Contentious C
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Posts posted by Contentious C
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That...sounds like it could be at a very different type of expo (though one partially populated by the same guys).
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Man, that former Houston MVP must be the fraudiest fraud to ever fraud: goes down with an injury, and his team waxes their opponent by 40 without him? Fraud, make him turn in that trophy.
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It seems to me you should be streaming this experience.
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This Atlanta team isn't half bad.
Their depth could be a serious problem for either the Nets or Bucks if they advance. Then again, how many eggs like this can Philly la--oh right, Doc Rivers as coach.
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Got far enough along in the 2nd Witcher 3 playthrough to be reminded of highlights and lowlights: the cutscene after the boss fight with Imlerith has to be one of the most METAL things in all of gaming, if not in general. But it's weird that one of the quests that soon follows has that incredibly lame shared dream bit, which feels like something from a 90s FMV sequence and is easily the worst cutscene in a game full of cutscenes. Think I'm just going to barrel through and start New Game Plus to see if it's any more difficult or enjoyable. But I'm pretty sure at this stage I could never really do this on Blood & Broken Bones, let alone Death March.
I also spent a little time with Her Story, which I hadn't played in probably 3-4 years after the initial engrossing playthrough. It's strange - but also kind of delightful - to be reminded there are games that want you to play them a certain way without necessarily forcing you to do so, by actually offering the true carrot of more rewarding gameplay if you do what you ought to, rather than cheese the system. I've only put maybe 7 hours into it over the years, but I think it's my favorite notion of what a video game could be for the last 10-15 years. That, or GRIS. I suppose I should give their newer game a try at some point, as well as Return of the Obra Dinn.
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Fact. Particularly sad will be the company who's kept him in hair dye for the last billion years of his time on Earth as a lich. Or I don't know, maybe he's a wight, a spotted one, even.
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Well, no more Celtics, so GO SUNS for the rest of the playoffs. Beating the Lakers would be enough on its own, but let's get Chris Paul that ring, too.
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In addition to the usual eyebrow-raising bullshit, it's also got some serious True Detective Season 1 vibes.
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And yet ESO felt like a huge step backward in terms of how it handled. It was somewhere between Morrowind & Oblivion, as far as I was concerned, and that's well beyond the "won't play this shit anymore" line for me. Played it for about half as long as it took to download and then ejected it into space.
After a few incredibly frustrating bouts of trying to play Gwent on Witcher 3, I finally started buying cards and paying close enough attention to put a good deck together. Now I'm roflstomping my way across the continent for everyone's cards. Sasha was the only challenging opponent I've seen in the last 30 matches I've done. Kinda sucks there's a romance option locked behind Gwent crap, and another one locked behind the fistfighting mini-game, but I guess Geralt's gotta punch a lady in the face once in a while to get some action...
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3 hours ago, Zimbra said:
Let me tell you about the worst fans in sports, the Cameron Crazies:
They do this sad shit for every game.
They say the tiniest human penis ever measured was 1.1 inches - I guess now we know where they located it.
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I don't know why I rewatch some things, but I rewatched things last night.
Jennifer 8 is a suspense movie from the early 90s that has basically nothing about it that makes it worth watching, but I couldn't recall if I'd seen it all the way through or not. I think I watched it probably 20 years ago and saw through to the beginning of the twist, but not the whole ending. Of course, 10 minutes in, I remembered all this and saw everything coming a mile away. Totally generic and feels/looks like something from 1982 instead of 1992. Shot incredibly darkly, for some reason - I guess someone thought it was good for this type of movie, but really it just makes everything harder to follow for no good reason. Oddly enough, this might be the only time I've ever liked Andy Garcia in anything, as he is full-blown manic at times in this, and it's the only positive thing there is to say about it. I've been thinking of rewatching Prisoners lately, since I just picked it up on Blu-Ray, and a movie like this *really* helps draw the distinction between something utterly ho-hum and an actual masterpiece within the genre, as Prisoners is.
