The Gaming Den

This is a bitching thread where we discuss shark jumps or moments where we knew ahead of time that there was no hope for what we were about to experience.

- Star Wars prequel trilogy: I actually have a moment for each movie.

1) The Jedi not giving a damn about slavery at all, deciding to focus on their silly Trade Federation crap.

2) The Jedi completely falling for the villains evil scheme despite the movie telling the Jedi the entire conspiracy on a silver platter.

3) The Mace Windu/Palpatine scene.

- Naruto.

Orochimaru gets killed in the most meanspirited way possible. The mangaka spits on the moral of the story in the most ridiculously contrived manner possible. The little shit Sasuke completely loses all sympathy with his new genocidal goal. Kakashi, Shizune, Fukusaku, and Hinata get killed in the span of <10 chapters.

- Chrono Cross

The third time in the game where it was revealed that the heroes changed everything for the worst so it can deliver it's retarded 'human beings are evil and hate the environment DURRRRR' moral.

- Teen Titans
The entirety of the direct-to-DVD Teen Titans in Tokyo. I am very glad that this came out after the end of the series so I can ignore it.

- Enterprise
I'm not a Star Trek fan and one of my buddies is, especially of Enterprise for some unfathomable reason. I've seen TNG and DS9 episodes and while I don't remember them too clearly I do remember them giving me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Tried to watch a few episodes of Enterprise, but that one episode where the crew allows extinction in the name of eugenics nearly made me put my fist through the television.


You know, it's a very weird feeling to be actually have hatred towards something you're watching. Yes, I've felt disdain and derision and disappointment and detached irritation, but I've rarely been so angry at something I've seen that's not Real Life or News that I couldn't sleep. I can only remember three times this actually happening: The Crazy 88 fight in Kill Bill, the aforementioned Enterprise episode, and the latest chapter of Naruto.

Chrono Cross lost me the very moment they threw down the revelation that they were not in fact going to travel through time or interact with the original Chrono Trigger plotline at all. The fact that they subsequently killed all the characters from the first game and then wrote them out of history was just urine on top of the shit cake.

But I rather liked the Teen Titans in Tokyo segment. It was an entertaining jibe at the "you are too anime" barb that had been thrown at the show since forever. They were like "No, this is too anime. Now back to the regularly scheduled Beastboy turns into a rhinoceros fight..."

-Username17

Chrono Cross lost me the very moment they threw down the revelation that they were not in fact going to travel through time or interact with the original Chrono Trigger plotline at all. The fact that they subsequently killed all the characters from the first game and then wrote them out of history was just urine on top of the shit cake.

Ha ha, yeah, I've never seen such blatant character assassination. I mean, c'mon, Dalton organizes a coup that kills off Crono and Marle? COME THE FUCK ON! That's something you do in an amateur parody fic, not a serious video game!

Batman and Robin is more faithful to the source material than Chrono Cross is. Hell, My Immortal is more faithful.

Wait, Hinata's dead? I thought she was going to all tearfully jump in, but she actually listened the very reasonable argument that the fight down there is out of her league.

Teen Titans in Tokyo? Wasn't that a normal episode?

-Crissa

To Maxus: Nope. Early leaked spoilers have confirmed what I said. It was particularly meanspirited and cruel, too. I can hook you up with a link if you want, or you can just wait two days.

Fuck this manga. No really, fuck this manga, this is the last straw. This is outrageous.

I've only read the first few chapters of Bleach, but this makes me glad I never got attached to it.

You know, when I first picked up Bleach I got a little bit past when they went into Soul Society but then I put it down for awhile involuntarily. It was a decent enough read, it reminded me of Yu Yu Hakusho before it got retarded and became about a string of ever escalating fights. I knew the exact point I gave up on that series, too, it was when Yusuke fought Suzaku and got a ridiculous and kind-of unnecessary powerup. So I just never tuned into another episode or chapter again.

So when I was thinking about picking up Bleach again imagine my delight when I found that the manga was no longer about the wacky attempts of a juvenille delinquent at playing Ghostbusters but was about a string of ever-escalating fighting.

I'm pretty irate at Heroes, but my husband still thinks it's worth watching. Which sucks. I really don't want to know.

-Username17

Maj wrote:I'm pretty irate at Heroes, but my husband still thinks it's worth watching. Which sucks. I really don't want to know.

