Bartimaeus

...you thought that the thread was getting too depressing, and that I shouldn't be so cynical... and you thought quoting from THAT was appropriate? I don't mind the "much of the problems exist simply because the characters them themselves" angle: that's like...the basis of the human condition. It's just...for some reason, I can't identify with or like any of the characters. I don't know why...I just can't. It clearly has nothing to do with that, though, since that's pretty much the majority of Frozen, and I like all of the characters in Frozen, so...

Yeah, my comment was purely on the style of animation: I think they have a few good movies. The first Shrek is a classic, even if it isn't perfect, and I liked Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Megamind decently enough. I have never liked How to Train Your Dragon, though, and I didn't much care for Chicken Run and I haven't seen the others you listed. I've also've never liked Madagascar or Kung Fu Panda, either. Dreamworks is very hit and miss with me. (e): What do people love about How to Train Your Dragon? For some reason, I've just never been able to like it - not sure why. All the characters annoy me like crazy throughout the entire movie - the chieftain, the son, the girl - the plot and action is a little too over the top and showy for my tastes, and I don't like the animation. I just can't hack it.

Well...I like Dreamworks' animation style even less than Pixar's. The only Dreamworks movie I've seen where I really like the animation style is Prince of Egypt...but that's (mostly) 2D, which is kind of cheating for this discussion, so...haha.

That quote is terrible...AND depressing. I have no wish for myself or anyone else to die for some imaginary entity that's supposed to represent a collection of people with supposedly shared values when we could just as well not...especially when, as history has shown time and time again, the vast, vast majority of war is never altruistic or serving much decent purpose at all. And...it's depressing that that idea is somehow still seen as a good value to have even as more relatively pointless and/or fruitless conflicts are still being fought today.

Disney/Pixar movies tend to be full of plot holes like that - they tend to be more about...emotional impact and appeal than any sort of logic. I mean, c'mon, Frozen opens up with the King and Queen being completely stupid by deciding that the TROLL's advice in segregating and isolating Elsa and Anna was good and then actually fully implementing it even though all signs pointed towards it failing even while they were still alive. It sucks when their lack of attention to/care for detail takes you out of the movie. That hardly surprises me. Almost all of the source material where Disney gets their inspiration from always ends horribly - in fact, though I'm sure there must be a few, I don't know of any that don't. Whereas I have the opposite reaction: I don't generally like Pixar's style of animation, and I tend to much prefer Disney's. Give me Frozen or Tangled over Toy Story or Monsters Inc. or the Incredibles, etc., any day. Although I am willing to admit that characters do sometimes look odd in Frozen: I think Elsa looks really weird at the end of that YouTube clip, for example. Still, I prefer it over Pixar's animation.

People, especially young people, think intelligence means being an ****. I can't believe somebody went back and actually replied to that. I guess my point was that...speaking for myself, I am fairly cynical and chronically depressed (though I do go through bouts of not so bad periods, such as now). It's not like I desire to be how I am, or think it's smart or something - I just am. I would happily be...uh...happy all the time if I could be. Similarly, I think other people are the same way...and sometimes, they may come up with rationalizations for how they are - such as it being the "intelligent" thing to be, because...maybe they don't want to believe that there is something wrong with them? I would think that sort of thing comes as a result of the depression and cynicism, not as a reason for actually being that way - even if it's sometimes presented the latter way. But that's just my own personal experience. Sometimes - at the worst of times - I feel as though bothering trying to be happy is stupid, or...worse, that I don't deserve it. But...I don't think that's clear and reasonable thinking, and I would definitely not argue such right now. I think the same might be able to be said for the "presenting it as though it's the only reasonable thing" problem. (e): rewriting as I think about it more

I said it was a rough demo.

I think so! I tried watching Fox and the Hound for the first time recently, and BOY, is it a slow-paced movie. I actually couldn't get through it it was so slow. Give me Robin Hood, give me Watership Down, give me Sleeping Beauty, give me the Sword in the Stone...but apparently I couldn't handle Fox and the Hound.

I thought Up was decent, but the best part of the movie was probably the first five minutes, and it kinda felt disappointing by comparison from thereon. Don't start the movie with the best part. ...Although, in my opinion, Frozen suffers a little from this, too: from "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" to "Let It Go" is the best stretch of the movie, IMO. ...But the rest of the movie still holds up at least pretty well, so I guess it's not as bad. What didn't you like about WALL-E, out of curiosity? (edit) People are posting too fast!

The only song from Aladdin I really like is one that didn't even make it to the final cut: High Adventure. (Warning: rough demo) (edit) Wow, An American Tail. I was just thinking of that movie recently, actually. Uh, I'm pretty sure An American Tail isn't Disney, so that probably explains why Disney doesn't have whatever "that" is. (REAL EDIT) Why did I mark this as an "edit" when I hadn't even posted it yet?

Apparently Spielberg would call Robin Williams during the production of Aladdin to have him tell jokes to the cast and crew of Schindler's List to cheer them up. Didn't Robin Williams end up suing Disney or something for his part in Aladdin? I recall him stipulating that for him to do VA work, Disney *had* to not advertise that he was in the movie pre-release or something, and Disney did it anyways. Or maybe he just said he wouldn't work in any more Disney films - it's been a while.

