ThaOGDreamWeaver

For those of you playing Sea Of Thieves and not enjoying the PvP cont- ...wait, is that a three-headed monkey?

Yes. Neil and PTerry had been good friends since straying onto each others' book tours some time back, and had a habit on that book of trying to mimic or mock each other's styles. (So the dark gothy and horrible stuff in the book is frequently Terry, and the ineffable wisdom, dad gags and snarky footnotes are often Neil.) After the genuine breakthrough success of the first book, Neil and Terry were frequently bothered by their fans, publishers and bank managers about a sequel, a movie or both. And so they had multiple drinking sessions discussions about where they could run with it. Some of the ideas found their way into Series 1 along with some wholly new stuff, and some for Series 2. (And some, particularly any that were mooted by helpful Whollyodd executives who wanted to "make it relevant to wider audiences", have been vitrified and buried under the South Downs, guarded by trained ninjas, ancient runes and a small but enthusiastic dragon, never to see the light of day). Bearing in mind that this is from very old interviews and Neil's website comments...

Small update: Ahsoka has an official release date of August 23rd, for those of you that need to bother your phone provider/supermarket/airline loyalty app/mom to add time to your D+ sub. (Seriously: I'm not sure how many people really do fork out eight quid/eleven bucks a month to the Mouse, given how many corporate offers there are.) There's also a tiny, tiny extra thing in the new mini-teaser/TV spot: Microspoiler:

Grand Funk Railroad - I'm Your Captain (Live At Shea Stadium)

Following on from TheOtherTed on the other thread: Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (aka WAR, pronounced WAAAAARRRGGHHH. Obviously.) Games Workshop has never been a thing for me, other than the single most consistently successful share in my very small portfolio. But the WAR beta looked so much fun I signed up and stuck around for a while. And happily, you didn't have to be a Henry Cavill-level 'Hammernerd to get on with it. It looked great and ran smoothly, was easy to pick up and play, had interesting mechanics once you got into it, and plenty to do even pre-launch. I very much enjoyed running around blasting people with Chaos magick and working out what to do with all the Dhar I was racking up. I also enjoyed hunting the odd chicken for lunch. WAR was very, very PvP-centric, including a central Realm Vs Realm mechanic that encouraged you to join mass battles. But. That also came with a very strict anti-ganking policy. Stray into lower-level RvR areas, or attack players who were much weaker than you, and you'd be thoroughly "clucked" - at least until you returned to your right zone: sometimes for the rest of the day, and occasionally permanently. Unfortunately for Mythic, like a lot of people in 2008-2009, I suddenly had to tighten my belts. And MMOs were a luxury, even moreso when the trusty Vaio that work let me take home after being fired finally died in flames. A game of that quality was expensive to develop and run - and even with 300,000 subs per month, wasn't anywhere near breakeven. According to rumour they lost over a billion bucks on it - then again, these were EA's numbers, so... hmm. AFAIK the game was maintained well while it lasted. But further development tailed off, as did the number of servers, until finally sunsetting late 2013 when the GW licence expired. As with many other MMOs, there are legacy servers still out there.

Broadsword Online are the artists formerly known as Mythic, and then BioWare Mythic, caretakers of Ultima Online and Dark Age Of Camelot. Haven't heard much out of them for a while so it's quite a big move. They did used to be part of EA, but were spun off under Rob Denton (who also worked on on SWTOR) when faced with closure in 2014. Broadsword also developed the ill-fated Warhammer MMO Age Of Reckoning...which I'm about to add to the Good Games That Died Horribly thread. Great game, in fact, but just didn't do the numbers. I think it's a pretty good retirement home for SWTOR and should see it kept around stably, maybe even growing a bit.

Kind of the point of an MMO - from my PoV - is that I can PL if I want to, or take my time, or do something else entirely. I mean, WoW allows you to do a lot of different stuff, but then the forum nerds scream at you for not doing it the right/perfect/minmaxed way. DCUO had some flexibility which got stripped. ST:O allows for some customisation, within the limits of Federation / Klingon dress codes, though the ship builder wound up being more satisfying. CoH has quite a lot of linear elements, but the sheer flexibility in being who you want to be has - I think - never been equalled. I've been on teams with sentient walls, affable demons, assassins, sorority girls, and the Nuclear Pudding King.

