LadyCrimson

John Wick 2 - not even a smidgen of the emotional motivation like the first had, which imo was what elevated the first a bit above most such films. Pretty much nothing but scenes of headshots, knife/fist fights, and street chases (on foot and in cars). There might have been a plot. Action was well done and the dry wit is still there, but eh. Just another violent action movie. I've been watching a lot of Korean or Asian films via Netflix recently. Train to Busan is really good. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5700672/ --they're fast zombies, btw, so if you hate those...but the claustrophobia of the train works and the characters and their struggle, tropes tho they may be, were effective.

HuluPlus is quite handy these days. No commercials. I mean, even Comcast's On-Demand of recent episodes of a current season still plays the ads. So as long as HuluPlus has no ads, I'll keep subbing. Between them, Netflix and Amazon, there's always something to watch or catch up on when I'm in a TV mood. Designated Survivor is kind of a guilty pleasure show. It's totally over the top, melodrama, redonkulous. Yet just like the series 24, I keep pressing "next episode" because it's like not being able to stop yourself from reaching for another pizza. Hulu also had a dubbed version of Season 1 of Attack on Titan (anime) and I finally got hubby to watch it that way (he hates subtitles, too slow of a reader). I didn't think he'd like it, actually - he's not an anime fan at all and this one is a bit strange - but he ended up sitting through the whole thing in a couple nights, vs. walking out of the room after an episode or two. I don't think he loved it - but he seemed to at least find it watchable/entertaining. Sadly, the (shorter) 2nd season is only subtitled so far, so he won't watch that with me.

The next Alpha for 7 Days to Die is out (or at least the "experimental" version of it) so I checked it out for a few hours. I haven't played in months. The distant-POI is very nice, visually, and the way they do the skill and chr. leveling is better now - no more grinding 10000 axes. The new wolves rarely seem to attack unless you're standing on their heads but I suppose they're decent visual addition, giving more "life" to the world. Same with the vultures. The electricity aspect is kinda "meh" to me, although the traps are definitely fun. But ofc it's still basically the same gameplay. And it becomes more unoptimized than ever. If you don't have a mega rig, good luck trying to run it without memory leaks hogging all your RAM, fps drops all over, having to set graphic settings to super ugly low standards etc. Every time they do something that they claim will improve performance, they take up any gains and more by adding all these other things. By the time the game is released an i7 will be the minimum requirement. :D

My cat is actually a dog in disguise. If I go outside he sits by the door waiting for me to come back, that type of thing. :D He's a rescue as well, about 11 y.o. now with a medicine-required hyperactive thyroid condition, but always been mellow and very trusting. Took about 3 trips before he got "used" to it, tho. Still gets upset if he can't see me during. Needy cat. ....and today, after meeting with some contractors, we're just sitting outside enjoying the sun and the huge backyard while waiting for the time we'll be visiting hubby's cousin/aunt in the evening.

Are we there yet? Van's so much easier because you can let him out sometimes, vs my smaller station wagon, and ofc he's much happier that way vs. being stuck in the dog-crate wire cage the entire 4 hours.

Leaving town in a few hours. Can't sleep. Same ol' story. At least I don't have to drive. Hubby gets to do that while I sit in the back of the van keeping a lonely, nervous, cat-in-a-cage company. Travelin' by auto with a cat. Always fun. Mr. Black is actually fairly good natured about it. Doesn't even mind the harness/leash. Was trying to read threads and wondering when the forum text became so bloody tiny that I had to literally squint to read it (27" 1080 IPS monitor), then remembered that I had the browser back on default view for full-screen video viewing. "Ctrl +, Ctrl +, Ctrl +, Ctrl +" .... ahhh that's much better. Have yet to get bifocals. Stopped wearing contact lenses (would rather always wear distance vision glasses then carry/pull out readers in my pocket/purse) and so now in stores I have to push down and peer over the tops of my glasses like an old granny to be able to read/use the payment keypad touchscreens etc. As they say .... getting older. It'll happen to you too!

