algroth

Say what you will, but at least the animated movie knew what it was and to whom it was aimed at. I'll defer to Kermode on the Bay films: Though this is really a tallest dwarf competition. If Bumblebee turns out to be the best Transformers film ever, it merely overcame a *very* low bar.

Maybe not hit by a bus, but apparently he's collapsed and is currently in the hospital.

VAMOS ARGENTINA

Non-stop Tokyo cruisin' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_4k418q-F8

Not looking good for Germany...

Must be the new director/goalie multiclass (I say this because "godan dag" is apparently "good day" in Icelandic). Edit: So this is an old tweet but I reckon it would be related to the prompt: https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/910639399418855424

I smoulder with all the flame and fury of a standard fantasy setting's Mordor stand-in at the fact that all this content could have been released on release date along with the game as it was in patch 1.1.1, and all other DLCs too! Or better yet, a month after the kickstarter ended, that should have given the greedy, lazy hacks the time to make their lousy game! With all DLCs to boot, which they've obviously cut from the base game to make more money from! Now, in all seriousness, much as more content is appreciated I cannot say I'm extremely excited for the content we got in this DLC. The crewmembers, even Ponamu Bird-Scorned, are merely generic crewmembers as far as I can tell (with the possible exception that one of them is a four-star navigator), whilst the new ship gear could have done a little more to offer further variety in our ship builds, considering how the base game has only one option for steer, lantern and anchor and if I'm recalling correctly right now the DLC steer, lantern and anchor all offer essentially they same stats as the former. I would also like to see a greater variety of ship upgrades that are a little more realistic/historical-looking, and less overtly high-fantasy as what we got here. And of course I have to thoroughly condemn Obsidian's practice of sacrificing live animals to a coven of witches in their basement, in response to these nefarious acts I will boycott their eventual release of New Vegas 2!

Worse... It could be an instructional video.

This is turning out to be such a crazy group. Nigeria giving Argentina a fighting chance, let's go!

What a mess. I can only imagine how this will rebound in the social situation here right now, when even what little panem et circenses you get turns out as bitter and hopeless as what we just saw. Terrible showing, and couldn't come at a worse time.

Can see Iceland beating Nigeria though. That leaves Argentina in a very complicated state if Iceland and Croatia draw.

To be honest, Messi hasn't been doing much at all this match. In the short time he's been on the field Higuain seems to have done more than him through the whole match. Mascherano too.

****ing Christ, that goal...

I greatly enjoyed the Endless Paths myself, but I don't exactly miss it in this game either. But I wouldn't mind a big Watcher's Keep/Durlag's Tower-type dungeon in an expansion either.

Iran did very well against Spain. Props.

Dunno about the princess, but I swoon.

Not that I care overly much about any Doom film or its protagonist's gender, but for the sake of argument I will say that the 'change' is a dodgy one for me, not because of any opposition to a female-led Doom per se but because it does reek of studio cynicism at its most transparent - but hey, it's a videogame adaptation and Hollywood gonna Hollywood. Nevertheless I do feel that there are better ways of changing the leading role's gender than merely announcing that "this former guy will now be a gal": the new Star Wars films are an easy good example of this as they present the new leads as a new generation of characters inhabiting the world alongside the old as opposed to a "reimagining" of the original party in something of a reboot; even better though is Mad Max: Fury Road, where the film really all about Furiosa's story but instead of presenting her as a Mad Maxine, Max acts as something of a viewpoint character and witness through whom we see Furiosa's story develop. Both are cases where the saga's focus shifts towards a character of a different gender whilst "respecting the canon" of those worlds up to that point and so on. For Doom's case you could very easily make this non-issue an even smaller non-issue just by setting the events as following the DoomGuy's exploits or happening in parallel and in a different place to the same (or even make the main protagonist a team of protagonists though I assume the fact that it's one person against the armies of Hell is part of the saga's appeal), merely setting the "DoomGal" as a different character to the "DoomGuy" and so on. But, eh. Doubt I'll be seeing it either way.

https://www.thewrap.com/xxxtentacion-rapper-producer-dies-20/ XXXTentacion died. I wasn't a fan, but 20 is way too young. R.I.P.