I also saw that Unbreakable was sitting there on Amazon Prime, so I rewatched the first hour-plus of that before I got tired and went to bed. Man, whatever else you have to say about Swervy McTwistyface's movies, they do NOT look good. I remember rewatching The Sixth Sense probably 5 years ago and being surprised by how dull it looks, and this is just as dull (granted, it came out a year later, it's not like was going to suddenly turn into a genius). But it's just...it's just an ugly-looking film. And the stuff that draws your eye is the most Muppet Babies-basic crap imaginable: "Oh, lookie, this guy's wearing a bright color, he must be someone we should pay attention to!" GTFOH with that. I also didn't remember it being quite so slow, despite being a short-ish movie. The one really gut-punch scene here was the gun bit, and there's some fairly compelling stuff going on with the family relationships that feels like it could have done more. But I'm not sure why people go ga-ga over this movie. It's just OK. Split was probably better.
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I don't have one of these, but a part of me finds it hilarious to think of "Fire Stick" being discussed in the Technology sub-forum.
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Just beat Witcher 3, and I LOATHE the fact that the game just empties out. That has to be one of the most tone-deaf things I've ever seen. Maybe they just didn't want to bother giving Yennefer et al something to do post-MQ (i.e., didn't want to write the dialogue or add the cutscenes), but it's really a worst-of-both-worlds approach. The first time I played New Vegas, I actually didn't know the game just ended, and I kicked myself for not doing stuff sooner, and thus reloaded an old save and punched through the DLCs, which were more fun than the main game anyway. But there's something to be said for still having things to do after the main quest as a lot of RPGs do. This, on the other hand, feels final but also just lonely and barren. As I was making choices about what to do with Ciri, I was sitting there thinking, "Wonder what she'll say when I visit her again?" And, then you can't. So dumb.
On the other hand, maybe it'll give me an excuse to do a 'Geralt of Rickia' playthrough where I play a significant portion of the game drunk, don't get involved in anything that doesn't directly benefit me, fuck anything that moves (well, OK, did that anyway), totally get down with all of Vlodomir's antics on the dance floor, tell every sorceress that magic is dumb, and hate myself when my daughter turns out just like me. Plus the whole Gaunter O'Dimm storyline is just Mr. Needful writ large. Dandelion's really not going to like those megaseeds...
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That's how I handled Hearts, since I just played it start-to-finish yesterday. The wedding bit was frankly too long, but it was otherwise a complete hoot after hours of Grumpy Geralt stuff.
It took for-fucking-ever to get to L28 from L25 without doing main quest stuff (paused that at Isle of Mists), though, which was absolutely necessary to make any progress at all, since the enemies chewed me up otherwise. Now I'm 35 and I suppose plenty of other things are going to be too puny at this stage, but that's fine.
They really need to work on the jank for the next game, though, assuming there will be one. The movement is just...it's not good. Not that I think every game should be done in Unreal, but there are reasons such as this for that engine's popularity. Kinda makes me wonder how Cyberpunk is in that respect, but there's no way I'm touching that until it's been out at least another year.
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The gruffness of the VA and the extent to which he gets annoyed really makes it seem like you could sub out large swaths of his dialogue for something Rick Sanchez said. Geralt of Rickia would be a potentially funny meme. Plus he keeps saying, "Show me what you got" to merchants.
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Finally got Geralt to L20 and went out to Skellige, and HOLY CRAP does the game get weird there. I mean, this was already a seriously fucked-up world on a lot of levels, but the sense of "something will jump out of nowhere and eat your face" goes from about a 4 to an 11 on those islands. Galloped right up onto a Level 30 Cyclops and thought, "FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK BACK UP HORSE". And I'm digging it.