FrankTrollman wrote:

You know, I wanted to get into Heroes after I heard people gush and rave about the first season but I was in a position where I couldn't get or watch the DVD collection so I didn't. It's my policy that something worth watching is worth watching on DVD, because I hate not being able to go back over the parts I missed or go without subtitles.

Anyway, after season two, two of my buddies sort of went at the series, criticism of the show started to leak into TVTropes, and it showed up on confusedmatthew's videoblog to-do list.

So since I've pretty much resigned myself not to see the series, you mind telling me what's going on?


Oh, here's another one. I used to be a professional wrestling fan. I caught on to the tail end of the Attitude Era back when the talent and storylines were at their height. And my favorite wrestler was Chris Benoit. I remember when he won the title in the three-way title between HHH and Shawn Michaels and he proceeded to continually defend it against them and it was so awesome. It was really one of the most exciting times I ever had watching a TV series.

I stopped watching for awhile after the booking slowly started getting worse and some of my favorite wrestlers either left the company or got buried, but I was ready to become a fan again, you know? Professional wrestling has suffered behind-the-scenes and creative setbacks to the extent that your head would spin, but I wanted to give the industry a second chance. Just one good angle, just one good feud and it'd be the glory days all over again.

And then Chris Benoit had to go crazy and kill his family and then himself. Because of steroid-induced brain damage. I have been unable to watch professional wrestling since.

Heros season one is actually pretty good. There is a plot, a resolution, and things happen.

Season 2 and 3 have none of those things.

Yu Yu Hakusho

I got farther than Lago did on this show, but then again I have a very high tolerance for movies and shows which are just excuses to string action sequences together.

I enjoyed up through the tournament arc, but found the show after that point to be completely unwatchable. For those of you who haven't watched, a ton of the episodes were just one big tournament, with the heroes powering up to fight the big bad, who is this demon guy who is about nine feet tall. Despite the cliche nature of this and some really ass pull moves like characters dieing and then getting better about two seconds later, I actually enjoyed it up to this point.

Afterwards, Yuusuke is wondering what he should do now that he is all powerful and has killed the most powerful demon on earth. Then he gets his ass handed to him by three weirdo highschool students who have bullshit powers. I just couldn't get over the massive powerdown/retcon that happened there. The fight even happens off screen.

Tactics ogre:the one for the gba

I was enjoying this game, though not as much as the original. Then I made a major strategic error and left my main character severely wounded and surrounded by enemies. Instead of killing him and winning, the AI actually went around him to attack other characters with more health and better defenses. Once I realized the game was programmed to actually let me win if I screw up, it lost its appeal.

I was willing to give Heroes the benefit of the doubt for Season 2 because of the writer's strike. Not anymore. Nice comic, Frank. Sums it up perfectly.

Command and Conquer 3 very nearly did it with EA's patch when missile squads became able to kill rifle squads and commandos became nearly useless and buzzers completely useless.

EA wrote:Since shadow teams are epically broken, let's rebalance a damage type completely!

Also, melee attacks are too good

It still entertained me some, but the fun was shattered.

Most webcomics lost me when I looked at them and realized that holy shit, this isn't funny anymore.

Cielingcat wrote:Most webcomics lost me when I looked at them and realized that holy shit, this isn't funny anymore.

Agreed.

I haven't read Order of the Stick in a couple of months.

Girl Genius hasn't screwed me over, though.

I actually still enjoy OotS for the story, for some reason. Maybe because it's my only remaining connection with D&D besides this place.

Ugh, Heroes. I still watch it for some silly reason - maybe I still misguidedly hope that the writers will come to their senses - but man, I hate virtually all of the characters. Especially Claire, whom I really despise as a whiny, stupid bitch, and who has somehow become one of the main (possibly even the mainest) characters.

I think a big thing about the 'holy shit, this webcomic isn't funny anymore' problem is that webcomics aren't as funny if you read them one at a time, waiting every week.

It might have something to do with the fact that even with genuinely witty or funny series maybe only one out of every four or five of them will actually make you laugh aloud and reading them together as a big chunk allows you to skip over the not-so-funny moments so it just seems as a string of hits. And when you get to the end of the funny streak and are waiting on a daily/weekly basis the laughs get stretched out to maybe one laugh a month and you're all 'man, what happened to the laughs?'

