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Mand'alor Dash

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Everything posted by Mand'alor Dash

  1. So, does that mean this is some sort of side-verse Cap (cause comics do that ALOT), or is this part of central Marvel continuity? Like I said, I don't really follow comics, so this is something I'm confused about.
  2. Just some midnight musings on philosophy. I've long considered myself an amoral man, now I'm starting to believe that 99% of what we call morality should be thrown someplace deep and dark. Go back to basics (thou shalt not kill/steal), and redo the rest from scratch. Too often, conventional morality seems to fly directly in the face of logic and reality.
  3. It's rather simple, really. Assuming that the Alicorn gene is recessive, then Alicorn transformation is really more like genetic modification. Think of it as every cell in your body being simultaneously forced to accept an unnatural mutant strand of DNA, as a pair of wings (or a horn) thrust their way out of your fully-developed skeleton and through your skin. Possibly even involving feather growth! Anyway, while Shining Armor being an alicorn is a rather daft proposition, he could very well carry a recessive Alicorn gene somewhere in his body, which means he and Cadence would basically have a 50/50 chance or conceiving an Alicorn. If the gene is dominant, then Shining Armor definitely doesn't have the gene, but we've still got the same 50/50 chance of Alicorn conception. And if it's recessive, but Shining doesn't have it, then maybe Cadence should learn a thing or two about honesty, because something else is clearly going on here.
  4. A year after its release, I've finally finished playing through Undertale for the first time, and all I can say is that it was... underwhelming. It's not bad, in fact there are parts of it that are actually very smart, but I really feel like I had gotten a bad experience from it. If you're going to play Undertale, the only way to play it is completely blind. If you've had an obsessive fan spouting off in your ear for the past 12 months like I have, then your experience is probably already colored, and you're not going to get very much out of it. In fact, every minute I played it, I had my little sister looking over my shoulder, telling me everything to do and every route to take and every person to talk to and every word to say. By the end, I felt more like I was forcing myself through it. It wasn't fun. Undertale relies greatly on discovery. Without this, it's just a woefully shallow RPG with some funny dialogue. I'll give developer Toby Fox props for being a good writer, but the gameplay is far too dumbed down to interest even the most casual RPG player. You can equip a grand total of one weapon and one clothing item (neither of which show up on your character), and have a whopping one attack. The "combat" diversifies when you take the pacifist route, since then you need to read a monster's rather obvious personality to figure out how to appease it, but this too becomes dull once you run into the same monster more than once. It isn't fun to run through the same set of actions 12 times, it's just busywork. But I guess you need to fill hallways somehow. Besides the frequent puzzles and abundant scripted events, Undertale is basically a whole lot of hallways with enemies in them. Very long hallways, some of which consist graphically of a single, solid color. You will find a love for your enter key, since the game's 8-bit "art" style strictly forbade having voice acting, and each text box has to be manually closed in order to progress in the game's mostly passive conversations. Occasionally, it'll let you make a binary choice between two dialogue options, some of which have some rather interesting consequences; but other than that, the dialogue system is very passive. Characters talk to the player, not with the player. It's undeniably well-written at points, but not enough to carry the entire game. Maybe there will be a day when people stop talking about this game, and new players can finally just hop in and enjoy it. Even then, I get the niggling sense that some of its meaning might be lost. This is a minor spoiler, so stop reading if you haven't played it yet, but Undertale is something of a deconstruction of RPGs. In fact, during a certain piece of late game dialogue, it makes this abundantly clear and removes every last bit of subtlety from the equation. It's also really late to the party, since KOTOR 2 brought up all the same points that Undertale did and then some; but Undertale's treatment of these messages seems lost for another big reason. It's just not that much of an RPG. It's a puzzle-adventure game with a really, really, really thin coat of RPG paint. The RPG audience most likely to appreciate the game's themes will be underwhelmed by the game's almost condescending simplicity, while new RPG players may feel right at home with the simple gameplay, but won't have the RPG experience to look back on when the themes become clear. It's like reading Watchmen if you know nothing about superheroes, or playing Spec Ops: The Line when you haven't played Call of Duty. You need to have experience with the original work in order to appreciate the deconstruction, except the core gameplay does not attract fans of the original work to begin with. The morality is black and white enough to make Bioshock blush, though I definitely have to give the game some credit for turning being the good guy into a puzzle. You can't just select the good guy options and get good guy points like you can in most RPGs, you have to really make a commitment to not hurting anyone. This is a good idea, but it sucks that every good option always has a good consequence, and every bad action always has a bad consequence. Pacifism is always rewarded, violence is always punished. Again, these consequences are much farther reaching than in most games (owing to its very short length), but it all just seems so binary. What if that guy I spared turned out to be a serial killer? Maybe not every saved life is exactly for the best. These are some very basic morality questions, and Undertale doesn't really incorporate any of them. Undertale is good. It's very ambitious in its structure (if nothing else). But there are key elements that the developer clearly dropped the ball on, even as deeply rooted as the game's target audience. There are certainly moments that are inspired, or dare I say, brilliant, but it's all so easily spoiled and rendered moot, especially in the present day when everyone and their mother is talking about it. Next to that other indie game that took the drooling masses of the internet by storm, I'd take Undertale in a heartbeat. But it still didn't set me on fire like everyone told me it would.
  5. G5. When they turned Rarity into a Werewolf, that just tasered my nipples. That's the straw that drank the last Pepsi in the fridge. You might say I should have seen it coming when Twilight dyed her mane red, but foolishly I held out hope; only to be left sitting in the smelly shadow of the broken toilet bowl that was once bronydom. Oh, how the mighty... won't get mighty again.
  6. This doesn't make any sense. Are you saying it's a bad thing that you get better as you play? That's not even entirely true, since there are certain gamers who are just naturally better at the game than others. I'm saying it's there because the evidence can be seen in every scoreboard in every match ever played in every game. When one team dominates the other, that's a skill gap. When a player has 2.0 K/D, that's skill gap. When a commentator runs around the map and turns the match inside out, that's a skill gap. A skill gap is visible any time where some players reliably do far better than others.
    1. Twiggy

