Bartimaeus

I have to imagine you'll like it a lot better than I did. There's a lot that can be forgiven and I genuinely wanted to be more generous towards it, but...um, I just couldn't, .

Experiencing something in a different time and place has always been one of my little musings of life: how would you feel about something (or even someone) if you experienced it right when and where you were supposed to? What might be some of your favorite things if they were given the perfect opportunity to impress themselves upon you? Alas.

The Primevals (2023). Filmed in 1994, but only released last year, was mentioned on RedLetterMedia, and my interest was piqued. Our characters and the story are...unfortunately dross, it's pretty much my least favorite kind of guy protagonist dude story, where our main character has an unhealthy obsession with something - yeti, for this particular movie - and is angry at a world that doesn't share his singular interest or irrational beliefs around them because he's a big dumb dip**** that can't let it go, and he ends up getting rewarded for it because surprise, it turns out that yeti are real, and that the garbage thesis he wrote in university (which was so bad that it actually caused him to fail and get kicked out of his program) about how yetis are totally real despite no evidence combined with his continued obsession on them makes him uniquely qualified to go investigate just how real they are! I genuinely loathe this kind of basis for characters being involved with a story, so the movie and I got off on the wrong foot immediately, and it didn't really get any better from there. Let's just say that while the stop-motion visual effects for the yeti are neat, the rest of the movie is kind of a dumb pile of crap, though I might be biased.

I never played the DLC in Bloodborne, didn't have a PS4 by the time the DLC came out. Looking forward to that...uh, kind of - playing those bosses for the first time on a no-level-up run should prove...interesting. On release, Shadow of Chernobyl had bizarre difficulty settings where choosing the lower difficulty settings made everything much harder because the majority of attacks by both the player and enemies would be "nulled" (i.e. not actually do any damage), while playing on the hardest difficulty would make them count. This sounds fair in theory (albeit making for arguably bad gameplay where people are just blasting each other in the face from point blank range and yet nothing would happen), but I think most who experienced it would say that it ended up favoring the AI because the player only has one gun that they can fire at any time while you can be fighting many AI characters/creatures, which means that if you're in a big fight with multiple enemies that you're trying to take down before you get outflanked and riddled with bullets from multiple angles, shooting one guy in the head ten times and having none of them count while everyone else continues to close in on and shoot you is disproportionately disadvantageous to the player. Hopefully they didn't do that again.

I haven't had much time to play, but I've been committing to an SL4 (lowest level you can be via choosing Waste of Skin as your class) run, and as far as second bosses go, I gotta say that Father Gascoigne is no Taurus Demon, he was legitimately pretty difficult. Out of DS1, DS3, and DeS (all of which I've beaten without levelling up, though I didn't do the DLC bosses in DS3 whereas I did for DS1), I think Bloodborne could turn out to be the toughest - though in fairness, I'd say that DeS was really not that difficult at level 1, Dark Souls 1 was mostly pretty difficult outside of a few particularly challenging spots and bosses, and DS3 was generally very to super difficult, so it really only has DS3 to compare against. No love for DS2, that game is straight poopy and I'll never play it again.

Told a friend that if the game wasn't crashing every 30 seconds, HoC's launch is still better than SHoC's. They told me they couldn't even get past pre-compiling shaders, the game kept crashing, so okay, maybe it is worse than SHoC's.

The old animated series from the 1970s, presumably, which I just remembered I've actually seen a few episodes of.

what the hell did we re-elect trump for if he isn't IMMEDIATELY DEPORTING these ILLEGAL GUESTS they're eating the posts and edits!

I obviously adore Cardcaptor Sakura, that hasn't changed with re-watching it...but I did try to take a little more of a critical eye this time around, and it was interesting to compare against my viewing of Sailor Moon, which was, after all, my very first anime show. For both of them being magical girl shows with nominally many of the same qualities, they have very different strengths...and very different weaknesses. It'll be interesting to re-visit Sailor Moon once the outstanding issues I have with the current offerings resolve themselves, which could unfortunately still be years away at this point. I think Cardcaptor Sakura will always be the more complete experience (probably further aided by the fact that it's a tigther 70 episodes and 2 movies instead of 250 episodes and 3 movies), but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll enjoy it more. And on the subject of Madhouse animated shows, I truly hope that Madhouse's Azuki-chan will someday get English subtitles for the complete series. That's one that will seriously continue to perturb me until it happens, as I'm 99.9 percent confident that I will at least really like it, and there is very precious little of anything across any medium of entertainment that I feel 99.9% confident about really liking.

