Pop

Wait, a comic book character died? Seriously? ****, we'll never hear from him again, for reals. I give it a year. Then somebody will go back in time, or to another dimension, and save him / find a replica.

Recently invested in my first Sony console, a PS2, and have been whittling away at Metal Gear Solid 3. I'm somewhat softening to Hideo Kojima's style, but the in-game exposition and bald philosophizing is still roundly horrid. It's a quasi-serious comic book game, and I'm learning to be comfortable with that (if anything, Kojima's villains are the best around). If this turns out to be good I might conspire to acquire a PS3 when MGS4 hits. I'm aware that it's most likely going to come out for the 360, but I am very tired of waiting for games at the moment. Who knows. After MGS3, it's on to the secondary GTA games, Vice City Stories and Liberty City Stories, both of which look visually terrible to my Xbox-accustomed eyes. It's also going to be rough going without custom soundtracks.

NIN - The Beginning of the End HOORAY MY SHERONA!

Zodiac - I saw it and I honestly think it's Fincher's best film, maybe because it's so un-Fincher. My previous fears about a Black Dahlia-style lamefest were unfounded. The movie is set up into three parts. The first part is mostly about the Zodiac's murders and the messages he sends to the San Francisco Chronicle, and the crime reporter (Robert Downey Jr.) who's assigned to the case. The murder sequences are pretty ****ing intense, Cronenbergian in their unflinching eye towards brutality, but not stylized at all. It's ****ing scary. The second part of the movie deals with Mark Ruffalo's cop, Toschi (the inspiration for Bullitt) and his investigation into the murders. The Zodiac killings stopped rather abruptly, and as such the onscreen killings stop partway through. The third part of the movie deals with the Gyllenhaal's cartoonist becoming obsessed with the killer and his hunt even after the killings stop and public fear subsides. There are a lot of weird bit parts in the movie. Donal Logue (sp?) puts on a fat suit and plays a police chief, and there's a cameo featuring the blonde guy from Mr. Show (I was the only person in the audience thinking "awesome!" when I saw the guy). Despite the conclusion being pretty much a given (apparently nothing was embellished) they make it intense and watchable throughout the two and a half hours of playtime. It's well worth it, I think.

They, uh, handled the traps outside Bodhi's room. Not that Imoen couldn't handle it with her scant skills (that's one of the things that was kind of annoying about BG2 and ToB, thieves stopped increasing in utility at about 9th level) but it's something. I usually brought them along just so I could loot their corpses afterward.

tru that. It's because of all the great FR CRPGs that I like FR so much. I guess I'm biased. Actually, when I played BG2 and got to the vampire den part, I always used to recruit the Shadow Thieves and the paladins as well as Drizzt, and always, sometime in the middle of battle one of the NPCs would cast a fireball, but since the NPC was an ally the damage counted as coming from me. So the fireball would go off and all of a sudden Drizzt and the paladin would turn on me because I "attacked them", and they along with Bodhi would maul me. I had to cheat to kill the fireball NPC before he could get the shot off. So these days when I play I usually go it alone, or just with Drizzt.

I don't know, really. I got here late. But I suspect, since this is a thread about what sucks regarding Fantasy RPGs, that the Forgotten Realms came up at some point, and people here who hate Drizzt brought him up, resulting in this tangent. But I see what you're saying. Perhaps I'm too stuck in high school, where the only kids who played D&D were the ones who got way too into it, the guys who carried around spellbooks and "spell materials". Actually, I'm having the same problems you're having with PnP. Getting into the college years you just can't find the time anymore.

You should write for Pitchfork.

An avatar from the NIN Alternate Reality Game that's going on at the moment. It's not terribly significant. As for the sig, the top half is a random quote from Joe's Cafe, where I go for occasional amusement. The bottom half is a quote from the Tick, one of my favourite cartoon shows growing up.

heh, I said you're supposed to. It was probably a bad analogy anyway. Not nearly as much stigma attached to comics as to PnP. Conventional wisdom would probably assert that the nerdiest comic freak is pretty average by PnP standards, for whatever reason. *edit - k, I didn't actually say that. But I meant it!

