Bartimaeus

Especially Ruby Rhod. He's mostly why I had to mention "ears" in the previous post.

1. The system likely works the same as Rainbow 6: Siege's, where only one person can be a specific character at a time - as such, if everyone owns Luke but you haven't grinded another 40 hours for another character (and presuming nobody has chosen them too), congratulations, back to the trash can with you. So yeah, unlocking additional characters is indeed very relevant. 2. Ahh, and here's the problem. See, most of the rest of us don't want normal gaming to turn into the radioactive waste dump that is mobile gaming, . Also, yeah, what Shady said above.

It's painful to sit through. If it was just Bruce Willis screwing around doing his usual bit, it would be an alright flick...but most everyone else in that movie, Jojovich especially, makes me want to rip my eyes out and my ears off.

To be fair, those started off as achievement unlocks, then eventually they added random drops of actual items (not crates) in addition to the unlocks. Then if you weren't getting what you wanted they added the ability to craft things into other things. It was all free updates adding content beyond the base game, and continually responding to criticism from new players who had less "generational wealth" who wanted the ability to get the items that they wanted. All the way to up to adding an item stores and going f2p eventually. Which was certainly necessary at some point if they were to justify free updates. Imo TF2 is one of the all time greats, especially before it went f2p. I respect basically everything Valve did with the game until the stupid Golden Wrench bull****. Which was an attempt to get people to craft away their inventories before they godfathered all items in under vintage status and started to have item rankings. Yeah, at the time, I was okay with the achievement unlocks because they didn't take too long to get (and actually, it was utterly trivial to cheat your achievements via the Steam Achievement Manager and/or the achievement unlock servers), but when they added the store and crates and piles of non-achievement weapons is where I really started drawing the line and quit pretty shortly after. Things really only got worse from there.

Do we really know Luke & Vader will have significantly better stats, or is it speculation based on their prominence within the original stories that make people assume they'll be unbalanced in game play? EDIT - I also believe EA has announced they're lowering the 40hrs to 15 for Luke and Vader, then 10 for the others (and 5 for one of them?) Reading more elsewhere, we know that, at the very least, Darth Vader and Luke have special force abilities (I read that Luke specifically has force pushes and force speed/rushes). I don't know about general stats - I presume we'll know more on release. As for EA, yeah...after the internet raised a hell of a ruckus and whined until all our ears bloody fell off. Goes to show once again that screaming and whining like petulant children can absolutely have an effect. Personally, I think it's all still baloney...but I'm not the target audience here.

There are 16 heroes. So that's over 600 hours - maybe a couple of them are unlocked by default, and maybe some of them are a little less than 40 hours? That's still an utterly ludicrous time commitment to unlock your freaking basic classes in a game of this type.

Uh, except the dozens of alternative weapons that you either have to grind for or buy in TF2, Keyrock. Some of them play similarly to the default weapons, but a whole lot of them don't.

I think the majority of people who play these sorts of games look at them as being pickup-and-play: you don't want to spend the first 40 hours of the game getting crushed because either you got the game later than everyone else or because a slew of people just bought their way to better stats. I certainly don't want to be concerned with that crap - I never would've played Team Fortress 2 if the only class you started with was the Soldier and you had to grind 40 hours for some in-game currency for each additional character unlock. It's such a crappy experience. (Similarly, after Team Fortress 2 started adding dozens of alternative weapons that you either had to buy or grind for, I quit playing...that, and because all the alternative weapons were making it difficult to play casually because of all the random crap that you couldn't really plan for anymore due to the sheer amount of stuff in the game.)

I only vaguely remember seeing commercials for Lucy...

Some of us find any amount of grinding to be completely reprehensible - there's also the fact that these types of games never used to be designed with it in mind, and now suddenly they are because companies figure they can make money off of the people who don't want to. If you're going to introduce a crappy free to play model in your game, please don't charge the additional $60 to buy the game to begin with - as I said before, that's just double-dipping.

Ah...he directed the Fifth Element too, did he? Suddenly, Leon's weirdities make a little more sense...

The international cut, .

That's stupid.

Okay, yeah, The Thing was like ten times the movie They Live was. That was good: had me on edge pretty much the whole way through.

I think silent protagonists are a developer's way of saying, "We can't think of how to write the protagonist's part in this story in a way that isn't going to annoy a lot of people", opting instead for something about as blank and inoffensive as possible. It's an okay route to go in some cases - really depends on the game in question - while others, it's pretty dumb. Half-Life 2, for example, I always felt it was a pretty bad choice to do a silent protagonist because Gordon Freeman really has a set role in the game, and the character interactions actually come across as being pretty comedic at times because of him being silent for no apparent reason. On the other hand, the cutscenes in that game (that technically aren't cutscenes) were already painful enough for the most part, so it was probably for the best they didn't make it worse by having Gordon talk in them too.

