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veni veni veni posted:R. Kellys original trapped in the closet DVD was one of the best things I ever bought because of the commentary. There's parts later on where the cameraman is making it look like he is floating around the room and the whole time while fake cgi smoke comes out of his cigar. Experiencing the whole thing is this insane fever dream that makes me feel like I'm on drugs. It's one of the greatest thing I have ever seen. lmao
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Oct 13, 2023 18:20
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History Comes Inside! posted:Honestly I won’t miss physical much when it’s gone because I already have Too Much Plastic Bullshit cluttering up my life I understand this sentiment exactly as I've preferred digital for things like books/tv/games to reduce clutter, but streaming for TV/movies sucks when there's specific stuff I want to watch (usually older stuff) and it's just not streaming anywhere. I can easily see some stuff being lost for ages because there's no more physical media for it and the streaming gods decide it's not worth the fees to carry it. I'm not one for  so if something obscure cant be found on youtube im just out of luck
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Oct 13, 2023 18:25
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Like loving Dogma.
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Oct 13, 2023 18:26
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Ubisoft has been reading this thread. Show yourself cowardquote:While Early says Ubisoft is "already seeing a significant increase in the digital share of purchases" and that "people trust that their game's going to be available to them without absolutely requiring physical media to play it", he adds that he doesn't envision a future where physical media will disappear completely.
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Oct 13, 2023 19:03
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Getting to the first real boss of Lords of the Fallen... After coming off the glorious Lies of P this feels clunky as hell and it's nowhere near the same polish of that let alone From games. Movement is janky. Attacks are janky. Animations are off. Sound is poor. World is fine I guess but ... I'll soldier on but if you are on the fence with this I suggest... staying away.
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Oct 13, 2023 19:28
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Lords of the Fell For It Again
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Oct 13, 2023 19:32
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exquisite tea posted:Lords of the Fell For It Again
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Oct 13, 2023 19:35
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Lmao
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Oct 13, 2023 19:49
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exquisite tea posted:Lords of the Fell For It Again 
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Oct 13, 2023 19:50
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I played through a bit of LotF before heading out of town. Only got up to the third boss (A little before where the streamers had to stop). Level design is pretty great, there are some gorgeous vistas and the exploration is really cool. Combat is... I wouldn't call it janky but it's very loose. Nothing feels as precise as it does in a From game/Nioh/Lies of P. But the game also doesn't require precision... at all. Like, these are some of the most generous parry windows I've seen in any game ever. Pretty much every enemy is easily staggered, even elites. Your ranged ammo and throwables renew at checkpoints and do real damage. There's... no time limit on health regain? It's gotta be the easiest game I've played in the genre by a long shot. Having sloppy combat mechanics but being easy is better than having sloppy mechanics and being hard, I guess. Anyway, if you like Souls games for the metroidvania exploration, it's worth a look. Is does the vertically stacked world thing like Lordran quite well and is a real stunner. The Soul Reaver style dual world puzzles are really fun. But if you play Souls games for the combat... yeah, this game sucks at that. It's not frustrating but it's not very satisfying either. Which is a bummer for me because I'm a combat first, exploration second guy. And yeah, playing it right after Lies of P really is a stark contrast in quality. Vintersorg posted:Getting to the first real boss of Lords of the Fallen... Not sure what you consider the first real boss. I guess probably Pieta? The game gets a lot better after her. Going through the intro area leading to her I was definitely getting worried. Gives a really bad first impression.
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Oct 13, 2023 20:02
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Ubisoft... welcome to the resistence.
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Oct 13, 2023 20:03
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:love this man lol The new piss5 
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Oct 13, 2023 20:26
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:Laserdiscs would have them, that was how the Criterion Collection became known for being the film buff's release Yeah. LaserDisc was a bit of a weird format because there's a version of it (CAV) which can store 30 minutes of material per disc side (so a film in this format would have 2-4 discs and up to 7 or 8 "sides"). Also LaserDisc is technically mostly an analog audiovisual format (it's not 0s and 1s), but at some point they wedged in support for a PCM digital audio track, and at that point LaserDisc players could support a stereo Digital audio track, and a stereo Analog audio track. Then things started to get really weird, where folks like Criterion actually split the analog audio track, so the left audio channel was the film's soundtrack in mono (which was often all the film was produced in anyway, given its age) and the right audio channel had the commentary, and players could also isolate to only play the left channel or right channel. Some Anime LaserDiscs released in North America had the English dub as digital audio and Japanese audio as analog audio, and you'd enable TV closed captions for subtitles. And furthering things with the CAV format, it was designed to go frame-by-frame and so after the film they could stack some extras and do things like have it auto-pause on a text screen, and you could do frame advance to look at, say, production art or other stills, so that also enabled an extra branch of extras. Some movies did get extras on collector's edition VHS tapes (especially VHS tapes that were explicitly sold as widescreen versions of a film) but I think that all came after Criterion kind of started the trend on LaserDisc. And VHS didn't really have an avenue for commentary audio tracks.