      Twiggy

      So you acknowledge that Trump really does love the Mexican people?

    2. Mand'alor Dash

      Mand'alor Dash

      It's supposed to be a Captain America joke, but I guess there was too much photoshopping.

    3. Twiggy

      Twiggy

      Kek. I see it now.

  7. To my understanding, Hydra is more of an Illuminati organization than a neo-nazi group, and they have their hooks deep in the American government. That's what they were in Winter Soldier, at least. I don't read the comics.
  8. I love how that commentator bitches about the lack of a skill gap, while demonstrating its existence in the gameplay. For "lack of a skill gap" to be a thing, everybody's K/D should perpetually hover around 1.0, and going much higher than that should be near herculean, if not downright impossible. We wouldn't see people reliably jetting around the map and taking out dozens of enemy players if it was all a "slot machine." This isn't a botmatch. There are real people behind each of those characters you are killing. That is the precise definition of the "skill gap" you claim is missing. I don't even play CoD anymore, and I'm sick of stupid arguments like these. CoD gets dull after a while. I completely get why it's a problem that other shooters are changing themselves to fit into this amoeba that is Call of Duty. I'm not happy with that, just like I'm not happy with Fallout 4 being dumbed down to be more like Skyrim, or SWTOR being turned into a linear World of Warcraft facsimile. It's fine to want a more diverse gaming market, but this is primarily the fault of developers and their stupid focus groups. He mentions Tripwire, the Red Orchestra devs, and how their focus group repeatedly just told them to turn it into Call of Duty. Well, of course it did. If you've played or even watched Red Orchestra, the word "niche" will instantly come to mind. Red Orchestra doesn't compete with Call of Duty because it isn't a damn thing like it. Red Orchestra is a game where you need to adjust the angle of your iron sights whenever you take a shot at any hefty range. That's obviously more detail and grit than most players would care to dive into. Instead of building a focus group full of just about anybody, they should have made a focus group out of people who already know a thing or two about realistic, tactical shooters. Perhaps they should have invited fans of Red Orchestra 1 to participate. I can guarantee that they wouldn't bitch about how it "wasn't CoD." I'm all for variety. I love it. But you can't expect niche titles to do well with the mass audience. And it's not the gamer's fault if your game isn't their cup of tea. By all means, find your audience, expand the market. Just don't bitch and moan when people don't choose your game over another one. Popping in real quick to say that's not "depth," it's breadth. I define the difference like this: if your game has one level, depth is the level of player agency present in that level, and all the different ways that each player can approach it. Regardless of content quantity, depth is what the player can do with that content. Breadth is the number of levels; the amount of content present, regardless of depth.
  9. I'm still on the fence as to whether the FiM movie will even be good. Have we already forgotten the Equestria Girls movies? Or does the mere fact that the characters are quadrupedal again mean that those don't count? 20-40 minute self contained episodes are one thing, and the latter already has a tendency to feel a bit stretched sometimes, but a feature length film is a different can of worms. Comparing it to the likes of Frozen and Zootopia? Fat chance.
  10. Doubloons! Don't drop 'em. ;)

