out those things, rather than dismiss them based on a 3-second glance at a thumbnail. And if they even remember watching it a week later, because they never developed any meaningful connection to the content. And so on.


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Zeus posted...

And, thanks to social sharing, people are able to get jokes from shows they never watched.

Yes, but without the context of those shows, it tends to be less memorable over time, and doesn't necessarily translate to an overall pop culture experience. Especially if it's reduced to a 15-second clip on YouTube or a meme.

Someone may remember the meme of a character's face with a quote written under it, but they don't even know if the character really said that, or it's just a joke someone else added.

And even then, most memes never really become universally shared or distributed, so you still wind up with tons of people who've never seen the meme at all. Especially when you have a growing mentality online that memes are stupid, and a lot of people go out of their way to avoid them or just dismissively ignore them.

Zeus posted...

...because those are on HBO. You do realize that this directly undercuts your argument about the availability of media diluting a shared pop culture, right? The stuff that's big is -- as it always has been -- things from mainstream media outlets.

ONE of those is on HBO. The other is on a common cable service available to tons of people.

But even if we flip it to something like Big Bang Theory (in spite of the Internet hating it), which is immensely popular AND available on network TV (ie, the most freely available media), you still top out at 20 million on the best day.

(And on this board alone there are dozens of people who've never seen it, and know very little about it other than vague allusions to characters or the fact that a lot of self-professed nerds find it kind of insulting.)

But all you're really doing is proving my point again. If popular media is spread out across multiple platforms that aren't necessarily directly accessible (agreed, not everyone is going to have HBO, Netflix, Hulu, CBS All Access, etc), then that makes it harder for the majority of the population to ever really experience the same things, creating an overall shared experience of pop culture.

Zeus posted...

That and initial viewership numbers also don't mean much in an age when people tend to binge shows after the fact.

I'm not sure I'd agree that a majority of people binge after the fact, but even then, you're not getting massively huge exposure beyond the people who actually care enough to watch on first view.

But regardless, even with the most popular of current shared media, you're far more likely to interact with someone who hasn't seen it than you are someone who has if you go up to a random person (even one in a shared cohort) and ask them about it.

And again, we're in more of a transition point right now. I'm not saying that pop culture IS dead, as much as I'm saying it's a weaker influence now than it's been in the past, and will likely be even weaker, if not outright dead in the future, as media continues to expand, content continues to be gated off to multiple different distribution platforms, and people tend to indulge more in their own interests rather than simply consuming whatever is available.

In a way, it's an expression of the usual concern about Internet culture becoming an echobox where ideas become balkanized, except applied to popular media rather than ideologies and world-views.
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I screwed up a bit in posting that last string of replies - I don't think anything got lost in the mix, but if it did it got eaten by technical glitching.



Zeus posted...

Why would that give you any reason to care? It's an absolute trifling. However, the new GoW is a great example of a game where I'll just watch cutscenes and boss fights (usually fast-fowarding through them) instead of actually playing the game.

To be fair, I've never given a single shit about the God of War franchise at any point in the past, no matter how much people have praised it. But adding a level of character, a stronger plot, and a voice-actor I like from other media has made me more likely to buy the game than any other game in the entire franchise previously.

Granted, I'm almost certainly going to wait until it's cheaper before I buy, but that's partly because I already have a backlog of games I haven't played yet, and partly because predatory market practices have trained me to always hold off on buying games until I know whether or not they're going to release DLC for it, which will then get repackaged into a GotY Edition later. I absolutely loved Horizon: Zero Dawn, but I still waited a year to buy it.

Sure, I COULD just watch online, but I usually reserve that for narrative games I know I'm never going to buy (like Shadow of War, because fuck WB Games and how they handled the microtransactions). Once I watched a bit of God of War early gameplay/cut sceneage on one of the channels I watch regularly, enough to know it looked like a game I'd be willing to play, I generally stopped watching videos so I could go in mostly fresh when I eventually play.

My standard for games is that a game with mediocre gameplay but strong narrative will always carry me through, while games with mediocre plot and strong gameplay will mostly start to bore me long before I finish them (see also, my general disgust with Destiny in spite of really enjoying the combat).

