Tale

If reading detaches from a character, then reading books never would have caught on. A good performance can bring a character to life in amazing ways, but it's not such a requirement. And it has to be good. Mediocre performances do very little for me.

A Fantastic Fear of Everything is a real fun movie. I started Hector and the Search for Happiness hoping it'd be more of the same. Got bored of that one rather fast.

Looks like a higher minimum and lower recommended. Just from looking at what Steam says.

AMA on Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5c3nkh/we_are_obsidian_entertainment_creators_of_aaa/ Stealing a couple specifically about Tyranny.

New policy. Bethesda did the same for DOOM and Skyrim Remastered. Now, they could also be doing it to hide a turd. The cup game requires you to have multiple cups after all.

Maybe this is what I need to actually start writing seriously again. My stories were never very optimistic.

That's a safe assumption.

You said spectrum, so I was going to be a smartbutt and say violet. But then I clicked your link and saw things were color coded. It's getting harder and harder to be irreverent anymore.

Collections people are like salesmen on some truly horrifying drugs. They're really interesting to deal with, for particular values of interesting. Just to be clear, they're not calling for me. But I have had to answer the phone with them calling for both the business I work for and other employees at the company. An all too common tactic is them angrily threatening to call business associates supposedly under the pretense of seeking information. Sometimes by claiming to have contact information for entities that don't even exist. They avoid saying they're doing it to just harass the debtor by getting them in some sort of trouble, because my understanding is that would be illegal. But that's exactly what they're doing. It's the entire reason I've fielded calls directed at other employees of the company. They call saying they want to know "the company's procedures for when they visit and serve papers to the employee." But, despite seeing at least half a dozen of such calls, no employee has ever been served here. The point is entirely to get the company to put pressure on the employee.

It hasn't been 10 years since the last Final Fantasy, has it? Or is XV the continuation of the story that began in the game released 10 years ago? It was announced pretty much at the same time as Final Fantasy XIII. Which went on to have two of its own sequels, then there was another Final Fantasy MMO. So it was announced about 4 games ago. When it was announced, as Final Fantasy versus XIII, it garnered a lot of attention for being developed mostly by Kingdom Hearts and FF VII team members, as well as having a darker tone, action combat, and heavy inspiration from real world locations and the Japanese mafia. This, of course, appealed to the mid-20s me. The game's changed a lot since then, though, especially in the transition from versus XIII to XV, seeming to lose some of the dark and edgy aspect in particular. But I still like what I've seen.

Final Fantasy XV (10 years) and The Last Guardian (7 years).

Just a few weeks from two major PS4 game releases I've been looking forward to for about a decade and my PS4 starts ejecting discs randomly. I am not looking forward to this... I guess if it's still doing it tomorrow and I send it in, I'll probably have it back before they release. Or shortly thereafter.

I saw Dr. Strange on Friday. Good, not great. At no previous point in the Marvel films has the existence of a formula felt so obvious. My biggest complaint is about the titular characters arc. It's not believable. Not because I don't see why he changed, but because I never really felt where he started off. The Surgeon Strange never felt like a real person to me. So when he changed, for very little reason, it didn't matter much. Still, it was a good film. And the way the villain is defeated was simply fantastic. It also sets up what I hope to be one of Marvel's next great villains. Because the villain of this one was terribly shortchanged. Rumor is that Mads Mikkelsen had a bunch of scenes cut and I buy it. There's something in the existing dialogue and portrayal that hints at depth for the character well beyond what we got.

Jim Sterling put forth the idea that EA did it to try and steal Call of Duty's audience. Battlefield has its own established audience, so its release was safe. But Titanfall 2 was meant to nibble away at CoD. If true, EA was either very optimistic about Titanfall 2's performance or they were very reckless towards their partners, unleashing it like a suicide attack, not really caring what happened to it so long as it hurt the opposition. I prefer to consider the latter idea, personally.

A bit of Final Fantasy VI, I don't remember it being this easy before. It probably was, though. And a bit of Fallout 4, checking out the Vault-Tec Workshop. Got some interesting ideas in there, but the lighting is really bad. All placeable lights are basically bright spotlights. You end up having to put lights everywhere so the lighting isn't spotty, it's silly. When it was outdoors the lighting worked because of ambient light in daytime. Everything got real dark at night, but that sort of fit the mood. But now we're dealing with a vault, where all the clean vaults were naturally fully lit. And it's more annoying because all the placeable lights don't fit to the ceilings well, leaving a gap. Still trying to figure out my layout, though.

Finished Corpse Party. It ends with some unresolved plots and no PC port of the sequels. That's disappointing. I'd still consider getting them if my backlog wasn't huge already, because it got pretty good towards the end there.

Tedious is my biggest complaint about ME1, not ME2. Have I mentioned just how much I hate the Mako today? We're talking the ending of Old Yeller at this point, and I'm not entirely sure that the frothing beast that needs to be put down isn't me. Anyway, Corpse Party seems to pick up in Chapter 3. Of 5. To such a degree that Chapter 3 is when they finally have the opening credits. This seems like a weird decision.

Zootopia, pretty good film. And now I see that Kung Fu Panda 3 is also on Netflix, so that's next.

I actually found that article really interesting.

I hit it up whenever I'm dogsitting over my dad's. He's got the premium channels. This is also my primary source of Game of Thrones and Ash vs Evil Dead.

A little more Corpse Party. There's this one part in chapter 2 with instant death stuff going on. Got kind of sick of all that. And so I did more Shadows of the Empire. Looks like there's a bug in it, one person says it's due to running over 30 FPS, where you slip and slide when going downhill. This makes one level with lots of slopes and ledges ridiculous. So I'm not thrilled with that either. It's really killing my nostalgia.

I wouldn't hate it if it turned out the player was an aspect of Kyros. A piece split off to explore her empire. Amnesia, on the other hand, "hilarious" is not the word I would use.

VB's ending was you picking a target to save from nukes. This is the ending of Lonesome Road, with the difference being that it's from the ground, not satellites. Many ideas in New Vegas and its DLC originate in that same design document, ultimately. That the final result is so different doesn't really change that, it's more a reflection of the passage of time. Developers with changed interests, working in a different engine, with different limitations, budgets, and schedules. I'm not saying they're the exact same thing, Van Buren and New Vegas. I am saying New Vegas is the end result of Van Buren, following a much longer journey of development. Like how we can see that the only reason Ulysses wears that mask is because they couldn't get the lip sync on his custom face working right, we can see that New Vegas is the result of time, compromise, and change upon VB.

I wouldn't say it takes basic elements, it takes very important elements. But important elements that have changed substantially over time to be distinct from the Van Buren originals. Like the burned man, MT, and the ending.