Castle Magus

"James returns to the Top 10 format for a deep dive into everything wrong with modern movie theaters: from $30 popcorn buckets and the IMAX scam, to Nicole Kidman’s spiritual AMC ad, recliner sear [sic] squeaks, the theater becoming everything but a theater, and the 'concession voucher' workaround for streaming TV finales. A spiritual follow-up to Top 10 Reasons Blu-ray Sucks."

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(Now that Dreamwidth is working again...)

It has been... let's see... Big Hero 6 came out in November 2014... ...around eleven and a half years since the last time I went to see a movie in a theater. And even then, it was at a cheapo no-frills theater, $5 or something for a ticket, which was that cheap specifically because it was no-frills. You could buy popcorn and a drink, maybe some candy, there were maybe two or three old arcade machines out front, and that was pretty much it. It used to be called Countryside Cinema or something like that, but now it's apparently Trex Cinema, and the tickets now cost $7.50 instead of $5.00, I guess. If I ever did go to see a movie in a theater again, which is increasingly unlikely, it would probably be at a place like that. I have zero use for any of the worse-than-worthless shit mentioned in the above embedded video.

Creators of unofficial, third party mods for any game should never be charging money for those mods, in my not at all humble opinion. I don't care if they have a Patreon or whatever, but they should not be locking their mods behind paywalls.

But especially... why the hell does an Early Access game that only just released into Early Access less than a week ago already have fucking mods at all, anyway? Isn't the entire point, ostensibly, of Early Access so that devs of the game can get feedback on what works and doesn't work and what should be added/removed/changed? If the players are using third party mods, doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose? I mean, unless the devs look at the mods and say "Hey, a lot of people are using <insert mod here> to do <insert basic gameplay thing here>, so maybe we should just put that into the game itself without it needing to be a mod." I hope the Paralives devs actually do that in some of these cases. Not just to fuck over the greedy asshats who are charging money for paywalled mods, but that would certainly be a bonus of doing it.

I haven't bought Paralives yet, and I won't be even considering buying Paralives until it has actually, properly released (i.e. is no longer "Early Access"), in however many years it takes for that to happen, so none of this directly affects me at all. It still kind of pisses me off a little bit, just on general principles, though.

(EDIT) Also, I don't care one way or the other if the Paralives devs themselves are tolerant of paywalled mods for their game. That's irrelevant to the fact that I personally just don't think it should be happening. (/EDIT)

"Time to judge yet another collection of product ads for products that probably shouldn't exist."

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Even the ones that had nothing to do with sex, TFS managed to make, like, 90% of them relate to sex in some way.

(EDIT) This is another video for which they keep changing the video's title, presumably for "gaming the algorithm" purposes. I guess this is just the way it's going to be now. (/EDIT)

Full headline, for the usual reasons: "Star Citizen Officially Crosses the $1 Billion Funding Raised Barrier as $5,000 Spaceship You Can't Fly In-Game Goes on Sale"

This grift would have been dead, gone, and consigned to the annals of obscure failure over a decade ago, if not for the utterly bizarre (but continually successful) manipulation of extremely gullible whales with way more money than sense, by selling, for multiple thousands of dollars per instance, what are essentially IOUs for things that aren't even in the so-called "game" yet, but which supposedly will be "someday." In this particular case, it's basically a $5000 USD long-term "preorder" for a thing with no set release date for a game which also has no set release date and has been in "development" for roughly a decade and a half now.

Even with NFTs, as beyond worthless as they are, at least one tended to get (a link to) the actual JPG for which one paid thousands of dollars (usually). One doesn't even get that much with this Star Citizen horseshit.

No video game should cost $100 (USD or CAD or anything else).

Pat's actual "am I crazy?" thing around 6 minutes into the video was not all that crazy. Pat's "real" take near the end of the video, around 14 minutes in, was off the wall bonkers, and I'm glad Woolie told him he was "batshit." I think (or at least hope) he was just being facetious with the latter thing, though.

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They only talk about it briefly in the video above, but despite what Woolie says there, it is most certainly not "the reality" that Stanley Kubrick's movie The Shining is "way, way better" than Stephen King's novel The Shining. "Kubrick's changes" absolutely did not make "a better product than the source material." It's certainly different, and good in its own way, but it's not better than the novel. The only thing that is "hilarious and kind of insane" is Woolie's dumbfuck claim to the contrary.

The movie The Shining by Stanley Kubrick is, however, better than King's own TV adaptation of his novel The Shining.

(I've only read the book version of Doctor Sleep, so I can't compare it to the 2019 movie, which I haven't seen. I've heard it makes changes to what was in the book, though. [For instance, in the book, the Overlook Hotel had burned down. In the movie... no, not so much.] In general, King is not averse to changes made in adaptations of his stuff, e.g. his love for the ending of the film version of The Mist, which King has claimed he wished he'd come up with it for the novella. He just really hated the changes Kubrick made in The Shining, and I don't blame him.)

I'll give the edge to Chrono Trigger (says Kane Magus), but Final Fantasy VI is really good, too.

That said, the entirety of "Dancing Mad" kind of stomps "World Revolution," not that "World Revolution" isn't still pretty great, even so. That said, to be fair to Chrono Trigger, the (spoilers for Chrono Trigger in the next link) final boss isn't just the part with "World Revolution." (And again, yes, it is possible to beat all of that with only Crono, by himself.)

For me, though, the top-most tier boss/character theme of Chrono Trigger will always be "Battle with Magus."

(I really need to find a way to play Radiant Historia one of these days.)

"I talk about my experience of this crash as both a young consumer and a new game developer."

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So... a somewhat different take on the situation than this one. He's not really talking about any of the current stuff, though, aside from a mention at the start about how "it's nothing like the 1983 crash." He still acknowledges that the current crap is bad, and it absolutely is bad, but the video doesn't dwell on it and simply describes his experience of the 1983 crash.

Yeah, this current... thing... whatever it is that's happening with the modern video game industry is not a crash. Sadly. As much as I've long wished it would just go ahead and actually crash already, what it's doing right now is not that. Honestly, I agree more with Tim Cain here that "it's nothing like the 1983 crash" than I do with John and Brenda Romero that it's "crashier." It's certainly something, but it's not the flame-engulfed car off the cliff into the explosives factory crash that 1983 was. And as Cain mentions here, it was a crash of the console industry specifically, since the PC game industry was still doing okay and getting stronger around that time. The current thing is affecting all sectors of the industry, though, not just consoles, since these days there's not really all that much difference between the "console" and "PC" (and "mobile") games industry. They're all shit now, in their own not too dissimilar ways. And it's affecting way more than just the United States the way the 1983 crash mostly did. This current thing is worldwide.

( Edit with additional Youtube embed behind a cut )