Speaking as someone that never played the games, I can't say the trailer did anything for me. It just looks like another The Walking Dead spin-off, and I lost interest in those ages ago.

I'm not sure I'm okay with any store blocking games based on their content, and if we are, let's start with the gambling for kids games, i.e. anything with microtransactions for loot boxes.

Sounds like y'all have never worked with fresh-out-of-college hires that will take every shortcut and try to game the system as hard as they can to do as little work as possible. And if they get fired in 6 months after 3 months of training, who cares? Take the money and run. About 10% of our new hires literally just don't show up on the first day. No notice or anything.

Judging by Putin's rapidly declining health, Ukraine probably just needs to hold out for a few more months. I'm not expecting a smooth transfer of power in Russia, though. With all the recent oligarch assisinations, things are already getting real Game of Thrones over there.

This has been McConnell's long game for quite a while now. Block all judicial nominees when a Democrat is President, then rush through as many as possible when Republicans are in control. The courts are now absolutely packed with young, far-right conservative judges, with little regard for precedent. The Republican's wisely realized years ago that they were go to lose control of the the popular vote, so they locked in lifetime judicial appointments instead. We'll be feeling the effects of this for probably a couple generations.

Expect some real lawlessness as more and more people start questioning the validity of the courts.

I've been enjoying the the new AoTS, so I hope it doesn't go away. I do fast-forward through about 1/3 of it to get to the good parts, but I did the same with the old show, too.

Personally, I'm a big fan of Adam Sessler. He may be the only video game reviewer out there that writes his reviews like a serious art critic.

What non-sensical action are we talking about, here?

I've got no problem with warrior-Galadriel. She's thousands of years old by the time LotR happens, and she and her family have been through multiple huge wars. The Silmarillion has her as one of the leaders of the group that goes to Middle Earth to fight Morgoth. She also still has thousands of more years to evolve into the "wiser" Galadriel we see in LotrR.

My only issues with the show so far are the somewhat lacking attempts at Tolkienesque dialogue, and the strong implication that the Stranger is Gandalf, who shouldn't be showing up in Middle Earth until well into the Third Age. If it is Gandalf, that just feels like pandering to the movie fans.

SotTR in RTX is one of the best looking, worst written games I've ever played. It felt like they must have fired the writers about about half way through production. At least the actual gameplay was decent.

At first, I wondered how Disney would feel about the Chinese government having oversight of one of their biggest franchises, but then I remembered Disney had gone out of their way to thank multiple Chinese government agencies in the credits to Mulan that were actively in the process of committing genocide.

I've put many, many hours into Rocksmith. It tends to be my go-to, brain-less, unwind at the end of the workday activity. It's really good for learning the physical mechanics of playing, since it makes the required repetition a lot more engaging. Not so good for actually learning songs.

That said, I was part of the beta, and it was an absolute dumpster fire. It's hard for me to imagine they've improved it a huge amount since then.

I'd be dissapointed if our intelligence agencies weren't using social media against our enemies. Russia has demonstrated pretty well how effective a tool it can be.

as a pig hunter he is very familiar with the smell of animal decay

I have questions.

jdreyer wrote on Aug 17, 2022, 21:04:
The original was so good thanks to the lore and story GRRM put together. Once that material ran out, so did the show quality.

According to GRRM himself, he'll be much more involved in this show. Apparently they shut him out of the last couple seasons of GoT. Probably D&D got sick of him telling them how stupid their decisions were.

Quinn wrote on Aug 17, 2022, 12:59:
That last Dr Strange movie is the worst of its kind: Let me hire the handful of actors that movie uses, I'll get a few cheap Indians that'll do the CGI and I could replicate that absolute shit.

Raimi's directing in the last Dr Strange movie was masterful. No amateur would be capable of that level of work.

Boomers would have been 40+ when Doom came out. Also, unlike us, none of them would have grown up with video games. I'm sure they exist, but I don't know anyone from my parents generation that regularly plays video games. It's even less likely that they were doing so 30 years ago when PC gaming was much smaller.

The hint guides were the best. The ones that would give you progressively more helpful hints. Not sure I'd have the patience these days to be wandering back and forth on a map, trying out everything in my inventory on anything clickable.

It's just too bad they didn't make this look like an actual modern game, instead of something from the mid-2Ks. Budget-limitations, I assume.

I'm sure Gen-Z will continue to call them "boomer shooters", solely because they know it annoys Gen-X/Millenials.

Reflections on PC look downright broke compared to PS5. Shimmery. Messed up brightness.

VaranDragon wrote on Aug 11, 2022, 03:08:
most of those stem from people simply not using their work laptops or computers

We force our users to use their work laptops to get onto the corporate network.

Gameplay looks almost exactly the same as Amazing Spider-man games from a decade ago. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I enjoyed those games, so I'll probably pick up this one some time in the future.