It's funny; I thought at first that the Detective Mode/Witcher Sense stuff would make it easier for me to get into the game, but having played enough of it now, I think it's a detractor more than anything. I think it's mostly that it's not as substantive and well-done as Detective Mode was in the Arkham games. I mean, that's clearly the idea they're going for, but it just doesn't work as well here when it feels like you're flailing about more randomly to find one set of markings or some trail. Really, the movement and interface in general leaves something to be desired. Geralt feels jerky and strange in nearly every situation.
Given the tone and the emotional impact of the main questline, I have to say I worry that playing the DLCs will feel...unimportant by comparison. It's weird how much *better* this method of storytelling is than, say, the Bethesda games where you're the Big Damn Hero. There, you can Save the Entire World but it seems less important than planting crops at some far-flung location you own. Here, you fight like hell and hang on by a fingernail's grip, and yet you're still rather powerless when all is said and done, because it's not really about you. It just feels like Ciri's got, well, something bad coming her way. A friend of mine warned me years ago that the game was like this, and he wasn't wrong.
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Sucks that the Celtics' season completely fell apart after Tatum's 60-point game against San Antonio. No way we're going anywhere at all in the East without Jaylen Brown, and Walker has been gimpy all season. They're really going to have to figure something out with him, because I can't see how his knee improves to any meaningful extent no matter what treatment he receives. Though I think their biggest mistake has been how they hoarded all those draft picks and then turned them into virtually nothing - Pritchard and Grant Williams are the only guys the last couple of years who've made any difference with respect to the rotation, while they traded away the rights to guys like Matisse Thybulle. It might have screwed with the chemistry somewhat to package some of those picks and Walker for someone more sturdy, but Smart/Brown/Tatum are the real core of the team anyway. This sucks.
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For whatever reason, despite renewing my Criterion Channel membership and signing up for Netflix this month, I decided watching things on Kanopy was a good way to go.
I began watching mid90s on Amazon, but then it went off their Included list, so I picked it back up on Kanopy. Man, was this good. Really, really good - maybe the best thing Jonah Hill has been involved with (I'm not nearly as high on Moneyball as a lot of people have been). Not always easy to watch, but definitely believable, as I lived that time and knew people like this even in the suburbs of the Deep South. Would have made my 2010s list had I watched it in time.
Despite having seen about a billion retreads of it, I had never watched the original Shane, either. It's obviously a product of its time and place, and there are a lot of things that just don't work anymore with respect to how movies look and feel, but it does have some good acting, and the bones of it and the undercurrents that keep it moving have been effective in a lot of other films ever since. It's also got a lot of ridiculous, annoying bullshit, though, like the kid who was way too loud and who can apparently run as fast as a cantering horse for who knows how many miles.
I think as much as anything, I was struck by how much movies I hadn't even thought of have now obviously borrowed from it. There are plenty of good (Logan) and bad (Waterworld) remakes, but Drive was the movie I saw the most of in this; the tensions between the 3 main characters in both movies are basically identical, except that Van Heflin isn't a lifelong fuck-up and Oscar Isaac is.
I started watching Timecrimes, but I'm only about 30 minutes in and I already think it's going to be a movie that annoys the shit out of me. Also, is it something about Spanish indie movies that they are contractually required to have boobs in them by the 5-minute mark?? Yeesh. I watched some total garbage on Amazon a while ago called Sister of Mine or somesuch that had Ivana Baquero in it (best-known as the girl from Pan's Labyrinth but was also in the generally awful MTV Shannara show), and it was basically the same way.
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I suppose I'll finish it up, but it's really just as mediocre as you can get. Spends way too much time on the Superman-wannabe, played by Josh Duhamel, aka, "we couldn't get Josh Brolin so we got this hack to do his voice, pretty much", with this annoying slow burn of revealing how they got their powers in a series of flashbacks. Clearly intending to tie off both the present-day story and the origin story at the same time with the final episode, which is just a waste of time. It feels like the sort of thing that should have been wrapped up in a single episode so that more time could be spent on the characters who are actually interesting, like his daughter and the son of the Batman-wannabe. Plus, there are a bunch of other tangential characters whose powers and relationships amount to background noise, rather than being given any clear reason for mattering within the context of the larger story. I'm not sure they could have plotted and scripted this worse if they tried.
