Bartimaeus

Completely unrelated to the anime thread: Why does Chrome have such gosh-awful image-scaling? The image: Downscaled on Firefox: Downscaled on Chrome: What the hell, Chrome?

What a terrible day for anime. Probably would've been better off being bored to death with Lady Asuka. Uh...kind of. Let me...oh, yes, I suppose you're right. I was having trouble remembering for a bit, probably because I watched most of the show between 2x and 3x speed and so I couldn't really afford to pay much attention to anything besides the dialogue. Yes, framing does indeed matter, as I have faithfully intoned many times in this very thread...and while the framing of Devilman Crybaby may have mostly justified itself, Nanoha sounds like it couldn't possibly ever do so in a million years, especially given you've already mentioned the transformation scenes as being...sketchy at best. I'm not ever going to enjoy an anime released after 2000, am I? ...Episode 1 of Samurai Champloo (2004): Episode 2:

Yeah, nah, I'm just gonna take your word for it. I think that's the strongest warning for something you've given, and I've already refused to click other things that didn't get that much, so it must be pretty freaking bad. And it appears my recommendation has been a FAILURE. Thanks for nothing, Nanoha.

...So the complete opposite of Cardcaptor Sakura, then. In that case, abort, abort - go back to stealing from CCS and SM!

@majestic Sakura was also a unique circumstance, because it's literally the show that made it so I could listen to Japanese voice-acting at all, . But yes, you are correct...mostly. Only mostly because I hadn't actually properly looked into it and was just going off of the few videos (including of the really bad English dub) and gifs/images you posted - when I was greeted with this on Netflix, I instantly changed my mind and knew I had to at least try it: It's weird how seeing a frame like this can be an instant "yep, I gotta try that", but that's the way I go, .

I think the other two aquatic levels are Rusty Bucket Bay and...Jolly Roger's Lagoon is the second game, so not that...oh, the beach one. Treasure Trove Cove, I had to look it up, though the name seems obvious in retrospect. I tried to go back and play it...two or three years ago now? I got through act 1 of the OC and I literally felt like I was going to stop existing if I kept playing. I thought maybe the second act, Port Saiid, would be better, but then it was just a bunch of wilderness areas that all looked the same and...I closed the game intending to continue at some point, but I could never muster up the willpower to do so. The story and general writing, characters, gameplay, aesthetic, controls, voice-acting...everything's pretty lacking, to say the least, at best. I had some fond but also some not so fond memories as well... I remember there being some succubus that's magically imprisoned that you can decide to kill or free in order to progress through an area, and if you decide to free her, she... Well, this isn't P:ST, she "betrays" you after freeing her in the most painfully obvious and stupid manner possible. I didn't get to that part in my attempt to replay the game, so I only have ancient memories of it, but even as a kid, I remember that being incredibly stupid writing, especially given that she dies in like two hits. That stupid freaking kobold. Stupid Aribeth. I didn't know this until the last few years (in fact, I think learning this is what inspired me to try to re-play the game), but you can apparently save Aribeth if you're one of the talky classes like a rogue or bard...and then she's executed by Lord Nasher right after anyways, lmao. Who the hell were the main villains of the OC? All I remember is...mage lizardmen? Why do I remember lizardmen? Is that even real? Endless tunnels and and combat going ever-deeper in some sort of pit that wouldn't ever end in Shadows of Undrentide. Saving and reloading over and over for randomized high-end gear in certain containers... Having to fight three dragons at once at some point, but dragons aren't as scary in NWN as they were in BG, like not even close? Probably other stuff I can't remember right now...I have a number of ancient memories of that game. Usually, if you've done everything else, the finales of stat-based games are pretty lame anyways, since they have to allow for a wide range of character power to be able to complete them. I wasn't able to get very far in SoZ, it felt too strange and kind of unfocused to me - like everyone else, I liked MotB a lot more.

