Ironik
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Posts
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Quote:EA isn't TRYING to kill BioWare, it's just what they do.Originally Posted by BellaStrega
I think this has more to do with fans being utter prats in response to ME3 and DA2 than it does with EA trying to kill the studio.
True fact: humans taste terrible to Great White Sharks. They taste us and go, "Yuck!" and then stop. Problem is, the taste-test tends to kill people. EA is like that. It's just an after-effect of what they are. -
George Takei just posted this. Coolness.
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Quote:One of Larry Niven's short stories talks about the lunatics who drive cars manually without any sort of computer guidance. The main character is aghast at the reckless disregard for their own safety.Originally Posted by Jack_NoMind
They don't, and I imagine will mostly be used for relatively predictable driving conditions initially (eg, highways). But the safety offered by the technology is of principal benefit when it's employed more-or-less universally and without the option for a driver to override it -- the latter of which is much more reliably ensured by a combination of technology and legislature than by either alone. Once the technology is proven, it's likely that user-driven vehicles will become (largely) a thing of the past. A risky, quaint and barbaric custom enjoyed by hobbyists in private, like horsemanship or steam engine operation.
Which I don't mind, honestly. I just want it to take long enough that by the time I can't choose to drive myself publicly I would have been rubbish at it anyway.
Computers can certainly react much faster and precisely than humans, and the newest passenger planes have been flown almost entirely automatically for years. They can even take off and land by themselves if we would let them do it. The only problem I have is that when computers mess up, they do so spectacularly, as with Toyota's computer glitches with brakes a couple years ago and the weird bug that turned Prius headlights off at night. Of course, *any* system can go tits up at any moment, but I find computers to be a bit more unreliable than mechanical doohickeys. I don't find it reassuring that it's common practice to ship cars with what amounts to beta-test-level software that they patch as they go. (Even the most expensive cars do this.) It's also a little unnerving that often the solution to a glitch your car is having can be rectified by unplugging the battery for half an hour, thus resetting the computer to the factory specs. -
Quote:Considering that Depp is part Native American, it makes sense to me.Originally Posted by houtex
Johnny Depp as Tonto makes no sense. I'm sorry, it just doesn't. Be like having Denzel Washington play Willie Wonka in the remake. OR the original.
This complaint reminds me of the bellyaching about Ben Kingsley playing Gandhi, when in fact Sir Ben is half Indian and Kingsley's father actually grew up in the exact same village as Gandhi.
Besides, this is likely going to be more along the lines of PotC (same writers and director) or the Antonio Banderas Zorro movies (same writers), so it's not something to get worked up over. -
Founders Falls.
Best ambient music in the game, too. -
Quote:4.5 out 5 punches to the face.Originally Posted by Ironik
I was at the bookstore today because that's fun for me (surprise!) and I ran across this book by comic book writer Paul Tobin, Prepare To Die!.
Unlike other recent superhero books like A Once Crowded Sky which come across as stilted and a little too cutesy for its own good (Ultimate's sidekick is PenUltimate? Really?) when I leafed through them, Prepare to Die seemed a bit more hardcore. I did land on a few pages that had sex scenes which I'm not a fan of -- they tend to bring the story to a screeching halt because authors (and filmmakers) never seem to use the scenes to do anything with plot or character -- but the action scenes I browsed through more than made up for it. I got it, so we'll see.
I started this yesterday afternoon and finished it today. That in itself is a recommendation.
This book isn't brilliant but it *is* really ******* good. You can think of it like a Marvel Max with the adult themes and sex talk and Rated-M-for-Mature attitude. It's definitely lewd and crude, but Tobin doesn't do it to be shocking; rather, it's just the way some of these characters behave. I do wonder if some people might see some misogyny in parts of the book, but the reality is that both genders are treated equally: good sides and bad.
The fight scenes are brutally satisfying, and there is a definite moral ambiguity to much of the interaction between heroes and villains. Especially when some of them switch sides. One of the unintended consequences with the Comics Code Authority was that heroes weren't allowed to kill, but villains often were. This raises the question of moral absolutes versus situational ethics because, in the final measure, wouldn't the world be better off if Batman just killed Joker outright? In comics which examine the complexities of the world, we've seen that when moral absolutes and situational ethics collide, the outcome isn't always predictable. When the Kingpin is killed, it creates an anarchic vacuum that was far worse than what Spider-man and Daredevil faced when foiling Kingpin's plans.
