madpierrot

I loooooove Initial D, but two things about this trailer kinda turn me off. First there was zero Eurobeat played during it. How can you have anything Initial D and not have eurobeat playing. The other is... why... does it look worse to me than old Initial D? For some reason the like cell shaded look of the cars just isn't clicking with me. Hopefully though it's a dumb good time like the other shows in the series. Looking forward to checking this out.

Oh my God, I can't believe animemusicvideos.org is still around and doing their yearly contest. I just checked for the heck of it and I can still log into my account there haha! I registered March 23rd, 2003! My account is about to become 19 years old, God that brings me back. Scrolling through AMV.org because there wasn't a YouTube and trying to guess what will be the best AMVs because it was about to take me anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes to download one video. Man this is legit a nostalgia trip.

I'll throw in the two AMVs that I can always remember. Quality is awful because they are so old, but man if they still aren't awesome.

• No clue what it is
• No idea who made it
• Inu Yasha
• Joy Enriquez
• How Can I Not Love You

• Again not sure
• Don't know this as well
• Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust
• Don't know, it's a DDR song I think though
• Moonlight Shadow

So with Elden Ring being the big hit it is and reaching more people than a Souls game usually does I'm seeing something come up, as it usually does, and want to try to clear things up as I see it. The "hardcore" Souls community is not what everyone makes it out to be. Anyone on a message board or who has listened to a gaming podcast has heard how awful they are and always call people out for being awful or playing wrong, but this isn't the hardcore community at all. This is the typical vocal gaming ass that all communities have.

To make a Dark Souls analogy that some might recognize. The Drake Sword from Dark Souls.

First someone that has played Dark Souls, maybe they beat it maybe not and thought it was neat. "Oh wow the Drake Sword is the best! You have to get it right away! It's like a cheat code."

Next the vocal jerks that people misrepresent as the actual hardcore community, but aren't. "Oh you use that? Get good noob. Just delete the game if you have to use that. Sword is trash."

Now the actual hardcore community. "Oh yeah the Drake Sword is really strong early, just be careful because it doesn't scale and the upgrade materials are hard to come by so late game it will be weaker"

The actual Dark Souls community is the most "play however the heck you want" community going because that's exactly what they are doing. They are the ones that do "fashion-souls" because they want to look cool or role play a certain character. They are the ones doing challenge runs so they rush to try and get random weapons or items to use. They are the ones who have beaten the game a dozen times over so they are going to mess around. They'll watch Sunlight Blade or Illusionary Wall on Youtube, they will show off their absurd build on reddit. Perhaps they might sound annoying when they give advice or comment, but that's just because they've beat the game a dozen times over and know exactly what to do.

So just the next time you're listening to a gaming podcast and someone talks about the toxic or negative or dismissive Dark Souls community, just know that's only the same vocal jerks that all gaming communities have.

I liked X-Com 2 a lot, but to me it wasn't anything amazing. Just a good, perhaps slightly disappointing sequel. But the War of the Chosen expansion put it as one of my top games of the decade. They didn't completely reinvent it, but what they did I absolutely loved. Such an amazing expansion and game.

But the underlying thing has always been, a website about video games where it's the core duders just having fun. You mention so many things (most of it still just being game related with core members), but even when it's not there is still always the core of gaming content coming from the main duders. Sure they've experimented with random stuff, had different people, tried out unique things, but the base (for 13 years) has never changed. You could expect to come to Giantbomb week after week and find the majority of stuff, being from the crew where they had fun playing games. I think that's what most people are getting at and honestly I don't know what people are talking about when they seem to basically ignore this. Absolutely if you want to defend the direction it's going and enjoy it, by all means do, that's awesome, but understand that it is a noticeable shift.

It's like going to your favorite restaurant where you know the chef and staff. Maybe it changes from Italian, to Mexican, to Chinese, but it's a restaurant run by you're friend. Now it'd be like showing up and it's a hardware store run by your friend and the staff has changed. Yes Giantbomb has always, changed, adjusted, shifted, but there has always been an underlying core and well, that seems to be vanishing rapidly. And that's why a lot of people (myself included) are bummed.

I'm one of the people that's canceled my subscription and frankly I'm super bummed about it. Been here since Arrow pointing down, been premium since the first week they offered it. Heck this website has helped me out more during bad times than most people in my life. I'll always be grateful for all the entertainment they've giving me and I'm not pissed or angry, but honestly bummed to see this direction. I hope it works out for them and wish them all the best. Zero spite or malice, but after 13 years it still stings seeing it turn like this.

Wow Initial D is a really good call. I like those a lot, but my favorite has to be Cowboy Bebop.

I feel saying Persona 5 Strikers is filled with Persona 5 spoilers a bit odd. I've seen it brought up a bit that this more or less a sequel to 5, through reviews and marketing, so you'd expect it to have Persona 5 story stuff in. The adds seem about getting the band back together for a summer trip together. Also wouldn't you just assume it's going to have that stuff since it's a game that's coming out way after 5 in the same universe? But yeah as someone that's beat vanilla 5 and Royal it'd be cool to see, preferably Royal, put out on more stuff. Game is just so good.

I really loved this generation. Last gen (I guess two ago now) I was an Xbox 360 guy and loved it, but switched to the PS4 because of the exclusives and loved it just as much. Big change for me was being a purely digital person. I didn't buy any physical games and really liked the change. Over all the 360 generation I still would say I liked overall a bit more. It had a few more big names titles that I'd consider all time favorites and in general I got more enjoyment out of the "B tier" stuff. Still though I loved my PS4, it had a bunch of games I truly loved, all digital is great for me, the controller was awesome. Having games constantly being added to threw DLC, patches, updates, free stuff really made a difference too. I'll certainly look back and think it was great.

I feel like I'm in the same boat as a lot of people here where I remember TechTV fondly. When I was in college, my roommate would have TechTV on all the time as just background noise that'd we'd listen to and occasionally actually watch. Eventually I just got so use to it that even when he wasn't around I'd leave it on.

It's odd to me seeing people talk about people who were on TechTV and G4, the personalities that made it. Maybe it's just because I started watching it early, but I always felt like Leo Laporte was the face of the network. Him and Patrick Norton are just who I think of. As someone mentioned, man what a weird thing listening to a TV show where people would call to be walked through tech problems on live TV. Also this was one of the few places that aired anime back in the day. They had some good shows too.

SITE USERNAME: madpierrot

LINK TO TWITCH OR YOUR STREAMING CHANNEL OF CHOICE: https://www.twitch.tv/madpierrot21

LINK TO YOUR EXTRA LIFE FUNDRAISING PAGE: https://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.participant&participantID=442072

DATE STARTING: Saturday November 7th

TIME STARTING (WITH TIME ZONE): 7:00AM (JST)

JUST TO CLARIFY I live in Japan so my starting times are for me here, but in America it would be Friday November 6th at 5:00PM Eastern