The Gaming Den

Honestly, to do Doom right you need to get into the mystical side of things. His mother sold her soul to the dil and Doom built a hellportal machine in his college science lab in an attempt to save her, but got kicked out of school when it blew up, and he sincerely believes that Reed Richards sabotaged it (because he's too arrogant to accept that his own calculations were flawed).

sold her soul to the dil

MY SOUL FOR SOME PICKLES! THE ONE THING LATVARIA DOES NOT LEAD THE WAY ON!

I finally got around to playing FFXIII a few days ago. And there is one part in the game where you search around a field for a needle head sized cocoabo chick. And you do this 4 times!

There nothing that I hate more than search and find moments, especially when the object that you are looking for blends in so well.

AndreiChekov wrote:I finally got around to playing FFXIII a few days ago. And there is one part in the game where you search around a field for a needle head sized cocoabo chick. And you do this 4 times!

There nothing that I hate more than search and find moments, especially when the object that you are looking for blends in so well.

That's the only thing about FF13 that ruffled your feathers?

Just watched Three Days of the Condor. An otherwise great thriller is ruined by a cringeworthy romantic subplot that is at best due to Stolkholm Syndrome- although that not technically rape since he stopped holdimg the gun on her scene manages to be less insulting to contemporary audiences than the big reveal. At the end, we're supposed to be morally outraged that seven people died because elements within the CIA wanted to invade the mideast for oil. Yeah, seven whole people, or about 0.001% of the bodycount that our second war against Iraq has generated.

Stannis Baratheon's plotline in Game of Thrones should not have ended as a shaggy dog story.

I get that the show makers don't like him, but for it all to be for noting felt like a cheap disposal of a plotline - not to mention making the Iron Bank retroactively incompetent, and Littlefinger even more retroactively incompetent than the amount of retroactively incompetent he became when we got to see how little leverage his intended northern puppet actually had.

Omegonthesane wrote:making the Iron Bank retroactively incompetent, and Littlefinger even more retroactively incompetent

I don't think it makes either party look incompetent. The Iron Bank was never gungho for Stannis. It was only after a moment of awesome from Davos they decided he was worth investing anything on the outside chance he might pull it off. Ultimately though they were right and the numbers were not on his side. His loss means nothing to them but a loss of gold.

As for Littlefinger he looks far more incompetent marrying Sansa off to Ramsay than anything having to do with Stannis. Littlefinger isn't perfect. His success in the show and the books always comes from playing both sides (but convincing each side he's their man) and jumping in with the winners at the last minute. Stannis failed? A setback maybe but Littlefinger plans for all contingencies. He's still allied with the Boltons. Agreed that his plan in the books makes a lot more sense.

As for Shaggy Dog story I agree and I don't. Stannis had to fail at some point. It's quite possible he's failed in the books. Depends on if Ramsay was lying or not. We all strongly suspected he is NOT Azor Ahai and he was not going to sit on the Iron Throne. Did we really think he'd swoop in and save the day? I did like his final line a lot. Supremely fitting for him. Especially since Brienne was not doing her duty. She abandoned her vigil to go get vengeance for a "king" that was always an admitted usurper.

But yeah it can't help but feel unsatisfying even for GoT. After all his sacrifices and he was always the rightful king. The part that lost me was half the army and all the horses deserted and they only just now realize and are telling him this! First 20 men burn ALL the siege weapons and supplies simultaneously and completely slip away and now this?! Stannis was right! Those fucking sentries were fucking asleep at their post. Hang them all!

Shady314 wrote: After all his sacrifices and he was always the rightful king.

But isn't one of the points of the series that there is no such thing as the rightful king.

Commanding your giant lizards to set people on fire doesn't make you a good or worthy ruler.

Smashing peoples skulls in with a giant hammer doesn't make you a good or worthy ruler.

Being the son, grandson, and so on of a guy who set a bunch of people on fire with his giant lizards doesn't make you a worthy ruler.

Being the brother of a guy who smashed a bunch of people's skulls in with a giant hammer doesn't make you a good or worthy ruler.

Being the son of the wife of the guy who smashed a bunch of people's skulls in with a giant hammer doesn't make you a good or worthy ruler.

It's almost like the feudal system sucks horribly at creating skilled and competent and trustworthy rulers.

hyzmarca wrote:

Shady314 wrote: After all his sacrifices and he was always the rightful king.

But isn't one of the points of the series that there is no such thing as the rightful king. It's almost like the feudal system sucks horribly at creating skilled and competent and trustworthy rulers.