Prepare to Die examines that same gray area of superheroing. Plus dollops of regret about the choices we all make as we get older. Those choice may have been right in the moment, but from another viewpoint sometimes they aren't the best path to follow. Problem is, you don't know until afterward.
All this, plus epic battles. What's not to like?
I really enjoyed the tone of the book, I liked the pacing, I liked the inventiveness of it and, ultimately, the preoccupation with sex didn't annoy me as much as it does in other books. -
Quote:Where is that?Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
Look up - get perfect desktop wallpaper:
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Quote:OMG, awesome Gun Fairy. "Twinkle THIS, little star!"Originally Posted by Bright
A fun "accidental" capture... I was taking screenies of my DP blaster doing the Hail of Bullets animation and happened to hit one during a very brief "camera outside the map" moment.
The result... Rose shooting magic missiles AT THE DARKNESS.
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Quote:You're just making excuses for crappy writing.Originally Posted by Dark One
Any time a game developer promises something, you need to take what they say with a massive grain of salt. As far as I'm concerned, I judge a game based on what it presents, not what one of the dev staff (or marketing or whoever, I don't know who Casey Hudson is) says will be in it. Expecting everything to turn out like a dev promises is no better than believing when a guy or girl says they're going to rock your world, IMO.
Which, in the context of the universe, makes sense. It's not like the people that went on the suicide mission were completely unreplacable. And some, like Kelly Chambers, makes sense for the replacement even if she survives.
You can ignore those missions, but you'll pay for it. The fetch missions end up with people helping on the Crucible or providing other assets to help with the war effort.
If all the people are doing is fighting, then they'll get burnt out and not be as effective. They all need at least a little bit of down time. It's not like they can do much else when you head to the Citadel.
Also, keep in mind the timeframes involved. For the Protheans, it was a matter of centuries before they were wiped out. The Reapers have no need to hurry because they've never really had to in the past. There's also the amount of time spent in travel that we don't really see. I prefer a game that moves on my schedule as opposed to stuff like Dead Rising.
The "time frame" thing has zero to do with the aliens' overall attitude and everything to do with the fact that Earth is being invaded NOW. Every minute they waste playing poker or fetching weeds is another minute where thousands of humans get killed or zombified.
And that is BAD WRITING. You don't start off with the sense of urgency by wrecking our planet and then completely undermine that by having characters chillax at the club. Imagine a war movie where Pearl Harbor gets bombed and in response the protagonists go to Maui and hang out on the beach, then go into the jungle to find some sugar cane. You'd be yelling, "WTF? Get in the airplanes and go after the them!"
That's why the fetch missions are retarded. You have to do them in order to ramp up your assets, but it doesn't *matter* what state your assets are in. I know, because I had the glitch where nothing would get me over 50% and I got the exact same endings as everyone else. It literally didn't matter what choices I made. That is completely antithetical to the other games. At the end of ME2, I lost crew members before I ever got to the finale simply by not upgrading the Normandy. I did that on purpose to create my Suicide Squad. It was a completely different experience than my first play-through. You just don't get that from ME3, because the story is on rails.
BioWare also had a sterling reputation of delivering on what they promised, which they seriously fell down on. -
Quote:When my friend JT suggested to his bosses that they tag Fargo with the label "Based on a true story," he did it knowing full well people would take that as gospel. While it is kind of fun to mess with dumb people, it's also kind of sad that people just believe that sort of thing.Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
This is also true.
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Here are my main issues with ME3:
1) We were promised for years that there wouldn't be an "A-B-C ending" by Casey Hudson, yet that's exactly what he delivered.
2) We were also promised for years over multiple interviews that the choices we made mattered. But they did not. I played through ME2 multiple times to get different endings, including a "Suicide Squad" one, just to see what effect that would have on the story. Turns out that effect was: Zero. If someone didn't make it through the ME2 finale, they were simply replaced by their sister/uncle/roommate/cat in ME3. It was just "replace character A with character B" laziness.
3) We experience the invasion of Earth in the opening sequence and then spend a good 50% of the game faffing off doing stupid fetch missions that are better suited for grunts, not the Hero Savior of All Creation. "Say, get some ointment for this random guy on that planet way over there."
3a) And this is related to the above for pacing: why do crew members play poker, or stare off into space, or go to a dance club? It's the END OF EVERYTHING and they're goofing off? WTF? They blather on about how driven they are, how much hatred they have for the Reapers, how much they want to save the galaxy... but after I finish this hand, esse. Come on, that's terrible writing, plain and simple. There was no sense of urgency.
