BisonHero

I've thought about this concept off and on for the past few years, and I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I genuinely want to know what it looks like in this modern era for a major sci-fi/fantasy brand to have a fallow period. I feel like the previous fallow period of LotR as a "brand" was really more like "it was unfilmable because the technology didn't exist to adapt it":

1. J.R.R. Tolkien writes the books *fallow period begins*
2. Making tie-in merchandise/spinoff media would be crazy and weird because it doesn't exist yet, this was still decades before Star Wars
3. Tolkien dies *fallow period continues*
4. Try to make some adaptations, do some radio plays, get that wild Ralph Bakshi movie from the 70s, honestly we're still in the fallow period, the Bakshi movie isn't even all 3 books
5. Do nothing for a couple more decades because on a technical level no one knows how to adapt it, and the movie financing for a project like that is probably eaten up by projects like Conan the Barbarian or Braveheart or really any story where you don't need thousands of orcs and a giant tree man
6. Peter Jackson's LotR movie trilogy explodes the brand into mainstream nerd culture, because reading is for nerds but watching movies is for cool guys *puts on sunglasses, fallow period ends*
7. They make a bunch of middling-to-shitty LotR video games, and those bloated Hobbit movies, and the TV show I've never watched, and I continue to die a little bit inside each time

See also: for a long time nobody knew how to make good superhero movie/TV adaptations except as kinda one-off flukes, like Superman 1-2, that Incredible Hulk show, and the Micheal Keaton Batman movies.

Now that Hollywood and streaming services know how to adapt sci-fi/fantasy nerd IP into not embarrassingly bad-looking films and TV shows, it feels like they're just going to ride every IP straight into the ground as long as people will watch it. I'm not saying all sequels are bad, but I am saying that even the bad sequels don't seem to deter the IP owners from making more sequels.

What are some legacy nerd IP that did so badly they've actually gone dormant (say, Star Trek or newer)? I'm genuinely asking, as maybe I'm forgetting some big ones. But, like:

• They keeping making Terminator movies and stuff, even though they've basically all been pretty poor since T2. They absolutely will not stop, ever, until we are dead
• They keep tacking more movies onto the Alien and/or Predator franchises, none of which have really captured the zeitgeist
• After a string of children's TV shows, they're still making terrible live action Transformers movies for teens?...adults?...idiots? If there's any God in this world maybe those movies will continue to tank financially

To disprove my own point, Jurassic Park did enter a 15-year hiatus where it seemed genuinely over and I think we were all fine with this, but then it turns out you can still make a movie people want to see about a dinosaur theme park. And in a weirder example, The Matrix also seemed very much over for about 20 years, but then came back for exactly one movie. Also to give an example that still shocks me to this day, The Planet of the Apes was dormant for nearly 30 years before that 2001 relaunch (then dormant again until the real relaunch for that 2011 movie).

Anyway, it seems like even a string of underperforming and/or widely disliked entries isn't enough to slow down the big IP that are already part of the nerd canon. So my hunch is that Middle Earth & Friends will be more than happy to make Lord of the Rings-themed entertainment for the next century, at the very least. It's what the shareholders crave.

Man, sucks that some wacko ads slip through sometimes.

Regional ad networks are so wild in America. I live in Canada, and across the Bombcast and other podcasts, the most “politically charged” ad I can ever recall was an inoffensive local teacher’s union ad saying like “we’re trying to teach your kids, please support us.” Never had any ads that raised my eyebrow.

I once made the observation to some friends that Pokémon GO and birdwatching are the same thing just for different generations, and I stand by this.

@cikame: This topic is overall kinda mean-spirited, but I do think Palworld is a very good answer. The game is exactly the sum of its parts: Pokémon and ARK-like survival game. It’s had its time in the sun, and I feel like we’ve already reached a point that nobody has much more to say about it, and influencers have already moved on to the next flavour of the month. I imagine the active player numbers are on a steady decline that will continue unless they start really wowing players by putting tons of new features/content into the game.