I think it's in general as it's free on GitHub, and seems to use Wine kit as a baseplate.

SWG: Restoration is one of them, and seems to be a big server with an active community. The site blurb says that one has all the playstyle / controls / features before NGE, but access to all the extra content from after NGE. Seems like a good plan. The roadmap says they've also addressed one of my complaints above with an improved tutorial area. There even seems to be some new Mando-inspired content. Unfortunately, it runs on native Windows only, and they claim there's no way to Wine it for Macs/Linux. Boo. Though that might be from before the SDCC announcement of the Game Porting Kit and native DX12 support on new Mac metal. Project:SWG does have a Mac client, but is an NGE server. I'll keep looking.

So, the Gods have blessed us - for their own ineffable reasons - with a teaser trailer for Season 2: So what the ineffable do you lot think?

I don't have an Evil Genius playlist, but I do have a collection of "position music" (music made for trailers, movie inserts, and other background stuff, often royalty free) which gets me in a particularly heroic or villainous mood when needs be. There's a lot of 2WEI in there (who do an Epicized version of Crazy, Smoke On The Water, and... Toxic, of all things) plus Hidden Citizens, AudioMachine, Two Steps From Hell, Epic Score, James Dooley, and Baltic House Orchestra - for their ridiculously OTT cover of Whole Lotta Love if nothing else, though this YouTube version needs BIG speakers or headphones to do the mix justice - and a few more odd ones. Then there's all the soundtrack stuff - John Williams, obviously, plus Brian Tyler, those lovable dorks Giacchino and Arnold, and so on.

Reminds me of all the old, battle-scarred Star Wars Galaxies players. "...for over a thousand logins, we became the guardians of peace and justice... ...before the Dark Times... ...before the NGE." I'm never quite sure why a dev, seeing the way their existing userbase played, would turn round and say "nope, NOPE, you are supposed to play THIS WAY and ONLY THIS WAY." SWG was maybe too rich and complex for a newbie to get into. But you can add simple tracks for someone to pick up, play, compete and branch out from without trashing all that. And maybe the Jedi unlock path was a touch weird and arbitrary (it should have been difficult and mysterious: but perhaps a bit more logical than mastering four randomly-chosen Skills.)

For those of you not interested in selling a kidney for Daft Punk casual magic ski goggles, there was another anno at WDCC23. Apple are repackaging Wine into an officially-sanctioned Game Porting Toolkit - but adding DX12 support for Apple silicon (M1 and up). Here's the kit: https://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple/tree/main/Formula ...and some basic instructional videos to go with it. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10123/ Early experiments posted to Twitter and socials seem surprisingly good - including someone running a stable Cyberpunk 2077 in Ultra Mode. (And yes, having CP77 stable at all is an achievement in itself 😁) Was wondering if this is something any of our community might care to have a hack at?

Just rezzing this thread as the movie should be in your local flick palaces fairly soon. Reviews seem to be following a general theme "Miller's great, the OG BAT IS BACK, BAAABY, and it's one of the best cape flicks everrrr... ...buuuuuttt...." And I guess you know who the "but" is. Get me drunk enough while talking around movies and I'll probably mention my own, highly personal and fairly naff theory of "the Believability Curve". A logarithmic graph of how difficult is for an actor to convince you they're in a particular role, based on the range of flicks you've seen them in before, and also what you know about them personally. For example, you might take a lot of work to believe Keanu could do Hamlet - but according to all accounts, especially one reviewer who'd heard of the guy but never seen Bill & Ted, he was... pretty good. This is where the problem with Miller comes in. In the bit of your brain your eyes are connected to, you can see a fine young actor with decent comic timing pulling off a quite tricky dual role, based on naivete vs heroic worldweariness, and pretty much nailing it. Where your memory lives, it's screaming at your consciousness that this guy is neither naive nor heroic - in fact, probably not someone you'd want within a 500-metre exclusion zone of schools, let alone with their face on kids' branded lunchboxes. And those two things together give you a headache. Whaddyouseguysthink? IM(np)HO, the way I'm feeling right now is that the Miller issues knock this down from "queuing next weekend" to... "interesting but non-essential". If someone took me I'd happily go, but I still need to see GOTG3 and a couple of other things, and my weekend time's limited right now for reasons. Controversy is all well and good, and can boost a movie in the right circumstances. But if the audience has been shocked into indifference...?

