toxicitizen

Sure but the thing with that is that in a book you can have as much inner monologue as you want to clearly show her state of mind. What you're describing would work but I don't think it would convey it to quite the right degree. In a movie, you need to externalize a character's internal conflict in one way or another and the whole "being a Bene Gesserit vs being a mother" thing is pretty abstract and subtle to begin with.

That's a fair complaint but tbh how do you even convey an internal conflict like that visually? The movie had to cram so much in its limited runtime that I don't blame him for cutting this particular corner. It could've been toned down I suppose but I was so happy with everything else that it never really bothered me. I especially loved how they represented the voice. That could've been super goofy but the way it was done was low-key creepy. Good to know! Out of curiosity, which ones did you think were the better/weaker ones? I imagine none of them will quite reach the heights of the first one but that still leaves a lot of room for the others to be great in their own right.

I guess we don't have a "Last INCREDIBLE Movie You Saw" thread so this will have to do. Finally went to see Dune yesterday. My god, it was perfect! Well, almost. The movie rushes through some parts that could've used more breathing room and then stretches some things that could've gone faster but I think that mostly came down to where they decided to end it. But overall this was shockingly faithful and every bit as good as I expected/hoped it to be. Can't wait for Part 2! As a side-note, I'm currently halfway through Dune Messiah and I already really hope that Denis Villeneuve will get his way and do a trilogy with Messiah as the third one, if only to see how audiences will react to it lol. Frank Herbert sure had balls to follow-up his hit book with a sequel that basically deconstructs everything he built in the first one. So far it's convinced me to just ignore anyone that recommends reading only the first book and stopping there. I'll read all the Frank Herbert books for sure. Beyond that, we'll see. I usually have an aversion to any kind of "expanded universe" stuff not written by the original author but I know Frank Herbert never finished Dune 7 and the conclusion his son wrote uses elements set up in the prequels he wrote so I'll probably at least read those so I can read the end of the main series. Although I'm already bracing myself for the worst...

I was about to reply with a joke like "Trevor is in this?!?" but after some quick googling it looks like he actually is lol. I really need to catch up on the MCU. I haven't seen any of the movies since Far From Home and only WandaVision for the tv shows. I saw a pic for the new slate of shows they just announced and I legit felt exhausted by the prospect of having to catch up on all of that. I should probably get on it before it all accumulates enough that I lose interest entirely...

Nice, let me know how it is. It's really tempting to get a Switch for this one (I was looking at the OLED model on Amazon just yesterday lol) but it's all but confirmed to be a timed exclusive so I just can't justify it. I'd probably get the Switch anyway if it wasn't for Nintendo being Nintendo and pulling all the 3D Mario remasters from sale. I'm so fucking salty about that lol. Having access to all of them on the Switch would make it really appealing to me and arbitrarily removing them is just such a Nintendo move...

Blasphemous Holy fuck, why did I sleep on this one for so long? This game is incredible! It's a good thing I played Bloodstained first because it would not have compared favorably to this. I can't really think of a single 2D souls-like that I actually loved until now. The only two I can think of off the top of my head are Death's Gambit and Salt and Sanctuary and I bounced off of both of them. I want to get back to them someday though. IIRC I only got distracted from Salt and Sanctuary, and while I found Death's Gambit rough and amateurish, it recently got a massive update+DLC so it might be worth giving another shot. Anyway, my point is Blasphemous is the first one to actually blow me away. What makes it really great is that, while it's clearly inspired by the Souls games, it doesn't just imitate them. It has its own identity in basically every aspect. I also found the whole bible horror angle to be way creepier than anything in the Souls franchise, including Bloodborne. I kinda want to jump right into NG+ and finish getting all the achievements but I think I'll hold off until next month when the final update/free DLC drops and adds what they're calling the true ending. Not that the game I just played felt like it lacked an ending but I'll take whatever they're willing to add!

At this rate it seems unlikely that FFVI will make it out this year but that works for me cause I don't have that much time for gaming lately. I don't even know if I'll dig into FFV right away although I'm really looking forward to this one since I've never actually played it.

What Jack said but also I think the main thing with Avengers wasn't the lack of MCU likeness so much as the character designs being pretty generic and kinda bad/boring. Guardians didn't have a good reveal but I distinctly remember thinking at the time: "well at least the characters don't look like shit in this one lol".

This just got here! I'm pretty happy to have it because I completely forgot to pre-order it until the last minute and then my bookstore didn't ship it on release day (and removed my shipping estimate). And it was out of stock both there and on Amazon so it really looked like I had missed out on the initial launch stock and would have to wait weeks to get a copy. edit: I guess I should've held off on posting yesterday cause I had other stuff coming in. Lately I've had more disposable income than I've had in a while so it's leading to some slightly... frivolous purchases. Also got this along with it. Art/lore books are quickly becoming a new obsession of mine...

