IlyaP

Galacticus? Right out the door?! Jeezus, they really don't want to start small with this movie, do they?

3 hours ago, DMC said:

Just caught up on the last three episodes of X Men and damn, now THAT’S how you plot an arc.  I also think my enjoyment was enhanced by being entirely unfamiliar with the new big bad.  Finale comes out on my birthday, nice present!

I've not seen the show yet (waiting for it to be done so I can do it in one or two sittings), but it sounds a bit like season 4 of Babylon 5, in that it's just in Hyper Go Mode with no fat whatsoever. 

There is no justice.

39 minutes ago, Myrddin said:

Are they doing Age of Apocalypse? Or saving that for season 2?

Was just about to ask that myself. 

There's still the moorlock massacre, the phalanx, the legacy virus/Stryfe*, Onslaught, etc. So much material out there that can be mined still. So. Much.

* That's right. Strife with a y. Comics!

3 hours ago, Rhom said:

Whoa… now there’s allowing for personal taste, and there’s whatever that statement is.

It's a two hour movie and I'm a slow reader, so a two hour movie beats reading a writer whose prose does absolutely nothing for me and goes on and on for hundreds of pages.

3 hours ago, Rhom said:

For all of Sanderson’s mass production sins, he will never open a book “Somehow… Odium has returned…”

I don't even know what that means. Presumably some character from one of the novels he just spawned in the last five minutes?

Will personally take Rise of Skywalker over any Brandon Sanderson novel any day. Sorry, True Kaniggit. 

1 hour ago, Arakasi said:

Well an eight year old would generally find the Ewoks cute. Heck so do my wife and I. But for me the reason I like Jedi the most is it has the best space battle of any Star Wars movie and the best lightsaber fight (mix of emotion and style). Plus it has the Emperor at his evilest best. Throw in a great set piece to start and I can deal with fifteen minutes of Ewoks. Oh also has my favorite ending I just adore the ending montage.
 

Empire is great but loses quite a bit on rewatch since it drags in the middle and if you know the spoiler well it loses something. Ofc he knew well ahead of this that Vader was Luke’s father so the ending for him lacks that bite. Ofc when I watched as a kid there was no internet.

Same. RotJ is probably my favorite of the original 3 movies. Plus there's a lot of great work done in Williams' score that I find haunting, the drama in the throne room is terrific stuff, and space battle is legit fantastic, and I don't mind the Ewoks in the slightest and enjoy their presence on-screen. 

Sure, the second Death Star thing is a bit trite, but I can buy into the concept intellectually, so have no trouble with "this again?". Also, that it's incomplete and has this eerie skeletal look about it makes it kind of nightmarishly haunting, somehow, and visually interesting. 

And Mark Hamill does some really good dramatic work in this movie, and I like the way the movie wraps up his arc. And the finale montage music in both the original and special edition releases are both equally good and memorable. There's simply a lot to enjoy in the movie. 

On 5/4/2024 at 12:18 PM, A True Kaniggit said:

The longer you go without eating, the hungrier you get.

Eventually you will begin to starve  

And when you are starving enough, anything tastes delicious.

So...this is what life like would be like if there were no libraries or bookstores? 

3 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Sounds like a hipster game to me.

It's only a hipster game if it comes from Portland, otherwise it's sparkling pretentiousness.

32 minutes ago, dbunting said:

I'll probably see this over the weekend and really hope they have the original theme song play at some point. I remember the original as a kid, loved the show, that and Dukes of Hazzard, lots of high flying vehicles! This is probably where my like of big dumb action movies came from, these were two of the first shows I ever remember truly watching and liking. 

I had to look up the original theme, as I've never even heard of this show, but the movie does feature an interpretation of the TV show's theme.

Watched The Fall Guy tonight with the wife, and we both enjoyed the hell out of it. So many little sight gags, movie history references, clever photography, and only two scenes that I'd have tweaked in the whole movie to improve the pacing a touch, otherwise a very good fusion of comedy, action, and a tinge of romance, and with some bangin' needle drops on top of it all.

1 hour ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

What’s the most annoying features you guys have faced in games? For me Weapon Degradation takes the cake,  luckily it’s less common now but it’s nothing more than a time sink 

Traffic's a pretty annoying one, in the rpg of life. 

Also, not being able to respec easily. F'n annoying, that.

7 hours ago, Werthead said:

A lot of the weaknesses Discovery had are shared by Strange New Worlds, but it seems to get a pass on those things because of Anson Mount's hair.

Anson Mount is, to be fair, very easy on the eyes. 

17 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Sanderson is a big mac.  It is dependable and consistent… sometimes it’s fresh and well made… better than usual… but it is never a gourmet meal for all that it is easily obtainable.

