Amentep

I've seen rumors of that, but no confirmation of a deal to make that happen.

Looking online, all I'm seeing is the latest Blurays are the tinkered with versions.

Sure, but literal a few years ago the only Leia toy you could find was her in the slave outfit. There was an outcry and I think they did the awards ceremony dress. So what some people are reporting as an attempt to remove the slave outfit may actually be an attempt to redress the balance that has been out-of-whack. In a perfect world the Slave Leia outfit would be one of many outfits for Leia toys. No one is forced to buy anything. But as I mentioned for a few years if you did want to buy something your option was Slave Leia or nothing else. And sure, in the context of the movie she kills Jabba in that outfit. After being captured by him in the first place and forced into the outfit. But yeah you can still swing that to be positive in a way. But toys divorce themselves from the context, so at some point the toy is a woman in a space bikini. Not that there is anything wrong with that. And if a woman chooses to dress like that for cosplay - more power to them. I don't think Slave Leia should be banned anymore than I think it should be the only Leia-based product available.

To be completely honest, I've always been surprised at how the Leia-in-the-hutt-slave-outfit became the go-to outfit for merchandising. For me white outfit from the first movie is more what I think of when I think of the character. Slave outfit is about as representative of the character as the award ceremony dress. Yeah its there for a reason in the story, but its about as representative of the the day-to-day of the character as Carbonite is to Han.

I can understand that; we all have things that appeal differently.

Yeah, I'm not interested in spoilers really, so been avoiding the leaks (although if it is FPSy and not RPGy, not sure it'll matter that much!)

I'm a whole package kind of guy. As long as the graphics work for the purpose of the game, I don't care. Mind you I also watch films like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE for fun so my opinion of what's acceptable in games is pretty broad.

Thanks for the link, I'm not sure it spoils anything. Still not sure what to make of it as I can't get sound out of it to see what the vocal unsinking is like or not (but the guy in the background is hilarious regardless). Weirdly most Bethesda games the story is irrelevant to me, the fun is just wandering around the countryside until I get bored, and rarely do I get bored as there's something always over the next hill (until you reach the edge of game space).

It is an interesting premise; part of what intrigued me was that premise. Mind you the trailer looked "fun" too. It was a toss-up between this or Scouts Guide to the Apocalypse which also is kind of a horror-80s comedy kind of movie.

Mostly curious. I'm getting the game regardless of what the internet thinks.

Longknife - how reliable are the sources for the screenshots and video footage you've seen? Because as you say the stuff from Bethesda hasn't looked all that bad, but I've heard of leaks and how people describe them but I'm not sure how reliable they are (ie are we really seeing the release version of the game or is it some early version? Is it something that's been doctored by an anti-Bethesda-ite or general troll trying to troll an audience that is hotly anticipating the game?)

Actually it works or the most part, IMO - but you have to consider its really a comedy film rather than a horror film and keep expectations there. There is one very cheesy makeup effect and some of the alien stuff is very cgi (not bad, just sort of mid-level still CGI looking CGI). The gore effects (vampires ripping throats and zombie eating humans) is pretty well done but not really dwelt on. You can tell to save budget that the move is done so as to really keep the expenses down (the "fight" is kept short and for the most part major makeup work is limited to a couple of scenes).

So I'm guessing the newest edition is still the tinkered versions? I'd been wondering if a bluray upgrade would be worth it but if they're not releasing the unedited originals I'll stick with my DVDs that have the straight-from-laserdisc unedited versions on them (even if they display terribly on tv now).

Yeah its still running. I know of several people who've gotten them.

Sure, wasn't trying to say that they were the "series proper" (despite the...er...high spiritedness that happened on the Iplay boards after BoS was announced that made it seem like everyone thought it was Fallout 3). But again, my point is that they started to change what Fallout was; even going back with Van Buren had it been completed would have been a different beast than Fallout 1 & 2.

1) I bitch just as much, actually more, about Bethesda's crappy writing and complete inability to create compelling characters as I do about graphics. 2) Bitching about graphics does not preclude someone from not liking the writing. 3) Fallout 4 isn't out yet, none of us have played the game and thus none of us have experienced the story. We have, however, seen screenshots and videos showing off how the game looks. We can't really criticize the game's story, outside of making predictions and jokes about it based on Bethesda's previous work, since no one has experienced it. We can criticize the graphics because we've seen them. *shrug* I've seen official screenshots and haven't seen anything to dislike, really. They seem functional, and not that dissimilar to Bethesda's other games post-Morrowind.