I think Gromnir hit the nail on the head on this one, as far as what Drizzt represents. He really is the D&D Wolverine. A brave dual-wielding superhero outcast with no roots, who just happens to fight for good because he's a badass like that. He's the hero that every nerd is in his head when he plays D&D. Heh, And the whole thing with drow puzzles me. I like the idea of drow as the antithesis of the "eternal force of good" that surface elves embody (never much liked orcs in the antagonist's spot anyway) but the kind of frankly immature ideas that go with them just aren't cool. Drow are hypersexualized, and I'm not even sure if that started with RA Salvatore's god-awful descriptions (from what I remember, he threw an inkling of incest in one of the books I read.) It's kind of this idea that part of what makes the drow inherently evil is their casual attitude towards things of a carnal nature, just as much as their willingness to murder indiscriminately. It seems almost puritan to me. And part of the reason Drizzt is so popular amongst the geeks is his hypersexuality in relation to the rest of the D&D world. Living vicariously and all that (for the record, sex never works in PnP in any capacity. It's just... ew). It's one of the big reasons why I find playing PnP to be embarrassing (video game RPGs tend to be okay) it's supposed to be like comic books - you throw them away when you grow past adolescence.

Wow, the "B-ballnacht"... Actually, the proper term would have to be "B-ballcaust", I suppose. I used to have this comic book, "Sir Charles Barkley and the Referee Murders". It is the most ****ing awesome thing you will ever see in your life, period. It's out there on the internets somewhere. I'll have to track it down.

Truth. I escorted a friend of mine to our local hospital when she needed to take some pictures of their discarded equipment for her photography class. A week later I got a call from an FBI agent in Denver regarding suspicious activity, some old lady had sent them my license plate number and they followed it up. Freaked my mom the **** out. My name's in a folder somewhere in Langley, heh. So yeah, be careful.

Didn't this already come up in the Climate Change concert thread? I don't expect Al Gore to make any sacrifices that I wouldn't be willing to make. You can waste to ultimately prevent waste in the same way that you can wage war to ultimately promote peace.

Sad clowns. Landfills. Recently buffed floors. The possibilities are endless.

'nother leak. Different this time. NIN - In This Twilight

Heh, yeah, apparently virtual terrorism is becoming a problem in SL. But the sad thing is that it's not common trolling, it's committed by people who have some kind of virtual "political ideology". FFS, if you're going to throw rendered **** at people, do it because it's fun, not because the internet real estate board is corrupt.

Abandoned / condemned buildings. Old black dudes.

Depends, really. I've found that if a business stakes a lot of its success on local reputation, word of mouth or repeat individual customers, its service will be good. Working at Wal-Mart, the customer was definitely not on the top of our list of concerns. Of course, there are a lot of factors, and it's not a universal law, but that seems to sum it up nicely for me. So I'd say it isn't dead.

fxd. You know EA got on this because of the massive success of the movie. Space will never be the same!

I got one that said "People are watching you". That was odd.

Wow, there are a lot of people who don't finish their games. I finish most every game I play. Maybe it's because I was just a kid when I started, and I had a lot of time and focus. That having been said, there are a few games that, for whatever reason, I've never finished. Barely touched: Diablo II (mostly because of roleplayer's remorse and boredom in the Second Act) Halfway through: Fallout Tactics GTA 2 Fell at the last hurdle: Icewind Dale II The Godfather GTA 3 GTA Vice City GTA San Andreas I don't know why, but I've never brought myself to finish a GTA game.

Once again, another (intentional) leak. Nine Inch Nails - Me, I'm Not

I've just played both too many times to get anything out of them. Same thing with the Fallouts, IWDs, NWNs, Bloodlines, etc. etc. The whole game is so familiar to me that it's more of a chore to play than something fun and exciting, which is unfortunate, because they were great initially. I actually prefer the ie engine to the more modern engines I've seen.

SiN: Emergence should be under Category IV, not Category III.