Nah nah anh, you've got it all wrong. First of all, what the hell kind of Big Macs are YOU eating? What are they, the size of a Ford pickup trick or something?  At least a standard Big Mac can be finished in one meal! As can a gourmet meal! 

No, Sanderson is in fact the family New Years dinner and month's worth of leftovers. He's all the turkey, Salad Olivier, sashimi, horse radish and coriander, and remaining bottles of champagne that no one consumed on new years eve! It's the meal that lasts you a month! THAT is a Sanderson novel!  

3 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Not an RPG though admittedly

Playing the game of life. Definitely an RPG.

1 hour ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

I would say wait for them to release their new modding tools and then look at nexus for some community mods that optimise performance as well as new quest mods.

The current W3 modding tools could use some work - mainly a UX polish, to make the modding process more logical and easy to understand. At the moment, they're fine? But they could be better. 

3 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Ahh then just play on the directx 11, it’s essentially then the same game with higher textures which you can optionally turn down in the graphics menu. The new quality of life changes like the new camera angle , UI changes, quests etc will all be there.

T'were that it were so simple, to quote the Cohen brothers. 

Naturally, I play the game in DX11, as DX12 just *does not work* in-game. The actual game itself will load, but after moving past the loading screens, like many, my screen remains black and unresponsive.

Meanwhile, my anti-aliasing choices are either FXAA or TAAU, and the latter looks terrific, but even if I scale down all the other graphics options and keept his enabled (eg turn textures, water, environmentals, etc down from Ultra+ to High or even Medium) the game just stutters. 

And FXAA in Witcher 3 v.4 (the current version - it's like 4.0.4, so I'm calling it 4.0 for simplicity's sake) looks awful - both with and without sharpening, which is also pretty dreadful when cranked up (and oddly, I cannot completely disable Sharpening).  There are ultimately numerous issues with W3 4.0 that are an issue for many gamers with numerous systems configurations. 

There are also observable memory leak issues, stuttering problems, and optimisation issues - particularly in Toussaint, which bring the game to a crawl at times. The next gen release is still in need of further tweaking, patching, and improvements. 

Such is life though. Just a game. Leaves me more time to read books instead.

25 minutes ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

When you launch the game play on the Directx 11 version and switch off Ray tracing if you had it on. I have a fairly high end system and even I struggled with the maxed out Ray tracing version. Directx 12 is what’s causing the instability.

My card doesn't support RTX, so that was easily eliminated as a potential culprit. 

5 hours ago, Werthead said:

As with a lot of western RPGs, there's some controversy involved when you see the switch to having twitch, realtime gameplay, a heavy action focus, less character development etc, to the point where everyone agrees that Final Fantasy VII is a JRPG but it's blood on the carpet over whether Final Fantasy VII Remake is still one.

And then there's Anachronox, which is a mix of the two, and it's delightfully out of this world and a sight to behold.

20 hours ago, Heartofice said:

The new Fallout 4 next gen update seems to have slowed loading times between locations to a crawl. Basically unplayable at the moment for me.

I'm experiencing something similar to this, but with the Witcher 3, where the next gen update has *seriously* borked something, and has caused me to have audio lock-ups that lock my system, random CTDs, and extreme levels of jerkiness. Apparently there's been a considerable amount of kvetching from the fan community about the update, and many users are reporting that the game has become nigh-unplayable to them. So I've given up the ghost on revisiting the game for the moment (the next gen update reportedly added new quests, which intrigued me).

We now have a cover for Neal Stephenson's next novel, Polostan, which is the first book in the Bomb Light Trilogy: 

(Still hate the name of this book. Polostan? What is this, an independent country founded by the owners of Polo and Banana Republic?!)

Really enjoying The Tortured Poets Department, which has some interesting production credits, including from Aaron Dessner from The National. It's perhaps a bit much at 31 tracks, and some tracks could have been dropped, but there's some clear lyrical growth on display here. The Tortured Poets Department, Clara Bow, I Look in People's Windows, Cassandra, and Peter are all terrific, and the vocals, particularly in Clara Bow, remind me a bit of Megan Washington's early material. Lots of good stuff to enjoy here. 

The first gameplay footage for Riven 3D has dropped and I am very excited.

6 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Kinda makes you wonder about EAs shitty mismanagement with BioWare.

There was a lack of communication overlap between Edmonton and Gothenburg, and no tools in place to foster improved information sharing, and no teams in-between both timezones, to allow for an overlap in communications and creative production. Not sure if Slack, Teams, Jira, Trello, Miro, and Mural were in place back then to faciliate the kind of workflow management needed to get the best out of everyone.

43 minutes ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Apparently it’s gonna be a new IP unrelated to Divinity. I’m just impressed they’re able to develop 2 huge games at once.

Four offices/teams across Europe and North America and over 250 staff members? With enough smart project management and good communcation tools, I can see how it'd be feasible to manage two projects and organise production pipelines and project milestones.