There ARE exceptions (I may have sunk more hours into Minecraft over the last few years than any other game, and more than a number of other games combined), but for the most part, if a game doesn't have a strong narrative, it never engages me enough to want to play it in the first place.

There's a reason why I own multiple Telltale games, but have zero interest in things like FIFA, Knack, or Call of Duty/Battlefield/etc, no matter how popular they are overall.



The Wave Master posted...

"I hate people, but I love gatherings."

Gets me evey single time be amuse it's true. I just think I'm done with Hero Shooters, team shooters, and definitely MMO's.

I lean more towards "I hate people, and also hate gatherings, because of the aforementioned hating people thing."

It's not universal (if anything, I probably hew closer to "I like individual people, it's people in general I can't stand"), but even with friends I tend to enjoy hanging out with a couple people rather than a massive group of people (which starts to feel more like social obligation to me than it does just hanging out).

That's definitely part of why I distance myself from most online multiplayer games, though the other part is because I don't really enjoy competitive gameplay as much as I do co-op with people I actually like (versus with total strangers), so there really isn't a ton of appeal there. And the fact that online multiplayer tends to weaken the potential for narrative is part of why I view the recent trend towards online multiplayer (and monetizing it) rather than solo play to be incredibly annoying.

My ideal game is one where I can make my own character, then play them through an interesting story. With bonus points for branching choice.


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Have you played Terraria, since you like Minecraft?
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I played it, but it skews the wrong way for me.

With Minecraft, I can mostly turn off the monsters and focus on creativity (though I usually stay in Survival over Creative because I feel like the limitations make creating things more interesting, whereas when I build things in Creative I get bored easily and lose interest because I don't have the patience for massive-scale art projects, but anything less than a major project feels pointless and unearned).

With Terraria, it feels very obvious that their motivating principle WAS the combat, and that building things was more of an afterthought/secondary feature, and there's far less you can actually DO with it, so I got bored of the game extremely quickly.

I probably wouldn't mind a new game similar to how Populous worked, though, with landscape shaping and being able to establish villages and the like. I've tried to set villages or cities up in Minecraft before, but they keep changing the rules to make villager breeding more and more difficult and annoying, so in the end I usually wind up with all these buildings but a world that feels totally empty. Being able to add people/NPCs to the world (without having to resort to Creative) would be a nice step-up.


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Well the building is definitely less deep, being only two dimensions, but for me what really hooked me was the sense of progression; as you dig down deeper you find all kinds of items to make your life easier. Not just better weapons and armor and materials, but items you can equip that make platforming more fun and interesting. Like, you can get a pair of boots that let you "cling" to walls, and those can be combined with boots that give you a sprint, and THOSE can be combined with a "cloud in a bottle" that give you a double-jump.

Plus all the bosses and different biomes make things exciting. It's definitely a game that's more fun with a friend, though.
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Yeah, but that's sort of my point. For all that people tend to compare the two "because building", they really don't have a ton in common. And most of the things that make Terraria Terraria aren't things that appeal to me in the slightest.

In the same vein, I don't play Minecraft to slowly upgrade my armor and weapons, go to the Nether, and eventually take out the Ender Dragon and a Wither. Those are things I might do (mainly because I HAVE to in order to make certain things), but I don't enjoy doing them, and would happily give up fighting things entirely if I could build potion labs and beacons and other things without having to fight.

In Terraria, fighting pretty much IS the entire point, and building just facilitates that. In that sense, it honestly has more in common with Fortnite than it does Minecraft.


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Oh, and on the subject of what does and doesn't matter in video games:

I just learned today that Yuri Lowenthal is doing the voice of Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the new PS4 Spider-Man game, and that Laura Bailey is the voice of Mary Jane.

That knowledge alone has actually made me slightly more interested in the game than I was before.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I just learned today that Yuri Lowenthal is doing the voice of Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the new PS4 Spider-Man game, and that Laura Bailey is the voice of Mary Jane.

Star couple? :3
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Yeah, but that's sort of my point. For all that people tend to compare the two "because building", they really don't have a ton in common. And most of the things that make Terraria Terraria aren't things that appeal to me in the slightest.