How does a game get re-rated after release? Isn’t it usually only if some wild new content is “discovered”/was-always-in-the-game-but-not-accessible-unless-you-hack-the-game type stuff? GTA 3 hot coffee, the nudity in Oblivion, etc.?

Balatro is so upfront with its whole vibe and imagery, so I don’t understand what the ratings board could’ve possibly missed the first time. Does it just take a few pearl-clutching people post-release saying to “please think of the children, this is teaching them gambling addiction” and suddenly it gets re-rated and pulled to be on the safe side?

Yes, but you have to say it like muh-tewer stories.

Has the staff done a stream/video of this game yet? I remember Jan and maybe Grubb saying they should do a stream of it back when it was the demo on Steam Nextfest, but I don’t recall if it happened.

I want to bear witness to the community giving tips and tricks to Jan’s poker addiction.

Balatro is great. But also I’ve been that guy who still occasionally recommends Luck Be A Landlord to friends randomly. What a time to be alive, if you want to play roguelike drafting slot machines.

I really doubt they always intended to announce this multi platform stuff on a random Xbox podcast like happened today. It felt so slapped together, like their hands were tied and they still couldn’t actually mention which 4 games it is because clearly there still are other arrangements in the works (in the hands of the individual devs, or Nintendo/Sony, or who knows) to announce each of the 4 games coming to new platforms.

It just felt like the whole segment was to quell fears and little else, since nothing much is actually changing.

It does make me wonder how they were originally going to roll this news out. Like was some Nintendo Direct just going to be like “guess what, somehow Sea of Thieves is being ported to the Switch 2!” Or was it going to be mentioned at a more formal Xbox presentation in the next 6 months? I don’t buy the intentional leak theory, since this was such a fumbled way to hear about the multiplat games, and today’s segment about it was basically 1 paragraph of text spun into an interminable roundtable discussion. It’s such a terrible way to present the info, but it’s probably the best opportunity they could put together on short notice to address the topic so gamers didn’t spend another month assuming Xbox was calling it quits on hardware.

With all due respect, this is likely a bot/spam account. If you want to address their question as a thought exercise, have at it.

Maybe this is a legit follower of the site that loves GB/video games, who just happened to first post on the forums with their off-topic question about Russian/Georgian/Romanian politics and their girlfriend. MAYBE. I’d buy it a little more if he opened the post with a “Hey GB duders” or something, but in its current form it’s very standard wording that could be posted to zillions of subreddits and forums.

It’s suspicious if your first post isn’t about the focus of the website at all and instead you’re dying to know what the community thinks about politics/NFTs/weed gummies/supplements/gambling. Like, why this forum?

"On some floors, I resorted to ditching the pikmin altogether and wailing on enemies with Olimar or Louie's antennae. Does this take forever? Yes. Do the gameplay loops of Pikmin still captivate without the pikmin? No. But if you're attacking with the astronauts, you're not risking their underlings, and unlike the pikmin, Olimar and Louie can be steered away from a monster or bomb rock at the first sign of trouble."

I also have strong memories of cheesing parts of the game with Olimar/Louie weak punches instead of risking actual Pikmin. Some of the dungeons are just hateful for no good reason, and you're dead-on that some of the cautious strats in Pikmin 2 are supremely tedious.

It's interesting to see Nintendo revisit most of the ideas from Pikmin 2 in Pikmin 4, but make the entire gameplay experience like 10 times friendlier. Riding Oatchi lets you compress your Pikmin hitbox into a small and fast little ball (this alone trivializes boss fights that were murderous in Pikmin 1-3), the game is autosaving constantly, most enemies no longer one-shot your Pikmin and instead just knock them down and their bud is de-leveled, etc. It's been interesting to watch Nintendo vastly re-evaluate how player friendly to make the series after the fairly harsh Pikmin 1 and 2.