some other gripes that suddenly arised

Manhattan and Veidt don't have the one-on-one talk.  In the comic, Veidt shows a hint of remorse by asking Manhattan if what he did was right.  This could be paralleled in the movie when Veidt said that he felt every sacrifice and let Dan beat him up but it was still an important scene and the lack of it cheapened his character.

Manhattan telling Spectre that Blake was her father.  In the comic, it's implied at first and confirmed later.  Why the fuck did Hayter and the other writer guy think that the audience was too retarded to get the connection?  "Your father... was THE COMEDIAN" COME ON!!!

Finally, Rorschach in the pedophile's house where the leg bone still had a foot attached to it.  In the comic, it's just a femur.  Again, did they expect the audience to NOT understand the connection?  The killer was careful enough to burn her panties but felt like feeding the still-attached shoe (complete with sock) to the dogs?  Gimme a fucking break!

After giving it some thought, there are two things that really stood out and I can't get them out of my mind.  They haunt me; they shouldn't have been in the film and they portray their particular characters in a horrible light.

The Comedian shooting JFK.

And Rorschach butchering the pedophile.  In the comic he sets the room on fire, gives the guy a hack saw and says "No time to cut the chains."

The scene where Rorschach butchers a guy made me feel uneasy; not because of the violence but because they made it seem Rorschach takes pleasure in killing criminals yet there's nothing in his character that points to you believing this.  When Rorschach snapped in the comic, he became his masked persona but he didn't flip out like a psycho.

Rorschach is a sociopath but he's not completely mental.  As far as the JFK thing went, it just felt... wrong.  Not controversial or sensationally wrong, just completely wrong for the character.

Adventure Games and RPGs (gaming wise) goes hand in hand, regardless they both follow a very simple thing. They stick you in a role, and you play as that role. Really RPGs are just Adventure games with random battles/any turn based fighting.

i wrote my college thesis on rpg's brah.  there are three things common in all role playing games

1. you control, to some degree, the growth of your character
2. rely indirectly on the character's skill to succeed in challenges, not the player's skill 
3. percentages or rolls are used to simulate random chance

zelda, for example, isn't an rpg because you're in control of link's actions.  your success at beating the game is determined by your skill as a player.  diablo is an rpg because even though you directly control the character, their success is primarily determined by their personal skills.

I didn't care for the mask much, how they made it a constant shifting stain, rather than liquid, but.

It's supposed to be a shifting stain in that it's symmetrical like an actual inkblot test.

Or when Dan and Laurie get attacked by the thugs in the alley.

I agree.  I understand they're guys at the peak of human agility but fffffffff Dan was breaking bones and snapping necks. 

Shit just happened too fast.

Opening
Flashback
5 minutes of plot
30 minute flashback
some plot
double the exposition
hint at more plot
NOPE NOPE EXPOSITION THIS SHIT UP

it looks pretty tedious in that the blob seems to be always dragging behind and trying to position it on a right spot took like way too long considering how easy it could be. Maybe the player just sucks tho.

alpha build

actually as soon as i wake up i'll probably forget the movie entirely and think it was shit. 

Saw it.  Rather than compare it to the source, I tried to review it as an original film.

It was decent.  Somewhere above average but a lot of pacing issues dragged it down.  I was impressed by the way they handled the montages especially opening title sequence where they show all masked adventurers... anyone else catch Hooded Justice and Dollar Bill lovingly touching each other off to the side???  However, most of the film was flashbacks with voice narratives and the actual plot itself was paper thin.

Again, it's hard to judge this film on the merits of a film and not being based on an original property.  The cold war is the heart of the story, the human condition is what drives it and yet everything just "falls into place."  There's very little struggle between the characters because everything happens so quickly.

I forgot where I read it but I think the original guy they asked to direct the movie said it would have worked better as a 10 episode mini-series and I agree.  The movie was essentially a trailer for the 3+ hour long DVD release which will probably be leagues better.

This is my all time favorite NES game and it's the only ROM I have on my computer. I really hope they fix the names of the beans though because in order to play it I have to have a bean reference guide open at all times.

there was a stupid mnemonic to the beans (ketchup = catch up, licorice = ladder, honey = humming bird) but yeah, a short description or something would be nice.  It's also cool they're adding enemies to the game and you can transform your blob into a killing machine because the original game could be beaten in five minutes by turning into a rocketship and pretty much flying to the last area.

AAAAAH MY DICK IS RAW

The studio behind Contra 4 is remaking the classic adventure game A Boy and His Blob which is not only one of the harder sidescrolling puzzle games I've ever played but it was also nominated by some parent organization in the 80s for "best game for kids" or something.  It was hard, it was fucking frustrating, but I played it for months until I beat it.

Now... now this...

DISCUSS

wait when you can say YOU CAN TELL ITS NOT REAL do you honestly mean you'd look at those and think after a second "yep not real" or that if someone told you you'd see it?

because I'm pretty sure if someone posted this: http://www6.incrysis.com/screenshots/00025ez6.jpg in the picture thread with "testing out my camera", no one would say HEH...GOTCHA.

It's the lighting.  Game engines still seem to render shadows too sharply.  Under ambient light shadows should be gentle and blend into the colors of the object.

An example of what I'm talking about.  Even in a dense forest, shadows blend into the object, not starkly contrast against it.

EDIT: Now if someone was saying "I'm playing with some filters on my hi-res camera" then yeah, I'd probably be fooled.

When it comes down to it, Batman & Robin was a much richer cinematic experience, overall, than The Dark Knight. The latter merely feels like a straightforward film, whereas the former is a genuine work of visual art. It's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about Watchmen: the synthesis of both style and substance. Snyder's production really has taken Gibbons' artwork into the third dimension, whilst also preserving the depth and the subtext of the original work.