Yes. I meant it purely from a legal standpoint. Not that he was the best man for the job. He clearly wasn't.

Shady314 wrote:As for Littlefinger he looks far more incompetent marrying Sansa off to Ramsay than anything having to do with Stannis.

True - him appearing to think Stannis was the more likely winner isn't the same order of magnitude of incompetent as failing to run due diligence on Ramsay. But it's still additional incompetence.

Shady314 wrote:As for Shaggy Dog story I agree and I don't. Stannis had to fail at some point. It's quite possible he's failed in the books. Depends on if Ramsay was lying or not. We all strongly suspected he is NOT Azor Ahai and he was not going to sit on the Iron Throne. Did we really think he'd swoop in and save the day?

I expected Stannis to be defeated by a real contender, not the Boltons. I'd have also preferred it if the battle in which he resorted to torching Shireen was not also the battle in which he was defeated - it'd feel less like Forced Dramatic Irony and more like simply having finally run out of resources.

Shady314 wrote:I did like his final line a lot. Supremely fitting for him. Especially since Brienne was not doing her duty. She abandoned her vigil to go get vengeance for a "king" that was always an admitted usurper.

Hadn't thought of it from that angle. Though again, it felt a bit forced that she just happened to abandon her vigil 5 seconds too early.

Shady314 wrote:But yeah it can't help but feel unsatisfying even for GoT. After all his sacrifices and he was always the rightful king. The part that lost me was half the army and all the horses deserted and they only just now realize and are telling him this! First 20 men burn ALL the siege weapons and supplies simultaneously and completely slip away and now this?! Stannis was right! Those fucking sentries were fucking asleep at their post. Hang them all!

I was actually bitterly disappointed by Super Ramsay's Super Sneaking skills on multiple fronts - not just the sheer level of Bolton wank, but the fact we didn't get to see Stannis up fast enough to try to delay them. The duel of two characters who got upgraded from not-really-fighters to badasses in the adaptation would have amused me.

Also, the show runners claim that Jon is perma-dead despite having gone out of their way to show Melisandre borrowing Littlefinger's jetpack to get to the Wall fast enough to reanimate him.

"Kurtis Wiebe is working on a Rat Queens RPG!"


"Using Dungeon World!"


I just saved Wiebe a ton of time and wrote the Rat Queens Dungeon World hack-
Step 1: Read Rat Queens.
Step 2: Tell a Rat Queens story with your friends, and roll dice at completely random intervals-
-If high, continue normally
-If low, something bad happens

There you go, a 31 word Rat Queens RPG, apparently.

So Hasbro is crapping out a Magic the Gathering Minis Game

If this doesn't go as fucking tits up as every other fucking minis game that Hasbro has pushed through WotC it will only be because the Magic the Gathering brand is retail fucking crack.

I found Frozen to be pleasant, but I just can't get over the exaggeratedly huge eyes of the female characters. They look like humanoid praying mantises.

I realize that it's an anime convention, but when the male characters are the most realistic animated people I've seen, and the females are insectoid, it's quite jarring.

The hilarious thing is that the bug-eyed anime look was originally inspired by Disney in the first place...

I just watched Cool World.

If I'd been paying any real attention and not the bare minimum while I read through the Ravenloft review, I'd want the last two hours of my life back.

How the fuck do you do a "Reality and Toons" movie four years after Roger Rabbit with effects that shitty? Bakshi directed this thing. He's not a shitty artist, and he's not a lazy director. How the fuck was that thing made? Technology marches on and all that, but my fucking friends and I could make something on that level, especially since I'm pretty sure the live cast was fewer than 10 people. And we're none of us film majors.

TV Tropes says it suffered executive meddling and the prop style was intentional, but, fercrissakes, they could have made something with more of a plot than "Jessica Rabbit Reject wants to knock boots with a real person because it's supposed to feel better, does, endangers world, hero gets an ass pull resurrection at the end." And the props being intentionally flat and two dimensional is fine, but then they should have matched the fucking scenery style.

There are interesting things you can do with that world, like things from the real world overloading Toon senses because they, er, more real, and things from the Toon world feeling, er, flat to real people because they're "fake." So, like, a toon drinks real beer and is plastered in one go, and a tea-totaler drinks toon beer and it doesn't effect him at all, and Toon/Real sex is the best sex a toon's ever had and a lame fuck for the Real. But Cool World just.... didn't.

The ending of Archie vs Predator.

Veronica is mortally wounded fighting the Predator, but is able to disable it. So Betty drags them back back to the panic room where the automated surgical table is.

