majestic

Boy, both on the same day?

Oh look, @bouyahywi is still around.

Stranger Things, season 5, part 1: On The Quest For Even More Subs. Quick note, I'm not going to spoiler tag anything before season five, it's been years. #dealwithit So, like, the series will be dropped in two installments, four episodes now, and apparently another round on Christmas. Hey, we gotta squeeze the maximum amount of Netflix subscriptions out of the show. Which has been the problem of the series ever since the first season wrapped up. Every season since the first was unnecessary, and while I still enjoyed them, season two in particular was basically just a rehash of the first one with worse writing. Season three vectored off into 80ies trash territory with the Russian plot and season four was, at least, a proper sequel, although it did suffer from sequelitits: in order to introduce a bigger threat parts of the original storyline were - if not retconned, then at least heavily expanded - and a new antagonist was created where none was needed. The parallel dimension with the eldritch horrors the show revolved around were incorporated into a hive mind controlled by someome who once was human. Henry Creel, also known as Subject 001, the first of the gifted children found and experimented upon by Dr. Brenner. By tradition he got a D&D nickname by the "kids" (who, at this point, where mostly at the cusp of becoming adults, if they weren't already) - Vecna. Vecna would have been fine for a second season. Less so in season four, but that is water under the bridge. With that out of the way, if you were unhappy with the show in the earlier seasons, then you'll not find anything in this one either. It is mostly more of the same - mostly because the pacing hasn't allowed a whole lot of breathing room or downtime. The first episode introduced the changes after the prior season, i.e. a military lockdown after the Upside Down bled into Hawkins. Anyway, the kids are on the prowl for Vecna, who they assume has survived and is still around. Spoiler: 'course he is. Wouldn't be much of a season without the antagonist. One of the problems the insanely long production time of the series brough is the actors growing up. It would have been an issue even if they came out with a season every year, but the lead actors are no longer kids, and even though they had Millie Bobby Brown wear a grey trackie the entire time, that did very little to hide the adult woman underneath, to the point where I wonder why they even bothered. In an inverse Golden Girls scenario, Dustin, who is amongst the oldest of the former child actors of the show, is the only who who still looks the part. With some heavy squinting. Yeah, anyway, there's no place I am going with this in particular. It's a pain in the suspension of disbelief, but in a series where a group of kids routinely outsmart high level military and intelligence officers as well as top secret government branches, them not looking like kids anymore might not be that much of a problem. A more discerning viewer's more like to ditch the series after the second or third season based on it getting worse. With that out of the way, I actually binged the episodes. This is at a time where I even finish movies I enjoy in more than one sitting, and it sometimes takes me several days to watch through an episode of Voyager, where I just recently finished a rewatch. Man, that series still has so many problems, but they do seem somewhat minor when compared to the problems of the series that came after. But I digress. What I mean by this is that no matter how ridiculous the setting, premis and storyline have become, I still enjoyed the episodes so far. A lot. Acting performances are once again top notch, and if they ever make a show that's just about Maya Hawke (who seems to look more and more like her mother every year) talking to Noah Schnapp, I'm game. To be perfectly honest, I think that's the primary reason I still enjoy the series as much as I do - I just don't care all that much for the storyline. It's the characters and the strength of the cast that's doing the heavy lifting. What pointless review. I wrote a lot, and yet said not much in it. The music is still fantastic, and the setting still makes me nostalgic (hey, 80ies). Camerawork and editing is good enough, and the CGI still is as it always ways: an eyesore. Hey come on Netflix, games do better physics effects at this point in time. Ah, well.

All that nonsense simply because Britain decided to reinforce Gibraltar instead of keeping up the blockade of Brest.

Argenta did it all. Thanks to the Blessed Bolter Casing and the insane damage stacking she was even a better sniper than actual sniper characters. Anything in her line of sight just died, no matter how far away. My Argenta turned into a Sister Repentia, which made it all the more hilarious.

One, Stargate Origins. Which I successfully ignored so far, and yeah, it was apparently pretty terrible.

Yay, another beloved franchise ruined by Amazon, can't wait.

"Kinda"? That is giving me "aliens eating people with down syndrome" vibes.

Wishing Marines a happy birthday on November 10th is pretty confusing. Probably for everyone who is not American.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It's just a bigger and more polished version of Clair Obscure: Expedition 34. *ba dumm tis* If you don't get the joke with 34, then you just haven't played the game yet. Go and fix that. Unless you're @Bartimaeus and are very likely to be creeped out the by character looks. Not sure what I can or want to add to the discussion at the moment, other than to join in with the superlatives. Outside of the same-y and "feels generated by AI, but art direction clearly says it they were crafted deliberately" hallway-shooter style levels, it is easily game of the decade material. Well, if one just ignores the mini-games found in the beach areas. If you're not like me and can let go of an achievement (and, uh, don't really want the swimsuit outfits for your characters anyway), just don't bother. Given the small team that made the game, the problems with the level designs can easily be forgiven. The minigames though, dunno, really. Someone tested those and left them in. The other things in the game that almost drove me mad are very much my own fault. It's not the game's fault that I spent almost twenty hours going through areas I very clearly wasn't supposed to be yet, just because it is possible with the combat system. Also not the game's fault that the areas of the final part of the game that weren't designed for super high level parties are pretty lackluster with an overpowered party. I mean, after all, you're not really supposed to grind levels from the mid 20ies to the early 80ies in Frozen Hearts - especially not before finding the limit break pictos.

