The Gaming Den

Triple X: Return of Xander Cage is Metal Gear + Zoolander wrapped in 90's arcade brawler nonstop pacing.

Vin Diesel is the hero of the world's children, Donnie Yen is Venom Snake, Deepika and Kris Wu show up lookin' pretty and kicking ass, Cecil the Lion has a cameo, Tony Jaa can jump really damn high, lol Bisping can actually act.

I like films to be consistent in tone, I really hate it when films are ultra snarky/cynical/jaded then do something stupidly hypocritical, Triple X is 200% SILLINESS ALL THE TIME.

It was very fun, like a later-series Fast and Furious movie with the extreme driving found-and-replaced with extreme sports. Lots of cool action and friendly fun vibes.

So far, A Series of Unfortunate Events on netflix is very good.

OgreBattle wrote:Vin Diesel is the hero of the world's children, Donnie Yen is Venom Snake, Deepika and Kris Wu show up lookin' pretty and kicking ass, Cecil the Lion has a cameo, Tony Jaa can jump really damn high, lol Bisping can actually act.

Woah, Tony Jaa has returned to sanity and is making films we're likely to hear about again?

Inkle's adaptation of the Sorcery series was awesome. As the series progressed they deviated more and more from the original, playing with your expectations and taking advantage of the computer game medium in great ways. Then they instituted a NG+ mode, and it's... harsh, man. In a good way.

Oh? I've played the first three parts on mobile. What's in NG+?

I just ran Shamutanti, so I haven't seen the later stuff yet, but...

There's a lot of hard mode options, like starting with no money, or disabling the rewind mechanic. There are more spell components earlier on, so you can try spells in circumstances you couldn't before. And it's been a long while since I ran Shamutanti the first time, but I'm pretty sure there are a lot more opportunities to be a horrible dick to people. So, a significant amount of new content.

More than that, the general tone is much harsher. The Crown's peace is explicitly a tyranny of mind control, for instance.

The first Sorcery game was ok, the second clearly had the "fuck you" mentality of some gamebooks which got a bit on my nerve.

I imagine the deus ex machina at the end of the second is a way to avoid forcing the player to start over from the beginning if he didn't do everything in the right order, but having multiple tries to find the one true way doesn't make it any less jarring that there's only one true path (and nothing that would indicate what it is).

I started the third one but when I realized that it was still going to be mostly arbitrary trial and error, I stopped.

Blade wrote:I imagine the deus ex machina at the end of the second is a way to avoid forcing the player to start over from the beginning if he didn't do everything in the right order, but having multiple tries to find the one true way doesn't make it any less jarring that there's only one true path (and nothing that would indicate what it is).

AFAIA, there actually isn't a one true path - it's not possible to collect all the spell lines in a single pass through the city, you have to run through at least twice.

Now that the fist season of THE GRAND TOUR is over:
Yes, it is exactly what people expected from the true successor of Top Gear!
I have very much enjoyed the ride. If i had had a holiday left over then, i would have gone to the recording in germany.

Well good for them. It looked fun, but I'm not getting Amazon Prime just to watch Top Gear 2.

You also get access to so much more on prime than just that.
And if you order from amazon on a semi regular basis, it also helps with the delivery time and shipment cost i think? But me? yeah, i basically got it for the grand tour, when amazon prime was still cheap.

Prime has some awesome original content. I binge watched Sneaky Pete and the Expanse a few weekends ago. The Night Manager was decent too. And soon there will be what looks to be an outstanding live action The Tick. Lotsa good stuff.

We're using prime at this moment to rewatch Avatar seasons with the kids.

Now, I recently got a Roku TV and it came with a free month of HBO stuff, so been catching movies that I missed in theatre. The Nice Guys was good. And I laughed way too much at Mr Right.

I'm on the fence about whether I'll watch West World. I've heard it's good, but I don't want to start something I cannot finish.

The best part o the f West World series is that character alignment is explicitly determined by what hat you choose to wear.

"Rise of the Legend" has Eddie Peng star as Chinese folk hero Wong Fei Hong.

It's a really great retelling of the story for the first half of the film then... you can just FEEL the CCP censors cut into the story like a knife and it gets derailed with a boring message on upholding society.

I recommend watching it with that warning in mind.

Any longtime lurker with a memory for small details might remember that I'm a big Discworld fan. I've read every one of a book except for the Science of Discworld series, which I could never lay hands on. I've been reading Discworld for nigh-on twenty years now.

And it still gets me.

One of the first books I had was The Truth. It was certainly in the first ten I read. And, as you may not know, The Truth is about the Disc's first newspaper, being produced by a young man, a young woman, a vampire, and a bunch of dwarfs who made and run what is basically the first successful printing press in the area.

Today, I found out that Geutenberg and his buddies, way back when they were getting started, tended to blame typesetting errors they were sure weren't in there before, on a little dwarf who lived in the press and would sneak out to scramble a couple of letters.

