Bartimaeus

I'd describe it as depressing. I'm having trouble describing exactly why, though. I guess it boils down to time and growing up. So many opportunities in life lost because of stupid decisions by either yourself or your parents, that devilish whimsy and selfishness that children have being inexorably snuffed out because of time's ever-accelerating course and being forced to grow up in some manner to survive, and being stuck in so many ways with your oh-so-random lot in life. The ending may have been optimistic and hopeful on the surface, but it really just reeked of the deeper, more desperate fight with life that we all undergo and try to win in a variety of ways. I didn't really mind the contemplative bits of the adult segments, but I guess I just didn't find the ongoing story of Taeko to be very compelling. Yes, I did listen to the English dub. I tried a little of the Japanese dub, but as usual, it wasn't for me.

It didn't help that all that stuff was so laughably shallow that it makes you wonder why they bothered in the first place.

Only Yesterday (1991). It was really depressing. I liked the as-a-child segments way more than the as-an-adult segments.

No, I have not. I'm not much of a moviegoer to begin with, and I'm way too intolerant of things I don't like which further suppresses my desire to watch new movies.

Yeah, I really have no idea. Pretty much everything you see there is wrong in some capacity. The sky is alright, I guess.

I read that the original American cut of Nausicaa, Warriors of the Wind, was quite the butchering, too. Hilariously bad cover art that should tell you enough about it:

I like Xbox controllers when I'm predominantly using the analogue stick, but I prefer dualshock-style controllers when I'm predominantly using the d-pad. The strain of using whatever's in the middle of the controller tends to wear on me after a couple of hours regardless of what controller I'm using, so I prefer to just switch out depending on what I'm playing.

One, I watched it with someone else (in person) who was trying very hard to convince me to like anime when I've very explicitly never liked anime (the art styles and the way characters tend to be written and the film-making conventions that seem to go with it), so that was already going to make it very difficult for it to work out. Two, I watched it in Japanese, and I have since learned (as it's been some years since I tried to watch Grave) that I seem to utterly despise Japanese dubs of pretty much all nature. Listening to Japanese people actually talk in a normal manner, I don't have too much of a problem, but whenever I hear Japanese entertainment (TV, movies, games, whatever), it seems like their enunciation just goes completely over-the-top, which activates my misophonia in the most extreme of manners, to the point where I'd honestly rather listen to silence with subtitles than Japanese dubs. It doesn't help that the casting choices for Japanese VA always seem laughably ludicrous...but given that that seems to be a problem in everything Japanese I've ever heard, I'm assuming that there's just a cultural difference in the way people's voices sound there that I'm simply unable to get over. Three, all I remember from that movie is a whole lot screaming and crying, and that I was utterly miserable throughout the entire thing. For most other languages, I would tend to stick with the original dub. Russian, Polish, Hungarian, German, Spanish, Greek...I'm fine with all of those. Japanese and Chinese, and to a lesser degree French*, are the ones that I know of that tend to make me want to gouge my ears out. *Funnily enough, I tend to like French when it's sung, though...and actually, I don't automatically despise Japanese singing, either, now that I think of it.

I looked at some of their other films, and Only Yesterday seemed like it would be the best choice to try next. (e): Although I see now that that's technically not a Miyazaki movie, but someone else from Ghibli.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984). I watched this on a whim - saw it in somebody's top 100 movies list, and something about it caught my eye, and I read it was by Studio Ghibli, so I decided to give it a try. Something to know in advance is that I freaking hate anime, and the only other Studio Ghibli movie I've seen is Grave of the Fireflies...which I watched in Japanese and hated. This time, I stuck with the English dub (with Patrick Stewart - yes, that Patrick Stewart, I was surprised to learn - of all people playing one of the main characters). It was surprisingly...decent? Not perfect: it had a few weird timing issues characteristic of animes as per usual, but it was actually rather enjoyable. Very strange, but enjoyable. I might try another Studio Ghibli movie after this. Also, it struck me how gigantically huge of a reference Dark Souls made to this movie with the Blighttown -> Great Hollow - Ash Lake connection. Good lord. There's no way that isn't a reference, especially with all the bug creatures and poison terrain in Blighttown - no way.

Yeah, DS3's lock-on range was utter garbage for some unknown reason. I remember fighting that Outrider Knight (icy dude that flies all over the place) for the first time and it was just painful. The lock-on would just randomly break at the worst time...

My friend said this year is the year of the Jaguars. He said that last year, and the year before that, too, but this year, I'm really hoping that he's right.

Great games today, unlike all the awful games every other day so far of the playoffs.

​Demon's Souls they can't really do because Sony owns it. At the very least DS1 will have online functionality again on PC, which it currently doesn't have because they broke it and never bothered to fix it.

​I get the feeling that the DM never bothers to pay those gold or XP costs, though...

http://www.pcgamer.com/bandai-namco-on-dark-souls-pc-remaster-there-is-no-discount/ ​ ​Even better.

​​ Yeah, I figured pricing would be a joke, considering how much the Scholar of the Lost Sin "re-master" was on release, too. I half expected $30 for previous owners of the game...of course, you said 20 pounds, so maybe it is $30 here in the U.S. ​ ​But hey, if you want to play online without a third party tool, I guess you have to rebuy it, as they completely broke the online functionality of the game when they moved from GFWL to Steamworks (maybe a year and a half ago?) on the original release and never bothered to fix it.

​Fun fact: the latest versions of both BG1:EE and BG2:EE still have graphical bugs leftover from when they applied the 1pp mod (a graphical mod for the original BG releases) directly on top of the game, as the 1pp installer had the exact same bugs (for example, Bolts +2 using the projectile animation of Bolts +3, while Bolts +3 never got what should've been their projectile animation to begin with - this happened because the 1pp installer patched Bolts +2 correctly, but then repatched Bolts +2 with Bolts +3's changes because the wrong filename was accidentally copy+pasted). Something about them directly applying a mod to the retail version of the game that they sold...and then not even bothering to check and make sure that everything was correct...just seems kind of funny to me. ​ ​At least Siege of Dragonspear was a semi-original endeavor, if nothing else.

​ ​Man, that guy surprisingly has great dry humor. ​ ​(e): Yeah, this guy is great.

​I have a knack for dying in Souls games right before literally the last hit. I remember when I died to Smough in DS1 at soul level 1 on NG7 only needing to hit Smough one more time...and I somehow screwed up my roll on his electric jump-butt attack and died. Good times.

Majora's Mask Baldur's Gate II Life Is Strange ​ ​Undertale​ ​ ​Others, I'm sure, but these are the ones sticking out in my head right now.

It really is the only way.

Yeah, I think "most disappointing games of all time" would be better, because it really gets at the heart of the matter - games that you thought were gonna be good that ended up being really bad or otherwise emotionally crushing you for not meeting expectations. You don't even necessarily have to have to played the game in question to know that it greatly disappoints, whereas something like "worst game of all time", that's a pretty lofty title. I don't think I've played 25 games where I could objectively think that they're the worst games of all time - but I could definitely list 25 games that were extremely disappointing for various reasons.

First time I've ever heard of it. Looks similar to Worms.

The parallels with the Roman Empire get stronger and stronger every day...