That's fair, though it's the opposite for me.

ifnsman posted...

Star couple? :3

IIRC Laura Bailey and Travis Willingham are a couple. Lowenthal and Bailey are both great, though.

I was hoping they'd get Josh Keaton as Peter, but I like what I've heard so far.
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Haseo/Luke as Peter Parker, and Trunks as Mary Jane. Hmm...
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Metalsonic66 posted...

IIRC Laura Bailey and Travis Willingham are a couple.

They are. Which is what made it amusing when she was playing Catwoman and he was playing Harvey Dent in the Telltale Batman game, and their characters were dating.


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They were both in inFamous: Second Son as well, though their characters didn't have much interaction.
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Metalsonic66 posted...

They were both in inFamous: Second Son as well, though their characters didn't have much interaction.

That game was pretty fun.
I'm a huge fan of the sandbox games where you get incredible mobility.

I liked inFamous 2 more, but it was a fun game anyway. I liked the different powers.
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As a huge Spider-Man fan I am not sure who I like as the voice of Peter Parker/Spider-Man.

I do like Josh Keaton a lot, but I do like Yuri Lowenthall as well. Both are great choices.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Not really. Because while I agree there are people who didn't see Star Wars even at the height of its popularity, I would still argue that Star Wars had more accumulated eyes on it than pretty much every movie released today that isn't a Marvel film.

The era of "must-see" movies is pretty much dead, and in turn, it's extremely difficult to say "a majority of people have probably seen this film". Whereas 20-30 years ago, it was much easier to reference Star Wars or Die Hard or LotR or whatever and have a very strong likelihood that the person you were talking to had probably seen it.

I would strongly argue that Marvel has become the new Star Wars, although Star Wars is plodding along. Plus you still have widely quoted action movies. Die Hard -- which, iirc, adjusted for inflation had a box office that was *still* less than Taken -- has its counterparts in widely-quoted films like Taken.

Plus the problem with your argument is that it's retrospective and we won't really know the long-lasting impact of some of these things right away. I *do* know that I've run into plenty of people who fucking quote Taken all the time in much the same way that people parodied Die Hard fans.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I agree. But it does mean that even the most popular media is being consumed to a much lesser degree than previously (which is why TV execs keep panicking because ratings keep dropping), and online even some of the more popular channels tend to be lucky if they draw more than a million views on a video (and that's without discounting multiple views per person).

...again, the ratings issue doesn't necessarily denote viewership because the tv execs are having issues with *live* broadcasts cutting into ad spends whereas viewership has shifted online and, of course, to piracy.

Are we concerned about advertisers or viewers?

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Children HAVE always had limited variety in media consumption compared to adults, but the factor you're overlooking is that children today also have vastly expanded variety in media consumption compared to children 30 years ago.

That and a buck won't buy you a cup of coffee... well, except maybe a senior coffee at McDonald's.

The added options don't really amount to much when parents aren't bothering with them.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I've pointed this out in the past, but this is one of the major reasons why the entire concept of "Saturday Morning Cartoons" died out - because kids have very little impetus to get up early on a Saturday to watch cartoons when they have dozens of channels offering them content 24-7 365 (and often their own televisions to consume it on, whereas kids 40 years ago were more likely to have to watch on a "family" TV). Once you factor in Internet videos and video games into the mix, the average child today has more content available to them in a month than I had in more than a year as a kid.

Saturday morning cartoons started to die out in 1992 when NBC stopped the practice (or technically earlier), with CBS ending at around the same time. Cartoon Network, the first true cartoon channel, came out later that same year. Nickelodeon, another major competitor, didn't start its original content until 1991. The alternatives were *just* starting when the trend was dying down (although sure, Nickelodeon *did* have some cartoon offerings before that).

Honestly, the fact that weekdays were picking up was probably doing more to kill Saturday mornings than anything else... as well as new FCC guidelines introduced in 1991

https://deadline.com/2016/06/kids-tv-shows-saturday-mornings-fcc-loophole-advertising-1201774658/
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Every child I've known of for years almost always has their own TV. Most of them are fully allowed to use On Demand or Netflix-type services in a family room (so their parents CAN occasionally check in and see what they're watching), and most of them have access to either tablets or phones that allow them to watch whatever online content they want (even if they're limited to YouTube Kids or some other kid-friendly monitoring software).

