@cle718: I couldn’t make it more than an hour in before feeling the same way, so your three hours is impressive as hell to me. Will never touch it again, have no interest in anything else in that universe.
One more voice saying I’ve watched a lot of MASH, but I’m pretty sure that pales in comparison to the hours and number of episodes of Law and Order (the original) I’ve seen. There are a dozen or so episodes I know damn near verbatim. Not plot points and twists…dialogue, scene transitions, transition graphic texts.
I found both Tam's discussion of Elden Ring and reviews in general fascinating and will probably give the second half another listen, if not the first part too. I think this is notable because - I've said it before but try not to go on about it too much - I fucking hate everything about SoulsBorne games. Still, Tam was entertaining, enlightening, and fascinating even when the things he was saying about Elden Ring made me think "...and that's exactly why I want nothing to do with it." I think the ability to pull in someone as hostile to the topic as I am is a mark of a great and engaging communicator.
There’s a “no rules pond hockey” game called Puck Off that seems tailor made for a certain Jeff Bakalar. I dropped him a bit on Twitter but doubt he’ll see it. Haven’t had time to check it out myself yet but plan to this weekend; either way it might be nice to see some multiplayer since I won’t be able to check that out.
@reap3r160: Exactly! Last night I was super burned out on life but did one side thing that took maybe 20 minutes that went: combat, storytelling, platforming, combat, stealth, combat, and a nice narrative bow* on the story. Perfect for what I wanted/needed.
*just a nice wrap up. As I was typing I remembered this was a game with a shitload of actual bows and I did not get one from this quest!
I'm having an absolute blast with this game and am thankful for its timing because SoulsBornes aren't for me and never will be. The thing that's really helped me, especially this week, is just looking at the IGN guide before I start a story mission not to read it or find out anything about the mission, but to just scroll the page mostly blindly to try to get an idea for "how long is this commitment?"
It's been great - I played up to a point on Monday night and saw the next story mission seemed pretty long, so I put it down and though "I'll focus on this tomorrow and it will be THE thing I do." I ended up being busy and by the time I was able to sit down and play, I knew I didn't want to invest that much into the game, so I did a couple side quests, checked out a couple question marks on the map. The rest of the week kinda played out like that for me with various other things coming up and I was grateful I didn't feel "locked in" to getting through a mission that would start feeling like a slog. With the weekend here, I still feel like I've made progress and am really ready to sit down with some uninterrupted time to tackle the next bug mission or 3 or 4.
Just watched episode 4. Without getting into spoilers, I don’t think fears of the effects budget being blown are well founded - this one seems on par with the first.
Also, I was pretty positive coming out of the first three episodes. This one, to my hazy memory of The Eye of the World, takes by far the most liberties we’ve seen so far (minus episode 1’s terrible no-good change we’re just going to pretend didn’t happen)…and is the best episode so far. We’re split among three groups: one is pretty much all exposition and world-building, and the other two are a pretty fair balance between those and plot action. Again, staying as spoiler free as possible, the climax of this episode was pretty fucking rad.
My history with the book series is pretty much the same as TheRealTurk’s above, and my thoughts are almost 100% the same as nophillip’s. Adaptations necessarily change things to make the story they’re telling fit the medium they’re being told in. Apart from the one change nophillip outlined that was unnecessary and, to me, the laziest way to do what they were trying to do, those first three episodes were perfectly enjoyable and I thought each one was better than the last.
If they keep the pace moving and developing the characters well, I’ll be happy.
2011. I remember it being in the late summer or early fall. One of my best friends in the world was visting the States from Korea, and carved out a weekend to come hang with me. We planned to spend an entire weekend just playing games and eating bad pizza and good steaks. I had a copy of Portal 2, and we dove into the co-op.
We got stuck. There was a puzzle/room we were banging our heads against for...I honestly don't remember how long. It could have been 20 minutes, it could have been 2 hours. But we had dinner reservations at Ray's The Steaks, and we were hoping a couple good cuts of meat and cocktails would clear our heads.
We were getting to the end of dinner and it hit me. "I got it. We need to hit each other in mid-air over the platform neither of us can get ourselves onto." We didn't rush through dinner, but we were giddy about trying this when we got back. And it worked! In hindsight, it was an obvious solution and we plowed through the rest of that magnificent game, but sharing that frustration and moment of discovery with one of my dearest friends, after not seeing each other for so long, and knowing it'd be another long stretch of not being on the same continent when that weekend up was up...it's my fondest gaming memory by far I'd love to relive that day.
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