I could never get into the Dark Tower books, back when they started. Maybe now that one can read all (I think?) of them at once, I might get more into them. Between real-life, gaming, Twitch etc. + worsening close-up vision I almost never read anymore, however. At any rate, I wonder if this movie will be accessible to those who haven't read the books. Because I don't care if he doesn't seem like "Roland" - Idris Elba is fantastic and the trailer looks fun. But if I can't understand anything in the movie because it assumes I know every original book reference it'll make or something, that would be no good for me.

Sooo.....I loved/love Final Fantasy XV, but this new leaderboard, weekly events they've begun is turning it into some kind of half-arsed online game. Not a multiplayer game, just an online game (there will be a MP DLC eventually, tho). The earlier limited-time hunts were brief fun for a nice one-time reward. The leaderboard stuff is a bit annoying and for a potentially new player, extremely annoying in some cases. eg, new player fishes for the first time ever and might see/have to click through a dozen "fishing quest active/how to fish/scores will be...." menu messages before and after they fish. Wouldn't be a great 1st impression. Or when ranking quests auto-trigger when you go near the area, whether you want them to or not. Annoying even to someone like me, if they wanted to start a new game and don't care about any of that. The worst is that the current leaderboard task is a combat oriented one, whereby 75% of those who know about a certain super-glitch is abusing the glitch to get impossible high scores/rankings, and so far SE seems to care not at all. Not that I care about rankings. It's just stupid. The glitch, btw, is/would be harmless fun in a SP game but ruinous to a "leaderboard" function. Shades of Diablo2 cheating. Is this a single-player game or an online MMO. I'm not really sure anymore. What is it with dev's nowadays - not everything has to have some kind of "online" component or MP awkwardly attached to it 8 months later. I'm still ticked that either SE or Sony doesn't allow small DLC to be hard-saved into a single-player SAVE FILE. Have to be 'net connected for weapon DLC to be loaded into your game. If you're not, those little items you paid for disappear from chr. inventories/aren't available to use. wtf is up with that. Oh well, maybe the more story-based Prompto and Ignis DLC will still be good.

I've finally mostly finished my level-1 challenge run of Final Fantasy XV and am now back to the "some of these other games are sorta fun to watch someone else play, but nothing interests me enough to play it myself" routine. I tried this little adventure game called Firewatch (PC version) for about 25 minutes. It's kinda cool, and the scenery is pretty, but meh. Uncharted 4 came "free" when I bought the PS4, so I decided to buy the Nathan Drake Collection for $20 as well, thinking maybe I should start from the beginning. And of course I haven't touched any of them. Such is my gaming life, most of the time these days.

^ yeah, that one's pretty popular on Twitch (Horizon). Looks like a good game. I might check it out someday. The uncanny valley when the characters are talking in the dialogue bits is really disconcerting at times, tho. Probably the worst uncanny valley I've had while watching gameplay.

I've decided that all dramatic game moments are greatly improved by wearing a Moogle/Chocobo hat.

Just have one (the black one in my avatar) - his buddy passed. Mr. Black ended up with hyperthyoid and nearly died as well, but medicine seems to work for now. Yeah they've become quite the prestige/desirable retro house purchase as of late. Ours isn't an actual Eichler, couldn't afford something like that. But the guy who built it was obviously a fan. :D

After watching some people on Twitch play it, I bought Final Fantasy XV. Which means I also finally bought a console (PS4) for the first time since the original NES. :D It's been handy when traveling, since I'm not going to haul my desktop back and forth all the time. So, I've had the PS4 for almost 4 months now, but I still just play Final Fantasy. It has a lot of issues with pacing and (if you're into such) story depth and lore but meh, that's not really why I play it. I see it more as a party action-rpg and I've always loved party combat vs. solo character combat. As I've never played any other FF, I can't compare it in that regard - I take it a lot of old school fans dislike it a lot - but I have a lot of fun with it. The goofy-haired boy band is fun to hang out with and the combat, while not complex, is nicely visceral and fun. When originally playing "blind", had some decent challenges here and there, mostly in the post-game content (overall it's a pretty easy game tho). I think they did a good job re: the four guys and their dynamic together and the main story worked - on an emotive level - where they were concerned. The rest was lacking. And their attempted mix of open world then very linear/scripted story telling didn't work well for me. Still...with all it's flaws, I still have a lot of fun. Edit: the Brotherhood anime episodes were quite enjoyable as backstory, as well. The movie (Kingsglaive) didn't work as well for me. I found it kind of boring.

