majestic

The top 10 happened when they switched to free to play before and after Rise of the Hutt Cartel came out. The cash shop made some 200 million per year. That's the point I was trying to make, SW:TOR sold well enough and had enough subscriptions to easily cover the development cost (and then some) until the switch to the free to play model. And that is assuming the 200 million dollar develoment cost wasn't blown out of proportion like everyone assumed when the number came up. I have no idea how well the game is doing at the moment. I'm just arguing that while SW:TOR did not become the cash cow EA wanted it wasn't a commercial failure for them.

You mean like when I thought it's ridiculous that - presumably Kylo Ren - speeds towards a lone Jedi in his TIE on the ground level so that Rey can wire-fu over it and slice it up neatly? To quote Luke: If you're not going to take this seriously, I'm out.

Breathtaking drama in this week's Discovery episode by the way. Breathtaking.

I'm hoping Mike, Jay and Rich are already working on a new The Nerd Crew episode. That way we'd get some quality entertainment out of the teaser. edit: For those that don't know. Here's the Solo teaser anylsis.

Meh is about the only thing I got from the teaser. And why is the subtitle The Rise of Skywalker when ever critic on the planet lauded the break with the Skywalker saga back in The Last Jedi, finally freeing Star Wars from the chokehold of Vader and his family? Also really creative. Back at some desert planet (but it's probably Jakku, not Tattooine, nyeh nyeh nyeh, like haha it's salt not snow) riding on a barge like craft, a semi destroyed Death Star shell and a surprisingly... bulky Billy Dee Williams flying the Falcon with Chewie. I guess Rich Evans was right when he said Star Wars is creatively bankrupt. There's no way to make a film in that universe that's going to be anything else than ridiculous pandering or a weird cinematic failure.

No, why would it? The game sold 2 million copies at launch. That's more than half of the supposed development cost right from the start. The game had 1.3 million subs after the first six months, if all of them bought the cheap six months plan the game had it's estimated development cost brough in after February. BioWare information at the time was that the game needed a stable 250k subsribers to keep it going, updated and turn in a small profit. And let's not forget EA sold already finished content that was supposed to be released to the players as free patches early in the game cycle as the first game's expansion. edit: And even with SW:TOR bleeding subscriptions like mad it remained the second largest subscription MMO on the market until it went free to play. Many players don't realize how small most MMO's userbases are compared to WoW at it's peak. The really sad part is that if EA launched the game in summer after some polishing instead of during the holiday season it would have hit the market in WoW's most dire content draught after a much hated expansion with a very nice base. Just imagine Asation and Explosive Conflict already in the game at launch. Meh.

I don't get the point about DA2. Origins and Mass Effect also only had an excuse main plot that barely - if at all - bound a few side stories together (and they are really similar. REALLY REALLY similar). That's okay of course because not everything needs a strong main plot. ME2 was all about the characters and Origins had genuinely interesting stories and lore to follow while you recruited help for the fight. DA2's problem storywise was the lack of interesting world building and forgettable characters - at least compared to other Bioware games. The copies sold and subscriptions retained for the first six months easily made up the development cost (and then some) of SW:TOR and the game was in the top 10 most successful online games for a time after going free to play. It wasn't very well received and the subscriber base dwindled at a record pace in the beginning but a commercial flop it certainly wasn't. By any realistic measure, that is. Applying WoW metrics to any MMO released after 2004 makes literally all of them flops. I'm sure that's what EA was expecting but they probably patted themselves on the back when the game made 200 million dollars per year with a development team on life support.