Yeah, I thought Little Nemo was pretty good...a little weaker with narrative and characters than you'd probably prefer for such a big and well-animated title, but it's basically an attempt to be a Disney movie, and if someone watched it as a child, I could definitely see it being a very lovely (albeit maybe confusing) trip down nostalgia lane. Didn't know all the surrounding story about it though - thanks for that. I do remember Miyazaki famously saying it was the worst experience he ever had making a film, but in all fairness, it sounded a bit like developmental hell along with there being way too many cooks in the kitchen while trying to collaborate across the ocean and through a language barrier - none of which would be trivial now, much less then. I thought I'd actually written about watching Little Nemo last summer, but it appears I did not. Whoops, wouldn't be the first time.

The forum has been seriously wigging out for me like the last fifteen minutes - don't know how an earlier version of that post got re-posted like ten minutes after the first. I reported it for deletion. There's a 1995 movie, but it's not made by Madhouse and I don't think it has too much resemblance or relevance to the 1990 OVA, at least from what I can tell at a glance. And to my surprise, I apparently already tried the 3-episode 1996 OVA...which I rated even lower at 4.5/10. Whoops. I rather liked Vampire Hunter D - the original, that is. Bloodlust was...more hit and miss for me. Should probably re-watch the original to solidify my feelings about it at some point, though.

Hey, somebody else in here got it figured out. Sadly, my GPU is...uh, not up to Bloodborne's standards, so I'm playing through at, erm, 360p, but otherwise, it works pretty well. I'm waiting for them to fix a few outstanding issues before I really dig into it (like...lootable items in the world and items dropped by enemies are invisible last I checked, so you have to find everything unaided) before I dig into it, but I've managed to get to Father Gascoigne so far.

I wanted to like it more, especially as it's one of the very few titles I listed there that is both longer and presented in a nice high definition transfer (contrast that to the "Darkness of the Moon, Shadow of the Sea" OVA that I mentioned liking in the previous post, which was only available on a fairly miserable VHS transfer), but I just didn't really find it clicking for me. Characters weren't very interesting or likeable, and I found myself pretty checked out on the seemingly generic fantasy story from pretty much episode 1. But at least it's finally off my list now after years of being stuck there. Also was good to confirm that the Tenchi Muyou series certainly isn't for me either, so I can strike all of that as well.

Not directed at anything in particular, but... I've been on a bit of a watch spree in getting through a pile of random OVAs and movies from mostly the 80s and 90s over the last few weeks, and one thing that I am appreciating right now is when anime has editing that doesn't waste the viewer's time. I'd much rather see 20 minutes that don't keep the viewer for too long thanks to punchier pacing and not pointlessly lingering on shots or unnaturally slow dialogue compared to 25 minutes that feel like it they were edited specifically to hit a particular run time. There are times when being extra slow is cinematically appropriate, but a lot of older anime makes a bad habit of doing it when it is really just not. It's one of the things that I think Sailor Moon in particular usually got right outside of when the show was being more dramatic: when our characters are having just casual conversation between each other, the editing of conversation is appropriately quick and natural, like a live action conversation would be. It's one of the show's better qualities over even something like Cardcaptor Sakura, where dialogue is, a lot of the time, quite a bit slower than it probably should be. It seems like newer anime does not generally suffer from this problem quite as much, at least from the little that I've seen...though there are other problems that drive me even crazier aplenty, of course. Stuff I've watched over the last few weeks:

Baoh the Visitor (1989). I think this would have actually been pretty decent as far as stupid 80s action OVAs go if not for the atrocious writing. Frustrating to see fairly good direction and animation go to waste because the writer is total pants and insists upon inserting themselves constantly by writing out the dumbest things possible. Who wrote this, anyways? Oh, well, uh...true to form, I suppose?