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Oct 13, 2023 20:48
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Fifteen of Many posted:God, the style in Control is immaculate. I want to hoot and holler every time one of those new area title cards pops up. Hell yeah
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Oct 13, 2023 23:32
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Still love the elevator door cutting the logo in the title sequence
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Oct 13, 2023 23:36
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I’ve been playing Lords of the Fallen. I love the creepy horror adventure exploration, and it just constantly feels like a real triumph this whole “two worlds” thing. It reminds me of The City and The City book. The combat isn’t janky as much as a) there’s no animation cancelling and b) it’s more action souls than dark souls. I heard a reviewer say it’s the COD of souls-likes and that really is true. The game gets very fun and much less annoying/janky feeling as soon as you go full ham. There is a lot to like. They’re also Continuously tuning everything patch after patch. It will get really good I bet. But once I embraced the no animation cancelling and gave time to that, it got a lot a lot better. I’m sorry but Lies of P is just so boring. I don’t know what it is but there is nothing exciting about that world at all. And the combat jumping from too easy to crazy hard randomly makes it feel inconsistent. I had to have a podcast on at all times playing it and I burned out after the factory. There’s no wonder or adventure there at all.
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Oct 13, 2023 23:59
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univbee posted:Yeah. Insane hacking skills here
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Oct 14, 2023 00:09
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I liked Gale in BG3 a lot more at the beginning of the game but he is really starting to grate on me as I get into Act 3
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Oct 14, 2023 00:32
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Big Bowie Bonanza posted:I liked Gale in BG3 a lot more at the beginning of the game but he is really starting to grate on me as I get into Act 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po4adxJxqZk
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Oct 14, 2023 00:35
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:Insane hacking skills here Oh and it gets weirder, like eventually they figured out how to get a Dolby Digital 5.1 track by replacing the right analog channel with the data for it. So on an incompatible player, you get static from the right channel (and the left channel is usually a mono mix of the film). Also, not only did you need a "new" player for 5.1, but you also needed a separate fairly expensive box called an RF demodulator which I think converted the analog sound to an interpretable DD 5.1 track to your receiver (also expensive). In the early days DVD days, LaserDiscs were often preferred to DVD since a lot of early DVDs didn't take advantage of newer tech like progressive scan that you needed insane money for anyway, the laser disc had proper uncompressed stereo audio, and if you wanted 5.1 the LaserDisc would sometimes have the advantage of, despite having the lower bitrate of 384kbps, sounding better due to being truly properly mixed for 5.1 (because on the DVD side the mixes were sometimes a bit different to compensate for the fact that DVDs would also get played on a plain stereo setup so a 5.1 primitive downmixing had to survive that). It took a few years for DVDs to start to properly leverage dual-layered space and better features, and for people to start to gain access to higher-end screens without having to drop five figgies for LaserDisc to truly get beat, although a few exclusives still stuck to LD for weird legal reasons, like I think because LD was a niche format it was a bit of a blind spot for studios (Criterion actually released some major films on LD like Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane and Se7en I think because the main studios didn't care about the format) so some of the commentaries and extras were fairly anti-studio. I'm not 100% sure how DTS LaserDiscs worked, I think they replaced the analog audio entirely or some such so if you had a really old LD player with no digital audio support you were SOL for sound. A lot of weird stuff they did with LaserDisc tech, given it technically predates VHS slightly. And there's a bunch of super-weird poo poo that's mostly exclusive to Japan, like CD+G Karaoke support. There was a LOT of karaoke stuff on LaserDisc, most of the 90s actual karaoke booths in Asia were run on LDs. Earlier I touched on the primitive "scripting" you could do with a CAV LaserDisc, in fact for time seeking you didn't input in a time format, you gave an exact frame number. But in the non-home, commercial applications of LaserDisc, they could also set things up so a computer could send signals to a player (to tell it to jump to a specific frame number). This is how those Don Bluth-animated arcade games like Dragon's Lair worked, there was a mostly-invisible "game" layer that would basically run a primitive Dance Dance Revolution thing (hit this direction within this window of time) and depending on the success/fail path you did, it would send a signal to an embedded LD player telling to jump to the "you died" animation for that part of the game or whatever. Similarly, with a rack of LD players you could have an extensive library of Karaoke songs at your karaoke booth, and the little kiosk controller which handled your song queue would just send signals so the right "chapter" of the right player started playing and got sent to the booth you were in. Because in the 90s this was the best and most cost-effective way to have high-quality video in a form where you could seek to it very quickly (didn't have to fast forward to somewhere deep on a VHS tape or whatever), since computers were a long loving way away from being able to trivially store hours of video cost-effectively. univbee fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Oct 14, 2023 |