Finished Sekiro just now. Then I read this article and had a good laugh at the comments. Personally I'd rank the final boss below a few others in terms of difficulty. The only troublesome attack can be avoided with the firecrackers and all his tells and prompts work properly and he has the posture of a wet paper towel. Unlike, say, a certain big burning beast from hell where five times out of ten the kanji and sound effect for the perilous swipe attack just don't work and the attack itself looks fundamentally the same as a normal claw swipe that's deflectable. There's also never going to be a From Software game where hitboxes work like they should. All in all a really great game except for a few instances where it breaks its own rules (hello stealth deathblow not taking away a deathstrike counter on a certain mini-boss) or simply puts bosses in your way that make you do the exact opposite of what you've been doing the entire time. Which would be fine if adapting your play style to the bosses were a core element of the game, but it's... not. Not really.

Better times to be honest. Over at Winterwind (with Gorth now posting there every now and then) we had a fun recollection going as well, about the time - already on the Interplay boards - we had a little issue with the Fallout forums (bad enough to make Interplay want to axe them... or much more) and after a some back and forth posters accused the moderators of being nazis. You know, like Volo alwas does, except in all seriousness. Which lead to the moderator team adopting high ranking nazi officials as avatars and having "Forum Nazi" as forum title. Try that stuff today the mod team would probably demoted over night and the community manager fired.

Wait, what?

I hoped Black Mirror would stratch an itch that the end of Outer Limits '95 left, but... not enough downer endings.

Hoi guys. And gals. It's been a while.

Today I found out that David Firth released an 11th episode of Salad Fingers recently: It's been five years since the last one. Worth the wait? Yeah, you bet.

I take it you didn't like Brotherhood then?

Blizz used to make these fun things for free. Today they're inside a lootbox for Overwatch or Heroes of the Storm.

Well, the "plot" thickens...

The first game I played was Pitfall. The first PC game I played... depends a bit on whether one would count Windows Entertainment Pack games like Klotski or the ones that came with Windows, i.e. Minesweeper or Solitaire. Assuming those don't count as real games the first PC game I played was Red Baron, followed by Wing Commander and Alone in the Dark. Some History Line: 1914-1918 in between, which essentially was Battle Isle with WW1 units.

A real time tactics/turn based strategy space battle simulator set in the Warhammer 40k universe.

I'm not sure I could name a favorite TV series episode (or made for TV film) in general. Quality of Mercy was a fantastic piece of storytelling with only two actors and another guy in a really cheap plastic armor. It didn't feel like the showrunners were trying to cut down production costs. Heh. It's surprisingly difficult to get Twilight Zone here. TV stations don't air it, it's on no streaming service and while there are box sets to buy they're not only ridiculously expensive but also riddled with production problems that were never fixed.

Y u no Bruce Campbell? Other than that looks pretty much like a must see.

I think Ira Steven Behr is a huge James Darren fan and at some point just asked him if he'd come on the show, and he agreed. That's the reason he was shoehorned into every other episode. And sometimes I feel like the only one that liked the Ferengi episodes. Profit and Lace in particular got a lot of hate but I just laughed at the antics. It really helps being a fanboy sometimes, also Ezri didn't bother me one bit. I doubt I'll ever get tired of watching Bree Tristan* in anything. If anyone had to replace Joey Summerskill it's nice that it was her. *Best bottle episode on TV in the history of ever. Fly of Breaking Bad comes close (and is obviously far superior in production values), but nothing really beats that look on the T-1000's face after realizing what he's done. Heh.

I recently found my copy of Der Struwwelpeter. The title story is about a boy refusing to groom himself (or be groomed by his parents): The hilarious part was the caption on the front page, translation shamelessly copied from Wikipedia. Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder mit 15 schön kolorierten Tafeln für Kinder von 3–6 Jahren ("funny stories and whimsical pictures with 15 beautifully coloured panels for children aged 3–6"). The book is full of stories where children have their thumbs cut off, burn themselves to a cinder or starve to death. Fun and whimsy, what else? Insert appropriate millennial joke here.

Finished Love, Death + Robots. Was pretty good overall, some episodes are simply epic (Three Robots is amazing). Sonnie's Edge is still not good, except for the animation of course. Beyond the Aquila Rift reminded me a bit of the Outer Limits revival show episode Tempests.