Suffice to say, the parents you know are *vastly* different than the ones I know.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Arguable. Yes, small scale peer groups will certainly exist (and always have - when I was a kid, I talked my friends into watching Doctor Who, at a time when the average American kid didn't give a shit about Doctor Who), but that doesn't necessarily extend to the population as a whole. What a group of kids in one school clique up and watch as a peer group that can discuss and share content won't necessarily be what kids in another school, another state, or on a different coast are latching on to.

Knowing people who work with young kids, the range of influence certainly seems larger than you suggest. And, I should note, you seem to be talking about late teens.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Yes, there's always been choice.

But there's never been as MUCH choice as is available today. And odds are, there'll be even more in the future.

A lot of that is supplemental, not a replacement. The big stuff is still big while people are also doing other things. Keep in mind that overall media consumption has *also* steadily grown.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-did-tv-watching-peak/561464/

Tv viewership, for instance, the number of hours of tv that the average household watched DOUBLED between 1950 and 2010. It's not like people are just replacing one thing with another. There's more material, but there's a far higher consumption.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Ehh. Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter are all major communities. Sites like Tumblr serve as lesser communities, and there are people who spend almost all of their online interaction time in places like YouTube comments or Twitch chat. So you're already fracturing the online social network to some degree. People who aren't online (at least in the social sense) or who gravitate to smaller sites (like GameFAQs) only split it even more.

And like I said, even if everyone in the world was on Twitter, it wouldn't mean much, because the nature of Twitter means that people split off into smaller subgroups and communities without any specific connection to the overarching whole. Things like Gangnam Style going massively viral are the exception, not the norm.

You're confusing shared viewpoints and ideologies with shared experiences. When things trend, both people for and against the thing -- to whatever degree -- often see them. I don't even use Twitter yet I still get content recommendations that have allowed me to see things trending.

Otherwise, YT functions as both social and as media. There's a very specific -- but sizable -- niche of dedicated social, but the platform on the whole shares content.

As for exceptions vs norms, it seems like a *lot* of exceptions gain major coverage. Even the Tide Pod challenge -- a strictly social thing -- found its way to Gamefaqs and everywhere else in a big way.
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We are on the second to last page, the penultimate page, if you will. Which means it's time to start talking about the next topic title.

You Geeks discuss and talk it, and if there is enough time we can vote and decide together.
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What is even just around the corner for geekdom? I'm having difficulty coming up with Venom based puns and I can't really think of much else on the horizon.
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Geekmasters: Infinity Geek, perhaps? Or Geek: A Geekmasters Story? *shrugs*
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The Wave Master posted...

We are on the second to last page, the penultimate page, if you will. Which means it's time to start talking about the next topic title.

You Geeks discuss and talk it, and if there is enough time we can vote and decide together.

Well, that didn't last long at all... I actually had a bunch of neat ideas the other day but I can't remember them now.
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The Wave Master posted...

We are on the second to last page, the penultimate page, if you will. Which means it's time to start talking about the next topic title.

Page 23 out of 25 for me.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

What is even just around the corner for geekdom? I'm having difficulty coming up with Venom based puns and I can't really think of much else on the horizon.

No Star Wars until next year, still no official name for the next Avengers movie yet (and that might be too far off regardless), no impending major sci-fi I can think of...

Time to do my usual trick of looking up near-future movies!

Geek Fest
The House with a Geek in Its Walls
Geek Rhapsody
The Geek in the Spider's Web
Fantastic Geeks: The Crimes of [insert regular poster's name here]
Wave Master: Into the Geek-Verse

...man, that's not really a ton of major movies, is it? Bleh.

Well, there's always my other alternative, old book titles!

All's Well That Ends Geek
Much Ado About Geek
The Taming of the Geek
The Merry Geeks of Windsor



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Mobile Suit Geek: Geek vs. Zeta Geek
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Metalsonic66 posted...

Mobile Suit Geek: Geek vs. Zeta Geek

Mobile Suit Geek Extreme VS.
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