I think this was due to EA pulling more team members to work on SW:TOR in order to meet deadlines, so they cut corners on Mass Effect. After three stinkers in a row with DA:O, TOR and ME3, BioWare has severely damaged their brand. They've lost people like me forever. -
Quote:I'm kind of afraid of it, to be honest. I used to make videos for my local animal shelter and people would pass around tissues beforehand and some would leave the room. I've never been on the receiving end of that.Originally Posted by Dark_Respite
The rough draft of this video is breaking my heart.
Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite -
Close the Valve rumor!
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Thanks for posting the photos. I re-read the whole post again because you are brimming with positive energy and I needed a pick-me-up; it did, indeed, pick me up. Congrats again.
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The Last Resort was on yesterday and repeated tonight. For those unfamiliar with the premise, it's an Ohio-class nuclear sub ordered to launch missiles at Pakistan. When the captain (Andre Braugher) demands that the orders come through the the primary channel rather than the secondary one, he is relieved of command. Then things get really interesting, and far more complex.
Although I had a couple small quibbles with it -- such as turning the "Nixon acted crazy on purpose" anecdote into Reagan and the fact that the women are a little *too* attractive for their jobs -- it was an engaging technothriller. The story was solid, the characters were interesting and more than one-dimensional and the underlying mystery seems intriguing. A bit of Red Tide, The Hunt for Red October and Seven Days in May (which you really should see if you never have) all rolled into one, which was fine by me. I'm not sure how they can sustain the story over a single season, let alone multiple seasons, but it had a solid start. -
Quote:I disagree. Except for a few missions, I hated almost all of ME3. Badly paced and clumsily written with uninteresting new characters, and the broken promise that the choices we made in the previous games would matter.Originally Posted by Lord_Nightblade
Agreed. Aside from the last 10-15 minutes (which were vastly improved by the extended cut DLC), Mass Effect 3 is a great game.
It doesn't matter to me that BioWare is dead; they were already dead to me. -
Quote:Winner.Originally Posted by Angry_Citizen
Congrats on level ten. Now you can get debt!
Grats to M and J for their achievement. You might not know this, but the 10th anniversary is Spandex.
I just did 17 and it was Separate Vacations.
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Quote:Actually, Marvel's Secret Wars happened *before* DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths. (DC's copying of Marvel goes way back.) I think the main reason Marvel's never had a company-wide shake-up comparable to DC's is because they never let their continuity get completely screwed up. DC has had a long line of terrible Editors-in-Chief making stupid decisions, which was only recently matched by Joe Quesada over at Marvel. Although to be fair, DC *is* about 30 years older than Marvel if we're counting from the Stan Lee Era of the mid-60s. (Which really is the Marvel we're talking about.)Originally Posted by MrKwydjebo
Crisis was the first company wide comic event and lead to a continuity restructuring (Which DC pretty much did again last year with Flashpoint and the New 52). Marvel has never really done a continuity restructuring like that (Although the rumour is that is coming up). They have done company wide crossovers with consequences abound, but never a wholesale reboot (I did like Crisis and what they were trying to do, sadly some of the follow ups led to inconsistencies, but that's another story. The "New 52" feels like a big marketing ploy and I really haven't been happy with most of the results since)
I believe Marvel's first "Crisis Like" multi crossover event was the 1980s (85? 86?) Secret Wars. If you haven't read it, then you would probably enjoy it. They followed it up with Secret Wars 2, which wasn't as good.
Personally I liked a lot of the 80s and early 90s stuff, and for my money, the Infinity Guantlet (And they just re-released "Thanos Quest, which was a set up for that) is probably one of the best Marvel Crossover events.
I agree that Infinity Gauntlet was completely badass at the time. I'm not sure how it would hold up today. I'm sure Starlin's crazy galactic sensibility is still on display. -
I do like their advice to name your unit members after people in your family. Gives an added piquancy when they get all explodified. Although if I'm honest, I'll just name them all after my brother and make them shoot out in the open.
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Superb, emphasis on the "super."
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Perusing my Amazon wishlist, I rediscovered some superhero books I had put on it. Here's the list for your edification.
The Black Stiletto. A 48-year-old guy discovers his mom was the famous crimefighter known as "The Black Stiletto." Apparently a sort of female version of The Shadow, or perhaps the original Black Widow-type. One of her old enemies reappears, endangering her, him and his granddaughter. (Just from that I assume the granddaughter becomes Stiletto II.) He's also written a book about her adventures in 1959: The Black Stiletto: Black & White and a third book due next year. The prose is plenty serviceable and the guy has a track record with pulp adventure, having written original James Bond novels, as well as books based on Hitman and Metal Gear Solid.
