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I've just finished Ember and am about to start playing Tower of Time. Anyone have any ToT must-know tips to help my experience be better?

More proof this forum is full of people with no taste.

I guess this is where different people (among those who did not like the D:OS games) have different reactions. For me, BG3 is not (yet) sufficiently differentiated from D:OS2 for me to like it. Still waaaaay too much D:OS2 in the game for my taste.

Heretics the lot of you... Even if you disregard the story, the art in GitS is something that few anime today achieve.

The Ghost in the Shell anime was really mediocre. Sorry, not sorry: I'm still out there looking for my perfect android-related media, GitS ain't it. @KP the meanie zucchini Fair enough, .

At least we got this from it

IMO, if you're going to do anything with Akira (1988), I'd recommend reading the manga. The movie isn't really a great movie, IMO, and while I can appreciate the technical virtuosity of the film, I think the story is far, far too condensed in the film version. Then again, I thought the Ghost in the Shell manga was the weakest work by Masamune Shirow I'd read, and didn't like the anime adaption either, so my tastes don't seem to align with everyone else when it comes to anime...

The cinema experience would involve getting overcharged for some water and listening to half an hour of commercials so not really. @Bartimaeus @majestic I'm on my phone right now and there's too much to quote without the forum software having a snack, so I'll try to be brief here. It's a personal thing and influenced by US education where everything lower than 70 is considered a failure, but it's just difficult for me to rate stuff numerically even to myself. Like I really enjoyed both Sailor Moon (except for Super S and the end episodes) and JoJo (note to majestic, it gets a whole lot crazier in Egypt. D'arby, not Barbie Mr. Jousturrr) but I can't quantify them numerically or anything. I can say I loved them and tell you why, as well as recommended then on those lines, but for the life of me I can't break out a calculator and explain why I rate JoJo 1999/2000 or Sailor Moon Pharoah 90/100. I just don't think of stuff like this in terms of numbers, and I don't think I'll ever really be able to. And I've never seen TAS, but it has a catgirl so if this thread would be the place to talk about it.

Hello guys, here I am again asking some ideas. I am planning a solo Wildrhymer but I don’t want the Skald/Stalker combination. My idea is try a ranged build, using the AC and summons and buffing them with chants. I am thinking in Troubador/Arcane Archer, maybe using the Spearcaster. What are your advices?

It is still a ****ty Baldur’s Gate sequel :-). But as long as Larian won’t miss the opportunity to create something of value, I can live with that.

Yeah, if it doesn't then fair enough. As I said, it's a matter of taste. Here's an analogy: there's a successful game called The Football Manager. Some years ago, they introduced a 3D engine to the game, in addition to its traditional 2D. So, previously, as a football (soccer) manager you'd been able to watch the actual matches only in 2D with your players represented by stylized circles, but now you were also able to watch them in 3D. And for me, and quite a few others, this was an awful change: the 3D engine is an attempt at a realistic portrayal of a match, but it's so unrealistic that it's actually a lot worse than the crude 2D view. The sprites look nothing like the real-world players they are meant to represent, their movement is clumsy, and so on. I get a similar feeling with these close-up scenes. The artificiality of the bodies and their movements is so obvious that it feels immersion-breaking for me.

All they had to do was check ClevelandGuardians.com and they didn’t do it.

I agree with all that you have written. I interpreted your comment about game’s graphic in a different way. Visual fidelity is on high level even at this point and is likely to get better - but there is a lot of junk, and cutscenes in particular need serious work to add to the experience rather then detract. It might/ might not happen. There is a lot of work to be done there both when it comes to generated cutscenes, and more directed ones. If there won’t be a big leap in quality, then yes those will end up embarrassingly distracting and won’t work on release, and I would rather not have them at all. It is not impossible, though, that they are still expanding library of emotes, working on chaining animations, figuring out staging etc. And hopefully, it will all be reviewed before shipping. I also really really really want a major UI overhaul. BG3 still doesn’t release for quite a while so they have time to improve. As I mentioned I think it moves in right direction, so it all depends on how far they get before the release date comes.

Act of War : High Treason. Certainly more difficult than the base game, I guess that is to be expected with expansions. But ok. Story looks like even more OTT nonsense than before though, but no poorly acted FMVs to go with it.