Normally wouldn't pre-order this far ahead of launch but I saw a pretty decent deal so what the hell.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Finally got around to playing this one. I don't have a ton to say about it, to be honest. It's pretty good; not sure I'd call it great. It's certainly no Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night. Hell, it's no Hollow Knight for that matter. But it's still a pretty fun time although I did find some elements kinda frustrating at times. Enemies that can fly through the scenery and disappear out of reach (and often out of the screen entirely) doesn't exactly make for fun combat. There's also a super weird difficulty spike on one of the early bosses. Maybe I was underleveled or something but since the game was never again that challenging afterwards, that one fight kinda stands out as simply poorly balanced. It's also kinda weird playing this immediately after Curse of the Moon as so many of the characters and bosses are recycled between the two. It's clear RotN is the one where they originated but it kinda takes some of the game's thunder away to reach a boss and go "Oh right, this one." The weird thing is that the games don't complement each other in any way. Curse of the Moon is its own separate timeline and is pretty incompatible with Ritual of the Night story-wise. So it probably would've been better if it had its own cast of characters and enemies. On a more positive note, it's by far the nicest looking 2.5D metroidvania I've played. I usually graphics like that super underwhelming visually but I thought this one looked pretty good. The background doesn't feel bland or empty and the characters/enemies don't feel disconnected from it. It's not graphically impressive or aything but I thought it looked pretty good for what it is. Oh and I expected a Symphony of the NIght-style inverted castle kinda deal but there's actually nothing like that in the game, which was a little disappointing. There's a bad ending if you go fight the final boss as soon as you reach him but it literally ends with a game over screen. So unless you're an idiot who doesn't realize that you still have like 40% of the map unexplored, it's pretty obvious you're meant to keep going. There are a few more areas to explore but that's it. It feels less like an hidden true ending and more like the game has an arbitrary point where it expects you to guess that you need to keep going. I'll play the sequel for sure although I do hope they improve things somewhat. This was a 7/10 at best for me and it could've been an easy 9-10. Oh and it has one of these obnoxious "Obtain/craft literally everything in the game lol" achievement as an extra fuck you. That's every weapon, armor, food, material, etc... Basically wasting an extra 5-10 hours of your time for no good reason if you wanna get all the achievements. Which... I will not be playing Curse of the Moon 2 immediately. I've had enough of this series for the time being lmao.

Finally upgraded my setup enough to warrant posting an update! I'm definitely not regretting that second monitor. Such a massive QoL improvement in so many ways. It's also so large that it wouldn't fit under the shelves that used to be on top of my desk, so I had to remove them. Got a Kallax unit from Ikea to make up for the lost storage space and I'm also very pleased with that purchase! Still need to get some proper bookcases soon, though. The two tiny ones I have are still overflowing even after moving all my mangas and art books over to the Kallax... Also, I think I finally need to upgrade to some proper PC speakers. That bookshelf stereo has served me well over the years but they're getting hard to fit into this new configuration. Also, I think the stereo part of the thing might be fucked lol. I was doing some reorganizing and found some of my old CDs and put one in it for the hell of it. The disc tray was somehow covered in dust even though I haven't opened it in years and even after wiping it clean it would only play the first track. When I tried skipping to the second one, it stopped playing and started making some weird noise. I panicked and got the CD out and there was now an inch wide ring of dust on top of it. Now it just won't play at all lol. At the very least the CD player probably needs a deep cleaning...

I'm still pretty gutted about Gloryhammer firing their singer and then all the controversy surrounding Chris Bowes that came out immediately after. But at least Beast in Black is still awesome! I'll also never tire of this song about Guts and Griffith. Any band that makes an entire album about Berserk is a good band, in my book.

Damn, you're already done with it? Did some of your previous progress transfer over or did you sink another hundred hours into the game already?!?

For a short little side-scroller, it has a surprising amount of replay value. The way you can either recruit 3 bonus characters you can swap between on the fly or kill them to get abilities on the main guy, or just ignore them entirely and be seriously underpowered, makes for drastically different experiences. Especially since the levels are designed with branching paths that require certain abilities to access that you might or might not have depending on the choices you made. There's even a new game plus kinda mode where you replay the game minus the main character, who is now the final boss. The only aspect I didn't like was doing boss rush mode for the last achievement. God, I fucking hate boss rush modes lol. If it's so trivially easy that you can just power through it then it's fine but it's like... what's the point? And if it's an actual challenge then it just frustrates me. The boss fights are actually fun in the game but having to do them all back-to-back with super limited amounts of power ups and healing items (only two for the latter) is just arbitrary and annoying to me.

Birthday present from a friend. So now I need to hurry the fuck up and play Yakuza 3 through 6 already, I guess!

