A 1970 Corvette

10 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

especially that human faced dog chapter

It's interesting that "ultimately, the Nazis were defeated by nations which lacked their racial tolerance" wasn't the thing that confused me the most in this post

Beta yourself? Wouldn't all the alphas steal your chances at getting girls even more?

All of the people in my classes are around ten years older than me, and my group's girls are already taken (and probably not my type anyway). I feel like I probably missed whatever chance I had in high school, but whatever I'm a shut in.

I've actually got in the best shape of my life over Coronatime so once the clubs open back up fully I should be on the prowl- Haha just kidding I'm going to sit at home playing planetside and drawing anime girls just like normal

3 hours ago, Moby said:

I had fun with Guerrilla as a "Play it once" game. Still didn't try the remaster.

 

I might be remembering it with rose-tinted glasses, but I remember liking it. I picked it up right after finishing Saints Row 2, so I wanted some other sandbox.

I do remember some problems I had with it like having way too many car/turret sections (one curiously happening AFTER you kill the guy that drives the car you shoot from) and the difficulty being all over the place.

It definitely has flaws. Some of the turret car missions where you gun for an AI driver can have the AI driver just loop forever after you've hit the target number of damage, evnetually ending in you dying just because the vehicle invariably gets health chipped forever.

Honestly vehicles are a pretty sore spot in that game. Their health pool isn't bad but there's some wonky ass physics that can happen where a tiny bump from an enemy car chasing behind you shaves off 25% of your health at once. Plus a lot of vehicles have way too little traction and they just fly off the road at the slightest bump. Put those together and you have a recipe for "are you fucking kidding me, this mission shouldn't even be hard but this stupid shit keeps making me have to reset." Some way to regenerate vehicle health, even if just a little bit, would be great since it's almost impossible to avoid enemy chip damage from guns.

Doesn't help that there are a few race missions where if you attack certain enemy areas (bridges) that ARE MARKED AS TARGETS YOU SHOULD DESTROY it makes getting the pro medals nearly impossible, and makes even just finishing them in time a gigantic pain in the ass too.

I feel like the low enemy/weapon/vehicle pool made a lot of the missions pretty dry too. They're not awful but they don't stand out very well at all.

I recently finished a rerun of Red Faction: Guerilla and it makes me sad that it came out in the time it did. Because it had a lot of issues that are kind of rookie sandbox mistakes now, and there's just NOT ENOUGH OF IT

• Sandbox is tiny and some areas are just dead zones where no gameplay happens
• Upgrade system is pretty flat and upgrades are rarely interesting, mainly +ammo or +damage
  • Ironically, the remastered edition gives you a bunch of upgrades that have interesting drawbacks and upsides
  • But they're only unlocked on NG+ mode and they're recycled from multiplayer
• Not enough enemy types and all enemies are fought in the same way (shooting a million bullets in their head)
• Not enough weapons, and despite having four weapon slots there are two "must-use" weapons and a dedicated melee slot
• Vehicles handle like they're on mars- wait, working as intended
• Core gameplay depletes playable areas of the map (liberating areas despawns all enemies and removes most missions)
• Utilizing the unique selling point of blowing up buildings also shrinks the "playable" area since outside of specific missions, destroying an area means it's gone forever
  • This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it could have been tied into area control, maybe having EDF rebuild strongholds/checkpoints unless their control level is below a certain point, or maybe be tied to the "pop-up" missions that trigger at random, idk

It really pains me that nowadays there are these bog-standard sandbox games that can drag on for twenty plus hours and have no unique qualities and then red faction guerilla feels way too short and small. It ALSO pains me that despite AAA games having a hard-on for spectacle, destructo-physics are still relegated to cutscenes or specific set piece areas. I hate it!!!!!!!

It also pains me that the series got smothered early because Guerilla's sequel crapped the bed.

obligatory "corv posting mechina for the billionth time"

Unfortunately I don't have a good parallel to the Suguri/OJ universe for Siege, unless it turns out the Alicianrone setting is a different planet (actually fairly likely, consdering everything) and the Witches bear similarities to Titanborn (actually, Suguri being immortal is already there, Miusaki is fucking invincible... Okay well still a stretch)

Posted as a joke about MtG's "FIRE" design philosophy by some random person, now I come back to it like once a week cuz it's pretty good

The Kunai is the pubstomp weapon now? Is this bizarro world?

It feels like Eldraine has been in the rotation for way longer than it actually has. I really can't get a read on the powerlevel of Strix at all, but we're not through with spoiler season so who knows. Learn is a dumb mechanic but I think it's fairly clear that it was reeled back for fear of being another Companion (though in all reality we'd only need one or two busted Lessons to ruin everything so we might still see it) on both the enablers for Learn and the Learn cards themselves.

I've been wanting to play EDH recently but my group irl has just basically dropped it entirely in favor of their cube. Which is fun and all, but not quite the same experience

45 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

The skinny that I heard was that Wizards had planned to do Ikoria style tie-ins permanently after the Godzilla cards being somewhat well received.  According to this idea it was too late to try to get anything to work for Zendikar Rising but they tried to scramble to get the God of War license for Kaldheim (which, if they actually tried, also fell through).  Story goes that the decision to get the license for Harry Potter at the same time that the set was beginning design, meaning that it would essentially be designed as a Harry Potter set.

