Bartimaeus

My feelings about those games are very complicated. I feel like the first game had the most right elements...but some quite poor execution in a lot of those elements that made it not quite always work, but not badly enough that the game collapsed in on itself. Space exploration should be fun and exciting without feeling like it was randomly generated or copy and pasted; there should be a good helping of interesting characters as well as dialogue/narratives/outcomes for said characters; there should be an interesting plot that can either be justifiably low-stakes or high-stakes; general gameplay should be fun without feeling repetitive. They, probably unfortunately, went with extremely high stakes right off the bat...which creates the classic problem of constantly needing to make subsequent entries even more higherer stakes than the last, which...had the effect that it had in the third game. Whoops. Characters didn't quite get the attention they deserved, and their outcomes were awkwardly and very hamfistedly railroaded (the fact that you can't even choose not to romance someone when your options as a male character are Liara and...Ashley, is quite frankly absurd; it's about just as bad if you're a female character with Liara and Kaidan, becuase Kaidan and Ashley are both less than ideal, so if you don't happen to like bright-eyed Liara or you simply just don't feel like the romancing type at all to begin with...well, oh dear oh goodness). Space exploration that wasn't corridor/wall-barrier fighting almost entirely happened inside of the Mako. The equipment system was an incredible chore. Still...for 2007, it did enough right that it still felt like a pretty novel cinematic action space game at the time. Second game got rid of most of the space exploration stuff (boy, I sure love launching them probes and wandering through and/or fighting in endless corridors...), but you got more and better character stuff in return, plus the main plot actually was a solid enough follow-up to the first without escalating things to the point of absurdity...too much corridor/wall-ducking shooting and not enough meaningful exploration by far, but it did enough right to still enjoy it. Good lord, what in the hell happened in the third game? Mediocre to terrible character stuff, very bad and way over-escalated plot that the writers couldn't figure out how to deal with, a veritable endless gauntlet of no longer fun repetitive shooting in corridors...and when it wasn't in corridors, it was in wide-open spaces with enemies pouring in from every avenue and where you're getting hit from a hundred different angles which is also not very fun. The exciting space exploration stuff is dead, the fun character stuff is dead, any remains of an interesting or compelling plot is dead, and the shooting gameplay has so incredibly worn out its welcome by then - especially in the absence of other enjoyable elements to make you care in the least bit. It's just brutal...and all the while, the game is acting like it's some kind of high art with the embarrassing ending and the dream sequences and...oh gosh, I just remembered the pathetic samurai dude... On second thought, let's not remember anything more about Mass Effect 3.

Cardcaptor Sakura, Clear Card, episode 1: What a sad intro song - no energy at all. But that comes with the time, I suppose. Alright, so I'm not gonna lie...I just about ALT+F4-ed because of this: Wimpy art with terrible lines and colors aside, they held on this for a couple of seconds and...I legitimately thought her dad was staring at her chest and the idea of that broke my brain so badly that it was going to be the first and final straw for this show. But no, apparently, he's just shocked at seeing her wear the middle school uniform - time sure passes by quickly don't it, daddy-o? Nevertheless, this should tell you how low my expectations for this are that I legitimately thought that was what was happening here... Where are Sakura's rollerblades and why is she running around like a knock-kneed teen girl to school? She used to know how to run properly just fine... "Rika went to a different school..." That's one way of explaining away the voice actress passing away from cancer in real life, I suppose. You know, now that I think about it, I don't think we really needed to see the mushy teen romance stuff...the original show ended on the exact perfect time so we never had to! And why is Mizuki...still hanging around Eriol? Another reason it was good that the original show ended exactly when it did, because I didn't want to see...whatever that was explored whatsoever. This show looks uncomfortably like Love Live!, methinks. Well, it wasn't a total disaster, but it wasn't very good, either. Eriol said she'd have a dream, and she immediately had a dream that's making her go through the whole Cardcaptoring thing again...but with a different set of cards? It also coincides with the exact day Xiaolang returned to Japan...and also, they cut away to the slightly creepy-looking teddy bear that Xiaolang gave back to her that she apparently made that's sitting right in her room a few times. Is this some sort of ridiculous plot by Eriol and Xiaolang to make her stronger? Also, I almost kind of wish they went with the slightly insane art style of the outro for the entire show. It's a bit too intense, but much funner-looking without being too different from the normal art style. The normal art style is so...just not enticing to look at in pretty much any way.

