Mirado

@ford_dent: I see your factual argument about Gamera, and raise you an unrelated video of Godzilla doing a jumpy victory dance which confuses a space alien guy:

It's in theaters, one week only, from the 11th to the 18th. My local theaters only had it for one time per day, so your location may vary in availability.

Shin Godzilla - 5/5 - Do you like OG Godzilla? The "I'mma come out of the ocean and fuck you up" one, not the "I'mma come out of the ocean and fuck up this monster" one, or the "I'mma come out of the ocean and be a friend to children" one, either. If you do, and you have a real love for the specific tropes an old Godzilla movie brings with it (people fleeing in panic, lots of boardroom indecision, failed military attacks, musical bombast, loveably sub-par effects, a wacky plan as a last resort), you'll eat this shit up.

They sprinkled just about all of that with a heavy dose of Japanese nationalism, especially the boardroom bits, but you can tell there's a real love for the roots of Godzilla, right down to the music cues cut straight from the 1954 original. Give it a watch if you can; the crowd I was with had a great time, including some tear-inducing laughter when The King of the Monsters first makes his appearance as a weird armless half-turkey half-lizard biped that literally has to push himself along the ground on his stomach to go anywhere.

You can tell that Ano was all over this thing, and I feel like he nailed it.

@ares42: Well, I wouldn't consider an unhappy supporter an undecided, but on the second half of your point, I think they've both hit peak adjectives. Trump's called Hillary a corrupt, warmongering, globalist, rape-enabling/defending, wilting, criminal demon in the pocket of billionaires and big business. Hillary's called him (and unfortunately for the poor Trumpster, he's demonstrated himself to be) a racist, misogynistic, narcissistic, tactless, hypocritical, pathological liar who has abused every loophole possible and probably some women he's come into contact with. You can't really accuse them of anything else, honestly. I mean, maybe something will leak that makes Hillary seem more corrupt or something that makes Donald seem like more of...well, himself, I guess...but odds are that enough shit has spilled out for you to have already decided where you stand on these things.

There really isn't much ammunition left in the armory. Hillary won't turn out to be a construct made of Hitler's DNA, and Trump on tape saying the n-word is probably not that surprising at this point. People on both sides have just been mining and digging and cranking on this shit as hard as they can, and I'd bet money that nothing truly shocking will be revealed, especially against Hillary; the Trump camp should be pretty desperate to change the narrative, so I assume they would have swung for the fences before this point. Wikileaks' latest batch was pretty tame, all things considered, so I'm betting they have nothing to top the email scandal as the biggest corruption accusation against Hillary, whereas if you aren't aghast at Donald by now, I'm not sure anything short of murder will push that person over the edge.

This debate has brought me so much joy.

More seriously, I can't understand how a person can still be undecided after all this. You've either bought into Trump's wild ride, or you're off-put enough to bail and join the Clinton party. I mean, you can no vote (don't do this, you don't get to complain unless you have a hand in the bullshit) or you can vote for a third party (best of luck with that), but "Oh jeez I'm not sure, I need more information." can't possibly be valid at this point. The candidates are clearly defined. No amount of time from here to the election will move the needle from where they've placed it.

@wheresderrick: Thanks for your impressions! The characters are what made me interested in the whole thing; I was pretty impressed by the voice acting and motion capture during the GBeast stream.

I'm starting to see reports of people getting past the tutorial (the first few hours) and realizing that the structure of the game starts to take a dive, with repetitive side missions required to advance the main story. For people who've hit that point, can you tell me if the game keeps up after the amazing opening?

I'm trying to decide if the start is indicative of the whole game, or if I'm just going to be disappointed and unable to return it once the good shit runs out. I'd rather have a 15 hour narrative like what Vinny and Alex showed off, versus a 30 hours open world game that has a bunch of filler in it.

While there might be a subset that absolutely refuse to play a game at anything below 60 FPS, I think the real reason for the outrage is the fact that it's obvious this was a rushed port from a series that traditionally had the PC as a lead platform. When you put a game on PC, there's just a certain amount of boxes you need to tick in order to be at parity with your competitors, and that includes things like not capping your game at 30 FPS. Plus, that's not the only offender; the UI scaling is all levels of fucked, with 4k making the UI more or less unreadable (and also turning your character into a weird metal man whenever he steps in a doorway), and outside of the main character models, it really doesn't look that much better than the previous Mafia game that came out in 2010. (Even if you assume that person cherry picked the best Mafia 2 shots and the worst Mafia 3 shots, or even if the Mafia 2 screens are using mods, that's still not a great position to be in for a game that's out six years later).

So while you might be unreasonable for shouting that you absolutely will not consider the other merits a game might have unless it runs at 60+ FPS, it's really just indicative of a deeper problem which I consider to be valid and should not be dismissed out of hand. This isn't a great launch for the PC version of this game, and people aren't crazy for pointing that out.

@do_the_manta_ray: A better way to get this answer would probably be to contact the mods using that link on the right side. Not that I don't appreciate getting this answered publicly, but that's your go-to ticket for asking the mods any questions you might have.

@humanity:Deus Ex was the biggest offender this year by far, with an actual fade to black before each melee animation. I can't believe they couldn't iron that out in the time between Human Revolution and Mankind Divided.

On top of the melee kills, the death animations are also repeated, with the same "clutch your stomach and flop like it's a silent movie" loop repeated quite a few times, along with @shoguns_decapitator's instance of a bomb causing it:

From that clip, I don't have high hopes for the gameplay. The story might be great, but after seeing the number of repeated animations in just that short clip, and the fact that the last guy looked silly, taking bullets like a Terminator, it seems sub-par. Perhaps it feels better in person than it lets on in video.

This is a very good breakdown, and you are spot on in most respects; the RICO act really hammered the hell out of the mob, as they could no longer hide behind the "I never gave a direct order" defense. One thing to note is that the most powerful families still held onto their turf right up until a mobster by the name of Sammy Gravano turned into a "stoolie" and sold out John Gotti in '91; with one of the highest ranking members in history taking a deal, a huge wave of Mafia members decided to also become federal witnesses in exchange for reduced sentences and protection. With the upper echelon defecting, the mob still operates, but it's a shell of its Prohibition heyday.