They even called him, in German, the Printing Press Dwarf.

This is Terry Pratchett. There is no way this is coincidental.

So here, years after reading the book, after many re-reads, I find yet another joke slipped past me.

Well done, Sir Terry, well done.

erik wrote: I'm on the fence about whether I'll watch West World. I've heard it's good, but I don't want to start something I cannot finish.

It's pretty short, and large chunks of the beginning are skippable under the category of establishing the dehumanizing murder-rape slavery. The trouble with the first couple episodes is separating the titillating 'oh we're HBO and so transgressive!' grimdark from the story-relevant grimdark.

re: Pratchett's jokes

I was born in the Soviet Union to the most iconic Soviet family imaginable. My grandparents were a collective farm tractor driver, a textile factory worker, an NKVD officer, and a Jewish doctor. Among the pretentious-lower-class people such as we were, knowledge of ancient mythology and mythologized history was considered to be mandatory for preschoolers. If you couldn't name the 12 labors of Hercules in as many seconds, you'd be laughed out of the sandbox.*

Finding out that in the West this is not so came as a noticeable culture shock. Like, there are plot points in children's lit which are directly lifted from mythology and are intended to be ohsoclever secret references for the readers to later discover and feel proud about "getting". For example, I've heard that in the recent Harry Potter, there's a villain named The Oracle and a lady named Delphi. Fucking seriously!?

So, when I read Pratchett, I keep wondering how many references are considered "Easter eggs" rather than just unexpected clever references to well-known facts, and how many jokes fly over people's heads entirely.

(And yes, I'm perfectly aware there may be jokes I will never get, like, say, about 20th** century music and such.)

* A slight exaggeration.

** Roman numerals were also obligatory knowledge for preschoolers.

I honestly have no idea how many of Pratchett's jokes are 'expected' to fly over the head of the reader. It's hard to tell. I started reading Pratchett when I was like 12 or so, and at that time I missed far more references and allusions than I got, but even so I enjoyed almost all* the books very much. For the most part, my appreciation only deepened as I got older and could appreciate the various nods to stuff in Pratchett's work.

I've been watching a little Mark Reads Terry Pratchett, a thing where a guy with no previous exposure to Pratchett has been going through each of Pratchett's books in publication order and reacting to it in ~20 page segments, five times a fortnight. Mark gets a lot fewer of the references than I do about most topics, but seems to enjoy the books a lot even so - if you wanted a fairly decent picture of 'what an Average-ish American will notice in Terry Pratchett's writing' you could do worse than checking out some of his reaction videos or text reviews. If you find this sort of thing interesting, I warn you to avoid posting spoilers of any sort in the comment sections, and also he and his community tend to tackle things from a fairly strongly leftist / SJW-ish stance, and his comment sections are heavily moderated accordingly.


*A few of his early books were light on non-allusion-based humor; for example, an entire section of The Colour Of Magic was basically 'look at how cleverly I'm skewering Anne McCaffrey' which didn't work for me when I first read it at all because I'd never read any of McCaffrey's books before reading it. Books published later on increasingly relied on more commonly known things and also were increasingly good and funny even if the reader didn't get one or more specific references.

Well, anyone who wants, there's the Annotated Pratchett File. It cuts off at about Going Postal -but-, it's good for citing references and all: https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/index.html

In other news, Tales of Berseria is now my favorite Tales game. My favorite JRPG. There is a scene that hits like unto when Kaladin says the oath in Words of Radiance, in general emotional rollercoastering.

Holy shit, that was awesome.

Maxus wrote:Well, anyone who wants, there's the Annotated Pratchett File. It cuts off at about Going Postal -but-, it's good for citing references and all: https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/index.html

In other news, Tales of Berseria is now my favorite Tales game. My favorite JRPG. There is a scene that hits like unto when Kaladin says the oath in Words of Radiance, in general emotional rollercoastering.

Holy shit, that was awesome.

I could never get into the Tales games. Feels too much like I'm playing Street Fighter.

I wish the Tales game felt more like Street Fighter. If the combat felt as interactive as you'd think it was, those games would be amazing. Age has severely dulled my patience for JRPG's, and while I've enjoyed my time with the Tales games, they have done nothing to maintain my interest the way games like, say, Ys Origins and Ys Oath have.

So I went back to the movie theater I watched Xander Cage at and yes, this MONSTER OF AN EXXXTREME NOVELTY MOVIE TIE IN CUP WAS STILL THERE:

I bought it (with a cheese popcorn set) and just sat in the lobby eating popcorn mirin' my gain.

It comes with two special straws that tilt sharply so the straws cross over to the other side forming an INTERNAL X.

In the years to come, when scavengers are picking the bones of the post-apocalyptic wasteland that once hosted western civilisation, some rugged survivalist type is going to dig up that thing from underneath a piece of rubble, and determine that we deserved our fate.

That cup is the most ridiculous thing I've seen all week. I love that it exists though I have no desire to own one.