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Yeah, that's pretty good. Similar to mine if I'd assembled it today instead of 2-3 years ago.
Witcher 3 is...a really big game. Jesus. It might be too big. Kinda fun so far, but I'm only about level 8. It seems like leveling is just really, really, really slow. It's also weird/frustrating that I can't just try to mix things for potions. I know that'd be rampantly abuse-worthy if you have the recipes from online, but I haven't seen a way of just combining ingredients. Maybe I'm missing something obvious.
I'm also surprised there isn't a Witcher-specific thread in here. Maybe it's time to toss him a coin...?
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Could go in the Comics stuff, but I'm not a fan of thread necros... but Jupiter's Legacy is reeeeeeally scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's official, superheroes are empty signifiers. Does make me wonder if the books were any good, but given we just got Invincible, who needed this?
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You can't say "beast" and then not give specs. PCs are the only socially acceptable dick-measuring contest left these days.
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I have the PS3 Remastered collection of both games. I suppose I'll get around to Shadow eventually. It's the reason I bought the game at all, but I think right now it's just not going to grab me.
But for now, after rewatching the series again, I decided to jump back into Witcher 3. I suppose "jump back in" is both a bit of a dig at myself and an overstatement, as I literally died during the tutorial because I wasn't expecting a 10-foot drop to fucking kill me, but it did, and I got so annoyed by it (after a friend told me, "You love the Arkham games, go play Witcher 3 next!" - yes, my friend is an idiot) that I just deleted the game. I also had kind of wanted to play through both 1 & 2, particularly due to the Save Game carryover from 2, but having seen the Let's Plays of # 1, I'm glad I didn't bother, as I can't do keyboard & mouse controls.
But this time, I didn't fall off the ledge and finished the tutorial, and now I'm out in the world. I just got the arsonist hung, and I guess I'll go fight some ghouls with the guy whose brother is missing later tonight. As much as I like the intricate dialogue and the amount of detail, I think I'm going to get bored sitting in some of these conversations long enough for them to play all the way out and learn what I need to know. A part of me would rather just loaf around the area, pick a bunch of plants, and fuck up some drowners, so maybe I'll just murder things to death instead of doing quests right away.
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I'm clearing backlog for once! With an actual log at times, in this case: finally decided to play Ico, which I had no actual exposure to whatsoever except for one of the Game Maker's Toolkit videos that describes it. I'm not sure I'm as high on it as he was. Granted, it's literally a (now) 20-year-old game that got reworked for PS3, so maybe it's just showing its age. There's something nice about the minimalism of the game contrasting against the scope of the setting, but I could do without jerking this poor girl's arm halfway off her body for the last 5 hours. The puzzle solving is OK but not at all great. And it's short; I'm surprised this was supposed to be a full-blown PS2 release, but then again I never owned a PS2, so I have no good idea how long the games were for that console in the first place. I do like the returns to settings and sense of progress, though; and fortunately, once you get the sword, the combat isn't the most tedious crap ever (just the platforming left to do that).
But it's hard to argue with what other designers have done thanks to this. I hadn't thought about the GMTK video in a while, but as I was playing, I thought "Jesus, did From Software just copy chunks of this for the From Software Game?" So I went back and rewatched the video (here), and, money shot: quote from the Dark Souls designer saying they did. Figures.
DVD/BR Collector Thread for the Physical Media Enthusiasts
in MOVIES & TV
Posted
My brain is a weird place.
I had a dream the other night that Criterion chose to release Wonder Woman 1984 and I finally understood what it felt like to see a movie on their list that was worse than Armageddon.