You try too hard.... You show me where any of those people included their losses, diseases, etc in their games... Humor is a different thing. User experience does not define personal comfrontation through story. A story can have many things but I don't think wht you're saying is what I'm saying. So I assume a narrative is only personal if it involves some autobiographical element or other to it? I cannot answer this question for you because I don't really care about the personal lives of the devs behind the games I like, but I can tell from playing the games themselves that there is a thematic and stylistic consistency through the body of work of the likes of Avellone, Cain and Schafer, or a definite, distinct vision in games like Myst or Wasteland. I don't think their works are any less "personal" regardless of how they may immediately compare to their real lives and such. Is it really asinine to rather replay New Vegas for the 10th time than to play these games which I know I won't or don't like nearly as much? I didn't clearly write out that the Tomb Raiders should be grouped with your Ass Creeds and the like, then the Indies in their own group of quirk, but figured that'd be self explanatory. That said, I don't enjoy the whole realm of gaming like I do when I just sit down and play New Vegas or a few other titles. I don't think I share much in common with the industry these days or perhaps ever - basically here for the Cainarsky, and once that's done, so am I. Not into Pillars - couldn't be any less interested in the setting/style. Same goes with every game listed here. Bastion was one of the best written games in recent times, but the gameplay? Heh, not so much. Many of today's games are remarkably unreplayable in my eyes. Maybe I misunderstood, but you did write this: Fair enough that it's entirely your prerogative if there's no game out recently that you know that you've liked, but these most definitely sound like blanket statements that hardly hold to scrutiny when applied across the board, within or without their "groups" and the likes, any more than someone stating Radiohead is all the "same bland britpop" would its own.

Great post coming from the guy who always claims that anyone who could possibly agree with me is a "sockpuppet" or fake account. I take it that you're not done with your little vendetta since you just came out of nowhere to insult me without anything relevant to say. What this is really about is the fact that you hate that I'm still here, and furthermore, I'm not going anywhere lol, k. Read whatever you want into my reply.

As usual, Sonic's arguments are extremely poor and thoroughly baity (attributing preferences for older games to "nostalgia" as if one couldn't attribute the opposite to recency bias, appealing to the Courtier's Reply to make a case for Taylor bloody Swift of all people, proposing blanket statements regarding the "evolution of storytelling" without further argument or that personal stories in earlier games are "proven as non-existent in games from 70's/80's/90's as they were far more cashgrabs then than there are now" as if a) the latter statement somehow proves the previous one to be true, or b) as with the height of Hollywood's studio system in the 30s and 40s not precluding artists like Alfred Hitch****, Leo McCarey or John Ford from injecting their own authorial touch to their work while most definitely working for the industry, people like Chris Avellone, Tim Schafer or the Millers were pretty undeniably injecting their own sensibilities and authorship to their work back then regardless of under what system they worked in or who for), I do have to agree with the overall argument that games *have* progressed a fair bit since those times and that the notion that "games these days are garbage", or that any one game can summarize the state of modern gaming, is really rather asinine considering the sheer amount of games on offer and the many diverse forms that these can come in. As if the 2013 Tomb Raider can in any way reflect the experience of playing games like Deadfire, Bloodborne, Ori and the Blind Forest, Undertale, Cities: Skylines, Overwatch, Doom, Sunless Sea, Super Mario Odyssey, Inside, Into the Breach and so on, or any of these the others. I also disagree with the assumption that "retro games" are necessarily the same as the games they are "emulating" or being inspired by - for starters I don't believe that a particular style or genre being revised decades after the fact can be the exact same it was decades prior, I do believe there is a definite process of refinement, recontextualization and transformation involved, there's a reason why so many new synthpop and synthwave artists today are loving the Minneapolis sound riffs or the Tangerine Dream/John Carpenter synth pads but do away with the David Sylvian/Roland Orzabal crooning, the "Purple Rain" reverb or the Human League/Dead or Alive anthemic choruses and the likes - meanwhile, defects like record scratches, tape distortions and so on have become a conscious design choice and not mere accident. For all its flaws a game like Transistor is utilizing the isometric perspective in a very different and much more deliberate and self-aware manner than the isometric RPGs of old were doing their own, and to a fairly different effect - likewise the "scripted interactions" in Pillars feel to me as a very "modern" addition inasmuch as they immediately comment on the game's aesthetic as a conscious design choice that is deliberately steering away from the more "cinematic" forms of either previous Obsidian games or much of the genre's more mainstream contemporary examples and so on, and they do likewise open up a different means for the game to tell its story and so on, which to me at least feels very fresh and inspired. Likewise I think it's absurd to not recognize that between several of these games and their spiritual predecessors there's been decades of progress in game design that have been put to use to either smooth out the wrinkles or straight-up innovate and create very fun and satisfying twists to these previous formulas and so on (e.g. Undertale's particular approach to turn-based combat and so on). Granted, with each example above your mileage may vary, but still I stand by these points.

This match is an utter clownfiesta. Utterly shambolic, all in the most entertaining fashion.