I realized this after I took a long break on 8-Bit Theater until the comic got the lulz back and went through a two-year archive binge and I was like 'wow, this comic is still pretty dam funny. That must've just been a slow point.'

Then again, doing an archive trawl sometimes leads to a rude awakening, like with MegaTokyo or Shortpacked. The tragic thing was that those two comics were legitimately funny/interesting... until MegaTokyo's abandonment of the lulz caused rampant boredom and Shortpacked cheeky refusal to have any meaningful character development or plot advancement caused rampant frustration.

In this regards, as much as OotS irritates me sometimes, I have to say that it's a genuinely good webcomic even if sometimes it drops the drama bomb a bit too much for its own good.

OotS managed to fairly successfully move from gag-a-day to storylines with humor. That's really hard to do without bogging down somehow. For instance, see some Irregular Webcomic storylines and 8-bit Theater. The humor is derived purely from incompetence, and there's a limit to how much progress you can make while still being amusingly bad at what you do.

Actually, yeah, let's talk about Shortpacked some more.

Even though abandoning comedy for the sake of drama usually results in audience tears, Shortpacked is a prime example of doing the opposite of a bad thing won't necessarily result in something good.

This comic pounds on the reset button so hard it hurts. The only meaningful bit of character or plot development that's ever happened was Ethan coming out as gay. The comic frequently comes up with interesting angles or plot hooks and goes down them but then gleefully dynamites them if it would cause the status quo to drift even a little bit. After the neat and tidy resolution of the Shortpacked-Must-Die! arc I no longer trust what Willis writes.

The thing that irritates me about OotS is how un-apologetically fucking slow Rich Burlew is. Even that Erfworld guy that he added to distract from Burlew's slowness has caught the tardy, so to speak.

I mean, VG Cats updates less frequently that OotS, but at least he owns it and pokes fun at himself for it.

Now, maybe I'm spoiled by Sinfest (updates 7 days a week) and the guys behind Least I Could Do (7 days) and Looking for Group (2 days), and all of those comics are admittedly less intensive than a typical OotS strip...but still, I can't help but think this was directed at OotS.

Hell, I'm even impressed by the Crimson Dark guy. He only updates once a week, but does it consistently and while taking a full University course load down in Australia.

Heh, I remember a book I read that lost me pretty hard.

I'd heard about a 'series' of stand-alone Forgotten Realms novels called The Fighters. Each one apparently focused on a different martial PrC.

Then I saw one of them at the bookstore, and decided to try it out.

Ghostwalker.

Okay, the main character, known as "Walker," is a Ghostwalker. The story opens with him being killed as a kid, and then skip to more than ten years later.

He did die, and his only real memories of his life before he died and was brought back was of his murderers--and even then, he can't actively remember them--he has to see them and get his memory to jog. His sole purpose for living is bringing violent and bloody death to all of the men who participated in killing him.

Except, for a man who actually radiates unearthly and bonechilling resolve, he loses focus pretty quickly once he sees a pretty woman.

The way they met wasn't bad--she was being accosted, and he was going through the town on his way to scout out another one of the men. On a whim, he interfered, saved her life, and went on his way.

Except afterwards he can't stop thinking about her [gaaaagggcckkg].

Anyway, about halfway through the book, the characters go to shit.

Walker spends as much time romancing her as he does hunting the men. The original revenge plot gets lost fairly quickly.

The main villains are evil for absolutely no reason. They're father and son; the father has actually murdered several of his wives and spends his time trying to be seen as a hero.

The son is just a stone-cold killer who murders people for absolutely no rational reason. He usually wears white leather armor, and actually makes a point to kill a couple of guards who saw him wearing black. Just because.

And, then, of course, when Walker goes gunning for the real string-puller, he gives his uber-powerful Ring of Regeneration to his ladyfriend and brings her around to watch the final fight. The rings lets her survive when the enemy blows up, but Walker's completely destroyed.

So, yeah. Characters did shit for no reason. The author should have kept with the revenge story.

Maxus, my emphasis wrote:

And, then, of course, when Walker goes gunning for the real string-puller, he gives his uber-powerful Ring of Regeneration to his ladyfriend and brings her around to watch the final fight. The rings lets her survive when the enemy blows up, but Walker's completely destroyed.

Bolding mine.

I'm sorry, but that's just one of the most idiotic things I've ever heard in liteature. I really feel for you, especially if you earnestly enjoyed the earlier parts of the story.