I don't really mean to promote the idea that "everything is fake" per se, but rather anything from either sides without clear and outstanding evidence should be very skeptically considered. Between literally faked footage, footage and photos from other conflicts, outrageous official claims and literal transparent attempts at propaganda... Being skeptical should be automatic here. Does anyone know anything about the "Patrushev" military doctrine Russia reportedly adopted in 2018? Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it: If Putin is actually planning on making good on this doctrine, then we're almost certainly headed straight towards nuclear annihilation sometime soon (not necessarily from this Ukraine conflict, but...if Putin decides to push it even further with e.g. Finland...). It could just be a public game of chicken and therefore simply posturing (or the doctrine could've been mistranslated entirely), but it sure doesn't sound good in light of this war.

Yeah, I know, virtually everything is fake news at this point. However, I posted it more to highlight the human element of both sides here - never a bad idea to remind yourself that even the invading force of an army usually has a pretty large makeup of what are effectively very scared children.

Reportedly (i.e. grain of salt), there was a conscription in the weeks leading up to this war that forced a lot of untrained young men into Russia's invasion force after being told they would be held back for training only - might explain why there have been some reports (more grain of salt) of apparently (and thankfully) pathetic displays of army professionalism. Untrained boys who wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of this will do that - can't imagine how I would fare in the same situation.

"Joined 39 minutes ago" - and straight into the Ukraine thread minutes later? Hmm... Mirrors of the same video are clowning on it as being merged footage from a video game called "Digital Combat Simulator", but it is not as though I can confirm that.

I'm by no means an expert in 144p video of air combat, but it really does look super fake.

I see that the trademark FromSoftware jank is still alive and well.

And boy, was it not good. Glad to hear it's more like DS - really didn't want FromSoftware to emulate BotW in that regards as well, given how pants the story and dialogue/cutscenes in that game were.

Rhea Gall Force. Forum just ate my post, but I saved it - very cool. Opening title crawl: "The third world war fought between East and West has reduced the cities of Earth to mountains of rubble." Oh, how topical. The hell are we doing on Earth anyways? The last three movies were about an "alien" species that maybe were or maybe weren't at some point in the distant past related to humans before humanity's apparent extinction... Oh. Right, well, I suppose that makes sense. Oddly, a few of the girls up there have a strange resemblance to some of the characters from the other films... The film opens up with some sort of operation set in a burnt out post-apocalyptic city where the humans are apparently being hunted by armed flying Skynet automatons...some leftover remnant from the World War still acting autonomously. However, it turns out that the humans are doing some hunting of their own - it's a classic "hit them while they're distracted" trap set by some well-armed survivors, lead by our protagonist named Sandy (redhead in the center in the image). They head on back to their base to celebrate a successful mission...and find everyone's been slaughtered while they were out. Whoops. Seems as though it's time to get off this rock...and that's the mission of the film - evacuate off of Earth without our two different factions (the remnants of "East" and "West" - presumably kept vague so as to not unnecessarily date the movie) killing each other or getting killed by Skynet in the process. The idea of this film is less interesting than the rest of the Gall Force series, but ironically, it's probably executed the best out of everything besides maybe the first film by just staying simple and dead-focused on the issue at hand, which is something the other films struggled with. A solid enough if perhaps unspectacular little post-apocalyptic sci-fi - hey, as long as something like this isn't doing grossly stupid/boring/pathetic things that completely self-sabotage itself, I'm honestly not that picky. Unfortunately, it is really difficult to find stuff that doesn't do exactly that, .

Elden Ring currently sits at the second highest game of all time on OpenCritic with 111 critic reviews so far as well as a perfect "100% recommended" score (works the same way as Rotten Tomato's Tomato Meter). Certainly a better reception and outlook than I expected, given FromSoftware's history of jankiness. Huh.

Lmao, this looks worse than even I expected. I guess it might work as a sort of absurdist parody comedy, though. As for how I found it, on the site I use, there's a banner that has six different images for recently added items. Text appears only when you mouse over it: I accidentally did that for approximately a quarter of a second on my way to somewhere else and somehow managed to read the "Komi" part of it in that time to go "wait, what did I just read?". Lo and behold...

It occurred to me that I had no idea who the hell "Lady" was. Um...that's a look. Anyways... Hey @majestic, did you know they just made a live action Komi Can't Communicate? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15100806/ Looks like a lot of fun for you, .

Snowpocalypse today. Yeah, I'm ready for spring.

Microsoft is killing the "Bethesda Launcher" (did not even know this was a thing) and will be moving over everything to Steam (i.e. if you own a game on the Bethesda Launcher, apparently you will be comped with a Steam copy, not a Microsoft Store copy).

I haven't touched the original Game Boy games, which are presumably at least decent for this garbage franchise to have lasted this long, but I've played some of Sword and Shield on the Switch with my niece, and I can't even... This is the best a trillion dollar franchise has to offer? Really?