When Veronica wakes up from her life-saving emergency surgery, she sees that Betty has strapped the Predator onto the surgical table.

And then Betty sets the machine to perform plastic surgery on the Predator and make it look exactly like Archie. She explains her plan to Veronica, to train the Predator to act like Archie would and keep him as their love slave.

In some ways it shows a lot of character growth, as she explicitly intends to share the mutilated and brainwashed alien hunter with her rival. At the same time, she's mutilating and brainwashing a vicious alien hunter for the express purpose of replacing her dead boyfriend in every possible way.

I recenlty got back into Magic for a hot second, then hated everything, then started playing Star Realms and realizing that the "features" of Magic are also it's failure points.

Care to elaborate, K? Is this about not liking collectible card games, or what?

Re: Cool World

The executive meddling was pretty onerous even by hollywood standards. Bakshi wanted to do an erotic thriller where some dude shtups a cartoon and the resulting cartoon/human hybrid offspring grows up and stalks her father. His casting preferences made a fair bit of sense in that light--he wanted an up-and-coming Brad Pitt as his irresponsibly randy protagonist and Drew Barrymore--fully entrenched in her insane jail bait phase--was to be the stalker. Bakshi envisioned the movie as getting a hard R because that plot was batshit. Also, because he was Ralph Bakshi and what the fuck else did you expect?

Meanwhile, the producer got the project approved but then had the plot thrown out in favor of some PG-13 shit about humans fucking cartoons being bad for the fabric of reality and cast Kim Basinger and Gabriel Byrne instead. This pissed Bakshi off super bad but the producer's dad happened to own Paramount, so he was pretty much fucked. However, he needed the checks and still loved animation, so he grabbed his pencils and animated some shit while half-assing absolutely everything else. Bakshi wasn't about to put too much work into a terrible movie unless it was his terrible movie, dammit.

Cool World left me pissed off after I saw it. It so far has been the only movie that I feel that way about, usually the terrible movies I see are at least fun to watch. That was not...

Started reading Ready Player One today.

It includes those core conceits:

1. The online world has been taken over by a futurised hybrid of an MMORPG and Second Life accessed with VR Googles and Haptic Gloves

2. The zillionaire behind this new online paradigm dies and leaves a will setting up a treasure hunt for an easter egg / treasure hunt inside the VR with the his winner inheriting his wealth.

3. Since said zillionaire was obsessed with 80s nerd culture, the characters in the book hunting the treasure become obsessed with 80s nerd culture, and banter about trivia trying to one-up each other with minutiae.

What's galling is just how BAD Ernest Cline is with many details his characters presumably would care about within this setting.

page 21 wrote: I'd found several old flash drives in a box of his things containing complete runs of The Amazing Spider Man, The X-Men and Green Lantern.

As someone who actually read Marvel comics in the 90s, that means that the archives did not actually include any 1980s issues of The Uncanny X-Men and the complete run only included one of the multiple X-Men series to be published starting in 1991. He was also missing Spectacular Spider Man, and Web of Spider Man. And an editor who knowledgeable on the subject matter of 80s and 90s comics would have noted that the phrasing "complete runs of Spider Man and X-Men comics" would have got the point across to the casual reader without making the 1980s nerd-culture minutae oriented narrator seem sloppy about his life's obsession.

page 63 wrote: One day in junior high, Halliday was sitting alone in the cafeteria reading a Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook.

Halliday was born in 1972, so this scene is somewhere between 1981 and 1987 - at which point there was no such thing as a Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook, the character should have been reading either the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Rules or the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook. And for a book that just suggested that Halliday was an amalgam of "Gygax, Garriot and Gates" one page back, that ignorance of TSR's two-pronged marketing strategy of the 80s is embarrassing. Again, the less specific phrasing "A Dungeons and Dragons book would say everything necessary without seeming that detail-obsessed characters are being sloppy.

On page 74, the narrator brags about how he'd played every 80s video game "From Akalabeth to Zaxxon", which probably looked good to the clueless copy editor, but I couldn't help but recall that during the 80s, I had personally played an Apple II game that comes earlier in the alphabet and an Arcade Game that comes later in the alphabet. Even allowing for the excuse that the narrator is referring to a subset of games which Halliday mentioned in his various writings that alphabetical boast runs into the problem that Halliday has previously referenced Atari's Adventure in explaining to the (presumably ignorant) audience the history of video game easter eggs. And well "Ad.." is alphabetically before "Ak..."