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Oct 14, 2023 02:20
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univbee posted:Yeah. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4pBk3-fduU
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Oct 14, 2023 02:28
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veni veni veni posted:Splurge on the Inzones you won’t regret it The stitching or whatever on my Pulses is coming undone pretty majorly now (after 3 years of near-constant use, tbf) so I think I’m gonna ask for some Inzones for Christmas
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Oct 14, 2023 02:51
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univbee posted:Oh and it gets weirder, like eventually they figured out how to get a Dolby Digital 5.1 track by replacing the right analog channel with the data for it. So on an incompatible player, you get static from the right channel (and the left channel is usually a mono mix of the film). Also, not only did you need a "new" player for 5.1, but you also needed a separate fairly expensive box called an RF demodulator which I think converted the analog sound to an interpretable DD 5.1 track to your receiver (also expensive). hey, thanks for these super interesting posts
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Oct 14, 2023 03:01
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I forget where I read it but I had heard Laserdisc once described as “everything you can shove into an analog TV signal recorded by a laser”, and that’s honestly pretty drat neat. Analog TV formatting itself is fascinating and being able to press that onto a disc and mess with the limitations and bandwidth in nonstandard ways is really clever. Unrelated, plat’d The Callisto Protocol and I gotta admit it really has grown on me. I think a lot of the criticisms are valid (some of the plot criticisms less so and it feels like people are damning it based on summaries rather than playing it sometimes) but it’s really well put together for what it is. I think it’s a game that, weirdly enough, got too much budget to pull off what it wanted to do. Game fun, pretty, wouldn’t have paid $100 for it but it was worth $0 + $15 DLC easily.
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Oct 14, 2023 03:58
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Blind Rasputin posted:I’ve been playing Lords of the Fallen. I love the creepy horror adventure exploration, and it just constantly feels like a real triumph this whole “two worlds” thing. It reminds me of The City and The City book. The combat isn’t janky as much as a) there’s no animation cancelling and b) it’s more action souls than dark souls. I heard a reviewer say it’s the COD of souls-likes and that really is true. The game gets very fun and much less annoying/janky feeling as soon as you go full ham. There is a lot to like. They’re also Continuously tuning everything patch after patch. It will get really good I bet. I hope the proximity of LotF and LoP and their kinda of opposite directions doesn’t result in a thing where fans of one have to diss the other… I’m realizing I might have done that a bit. It seems odd to consider a lack of animation canceling to be a component of being more of an action game, since a lack of animation canceling is one of the big things action game fans had trouble adapting to when Souls started. But that aside, I think you’re absolutely right in the overall point. If Souls is Counter Strike, LotF can be CoD. It’s looser and more about going ham than being precise and analytical. It looks like Souls combat but kind of felt more like AC: Origins on hard (which is the one asscreed I liked). That’s not a bad thing, it’s just going to be the wrong cup of tea for a lot of genre fans. The level design and visual are a big triumph, if what I got to play is indicative of the full game. I played a bit past the Blasphemous boss and thoroughly explored the whole bridge area. The optional connection underneath was really cool. Probably the first time a loop has made me say “wow” since the elevator back to firelink. The visual density is really incredible, this is the first time I’ve seen an Unreal engine fully use nanite and still have a clean image with mostly smooth performance. I think in terms of art direction it’s the best execution of the Beksinski look so far. There are some really impactful vistas. The guy who was outright negative about the game before had only played up to Pieta and… I gotta say that first part of the game is garbage. I feel like the intro was originally supposed to be shorter, like DeS or DS1s starting areas, but play-testing maybe showed they needed more time to introduce all the mechanics before the first proper area, so new spaces were put together in a rushed manner for that purpose. The quality divide in level design between it and the rest of the game is pretty severe, especially visually. Anyway, From’s Souls games are masterful because they resound with a lot of different people for a lot of very different reasons. I think LotF doubles down in one direction while LoP doubles down in another. LoP is definitely more my style (Tightly tuned bosses, maybe my favorite combat system in the sub genre, small densely wound levels, and I love the steampunk France setting) but people who want expansive exploration, more action-y combat, and horror fantasy will prefer LotF. I still liked what I played quite a lot, despite leaning in the other direction. Edit: you know bb with Ludwig’s holy blade might be a better description of the combat feel. You set aside precision and kinda just run at everyone and stagger them into oblivion while rolling with incredibly generous iframes. Bugblatter fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Oct 14, 2023 |