^lewl. I forgot to mention that I also saw Freaks of Nature (2015) on Friday. This film (formerly known as "Kitchen Sink") is based off of a screenplay that made it on the Blacklist of best unmade screenplays a few years ago. The basic plot - in Dillford, a small town in the US best known for making "the riblet", vampires, humans and zombies all live in an uneasy co-existance. At the local school our hero Dag is struggling to make the baseball team. He's in love with Lorelei, his pot-smoking next door neighbor who hides her pot at his house and gives him mixed signals. We're also introduced to Ned (the smartest kid at school) and Petra (who has caught the attention of one of the attractive, leader of the teen-age vampires, Milan). Besides vampires and humans, the school also hosts zombies (wearing shock collars to keep them from eating brains - it seems these zombies get high off brains and crave them constantly but get stupider the more they eat). And so the uneasy alliance for the town goes until a giant alien spaceship shows up. The vampires think the humans are collaborating with the aliens to destroy them. The humans think the vampires are collaborating with the aliens to take control. And the zombies find an unlikely leader who makes them realize that the vampires and humans care more about fighting each other than with supplying brains to them. And the town erupts into violence. Its an odd film; its easy to see why the script was so well liked. And as a film, its easy to enjoy the feeling it has that echos a number of solid 80s teen comedies (to me it felt a bit like Better Off Dead (1985) and Three-O'Clock High (1987) and House of Frankenstein (1944) had a gory love child). And yet it also feels like it could have been better - in particular the film gives short shrift to Lorelei and Milan as characters; they propel a lot of the plot (as they motivate Dag and Petra respectively) but their motivations are left a mystery as the characters are left as sketches. Also I felt one "surprise" at the end was telegraphed a little too much. The main teens - Dag (Nicholas Braun), Petra (Mackenzie Davis) and Ned (Josh Fadem) are all well done and they hit a lot of beats familiar to anyone who saw an 80s Teen Comedy and there is a parade of good small parts for Bob Odenkirk and Joan Cusack (as Dag's pot smoking parents), Keegan-Michael Key (as a frustrated vampire teacher who ruins kids lives because he can), Dennis Miller (as the rich jerk who owns the towns "riblet" processing plant) and Patton Oswalt (as a survivalist who built a bunker in his basement because he always knew the vampires would turn on the humans). Squirted into theaters after having its release date dropped twice its unlikely it'll be in theaters long. But I liked it enough to consider seeing it again when it gets a home release.

Thanks because F3 onward was more FPS than RPG That's actually a really good point, actually. As I'm not as big a fan of FPS, I only passingly pay attention to them but graphical presentation seems to be very, very much top on the list of things people want to be as advanced as possible in FPS (that and large non-linear maps). Mind you Bethesda's games now are almost hard to quantify as they're not really RPGy or FPSy to really be either but contain elements of both.

Random observation: A number of RPG fans all the time say that graphics are secondary to story and modern games suffer from being too focused on "kewl" graphics and not enough on the RPG aspects... ...but then RPG fans (as represented here and elsewhere) spend an inordinate amount of time bitching about Fallout 4's graphics. Is it just me or is this odd? I mean honestly I haven't thought any of the Bethesda games post Morrowind was graphically bad (and that was only because I found Morrowind's graphics to actively hurt the ability to play and understand the game - interiors were awful to navigate) and what I've seen from the legit sources, Fallout 4 seems to not be Morrowind 2.

Pretty sure the original Fallouts have been dead since 2004 when "Brotherhood of Steel" came out. More like when Van Buren was canned. Still, doesn't change my point. BoS was the first game to move away from the isometric format of 1, 2 and Tactics. VB would have also. BoS also was a bigger departure from the canon than Tactics (although VB would have probably skewed closer but honestly wasn't it too little, too late by that point?) Anyhow my point is that the original Fallouts - design and canon - have been by the wayside for over a decade. Bemoaning that fact now is kind of pointless, IMO, as they weren't going to come back after Iplay shut down.