I'm beginning to understand why you liked Rings of Power so much.

Indeed, it is way better to have a vindictive, narcissitic asshat with the intelligence of a seven year old as POTUS. Or worse, imagine if Biden had become president and stepped aside after his cancer diagnosis, it'd be a mixed race femoid with a weird laugh running the country. Unthinkable.

Ah, the big mistakes of the very late 90ies and early 2000s. I feel like I need to apologize to George Lucas and George W. Bush, even though I obviously know neither personally. In hindsight, Bush wasn't that dumb, and the prequel trilogy wasn't that bad. Yeah, Bush wasn't the brightest bulb, and the prequels weren't good movies, but boy, did it get worse.

And here I was wanting to complain about having to heavily cut back on the coffee after being diagnosed with an ulcer. Yeah no. I'm never going to the dentist again. Like, ever.

I might, once it is discounted. I mean, yeah, as I am the only one here on the forum (I think) wo didn't like Bloodlines, so why not. Can't be any less interesting. I didn't like any of the games Troika made. There's just something about these games that never ever click with me.

Not true. We do have standards cucumbers and bananas need to adhere to.

There's a difference between Microsoft security fixes and the Windows feature updates. We do that at work too, we're always installing the critical fixes, but the (sometimes semi-)annual feature updates? No thanks. Would be way too complicated to roll out and support. We only install those when the new features or changes are worth the hassle or there's no longer a way to avoid it because it would break something. And that something is in 99.99% of all cases some Microsoft service we need.

I have no idea, sorry. I only did the one playthrough with the mage. The game has a whole bunch of options to tune combat, in addition to several presets. You can just drop enemy health to low and turn off death if you don't want to bother with the combat too much.

That depends way too much on your class and your choice of weapons. I played a mage and thought the 2-handed playstyle was slow, unresponsive and not fun to play, so I switched to dagger/orb Spellblade and never looked back, stacking burn, shock and arcane bombs while zipping around the battlefield was very satisfying. Rounded the build out with some burst damage attacks, and it was a hoot and a half to play. At least it was for me, but I like high dps glass cannon characters whose only defense is high mobility and good cooldown management. There's a reason I tend to play sorcerers in Diablo IV and used the Stinger in Everspace 2. But yeah, game is definitely too long. The mage's ranged playstyle with the staff and the entire Control tree is probably also a leftover from the days where you were supposed to have actual players keeping the attention of the enemies, instead of semi-braindead AI companions. Probably. You have your home base to upgrade your gear, and the Crossroads were most likely meant as a lobby of sorts where you could pick where you want to go and check for groups. Most likely the entire reason why you have to reach everything through the Crossroads and not have a more connected game world like in the other games. Pretty standard for the live service game they were going for before pivoting to a single player experience. All the level designs - especially the much maligned city maps - are also left from it being supposed to be a co-op crawl through dungeons, rather than exploring traditional RGP areas. Game's pretty decent for its chaotic development. Certainly better than the negativity heaped on it, but also not great by any means.

No, I just gave up and spam positivity everywhere. I blame it on too much Scooter.

Rings of Power is really great. The internal logic and consistency is top notch, the acting is a tour de force, the dialogue is simply *chef's kiss*, the costumes are perfect and to top it all off they really made sure to pay the necessary respect to the source material. Then there's the casting, just incredible. Galadriel and Elrond really come to life, better than in the books, and certainly much better than Hugo Weaving or Cate Blanchett ever were in the films. I just realized I did not yet praise the editing, camerawork, the sets, the scene building, shot composition, the fantastic sound design and the music.

Not overly surprising, since Trump and his cult call everyone who isn't Trump, or on the extreme end of the political spectrum, "leftist extremists" it only logically follows that the Reptilians also must be leftist terrorists. The problem is now that I am not perfectly clear on the lineage of the Reptilians. While all dinosaurs are reptiles, the inverse is not correct. It might be that the Reptilians are an off-shoot of a different group of animals within the reptilia. When in doubt, just go with guilt by association, i.e. the dinosaur is a left-wing extremist because other reptiles clearly are too.

No, the nVidia driver turns off rebar anyway, except for whitelisted games. If you had an AMD card, then yes, definitely.

I recommend Kill la Kill. This has... uhm... is... uhm...