I mean, i didn't hate it...at the very least, I still have the soundtrack for it, which says something. And, again, I know we're supposed to be positive...but I've never liked Aladdin. And, while we're at it in case we're posting any more Disney songs, I've never liked the Lion King, either. Something about the music in both I've just never cared for. Tangled is probably my third favorite 3D animated film, after Frozen and WALL-E. It doesn't have as many "wow" moments as Frozen, but it doesn't have as many "wot?" moments, either. It was merely consistently good, IMO.

I'm trying to be positive here, man. Or...at least as positive as I can be. ...but yes, PatF wasn't exactly my ideal Disney movie. Here, then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbVlGESh9Mc

Yeah, you must be really struggling to run much of anything from this millennium with only twelve megabits of RAM - a megabyte and a half is simply not enough by today's standards, I'm afraid. Would definitely recommend upgrading. More seriously, yes, if you don't have any spare parts already, it can be really difficult diagnose a lot of hardware problems. I still have old nvidia 8000 series cards and DDR1 and DDR2 RAM sets and old power supplies and...for this reason. You'll never know when you'll need them for solving computer problems (yours, and sometimes other people's...).

Whereas I will never pick up a physical book again if I can avoid it. I hate the feeling of paper, particularly book paper.

Sometimes, I think some of the things you say are just trolling. Unfortunately, I know better at this point...

That's strange. I thought the new time limit was 24 (or was it 48?) hours. I can edit my previous post in this topic, which was just under 24 hours ago.

Kind of an odd build. The MSI PC Mate is fairly down there on the low end for motherboards, with only 3 true phases - not good: would not exactly recommend overclocking any, particularly with the highest end desktop i5 you can get. 3 phases is the absolute bare minimum a motherboard would have these days, and you'd typically find it in mATX boards, not standard ATX boards - and, at around $80-90(?) in the U.S., I'm not sure why it wasn't at least 4 phases. Though it's a generation older, I paid around $30 more for the Asus Maximus VI Hero, which is an 8 true phase board (and the phases are almost certainly higher quality, to boot...can't say for sure, though, since I didn't find details for the PC Mate in a cursory Google search...which I would not take as a good sign, but perhaps one should reserve judgement ). I've always thought of the PC Mate as sort of the board made just for the Pentium K/G3258 - not exactly suitable for the 4690k or other higher end CPUs. Odd choice for PSU, too. Again, the highest desktop i5 you can get...and the most power hungry AMD GPU you can get...and you lowball the PSU? I also don't like that with that GPU, you're running pretty close to the max rated wattage on it, with system power consumption at around 475, maybe as much as 500W at full load. I personally like a 100W buffer, but that might just be me. (e): I wouldn't worry overtly about the PSU, though: from what I can quickly dig up, it's still a good PSU for its specifications...just not what would come to my mind when you say the system will have a 290x. SSD looks good, although it would not have been my absolute first choice at its price point in the U.S. However, you are in Sweden according to your location detail, so I can't really evaluate it as such, and it's, at the very least, competitive and comparable to other options, so it was likely a perfectly good choice. Everything else is up to user preference and/or behavior and seems fine, so that is my quick analysis on the build.

Are people proud of being depressed and cynical...or are they merely depressed and cynical?

Maybe it's just nostalgia from when I first watched that when I was like 4, but that animation is still pretty cool.

They sucked in the IE games, too: I have no idea why anybody thinks differently. Best fights of the IE games? Dragon battles. Lich and other spellcaster battles. Other adventuring groups (that are difficult and varied). Other enemies that are difficult, but aren't really super annoying/cheesy (so not dimension-dooring/brain-draining/insta-AoE-paralyzing mindflayers, or stupid trolls most of the time, for example). Not so much fun? The umpteenth group of random demihumans who can't even hit any of your characters. Random, stupid groups of kobolds and goblins when you're like level >=10. Masses of shadows and shades and other garbage undead. They're boring and just a huge waste of time.

Ironically, I think Torment would actually be a good way to showcase decent RTwP: unlike BG and PoE, there's not supposed to be much fighting. One of the biggest problems with RTwP in PoE and the Infinity Engine games? How many gosh danged trash battles there are that waste so much of your darned time. Seriously, they never seem to end. PoE even one-upped the IE games by having all the trash battles wear down your characters for future, more meaningful battles, and, furthermore, made even what should be the easiest of fights have way too much danger for your characters to get screwed over in a number of ways, so you're ALWAYS having to spend time strategizing every single last fight. If you're going to try to make every battle be meaningful and take more than a tiny amount of time...here's a tip: don't present the player with a million different fights to wade through over the course of the game. Or...at the very least, let me CTLR+Y enemies like I can in BG. Every battle in PoE feels like I'm fighting the equivalent of a bunch of spirit trolls in BG2: it's not fun.

I'm just the opposite. After Pillars, I might just be done with RTwP for good. Hey man, don't diss on RTwP for the faults of one game. PoE's combat woes were outside the scope of merely RTwP! I dislike the way they went about deciding to have turn-based combat more than I do the idea of turn-based combat for Torment itself. Don't sell a game on nostalgia alone and then flip one of the core tenants of combat on its head - even if combat is not the major point of the game like it is for PoE or BG. State it clearly in the Kickstarter - or, if it actually was a decision they had yet to come to by the conclusion of the Kickstarter, give a way for the people who want nothing to do with the decision a way to back out.

Those guys make some really decent covers. The fact that they can make me like a Miley Cyrus song says enough, I think.