Burn Baby Burn: A Supervillain Novel (WHOOSH! BAM! POW!) is an ebook by James Maxey. It looks like fun. Here's the first line: "Sunday Jimenez was fifteen when she killed her first nun." Okay, James, color me intrigued. Maxey wrote a superhero book that I kind of liked called Nobody Gets the Girl, which reads an awful lot like City of Heroes fan-fiction... written two years before the game came out. "Burn" seems to be a loose sequel to "Nobody", but you apparently don't need to have read the first one.
Wearing the Cape and its sequel look interesting, the first one being an origin story, it seems. The costumes look straight out of the CoH character creator.
Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. I don't know anything about this other than what you see here. I must've put it on my list for a reason, if only to check out later.
Corrupts Absolutely? Dark Metahuman Fiction has a story by Joe McKinney, who is currently writing my favorite zombie apocalypse books. His books have moved onto my "buy on release" list, so this collection went on my list purely on the strength of his name among the authors.
In Hero Years... I'm Dead by Michael Stackpole seemed intriguing as I read the sample.
Chicks in Capes. Seems pretty straightforward.
Pulp Heroes - More Than Mortal looks like pulp fiction that mashes up Doc Savage with various other heroes and villains of the day.
Damned Busters: To Hell and Back, Book 1. I actually bought this and it's been sitting on my to-read pile for months, maybe a year. (My to-read pile is taller than a 5-year-old.) But it looks quirky and odd and slightly different from the usual superhero fiction. -
I was surfing around the other day and wandered into the XCOM: Enemy Unknown site. I never played the original but I've heard of it. So I checked it out and it looked pretty interesting. But the fact it's turn-based turned me off as I'm more of a RTS guy.
Then I got to the base. Check it out: http://youtu.be/U88EcjtDnyE
Now I'm a little more intrigued. -
I gave it a pass because the commercials looked dumb... also because it's a JJ Abrams production, and so far I have hated everything he's involved with. Not disliked, not "didn't care for": hated. Even when I didn't know he was involved I would just see red because of the rampant stupidity going on. So I avoid anything he makes now.
I don't know how they stopped all the electronic equipment, but knowing JJ it's probably some sort of magic tech and not an EMP. An EMP would cause widespread death and destruction, but it's a one-time thing that wouldn't end civilization. The magic tech will somehow stop iPhones but allow people to live because of the power of, you know, STUPID.
In better TV news, I started watching Breaking Bad on Netflix streaming, and it is awesome. I missed the first two seasons so I didn't want to jump into the middle of it, but this show deserves all the awards it's gotten. Plus, The Walking Dead is returning soon (Oct. 25), so I won't have time for low-rent Hunger Games knock-offs. -
Quote:The specific parts that are very much derived from fantasy games are the static areas where invaders are continually contesting for ground, item degradation and being forced to earn and spend money to buy/upgrade/repair said items. It's straight out of EverQuest that equipping a weapon increases your health stats. Why would a GUN make me healthier? That's just dumb design, based on old school magic tropes. I was especially annoyed when my version of the "Bat-radio" had decayed. That was one of those Whatchoo Talkin' 'Bout Willis? moments. there were others, as well, but it's been long enough that I've forgotten them.Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
As someone who has criticized COH heavily for what I perceive as generic fantasy elements in its design that have displaced the comic book/super hero tropes that should have been in mind instead, I don't get that impression from DCUO at all.
In my analysis, if any one thing is the problem with DCUO's devs is that they seem to come from a console oriented way of thinking. The game was designed to be a console title and reflects that. I see some of that in CO too.
I didn't know the skin cells thing, just the hints I picked up in beta and the info from the two trailers. The alien tech-created heroes was pretty cool, but I agree with you that does sound pretty stupidly demeaning. Another mark against it.Quote:I am less enthusiastic about the backstory and origin of the player character's power in DCUO. As I interpret it, the player character's power comes from, essentially, mechanical dust mites sent by Brainiac that fed off of the Justice League's skin cells. We are, quite literally, their castoff waste. That is several orders worse than anything the Well did in this game, in my opinion.. -
Quote:I'm all for free speech. Free speech includes the right to be wrong.Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Always fun to see which side truly believes in free speech and tolerance
It also means I get to disagree with someone who is being a bigot. I believe in equality for everyone. No exceptions. Card believes in the violent overthrow of a government that allows gay marriage.
I hope that clears up who is on the side of truth, justice and the American way.