Amentep

Ah, Myers-Briggs, we meet again. I come out INFP ("the mediator")

The period I'm talking about was pre-Disney buyout so they had no influence on the toys. Now that they do, they're making other outfits available (Leia in Disney Infinity, for example, has the white outfit and the bounty hunter outfit). Not that any of that matters, I guess...

That was like a white jump suit? Or the burgandy-brown dress w/pants and a shawl thing she had on in Cloud City? (If I remember correctly - its been a startling number of years since I've seen Empire). Does it sell because that's what people want or does it sell because that's all they have? Probably a bit of both.

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.