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Oct 14, 2023 04:08
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Nanite is absurd. The amount of detail on the screen at once while still pulling ~40-60fps in quality mode is really hard to believe, and the draw distances are scary. I think my favorite thing right now about Lies of the Fallen is the Umbral realm. The time limit before poo poo gets really scary, the limited numbers of exit portals, the increased rewards and wild paths to new places… it’s anxiety provoking as hell and I love it. It’s the same feeling I had in the original Dark Zone when The Division 1 first came out. High risk, high reward, get in and get out fast as you can. How the f is this in my dark souls game?
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Oct 14, 2023 05:17
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Haha, Lies of the Fallen. I wish I had a clever joke to use with that.
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Oct 14, 2023 05:18
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Handsome Ralph posted:Debating buying a Pulse 3D headset as an upgrade from my gold headset I got 9 years ago. Is it worth the upgrade or nah? If you got 9 years out of the golds, you’d get a century out of the pulse 3d. The sound is definitely better than the golds and I find them more comfortable with my big goon head. Mine are still in great shape after getting them day one at launch and constant use during the pandemic. Each time I got the golds, they’d have a hinge break or some other really frustrating issue after 2 years.
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Oct 14, 2023 06:56
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Handsome Ralph posted:Debating buying a Pulse 3D headset as an upgrade from my gold headset I got 9 years ago. Is it worth the upgrade or nah? I did just that last year, love both types, only upgraded because the golds padding was flaking to bits on me. Just make sure you enable 3d sound for the headset within the ps5 settings.
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Oct 14, 2023 07:11
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univbee posted:Oh and it gets weirder, like eventually they figured out how to get a Dolby Digital 5.1 track by replacing the right analog channel with the data for it. So on an incompatible player, you get static from the right channel (and the left channel is usually a mono mix of the film). Also, not only did you need a "new" player for 5.1, but you also needed a separate fairly expensive box called an RF demodulator which I think converted the analog sound to an interpretable DD 5.1 track to your receiver (also expensive). I love LaserDisc talk! Just to add, the DTS discs did have a digital layer, but there was still an analog track available. Some of my DTS LDs have the regular analog audio soundtrack on them, but most use it for the commentary track. So an incompatible player you might only hear a commentary track and be kind of confused. DTS in cinema was also fascinating as you had to put a separate CD into the audio processor for each film, but if you left the wrong movie CD in the audio processor when you switched films some of them would still start the wrong soundtrack. This was rectified pretty early on thankfully because projectionists would be spending a lot of time getting high in the booth and forget to change discs when moving prints (not saying this from experience or anything)
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Oct 14, 2023 11:22
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Hal Insandenza posted:I love LaserDisc talk! Since I can’t help myself on this subject let me continue this derail… We actually still use those ancient DTS players now, because all these 70mm releases from Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan use strictly DTS playback because the old analog sound readers are too finicky for anyone to correctly align anymore (well just we’ve lost most of the industry people who were good at it) but instead of the soundtrack being on CD it comes in a USB drive that the later model DTS processors were able to use to load a soundtrack into. By the end of the film era there were so many competing sound formats (Dolby A, Dolby SR, Dolby Digital, DTS, Sony SDDS) that they were running out of space in the film to put more soundtracks on and the last one (SDDS I believe) was forced to put their soundtrack between the sprocket holes, and the later ones were always at the most risk of being compromised as the film got older and a bit worn on the edges, leading to lots of pops and hiss in the soundtrack. Edit: I slightly misremembered, the SDDS was actually beyond the sprocket holes right on the edge, the Dolby Digital track was the one between the sprockets. Hal Incandenza fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Oct 14, 2023 |
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Oct 14, 2023 11:32
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All this stuff is insane and I love to read about it
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Oct 14, 2023 12:12
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One of my old roommates collected old video formats as a hobby. I think the one that struck me as the most interesting was a vinyl format by RCA. Spin at different rates for NTSC and PAL, I guess kinda like LP and SP settings on records. The copy of Empire Strikes Back he had didn’t look great, but that might have been degradation of the disc. One of my favorite birthdays entailed booking his laserdisc player up to our projector at the end of a party to watch Terminator 2. But we were so drunk that we kept getting confused when it was time to turn over/switch discs. We kept being like “hey, didn’t we watch this scene already?” But it would be a badass chase or fight and we decide to watch it again. I think we must have watched it for like 5 hours and just passed out before actually finishing. Can’t have that experience on streaming.