Only got time to start Bebop (also forgot BluRay on PC isn't as easy as it should be). First episode was fun enough to watch, but felt a bit short.

Hahahaha, you just reminded me about Princess Mononoke and when it showed in cinemas over here... Parents were bringing children to watch it and right of the bat the protagonist was taking off limbs and heads with a bow and arrow, queue parents leaving the cinema... Pretty sure that is what killed anime in cinemas over here...

Just bought that last night, saw it on NPR's FB page. Title was fitting, know 3 Russian women with pets named Pushkin. Although, really Pugachev's better for a cat.

Just for the record this is still an issue in 2021 and at this point it's pretty obvious it won't be fixed anymore.

I think I talked about this before when ratings last came up in here, but I really think ratings only make sense when you have the context of a person's entire list of ratings to compare again. Me saying Cardcaptor Sakura is a 9.5/10 doesn't mean a danged thing unless you can look at my other ratings and see hey, he's only given literally one other thing out of literal hundreds of other things he's rated a 9.5 or greater before, so that must really mean something. Meanwhile, other people give out 10/10s constantly just because they thought something was good and they're used to giving perfect scores for literally anything that they think is just good. Not me - like I said, my average score is 61%, and out of the hundreds of movies I've watched, I've only given an 8/10 (what I consider to be "great") or higher a total of 26 times, so that rating really means something within my rating system. But you can't see all of my ratings since they're on a private site, hence why I was trying to give some quick context with the list I made, . As for what an 8/10 means...like I said, it means "great" - how it gets there is irrelevant. Some might just be consistently great but never go beyond that for whatever reason, others might be utterly perfect in some aspects (e.g. Steven Universe's main cast are my idea of "perfection") but fall short in other ways (e.g. average to poor filler episodes that feel kind of irrelevant and inexplicably drag down later seasons). Earlier, I said I rate stuff roughly 75% subjectively (how much everything appeals to me specifically in terms of characters, themes, plot, setting, world-building, style et al.) and 25% objectively (how well-constructed all the elements are, attention to detail, competent writing, acting, and so on). For movies, I don't usually give out anything more than a 7.5/10 if a work has what I would consider to be some kind of large bugbear or hangup that markedly took away from its enjoyment unless it really truly was consistently great except for that - I'm a little kinder towards longer TV shows like Sailor Moon purely because of their length and the quantity of good times given outside of that, so I don't usually penalize e.g. something like SuperS quite as much as if the equivalent were to happen in a movie. That's usually not an issue for me either, especially considering a lot of my favorite stuff (including anime) is often quite aged, so clearly I have some kind of appreciation and fascination for older stuff. It's just that...I'm a really tough person to appeal to, and I usually have excellent (but by no means perfect) intuition for what will appeal to me based on how a film/show is communicating to me right off the bat. How themes are being communicated, the types of characters used (and even the way characters just look, talk, or express themselves), art or filming style, setting - everything like that has a sort of unconscious language to it. My intuition for anime is still admittedly a work-in-progress, since it's not a medium I've had extensive experience with and so I'm still forming heuristics for it, but it feels like it's getting better, and when I take just even a super quick look at Akira, it seems like a very masculine (in the worst sense) main character that I'm probably going to hate, an edgy almost cyberpunk-ish setting that I'm probably not going to care for, looks way too action-oriented for my tastes... It just doesn't look like it's going to appeal to me. I'm very particular about what I like, and these are already setting off red flags for me - I'm still going to give it a chance eventually, but that's my perspective going into it. lmao - while I'm usually a bit of a proponent for darker stuff (up to a limit, of course, and given the right kind of kid who can handle it) being suitable for younger audiences because of how meaningful and formative such works can be at that age, I think that's a bit much...

Fair enough, it is near your home, so is a good thing to do. You don't want to give random people possible evidence to hunt you down. Every piece of information is a tile to make a mosaic about your life. Is why I lie 90% of the time.

I'd love to get the cinema experience for this one, just like, in a real cinema. Looking at Germany in envy here. Guess there's a first time for everything, huh. edit: Our film and TV rating system keeps being ridiculous when it comes to animation. Not only did they put Grave of the Fireflies into the FSK 6 category (i.e. suitable for children of 6 years and older), but they did the same for Violet Evergarden. Hilarious. How inept can you get?