Clanker's Cavern. IIRC, you can enter him through...oh, yeah, that's right, you have to swim down to the very bottom of the entire cavern and rotate the gigantic key in the padlock around a few times before he's able to rise to the top first, THEN you can enter through either his teeth or his blowhole...and maybe even his gills? Or maybe you can only exit through his gills? ...Do whales even have gills? They can't, they're mammals... I didn't play NWN until after Baldur's Gate, and boy, was THAT a rude awakening. Ye gods, even back then, that was a difficult transition to make - game controlled, looked, and sounded like garbage. Some fun fan-made online modules, though - I was friends with someone with DM privileges on some big, fairly populated LotR one, and I remember that being a heck of a lot of fun. I think my first NWN character in the OC (which I actually did finish as well as Shadows of Undrentide but not Hordes of the Underdark) was actually an extremely boring fighter that I prestige class-ed into an equally boring Weapon Master (...well, once Shadows of Undrentide came out anyways). Better than playing a freaking bard at least, I suppose...

I'm trying to think of what I've actually made a prediction about (something where I've actually said "from what I can tell, I think this is going to be (x) for me/you") and been wrong about. I don't always have predictions, because sometimes I don't have a strong enough of a feeling to say confidently right off the bat before even trying the show out (e.g. Steins;gate, Princess Tutu, Utena), but other times I do (e.g. Clannad, Magic User's Club, Violet Evergarden, K-On, etc.), and I'm not sure I've actually made a wrong prediction thus far. Maybe the closest was Blood-C...but even then, I wasn't exactly totally wrong with that, right? We saw the trailer and that looked gosh-awful, and I took a quick look at some screenshots and said "I don't think that trailer's really representative, though - I think it'll be less dramatic action-y and more silly character-y than that trailer would have you think"...which was true, at least early on. Didn't end that way, but you could see why I made that prediction, . So that's probably the closest that I can think of to being wrong with an actual prediction.

I like the first one, and I love the second one, but the third one I didn't realize how surprisingly mediocre it was until I re-visited and played all of them through probably 4-5 years ago now. Even the music is pretty bleh, which is a little shocking for Rare at that time. OH CRAP, speaking of Rare, I forgot about Banjo-freaking-Kazooie - that was also one of those very early games for me. Another one that also holds up pretty danged well, too, although early 3D controls do usually leave a little to be desired in comparison to late 2D controls like DKC. Do not speak of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named - you may well summon back that utterly vile and vacuous character by saying his name, .

I had Princess Tutu in mind, actually. I don't know when/if we'll ever get back to that, . Might actually become something I check out more on my lonesome at some point after I've finished Sakura instead... Hey, my prognostication said it looked alright outside of the cat/foxgirl, and it looks like I wasn't wrong, .

Now that I think about it, my aunt also had a laptop around that time and let me play Diablo 1 on it before we had it (at an extremely fundamentalist evangelical church that would have considered it literally satanic!*), so it's also possible that that could be it as well - I really don't remember for certain! *And now that I'm thinking even more about it, it's a good thing nobody else knew, because that church, which was my grandfather's, was seriously wacko and it could've been a whole major ordeal for the entire family if the rest of the congregation had found out that the pastor's daughter was having a literal ~5 year-old playing freaking Diablo in their church. ...I mean, maybe not as bad as if they'd known my mom was a turbo-D&D nerd and was running a D&D group and was even on some of those early D&D web forums at around same time back then, but still. They say that the sins of the [mother] don't pass on to the child, but I think my mom and I are living proof that that was a lie...

Unfortunate news for @majestic, this has been on the horizon for a long while now (maybe as long as a year now?) and was almost already started before Nadia was, but then I'd randomly come across news that it'd been licensed and was in the process of being re-dubbed, so it got shuffled back a bit. So that's likely to be the next major show for me, though whether we go with the English or Japanese will depend, of course, on what it actually sounds like. I tried watching the movie for this probably like 5-6 months ago, and I made it about ten minutes in before I was like "I guess you had to be there when it came out, or maybe watched the original show, or something, because this ain't working". That, and as not great as the Sakura song is (which makes it stand out as being worse than it is in a show of Sakura's pedigree), it's still better than that, . Hey, maybe it'll surprise you and K-On it on up. I'm the absolute worst post editor around here, there have been a number of times I've actually had to edit out some of my edits so that I can put it in the next post because I can't stop myself from revising and adding more on.