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Oct 14, 2023 15:13
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I was very sad the last time I hooked up my laserdisc player and discovered it has lost the ability to automatically read both sides of a disc and I needed to manually turn them over. Of course with CAV movies you had like 2-3 discs so you still had to swap discs anyway but that was just a good opportunity to pee/take a bong hit/get some snacks
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Oct 14, 2023 15:26
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Got a bad day at black rock laserdisc. No player tho lmao All media should be released in boxes like that
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Oct 14, 2023 17:43
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Well I'm calling time on Scarlet Nexus. Gonna have to take the DNF on this one. Shame cuz it's a good game, I think, but it's sorts caught in two worlds. I can't decide if it wants to be an action game or a VN and it steers too closely to VN territory for me and the combat is too sparse and too undercooked for my tastes. Shame cuz the core of the gameplay is quite good just needed a bit more focus and a bit more polish. Anyway on to the next! You might recall I had given the viewers a choice last time around between a game from 2003 and 2021. We've done the 2021 game so now we're gonna do the 2003 game! And thats none other than... 24. Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits  ...does it feel like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel?? Cuz we kinda are lol... I was expecting to have Suikoden remasters to play at this point.. 
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Oct 14, 2023 19:13
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My dad when I was a teenager nearly bankrupted our family building a big home A/V system in our basement. We had a (70-80” at least) flat screen tv that was a gigantic cabinet. I’ll never forget how absurdly large the cabinet was. At least it was fake wood color. He was full on board with laserdiscs and THX certified tuners and speakers. I remember him sitting on the couch for half a day with this sound meter tuning each speaker channel. And when he was done we all watched Jurassic Park with the tuner’s volume knob turned all the way up. Those super deep base notes at the very beginning of the movie? I kid you not it shook, shook the house. Everything on walls or tables just loving rattled with each note. My mom was so pissed and my dad was sitting there actually cackling like he’d lost his mind completely. So I guess it makes sense i blow so much money on physical media. Blind Rasputin fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Oct 14, 2023 |
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Oct 14, 2023 19:15
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Did your IRL drinks do the ripple when the T-rex showed up
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Oct 14, 2023 19:22
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I'm playing Dying Light at the same time as Control and I gotta say I feel it is not a fair way to experience the former.
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Oct 14, 2023 21:02
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fridge corn posted:Well I'm calling time on Scarlet Nexus. Gonna have to take the DNF on this one. Shame cuz it's a good game, I think, but it's sorts caught in two worlds. I can't decide if it wants to be an action game or a VN and it steers too closely to VN territory for me and the combat is too sparse and too undercooked for my tastes. Shame cuz the core of the gameplay is quite good just needed a bit more focus and a bit more polish. I played this when there was a free weekend on Steam earlier this year. I kinda liked the game but after the first few hours you've seen all the animations and the novelty wears off pretty quick. Doesn't help that the route split means you're stuck with the same crew and powers for half the game. quote:Anyway on to the next! You might recall I had given the viewers a choice last time around between a game from 2003 and 2021. We've done the 2021 game so now we're gonna do the 2003 game! And thats none other than... I remember enjoying this when I was younger and had much lower standards. The final dungeon and boss were rear end, though.
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Oct 14, 2023 21:18
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