The local channel squished Agents of Shield to run poll results during the show.

Pretty sure the original Fallouts have been dead since 2004 when "Brotherhood of Steel" came out.

Forgot to post my weekend watching: NIGHT OF TERROR (1933) - A mad killer is on the loose. A scientist creates a stir planning to test a suspended animation formula by being buried alive. The scientist's fiance is heir to a fortune. The other heir's start dropping like flies. Is it the work of the mad killer? Or is someone using the mad killer to disguise their goal of getting the money? Its a pretty good myster/thriller (the solution is rather clever). The madman in this is particularly mad, killing practically on sight and wandering, crazed, through the proceedings (the opening, where he kills a couple kissing in their car can't help but make me think of the 1940s Texarkana Moonlight Murders that became the source for The Town that Dreaded Sundown) Stars Wallace "The Mummy's Hand" Ford, Bela "Lederstrumpf" Lugosi and Sally "City Limits" Blane. THE MUMMY LIVES (1993) - Late Cannon film, this entry into the Mummy horror film canon comes at a low ebb for mummy films. It trots out a lot of the expected tropes (priest who defies the gods and is buried alive; reincarnated loves, etc). Originally intended to star Anthony Perkins, when he passed away he was replaced by Tony Curtis. Many feel Tony was miscast in the role (and its easy to make jokes about him coming from the Brooklyn part of Egypt as Curtis was never one to affect an accent), but the part under him plays up the doomed romance angle and he's quite capable when playing the charming revitalized mummy character; less well done are the actual horror aspects as they seem to not be as well thought through (or they just didn't have the budget/time to do it right). And while the sets are pretty impressive considering its low budget, the film feels like a rushed job. These were the days after Golan-Globus had split, Cannon had financial problems and the death of the planned star probably led to concessions in the filmmaking. Its remarkable the film is coherent at all. Probably not for anyone but Mummy film purists, but its a respectable mummy film even with its often cheezy moments and sometimes spurious logic. Look for the death by domestic cat as a highlight. Stars Tony "The Black Shield of Falworth" Curtis, Greg "Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back" Wrangler, and Leslie "Pensacola: Wings of Gold" Hardy. ELVIRA: MISTRESS OF THE DARK (1988) - Elvira quits her talk show to go to Vegas but needs money. An Aunt dies and she goes to the reading of the will and ends up stuck in the small, anti-fun, anti-non-conformist town of Fallwell. Meanwhile, Elvira's evil uncle tries to get a hold of a spellbook that will give him ultimate power. The enjoyment of this film is probably related to ones thoughts on Elvira's shtick; the floor is littered with asides, gags and double entendres (Elvira: "I was flat-busted" "I mean I was broke") and the finale song and dance routine is very much a vegas-y song and dance routine by someone who'd been there, done that. Some jokes hit, some miss but like the Airplane! films, if you didn't like that one another will be along any second. Its funny looking back on the film - positioned at the time as we were going through a period of anti-pop culture focused on rap and video games to then look and see that we're still fighting over video games (and maybe rap, not as hooked into music as I once was). Stars Elvira "Elvira's Haunted Hills", W. Morgan "Hawk the Slayer" Sheppard and Edie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" McClurg. SUPERNATURAL (1933) - White Zombie is often credited as the grandfather of the zombie film (albeit anyone in the know understands that Night of the Living Dead owes more to Mattheson's I am Legend than any of the voodoo zombie films that came before). The director/producer's of White Zombie - the Halperin brothers - on a career upswing were hired by a major studio, Paramount, to craft a horror film. And while many a horror film critic has poo-pahed the film (as it has a fake psychic) they seem to miss the weird science and mystical mumbo-jumbo that placed the film firmly in the horror pantheon. The film had its troubles in production; the Halperins wanted Madge Bellamy for the role (she'd played the wife-turned-zombie in White Zombie). The studio wanted a bigger star and one already under contract - Carole Lombard. Lombard hadn't yet become the queen of the screwball comedy (that would come in the next year, in Howard Hawk's Twentieth Century). And while Lombard had gained notice from critics (and William Powell), she'd yet to completely break out as a star. So Paramount tried her in a variety of genres trying to find her niche. For her part, Lombard wasn't keen on getting typecast in horror pictures and ultimately was coming to realize what she wanted to do was comedies. This led to a strained relationship with the Halperins over how to handle the film and the role (Lombard, after an earthquake had shook the lot, is reported to have crossed the lot at Paramount to find the Halperins and quip that "She was just getting started" with respect to how she felt over their disagreements about the film). The film when it came out was a dud; Lombard recovered going on to greater stardom, but the Halperins' career fell as they went back to the minors and poverty row movie companies. But enough with the background; the film itself turns out to be a real gem. Good performances from the cast lead a plot that deals with themes similar to White Zombie; a young woman finds her will being usurped by that of another - in this case an executed murderess who has one last person to kill. The film takes its time with the set-up (with at least one scene ultimately being dull) but it all leads to understanding why the characters all get drawn together. Lombard's distaste for the film never shows; instead she gives a great performance. In particular her ability to play the possession in such a great way where her facial expressions, body language and attitude change in big and small ways to illustrate she is, literally, a different character is very well done. Overall the film is well worth looking out for if you're a fan of 1930s horror films or of the Halperins' other horror films. Stars Carole "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" Lombard, Randolph "Ride the High Country" Scott and H. B. "The Devil and Daniel Webster" Warner. GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) - Who you gonna call? Its hard to really discuss a film as big as this one in retrospect. One that you've seen dozens of times and even though I hadn't seen it in years the dialogue and scenes were still familiar. Its fun and clever and while not perfect its still very much the same film it always has been. You almost have to feel for William Atherton who was so identified as the evil EPA guy that people harassed him in public for years after. Stars Bill "The Razor's Edge" Murray, Dan "Driving Miss Daisy" Ackroyd and Sigourney "Gorillas in the Mist" Weaver.