And that's just stuff that jumped out at me during a casual read....I'm sure a full on review depth critical reading with the sort of access to Wikipedia and feedback from other nerds who lived through the 80s that the author presumably had while writing would net me loads more.

Edit: Such as the following which seemed fishy to me, but I needed references to confirm.

page 63 wrote: At age 15, Halliday created his first videogame....he programmed it in BASIC on a TRS-80 Color Computer he'd received the previous Christmas (Though he'd asked his parents for the slightly more expensive Commodore 64).....Ogden Morrow convinced Halliday that Anorak's Quest was better than most of the computer games currently on the market, and encouraged him to try selling it....
...and together the two of them hand-copied Anorak's Quest onto dozens of 5 1/4-inch floppy disks and stuck them into Ziploc bags along with a single photocopied sheet of instructions. They began selling the game on the software rack at their local computer store. Before long, they couldn't make copies fast enough to meet the demand

Again, this guy was born in 1972, so age 15 puts the date at either 1987 or 1988 (depending where his birthday falls) and with that in mind, this whole narrative is suspect. I totally get that this is a rip-off of Garriot's bio in the real world and I totally remember that the in 80s people hung on to older obsolete computers longer than today. But Garriot was selling Akalabeth in Ziploc packaging in back 1979, the Commodore 128 was over two years old, so if his family was not able to afford the then-obsolete C-64, they were not able or willing to spend much on computers. But somehow he was duplicating 5 1/4 floppies at a time when floppy drives were expensive external peripherals - in fact the 1986 Radio Shack Catalog has them selling for $299 each -- which is the same price that C-128 debuted at a minimum of two years prior. And that C-128 was more expensive than the computer the family couldn't afford to get their son for Xmas. So how the fuck did dude get the first, let alone the second drive needed to copy floppies? 1986 Radio Shack Catalog.

Also, since Garriot is specifically referenced in the book, the fictional zillionaire's ziploc shareware game would not have been competing with Garriot's early Ziploc'd Akalabeth but with Garriot's much more polished Ultima IV (1985) or Ultima V (1988) or Autoduel (1985), which had real-time components on top of RPG stat advancement in 1985. Wasteland and Pool of Radiance (the first gold box D&D) game were also released in 1988. But if the year is 1987, then The Bard's Tale (1985) (and the crappier sequel Bard's Tale II) the first Might and Magic (1986) and Wizardry IV: the Return of Werdna (1987) were still all competing in the PC-RPG category. But the real kicker here is that nary a one of those 1980s PC RPGs had a TRS-80 port - by 1987 there was not enough of a market for games for that system. And for what it's worth, Temple of Apshai is not mentioned at all in the book - despite being a real-world historically relevant CRPG originally released for the TRS 80.

So a dude who didn't have the financial means to own the equipment needed to make copies of his game uses a marketing strategy that his real-world analogy/competitors abandoned 8 years earlier and becomes a success selling a game that's totally not as revolutionary as the author thinks on a platform that nobody was buying games for at the time -- because the author couldn't be fucked to actually check dates and prices or include historically relevant information of the marketplace he was writing about. In a book about people obsessing over details of 80s minutiae....

Josh_Kablack wrote:In a book about people obsessing over details of 80s minutiae....

It's a book about people obsessing over 80s minutiae, but not for said people. A lowest-common-denominator reader isn't supposed to know or remember the details, they're supposed to feel excited / proud / ashamed about getting the superficial references ("lololol i'm so nerdy"), being "in" on the joke, even though there's no joke.

So... I just watched Birdman. Superficially, it was fine. But as for the actual meaning... what the fuck? It's not even consistently pretentious. From what I've heard, the director has the view espoused by the critic about halfway through, that summer blockbusters "aren't real art" but then you've got the main's delusion convincing him to go back to that sort of thing, and appearing to attempt suicide three times, each time turning out to not happen and the overall feel that it is uplifting and liberating for him to go back to "not real art."

So what the fuck?

As with a summer blockbuster, best not to think about it.

Starmaker wrote:

Josh_Kablack wrote:In a book about people obsessing over details of 80s minutiae....

It's a book about people obsessing over 80s minutiae, but not for said people. A lowest-common-denominator reader isn't supposed to know or remember the details, they're supposed to feel excited / proud / ashamed about getting the superficial references ("lololol i'm so nerdy"), being "in" on the joke, even though there's no joke.

I keep trying to tell myself it's a moviescript about a fantastical treasure hunt and that it is to 80s nerd nostalgia what the National Treasure movies were to American history, but as a former 80s nerd, I am having a hard time not ragequitting this book.