  11. JFC, Scott, another one?

  12. Horse cartoon doesn't really have anything to do with my worldview. In general, I just want as little government as possible. Firmly capitalist, anti-war, pro-constitution, all that. I classify the vast majority of my beliefs as "right-wing," but I'd rather not be lumped in with evangelicals or nationalists. They and I seldom see eye-to eye.
  13. Not the claim; using somebody else's footage without permission and claiming it as your own is plagiarism.
  14. Just when I thought Family Guy couldn't get any worse. I see MacFarlene and co. have no qualms about outright plagiarism.
  15. Such is the dark side of any movement or counter-movement. I can't speak for anybody else, but I chose the side of free speech and free thought, and I intend to practice what I preach.
  16. How the fuck is it? Besides "muh gold bikinis," I have yet to hear even a solitary reason for why anyone would believe this tripe. And if you honestly believe that the entire industry is sexist simply because fantasy RPGs depict women (who are statistically just as powerful as male characters) in skimpy clothing, then I don't even know what can be said. This is actually an extremely good and important point. I have very outspoken anti-SJW views, yet even I have been labeled an SJW at times for a variety of petty reasons. Witch hunting is the real deal, and despite my feelings on the matter, it is something I refuse to take part in
  17. Did you even watch James's video? He explains very calmly that, like in Star Trek, you need to pass these torches properly. He explains the problems with the movie in great detail, and he actually has a great deal of experience behind him. And what is the media's response? LOL SEXIST GTFO And no, calling out PC culture for the vomitstain on society that it is, is not "sexism."
  18. Those were at least childish action movies based on children's toys. I agree that they were awful (the latter at least; haven't seen TMNT), but Ghostbusters has always been a generational staple. Now it's not only being remade with absolutely none of the charm, wit, or artistic vision of the original, but with modern PC culture being stuffed in just to pander to morons. And to ice this shit brownie, the mere act of pointing this shit out is enough for the media to brand you a sexist manchild. That's not just a sandline, that's a faultline in the concrete.
  19. You want more shitty remakes? You want the executives who greenlight them (Rothman) to almost literally spit in the faces of the fans of the original? This is a line in the sand. Ghostbusters is sacred, regardless of what decade you saw it in.
  20. If it helps, every one of our listeners is going to hear 8 whole minutes of reasons to stay home. #MLPFDoesntUseHashTags Have you forgotten the name of the movie?
  21. I would join this boycott myself, but as luck would have it, I've been working as a small-time film critic for a local radio station since November, and I don't really have a choice when it comes to a big-name film like this. I find Rothman's behavior, and all those who wrote hitpieces on James because of his opinion, to be absolutely disgusting; but I can't just avoid the movie when I'm trying to build my name.
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