Mmm, since technically Persona games are SMT games and given that most of the SMT series proper have their own unique worlds/setups, I'm not that worried that GENEI IBUN ROKU #FE also has its own unique setup that's as much Persona as it is SMT as it is Fire Emblem. Yes and no... sort of. The relationship between SMT and Persona is a bit weird, I'm not sure I completely understand it myself. The original Persona game was known as Shin Megami Tensei: Persona in the west, they added the SMT so that it would be recognizable and sell better, in Japan it was known simply as Persona. As the Persona series grew in popularity, it actually became more popular than SMT and they dropped the pretense of calling it SMT in the west. If I remember correctly, Persona was a spin-off of a game called Shin Megami Tensei If, which itself was a spin-off of Shin Megami Tensei. So, I guess the easiest way to look at it is that Persona is a spin-off of a spin-off (second cousin?) of SMT. Anyway, the two series share no story connection, though they do share some mechanical similarities. Core SMT games tend to be significantly darker than Persona and tend to delve into angels and demons and religious ideologies. To me a spin-off of a spin-off (as the Persona series is) is still in the same family (so I'd consider SMT, Devil Survivor, Digital Devil Saga, Persona, Devil Children, Last Bible, Raidou Kuzunoha, Jack Bros, etc to all be SMT games ultimately). That said, with respect to this game the Japanese title for Persona 1 is Megami Ibunroku Persona. I think the use of "Ibunroku" in the title Genei Ibunroku #FE for this game is intentionally signaling they're taking elements from the Persona series for this one - and I don't have any problem with it (I'd argue it actually makes the most sense - the Persona and Radiou Kuzunoha series are about as close to the heroic fantasy of Fire Emblem as the series in my experience has gotten). As a side note, the original western release of Persona wasn't branded "Shin Megami Tensei" as it (and a translation of Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible) were the first games in the "series" officially translated to English. The pair came out in 1999 as Revelations: Persona and Revelations: The Demon Slayer. The theory I heard at the time was that Atlus was trying to create a brand that would make sense of the supernatural, religious overtones of the series but make sense to English readers in a way that "True Goddess Reincarnation" or "Rebirth of the True Goddess" wouldn't.

Mmm, since technically Persona games are SMT games and given that most of the SMT series proper have their own unique worlds/setups, I'm not that worried that GENEI IBUN ROKU #FE also has its own unique setup that's as much Persona as it is SMT as it is Fire Emblem.