I'm gonna kill you. Yeah, bet you didn't expect your first death threat to come from me - you're welcome. I haven't been exposed to too much of the Pokemon anime(s), because it's not something I can really stomach to watch. But the entire franchise, from the shows, cards, video games, and general merchandise, just reeks of cheap addictive garbage meant to prey on children. If any of it was at least half-decent, I'd at least be a little more tolerant of it... Well, she's 8 years old now, so I guess it's time I have her watch Neon Genesis Evangelion instead. Hopefully, that'll break her out of her Pokemon habit, .

I've watched some of MLP because my niece (note: different niece from "my nieces") was super into it for a few years and I used to babysit her 2-3 hours a few times a week for a couple of years - before she was in school. It's alright as far as children's entertainment goes (certainly a lot better than a lot of other garbage I've been subjected to), but I don't think I could quite qualify as a "brony", especially seeing as I didn't turn into either a girl or a nazi. It was so much better than what came next, which was...ugh, Pokemon. I hate Pokemon. She's unfortunately still on Pokemon.

Gall Force 3: Stardust War. The title comes from the two sides of the war that's been dominating every second of this series having reduced each other to stardust, since neither side has any inhabited planets remaining and thus no way to replenish diminishing manpower and resources. Guess that's what happens when your weapons are infinitely stronger than any kind of defense you can put up - suppose that's pretty realistic, given that we face the same situation here on Earth. Anyways, the series ends with our group of main characters not being able to do much to stop the annihilation of either sides, and decide to create a capsule that would pass on all the scientific and historical knowledge that their race had amassed for some future race hundreds of millions of years into the future. Pretty dour ending - pretty much an allegory for what will probably happen to us given our propensity for becoming irrationally set on no-win courses that will inevitably bring our doom. However, it is my opinion that this series lacked the necessary tension and gravitas to really pull off such a heavy subject, and the series would've almost definitely been better if it had been sillier and more focused on fun character-driven adventures. It's not bad, but you need some serious creative chops to make something like this really work as well as it should, and this just wasn't quite it. Still, I suppose it ranks as one of the better anime sci-fi things I've seen - no, it's not Crusher Joe, much less Magnetic Rose or Neon Genesis Evangelion, but it was fine-ish.

Yes, for sure better and more tolerable than most everything I see from...well, I'm sure that I don't need to repeat myself here. It did the job well enough without looking out of place or distracting, and that was what was important.

I thought it looked...odd. If I'm recalling correctly, the backgrounds generally looked nice and fitting, but the character models and animations weren't exactly what I would have expected for a film of this type...but it was within acceptable parameters to at least get the job done. Still, it was strange looking to me - I especially remember that dumb look on the main character's face that they kept drawing over and over being a bit of an aggravation for me...but that might partially just be my dislike for the character speaking, . The pre-2000s era of animation we shall never return to...sigh.

Ah, but you see, as I've said so many times...for me, characters trump all. I won't care about your allegory, your themes, your plot if I don't like your characters, and I did not like that main character, the character which the entire film is framed around. I really, really did not like Suzu. So, in a sense, it's a credit to the film that I thought it was okay even given that I strongly disliked the singular protagonist...and that it was an anime film made in 2016, especially seeing as it is a drama. All of those put together should really spell out me hating this film, but I didn't, because it had other good qualities that made it so I watched the entire thing and didn't come out disliking it - I just thought my experience with it was was overall "okay" and that I wished the main character was...someone else. In other words, it was a good film hamstrung by issues of it failing to personally appeal to me, that's all. I have my reasons for not liking this particular kind of character - let's just say I had spent entirely too much time around someone who I would say is painfully similar to Suzu, and I unfortunately find that personality type incredibly grating as a result.

Yeah, I saw that one a couple years back, it was alright. Big problem for me was that I really disliked the main character from beginning to ending, and...it's a movie that's entirely through her perspective, so not liking her is a pretty big problem. Slow* main characters are apparently a tough one for me. If I had liked her, it probably would've been a great movie instead of just an alright one. *I don't mean stupid, I actually mean...just slow. As an example, Minako may be pretty dumb, but she has sharp reflexes, her mouth runs faster than she can think, she makes decisions quickly, and sometimes even starts acting before those already too quickly-made decisions have been decided in the first place...and so she is not slow in the sense that I mean - in fact, if she was slow, she'd probably be effectively smarter because she'd have more time to think what she's going to say or do through. Being slow in all of those areas tends to be very...frustrating to me, and she was as extreme as I've ever seen in a main character in a cinematic film. It didn't help that she also had great difficulty finding stuff to be useful at.

Speaking of Netflix doing weird stuff: Netflix has some sort of thumbnail-picking AI that tries to pick the best thumbnail to appeal specifically to you. This is apparently the one that they thought was best for me, immediately after finishing an episode of Gilmore Girls. Yeah, okay, Netflix. ... *starts watching Seinfeld*