Yeah, there's nothing like that in EA games. Crap's all server-side and account-based.

Portman's part was super creepy - that's why I thought it was unusual and uncomfortable. It presents a side of young teenagers/teenage girls that you won't often see in film for the exact reason that it does come across as being really creepy...but can actually happen, especially when they've been abused/traumatized. I also was glad that they didn't take it far enough that I had to stop watching. As for Eternal Sunshine...agree to disagree! I actually liked the supporting cast, but I think their inclusion ruined the mystery part of the movie for me too quickly - it was too easy to figure out what was going on. And they kind of just kept taking me out of the movie every time it switched to their general nonsense... I'm not really on a backlog kick, per se - I'm not really much of a film/TV person in general, but lately I've actually been in the mood. It's more like I'm picking acclaimed films by decade that I've never seen and know (next to) nothing about just by the cover and like a one sentence premise summary. Stalker was pretty much the one exception out of the things I've watched recently - that had been something I'd wanted to see for a while. On another note, I am currently starting The Thing right now, and I'm already annoyed by the bogus chess scene at the very beginning of the movie where the formations of the chess pieces make zero sense and doesn't even remotely resemble a late-game chess scenario, and there's no possible way for the guy to have been checkmated in the next move. Didn't anybody working on this film ever actually play chess and notice that nothing about it made sense? Random details that are so easy to get right that films somehow repeatedly get wrong annoy me so much...but I assume the rest of the movie will be better than this minor annoyance.

Leon: The Professional (1994). I'm not a fan of Natalie Portman - as far as A-listers go, good golly she is wooden - but she gave a pretty unusual and uncomfortable performance in this one (in a...good way?). A pretty cool action flick, though Gary Oldman was way too over the top and unnecessarily evil to be even remotely believable, and kind of made for an unfortunately extreme contrast to the other two main characters. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). The main story with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet was decent, all the additional bullcrap with most everyone else was not and was really just kind of annoying most of the time. An okay watch.

"Yo dawg, we heard you like paying so we put a F2P model in your $60 game so you can pay while you pay..." This is why I can see people being mad. It’s the idea of components of free to play games slipping into $60 Games. Either you pay $60 for the game or yeah, spend 40 hours to unlock that character like you would in a free to play game. I think that’s the problem. I think they call that double-dipping.

It's because Arkham Asylum created, or at least popularized, that type of combat system where you just hit a button and your character magically parries or floats over to another combatant, regardless of what they were doing previously or where they were, which, while nonsensical, looks pretty from a cinematic standpoint and was really fresh and novel at the time. That and Assassin's Creed, which actually came out a year earlier. Having played both, I think AC is a bit different. AC tried to create a marionette style of controls that maps buttons to certain parts of the player character. Arms, legs, head. Other than parries which when times can auto-trigger caned counters or finishers, it's mostly free form. Just if you get good then there is no reason to try for anything short of a finisher. Arkham has a far more intrusive "A to win" style of combat that grows old really fast. AC seems to be moving even further away from this style, and expanding ever more on it's more free form aspects. Yeah, I wasn't trying to say it was equivalent, but a pretty similar idea. I still remember being surrounded be like two dozen guys in AC1...and all of them attacking you one at a time where you can just parry every single attack for easy kills. Super silly stuff.

It's because Arkham Asylum created, or at least popularized, that type of combat system where you just hit a button and your character magically parries or floats over to another combatant, regardless of what they were doing previously or where they were, which, while nonsensical, looks pretty from a cinematic standpoint and was really fresh and novel at the time. That and Assassin's Creed, which actually came out a year earlier.

Yeah, I actually wasn't going to watch The Thing because I figured it'd be more of the same, but I talked to a friend and they said it was better and still worth a shot, so I'll still be trying it.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Really good and a very wacky performance by Jack Nicholson. John Carpenter's They Live (1988). I did not care for it: way too much "dead time" throughout the movie, where nothing is really happening and there's nothing interesting to look at or anything to contemplate. Hopefully, Carpenter's The Thing is better than this one. Little Women (1994). Hm. It was a sort of Gone with the Wind-type life story, but not nearly as long or expansive, which was probably for the best. Winona Ryder was the star of the show, while Christian Bale felt...almost out of place in comparison. A decent watch, but not really my style.

feeling good being the only person to pick the packers and cowboys correctly in my pick'em today.

packers beat the bears I am content for the rest of the season