 

However, I don't think it was ever meant to be at its core Harry Potter in the same way that the upcoming core set is apparently a D&D set.  They would have their own versions of things if for no other reason than being able to put their own trademarks (much like how Theros was a set with blatant characters from Greek myths which were given OC names that no one remembers rather than just being called "Trojan Horse", "Hades," etc.)  Then certain cards would be given alternate Harry Potter forms afterwards a la the Godzilla cards.

Yeah I think that's pretty probable. It hurts me to think that they'd be altering set designs to work with tie-ins, even if it's not a huge change and sort of incidental, but at this point the entire MTG game design philosophy is pain anyway so whatever

Quote

Haven't paid attention to what's going on in Magic since then and I didn't know anything about their "Universes Beyond" crossover sets.  And to try to figure out what that was I ended up looking at the official twitter and now I have AIDS, thanks.

You're welcome! I enjoy others' suffering, it helps me feel better

2 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

So the only reason that this set exists is because they thought they'd get the Harry Potter license, right?

There's a lot of schizo theories that strixhaven was originally a harry potter crossover set that had its crossover status terminated for whatever reason (plenty of different speculated reasons, none of which are really worth discussing) and then the set had to be crowbarred into an original setting late into the development process. I personally don't really buy it, but there was a lot of murmurings about a harry potter secret lair crossover set that may or may not still be happening. If it doesn't happen, then it's slightly more likely that said theories are true.

That being said, it's such a transparent copy of themes that even if there wasn't any attempt at getting the license, any passerby will still assume they did try.

It annoys me how this guild is supposed to be "super smart math nerds" but all it does is ramp, "fractal tokens" and +1/+1 counters. There's such a wild disconnect in what the flavor is saying and what the gameplay mechanics are. To be fair, the most intense math MTG can get is "double something," but at that point maybe just don't try to dress things up as smart and take the flavor in a different direction.

At least the Boros stuff is okayish.

I was going to ask where the Steamed Hams Half-Life 2 mod was, but it's probably lower quality than all of these anyway

6 hours ago, Raison d'être said:

She's pretty much better now, although obviously still not perfect.

She tells me she's gonna retire and open up a shelter for dogs while also becoming a beekeeper. Which shows that her crazy personality is still intact, thankfully.

Wait a second, dog shelter AND beekeeper? That reminds me of something...

I wanted to say baking chocolate, but I legitimately might have a crossed wire because "baking chocolate" is also an item used in baking and I can't think of an example of saying "he's baking chocolate right now"

Let's go with "alchemizing chocolate" and call it a day

Now THIS is an OP

just what I had on random ofc

However it shows my two states of mind well: Planetside or Rin, with very little in between

Banned: More Play Design Fuckups, and one card that was fine until Play Design did nothing but fuck up for two years straight

I can't wait for Modern Horizon 2!

I should listen to more blind guardian. I guess I've just not been in a power mood recently, what can you do

I finally decided to dig up the source for redlettermedia's "sad music" they play in videos now and then

I actually bother watching the superbowl for the first time in a long time and it's a clown show game that is decided by halftime. What a sham

Throwback thursday: What's something you were listening to ten years ago?

I've found agreement with your Senkou-san issue. A lot of the more lighthearted slice of life-ey shows just feel a lot better if they're read which is something I've kinda dealt with a lot recently. Maybe it's just me getting more and more accustomed to the tropes and wanting to get through it quick which is something that's much easier to do with manga than anime.

Super agree with Konohara Kitan. I didn't get past the first few episodes just because it legitimately just did not pop out as an actual show in my head. The only real imagery I remember is the "literally just Saber from FSN's design but with fox ears" which doesn't reflect well on the show at all

Inuyashiki is a show that is pretty much counter to my normal tastes (old man MC, serious tone, not enough cute girls). The characters really carried it all, and they're what stick with me even now. I picked it up without really knowing what it was (I think cuz it had 3DCG lol) but it really grabbed me at the time.

I feel like a lot of Kemurikusa's high for me was coming off the waves of the insane kemofure phenomenon, and comparing the two side by side. I enjoyed piecing together the plot and Wakaba's growth from the first episode on, though. And I can totally look past the animation and 3DCG cuz my heart installed a blind spot for low quality in my eyes apparently

1 hour ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

I watched Avatar and Ghost Stories with a friend last year. I never liked Avatar as a kid but it's a good show now. And Ghost Stories was funny.

I watched the first few episodes of avatar but I never really got into it. And if it's because it's a slow burn, I made it through all of ZeXaL's first season without any issue, so maybe it's just not for me

3 hours ago, Rynjin said:

I'm pretty sure Crysis is only remembered because it used to fry machines, not because people liked it as a game.

It still had some parts that got icky FPS-wise on my machine from the future! Its antialiasing also sucked ass for me. But that could be equally as much due to its age since it's a crapshoot as to what games will run well or at all on new systems, and on the AA side it could have been me not understanding the intricacies of the stuff I was messing with.

Well when I get to Crysis 2 (a game I actually remember liking in the past and the first Crysis game I ever played) we'll see how much of an improvement on the game side there was

10 hours ago, Razputin said:

What I remember from Crisis is a really exciting introduction with fun stealth combat vs human soldiers, then a blinding white haze of hot hatred and then a cinematic ending sequence I desperately wanted to end

You definitely summed it up much more concisely than I did.

It was funny going to Crysis after just having played half life 1 though. Even though HL1's Xen was admitted by everyone to be rushed and much lower quality than the first half, it was still leaps and bounds more fun than crysis's alien segments