Yeah, base game is the version with Raidou and DLC for the edition with Dante. Makes sense as they probably had to re-license him with Capcom to have him available at all.

A friend of mine has a curved TV and the curve on it is way milder than on my monitor so I assumed that's something they take into account. I figured maybe a less aggressive curve could account for a farther viewing distance and a wider zone where you get the best view or something. So I googled and one of the first results was an article about why curved TV didn't take off and went away. So you might be on to something there lol.

I don't think it has anything to do with specific content and whether it's made for a curved screen or not. From what I understand, it's mostly meant to give a clearer view of the screen because of the way the human field of view works. The effect I noticed in Curse of the Moon didn't detract from the experience or anything. It just made me go "holy shit what" for a second hahaha. Most of the time you don't really notice the curve, there was just something about that particular effect that made it extremely obvious for like a second or so. It's also worth noting that my monitor has a more aggressive curve than in that picture. Mine is meant to match the curve of the human eye, I think.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon What better way to put my new monitor through its paces than by playing uh... an NES style throwback sidescroller? Yeah, I don't know. It was pretty good, though! For some reason I bounced off of the original Castlevania every single time I fired up the Anniversary Collection but this one clicked with me instantly. It probably helps that it's not bullshit hard like NES games used to be. The last level has one hell of a difficulty spike, though. The entire game is pretty forgiving and suddenly you're being chased by this swarm of... something that destroys everything and some sections require perfect timing with your jumps otherwise you fall to your death. The final boss also felt insanely hard at first but once I started getting a feel for its pattern (and realized there was a hidden room with the most powerful power-up right before it) it was actually pretty easy. I unlocked Nightmare mode and still have some alternate endings to do, though. The game is less than two hours long so I don't mind doing a few more runs before moving on to something else. Oh and since I mentioned my new monitor. Playing a sidescroller on a curved monitor is weird. Maybe it's the angle I was sitting at from it but whenever there was a transition between two rooms and the camera panned, there was this really weird effect. Normally in a sidescroller a camera pan will register as, well, a camera pan. But here the curve made it feel like it was the background that was sliding in from the side, like it was on a physical layer scrolling behind the screen of the monitor. I don't know if that makes any sense but it's kinda hard to describe.

Yeah, I'm not very deep into FFXIV but the more I play of it the more excited I get about FFXVI. Yoshi-P knows what he's doing. This could actually be the best single-player FF in quite a long time.

I'm unironically super hyped for that game. As long as it's a somewhat decent souls-like, I am fully on board with whatever stupid bullshit they can come up with. Honestly a little bummed out that it's EGS exclusive but whatever, at this point I can wait out the exclusivity period for literally any game.

I, too, have ascended! 32in, 1440p, 240hz, g-sync and curved. Even with 150$ off it was still expensive as fuck but idgaf. I felt like spoiling myself. Also feels good to finally have a dual monitor setup. It's definitely going to double my productivity and not just, like, have discord or youtube open on the second monitor. Also, I want to thank @Mister Jack for ensuring that I paid extra attention to whether or not the high refresh rate was actually enabled. It didn't seem any different at first so I poked around and realized that, even though it was set to 240hz in the settings, G-Sync was locking the refresh rate to match the second monitor's 60hz. Had to tweak some things in Nvidia Control Panel to get it right. It's buttery smooth now. ?

Halo 3 I played the first couple missions at the beginning of the month, back when I was still waiting for FFIV, and I wasn't really feeling it at the time. Then around the same time Ethan called it "the best shooter campaign ever" or something along those lines and it got me curious so I went back to it after I wrapped up FFIV. And.... yeah. What the fuck? I liked Halo 1 and 2 but they didn't exactly join the ranks of my all-time favorites. They were good and I understand how groundbreaking Halo was at the time but to me a great FPS campaign needs a little something extra. I realize this isn't a fair comparison but they weren't exactly Titanfall 2 (not that Titanfall 2 is among my all-time favorites either but I digress.) Halo 2 in particular frustrated me a little by the end with some difficulty spikes and tedious mission design. Halo 3 is a whole different story, though. There isn't a single mission in that entire game that I didn't thoroughly enjoy. Never a dull or tedious moment or any point where I wished a level would end already. This is a pretty damn solid FPS campaign. There's one moment in the final level. You're trying to get off the Halo before it fires and running through some corridors and as you come around a corner you see the exit... and a warthog. At that moment I had the biggest grin on my face because I knew exactly what we were doing and I knew exactly which track was going to play. This series' soundtrack is so freaking good, all they have to do is put me in literally any vehicle and play some version of this theme and I'll immediately go "Fuck yeah!" It's basically like a cheat code. So I guess I'm halfway through my Halo journey. ODST and Reach are next, and then Halo 4. I might look into how xCloud works on PC to play Halo 5 eventually but I don't think I'll get Infinite at launch so I'm in no rush.