Amentep

Eventually education will probably be moved to an online delivery format.

I probably enjoyed the structure of Titan Quest more than the sort of open wandering of Sacred, but I liked both.

Ah, Threads - for when The Day After is just too upbeat for you.

How did you lose the character? Generally if you remove a character from the party that character and their progress is still there and they can be added back to the party. Did something else happen? Was the character created with a nickname?

Oh Resident Evil is a fun enough film, but I wouldn't argue that its a great film in any objective sense.

Wonder if THQ would try to bring back Sacred in a form more like the first two rather than Deep Silver's Sacred 3. Or if the IP is just dead now after 3.

The only thing that bugs me with criticisms is when the critic tries to justify the critique by trying to project their own feelings on the people who made the move (most commonly used with an actor - something like "X is usually able to enliven a bad film, but even X looks embarrassed to be in this production..."). Or instances like Roger Ebert's review of the original Resident Evil movie (which has enough problems going on to address on its own) which takes at least a paragraph to criticize the IMDB entry for the film! But otherwise its just an opinion.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/eli-wallach-dead-good-bad-714794 RIP Eli Wallach.

The game 'scales' to the number of characters you have in your party. More characters = more locations to explore the cards in, more locations for the boss to escape to, more location rules to have to deal with. The game is beatable with one character or with 6. 4 creates a nice balance. Any character beyond the Rogue Merisiel & Cleric Kyra would have to be bought. But again the game should be able to be completed without the other characters. Are you unable to finish the scenario because you run out of time or because you are being defeated?

Yeah, that's been slowly cooling my interest in ANW as well.

I used to love the Olympics, but the incessant need to promote the competitors instead of the competition (ie, instead of showing you an actual competition as it unfolds/unfolded, here are 40 minutes of various athlete's hard-luck stories about how they overcame adversity to be here with 5 minutes of ballyhoo/hype, 5 minutes of edited highlights of the competition and 10 minutes of commercials to round out the hour) has really strangled sports programming as a whole, IMO.

Less than a d4 and you're talking chits.

I still get a giggle out of people using D2 to refer to Diablo 2 and responding as if we're talking about D2 ... I have no life.

I wasn't that crazy about Shining Wisdom and could never beat Shining in the Darkness, but I remember liking Shining the Holy Ark.

I wish they'd actually released all of SF3 in the US instead of just the first chapter. Or are you counting SFCD / SF Gaiden as the third game? ... Now I want to replay SF games.

I thought Shining Force had a turn based system where you could move any character you wanted to during your turn? Has it really been that long since I played it?

Sounds like an adjunct (aka part-time) professor who was teaching a course that they probably were only marginally qualified to teach.

Uh, no. The "let's make it our own" approach, as you call it, isn't great for "making money", it's simply the natural byproduct of an artist within a different medium adapting and choosing to tell his own vision of a particular story, roster of characters and/or setting. Sometimes the changes can be informed by financial/money-making ambitions, sometimes by artistic ones. Tarkovsky didn't make his own vision of Roadside Picnic, which differed greatly from the source material, just to 'make money'. It's no different in this case. Nolan is under no obligation to portray the Batman villains as they were in the source material either, it is simply his take on them. As far as I'm concerned, with both Bane and the Joker he's made some of the most memorable comic book film villains to date too, perhaps precisely because these two were molded to fit the themes and conflicts that Nolan wanted to explore in either of his films. And mind that I don't think the Dark Knight trilogy is even amidst the half of Nolan's best work. But no doubt it is head and shoulders above pretty much the rest of the genre it's a part of. Hitch did this all through his career. He argued - for example - that if you took a stage play and set it all in one room that you were doing it wrong because you weren't taking advantage of what film was (and then went and broke his own rule by filming ROPE in one room - but with the illusion of it all being one shot to make up for it). A good example of this is his adaption of YOUNG AND INNOCENT which jettisons the story of the police officer doggedly pursuing a wanted man (the main story of the book) to concentrate on the wanted man trying to elude the law long enough to prove his innocence, which Hitch found to be a more interesting story. Much as I find Nolan's Batmans to be overly serious and overlong, I can't fault them for being a different take on Batman. You're talking about DC Universe. The comics themselves at this point are 20 alternate universes with different takes and they do not market themselves like that; New 52, for example, is the main timeline now, and it's at most parts a betrayal of the source material - and it IS the source material. Few things bother me more than ridiculous nerd purism. Most superhero comics aren't even good! I can't remember if I even liked a single issue of Batman I've read that wasn't The Killing Joke. Even ignoring that, Nolan's take on Batman was different for a reason - it was a different medium and a different story it was telling. If you want to see what happens when you try to take a comic book and put it on the screen, go watch Watchmen instead and see how incredibly boring it gets before they start changing stuff in the end. Sure, it gets ridiculously stupid from that point forward, but at least it's not boring. Officially the DCU consists of 52 alternate universes; originally it had infinite. The current continuity is under the "Rebirth" continuity, which is the New 52 continuity with some of the pre-New 52 Continuity restored (particularly with respect to Superman and the older group of Titans). But the idea of continuity has always been in many respects more a fan construct that was imposed on comic stories once fans got into the business; I think prior to that continuity simply consisted of what the editors (like Julie Schwartz) could remember and/or what some of the early comic fans (like Dr. Jerry Bails) could remind them of.

One forum I go to (about film) has an entire folder of threads dedicated to memorializing those who've passed away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkn2oSs14iA&sns=em

IIRC doesn't Japanese weapon fighting styles use stances (I know the Katana has several, not so certain on others)? If my memory of that is correct, it seems like it could be an attempt to at least give a bit of a real 'feel'.

Disturbing lack of actual Venom in Venom movie trailer. I would be displeased if the movie was about internal struggle of Brock and Venom actually showed up at the climax. I imagine its more of a "it is too early for visual effects to be ready for a trailer" than anything else. But that's pure speculation on my part.

Shining Forces? Awesome! One of my favorite franchises that is entirely dead in the west. Dead pretty much everywhere isn't it? Particularly after Sega tried to rebrand Shining Force as a an action-RPG instead of a Fire Emblem rip-off clone quickly followed by a lot of other Shining games that made a hash of the whole thing. There hasn't been a Force game since 2009 and the last original Shining game (as opposed to ports / updates to their Shining Fighting Game Blade Arcus) was in 2014...

The problem with the analogy is that as I understand it, you have to have a clutch on a gear shift and you have to have a gear shift to to be a manual shifting car. You can drive a manual with two pedals (with either what volkswagen called the autostick system where moving the stick triggered a solenoid to disengage the clutch or with a product like the Duck Clutch where you press a button on your stick to disengage the clutch) but you're really just moving the clutch somewhere else than the floor and so I'm not really sure that the analogy works when comparing to video games.