Based on Gorth being aware of the situation and having to explain what happened, I can only assume it was a bot or some other similar kind of situation that the staff took care of. Maybe their profile information had spam links, or they tried PMing someone something, or the original post put a link in the punctuation, or something like that - seen those happen before with otherwise innocuous posters. I don't remember exactly what my first game was, but it was something in between Age of Empires, Diablo, Super Mario 64, and Ocarina of Time. I remember in my town/school district/whatever, kindergarten was only every other day, so I'd home sitting on the PC all day trying to figure how in the hell to play Age of Empires and have fun with some of the early campaign scenarios (the simpler ones that don't have the full AI enabled). Those are my earliest memories of gaming, so maybe that's actually it, but I can't say for sure that it was actually was, especially since we also had a SNES and I have *very* vague memories of playing...MAYBE Donkey Kong Country 2 before that, but like I said, I can't say for sure.

...Yeah, nah, I actually do like the the CCS S3 intro more. Might be a minor case of Stockholme syndrome, though - while I still don't care for that song (especially the middle main chunk which is a complete drag), at least it ends well enough. What a disgusting display.

Tempted to upload the first episode somewhere and say "look, you found a copy!". ...I mean, it'd only be the first episode, but @majestic I'm a bad person to ask, since I'm always against pointless nudity. However, I maintain that I didn't detect anything super wrong off the bat with this show, so it's up to you to prove my process wrong. Yeah, no kidding, looks straight stolen out of Sakura. Is the song at least better than CCS S3's?

I've seen an episode of this and thought it was pretty decent-seeming and planned on eventually watching some more, guess I'll take that as a recommendation from you to continue it, .

It should be noted that there are again 7 seeds in each conference, which means while the first five seeds in the NFC are two games or better ahead of everyone else, there are still two more seeds to give after that, which realistically means that every 2-4 team right now is potentially only one game out of being in a playoff spot. ...That said, all of those 2 win teams besides MAYBE the 49ers look pretty dead, and heck, even a couple of 3-3 teams like the Bears and Panthers look potentially dead. At least one team in the NFC is going to have a 9-8 or even 8-9 record and limp into the playoffs as a wild card, methinks...maybe the wildly inconsistent Saints.

Yes, that was my understanding, which made me considerably more interested in it, . How is an official dub of DBZ even more bizarre and meme-ish than the TFS Abridged dub?

It's on my to-do list to at least try - it might just take a while to get to it, especially because I haven't really been much in a watching (anything) mood as of late.

95 years young!

It boggles the brain that there are people out there that listen to this guy every day. I apologize to everyone for bringing Alex Jones into this thread on two separate occasions now.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/81req5z10wlo830/9p3fjmFzGA.mp4

I think literally the only game I played on PS4 before getting rid of my PS4 was Bloodborne. Now I'm praying they re-release it on PC someday so I can play it again, because I sure as hell ain't getting a PS4 again. While emulation will probably eventually be an option, the development of PS4 emulation has been...slow, to say the least. At least you can emulate Demon's Souls...and there is that stupid remake as well, I suppose, but I'd genuinely rather play the original.

Doesn't ring a bell. ...Oh, Kuragehime, yeah that...almost rings a bell. Well, I vaguely remember the banner image anyways. My brain likes to reject information that it doesn't want to have, and I guess this was one of those things. It certainly beats the snot out of the idiocy Rebuild pulled. Give me weird and insane if they at least try to set it up rather than stupid and boring that they didn't even bother with, I suppose. Remind me to give some more bonus points to Sakura for ditching the whole ridiculous transformation thing entirely - the best part of them even in Sailor Moon was the dope music. Oooooh, Sailor Moon! Sailor Mars, Sailor Mars! Sailor Veeeeenus! Sailor Juu-peh-tuh! ...IIRC, they didn't really do anything special for Ami's song, but it was still good. Dang, thinking about that really makes me want to re-watch the show. How come shows keep ripping off Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura? It's kinda like they were...great shows or something, I don't know!

I did not see anything that would suggest there would be any kind of ecchi content, so if there is anything, I'd guess it'd be very mild indeed. Curious that it is labeled seinen, though - things must not be as they seem on some level! I don't even remember what show you're talking about there, but it sounds terrible. Definitely no @ FMA: I saw all I needed to see with that 15 years ago when my sister was watching it, . And hey, I still have my one exception to my "no shonen" rule, which is the first season of Ranma...