You're the only person in the world who honestly thinks this.

B&R vs. TDK all boils down to your preference; campy silver age stuff or contemporary fiction.  You felt that everything about B&R was imaginative but I thought it was messy.  Every scene happened without any reason to it and it felt less like a narrative and more like a poorly written fan fiction where the author decided to toss everything he could possibly think of just because he could.

IDK, I look at the trailers for Watchmen and it just doesn't strike me as interesting.  Like, Dan see's Dr. Manhattan splatter Rorschach across the snow and flies into a mad rage and Ozymandias looks like Batman without the mask and the Crimebusters have now been renamed to Watchmen because apparently nobody in the world can make the connection between literature and film when it's not directly referenced in the film itself I JUST DON'T KNOW MAN I JUST DON'T KNOW

i said maybe 2 or 3 years ago that 3D graphics will never reach the point where they'll fool my eyes.  the dirt in the above pic still looks artificial when you analyze it but god dammit this shit's coming pretty close to fooling me!

now if only these engines could render humans realistically.  environments and static objects are easy but all humans must look like latex

what is this i don't even

so, rorschach's comment about ozy being gay has been removed

and i liked lxg and didn't find it too wordy at all!  i thought the ending (2nd volume) was pretty abrupt and like all of moore's work RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE but the fact that all of the characters pretty much HATED each other really added to the characterization.  mr. hyde was a ticking time bomb, quaterman a old fart, nemo is bitter at everyone who's british, the invisible guy was a massive dick, campion bond was a weasel, and the chick with the scarf was more bitter than nemo. 

haven't gotten around to reading black dossier but i heard gollywog is in it!

only the first line of dialog is actually spoken (and cutscenes are fully voiced) and i've counted maybe 3 misspellings so far.  nothing wrong the grammar.

hmmm the party banter is nice.  the character's will comment on their surroundings and opinions.  it's contextual and unique for each character so unlike other party banter games (like Wizardry 8 and Baldur's Gate) it's not a general pool of terms they'll use for every situation.

that's why they called it drakensang

I've been playing this game for four hours and nothing story related has happened at all.  I can't tell if that's a good thing, yet.  From what I've heard, the opening area is basically a 6 hour tutorial and it pretty much shows.

First off THE GAMEPLAY: I've never played The Dark Eye tabletop but if this definitely feels like playing a table top game.  It's more complicated to new people than Temple of Elemental Evil and I don't remember Realms of Arkania being this in depth.  It's simple once you learn all the abbreviations, but to a new comer you're bombarded with dozens of acronyms that make no sense.  Get a hold of the manual if you pirate/buy the digital copy because it has a 5 page glossary of terms all relevant to the game world (names of gods and mythical figures) as well as what the acronyms stand for. 

The mechanics are simple; you kills shit/do quests and you get ADVENTURE POINTS which you spend on talents (skills), attributes, and magic and shit.  You can also talk to trainers and pay them to train you in talents you don't have but it all costs ducats and AP.  Combat takes place in rounds, you can choose to pause the game each round for a turn based feel, and the game is actually pretty tough.  Unlike DnD, you have "wounds" where if you take too much damage in one hit you'll get a penalty to your stats.  Magic and special skills are required to get through even the simplest fights because enemies love to gang up on you and can kill you in two to three hits.  My only gripe regarding combat is that your health regenerates outside of combat waaaaay too quickly so you can literally beat up on a tough enemy then wait 60 seconds to fully heal.  Wounds only go away by praying at a shrine or successfully healing them using a heal check and the more wounds you have + the longer you wait to heal them then the harder they are to heal.

As for other combat options, you can build equipment (alchemy, weapons/armor, bows) which is actually pretty in depth (every piece of equipment in the game has a formula to it).  You can also build traps, scavenge for plants, and gut animals for their innards.  Traps and status affecting spells are pretty important because they lower the ability of your enemy in combat.  Combat actually takes a bit of time to resolve (shortest fight for me was like 30 seconds) so the more fuck up your opponent, the greater chance your tanks and meatshields have to survive.  Enemies will actively pursue spell casters so you're constantly switching between your fighters and casters to keep the enemy occupied.  There's no "attack of opportunity" here and you can only parry 1 attack with a weapon (unless you're skilled with shields) so if someone starts casting a healing spell then EVERY enemy will stop attacking whoever and gang up on them.

As for the story... uh....  haven't gotten that far yet!  The world is broken up into several "zones" (think Baldur's Gate where it's a huge world map and you can click on smaller areas) and they're laaaaaarge.  Thankfully only the important NPC's have dialog trees while the random joes have a small little text box (I hate saying the same damn thing to random NPC's that don't matter). So far, skills influence dialog options nicely and there's an entire talent section devoted to social talents but I haven't noticed any "good vs. evil" choices or plot altering quests yet but I'm still in the first REALLY LARGE area.

Graphics are great and the engine runs real smooth.  Transitioning between areas takes a long time to load but moving from one area to the next isn't frequent at all so it's not like you're staring at the loading screen.  The music is kind of... meh.  It's not memorable, it's not ear splitting bad, it's just meh. 

For 30 bux it's a pretty bomb game.  It's fun, not entirely buggy and stupid like 99% of European RPGs, and it's keeping the dying tradition of table top PC games alive.  NWN2 was pretty disappointing but this is everything that game isn't.

nono, i go through all of them.  they're all bad i don't need someone telling me what's worse

go read the archives at comics.com

try not to laugh yourself to death at the unintentionally bad newspaper strips