Boo. Just dropping in to say hello. Nice to see so many of the familiar faces around and that the forum itself is still here. I sorta lost interest in gaming and the internet in general for a while, plus life got really busy, lost a few family members, hubby had a few serious health issues, etc. (he turned 50 last year, jeez, time flies...). We bought another house that we were planning to retire into a while back but now we're having second thoughts re: location and workload to fix it up. It's a nice house tho, on an acre, with an Eichler-influenced giant open living area w/vaulted ceilings and near to some of hubby's family to boot. Driving back and forth from Bay Area up North is becoming a serious chore, however. We'll see. ... life is settling a bit recently and we're doing pretty good at the moment. Started getting a bit back into the 'net stuff during trips up North where there's not much else to do at night in a largely empty house, heh. Anyhoo, cheers all.

I think the superhero film fad is probably close to being over (for a while). Not immediately, but business-wise, it just might be losing it's appeal/reaching a peak - they'll become unsure how to make it all "bigger" for continued audience lure. I found Berardinelli's thoughts on the matter sorta interesting. http://www.reelviews.net/reelthoughts/reelthought_1430317224 Trends, cyclic repeat. Reminds me of how annoyed I became at the multiple-ending syndrome - where a film will flash-edit between 3-5 different final confrontations or something.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961). Interesting doomsday scenario film, I quite liked it. I read that the US version added the bells at the end tho...which is too bad. I think I prefer the idea of them not being there. Guess I'm on another "older" movie kick.

Well, I don't think this thread is going anywhere constructive. Next time maybe we could focus a bit more on the topic and less on who may be insulting who.

Tom Hardy will forever be "the clone of Captain Picard" to me. ...the trailer for this movie makes me want to see it in the theater for the visual vista stuff alone (definitely some kewl looking bits in that trailer). But I'm not a huge Mad Max fan (seen them all, don't dislike but don't love either, find them often dull), so I'll probably skip it. The one critic I tend to at least like these days (James Berardinelli - he's not given to hyperbole, usually) gave it 3 out of 4 stars and had good to say about it. (edit - make that 3.5 stars. His new page layout is giving me eye fits).

Hubby came home, told me BB King had died and that he and a workmate went out for a beer to toast the man. I think it's one of the first times a "famous" person has passed where my husband showed any feeling at all. Poor hubby. We saw him in concert a few times in the 80's/90's. Definitely one of the goods ones. RIP and all that.

Interesting fur coloration for a cat.

Still can't see it. Googling around this seems to be an issue with Dropbox - the "share link" is not a true img. link, but rather some kind of framed page reference, even if the url you initially see in dropbox appears to be one... did you try adding ?raw=1 after the link you're trying to use? That's the only fairly recent solution I saw with a quick Google. ...at any rate, if you can't figure it out at dropbox, imgur is probably the easiest for occasionally sharing image files on forums. When you upload on imgur you can just r-click to View Image and get the direct link that way.

Define more meaningful battles? They can't all have deep reasons for choosing combat, because then even those would become rote and tiresome. Or wandering maps with nothing to do in them except admire scenery, which doesn't work as well in non-3D games, imo. It would have been nice to feel like there were more times with peaceful solutions, or if the land maps had more of a feeling of wild expanse vs. feeling like it takes 60 seconds to trek across/clear the fog whilst encountering wolves and things. Maybe the Pillars maps are similar in terms of physical size to some older games (?), but they feel smaller to me, which can make the encounters feel too closely spaced together.

You're linking to something that isn't the direct image. The forum will only embed direct image links using forum BBCode. ( IMG tags around a link that ends in the image extension, like http-whatever-com/image.jpg When I try to go directly to the link you're using, it gives me a Dropbox-403 error page and tells me I'm not signed into dropbox and can't view it.

Thanks for killing the boss for me, minions. Almost makes me want to pull out Diablo2 to play a summon-skelly Necro. Almost.