Christina Aguilera - Candyman

So, the movie is here. And where to begin, at least without spoilers. Well, for one thing... Good Goddess, y'all. ...it's gorgeous. The light. The styles. The fluidity. The motion. The emotion. There's as much or more love, detail, and in-jokes packed into every frame as the original. On with the spoilers... So all that said - seriously, why are you still here reading this? Go see. Enjoy.

The Fratellis - Yes, Sir, I Can Boogie 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (No, I don't know why either, but WE LIKE IT.)

I have so many favourite toons it's hard to choose. For current main, Kelsey Dagger, there are two. One obviously the inspiration: ...and then this one for the way her battle style's evolved... (DIRE WARNING, TEAM: When they say this vid is potentially seizure-inducing, THEY MEAN IT. And while it's a great tune, it's actively unpleasant to watch directly. I think it's designed for use as club background lighting.) For my OG toon DreamWeaver: And her redside equivalent Emily Anarchy (and new toon Jett Blackheart...)

As we've got a what else are you playing thread over in Games, I thought a recco thread for other fun, non-capey stuff might be a good thing to have around the place. I've finally got access to watch Poker Face (niece's husband purloined my laptop on holiday to watch sportsball... but left his Sky Go app and code keys on there. Profitez-en.) And it's good. It's another Rian Johnson joint, and it has all of the trademarks of the Knives Out series - particularly the fact that there is no cheating. The clues are there if you're watching, though marginally less obscure than the movies, and the whimsicality dialled down a fair bit. Nat Lyonne is basically... her usual charming, fast-talking self (faster with coffee). But in this setting comes over as Columbo's overtalkative little sister, with a minor-league superpower - an unerring ability to spot direct lies - which gets her into all kinds of trouble. Despite being set in the present, there's also a pleasing 70s crime-of-the-week show vibe to it, from the opening titles through to the remarkable selection of guest stars. Also - if you haven't yet, do get round to watching The Menu. And stop instagramming your damn food. What stuff have you found that's good out there lately?

Small update:

Make sure you don't get any red on you. Taking a look, they seem to be drawing heavily on the Indian Premier League format - wonder if the Super Kings are in partnership with champions Chennai? And for good reason: Brits, Aussies and Windies may snipe at each other for where the "best" teams come from, but the IPL is the richest with seriously insane fans. The TV rights alone went for $6.4 billion for four years - or at around $7m per match, substantially more than Premier League Football. Even if MLC winds up being the IPL Summer League, it'll be a fun day out and a fair bit less boring than baseball.

Happy Pride Month. Remember to equip your Prestige Glitter Slide power in June for your 2x speed buff.

I think the one that I got most into - but got most disappointed by - was Secret World. Nice power system. Great mythos. Fun (if occasionally confusing) storytelling. And a properly open-world first act in... ...a seaside town in Maine. Really? Really. (It's even called Kingsmouth, FFS.) But even Molly, The Thing Of Evil would never deny it felt like walking into her master's work. It was gloriously creepy, genuinely disturbing without over-reliance on epic bosses, jump scares or setpieces. (Though it did have some FUN stuff. ESPECIALLY the obligatory Abandoned Theme Park Of OMGDoomzor. Yes, I know, but... it's GOOD.) But after that point, once you get to Egypt, things got very much more on-rails, grindy, and shabby around the edges, and I rapidly lost interest. Apparently, so did the dev team.

Night Trap wasn't just cringeworthy. Sega CD titles generally worked better when they just used it as a storage medium to make bigger, better games (Sonic CD etc.) FMV tech at the time wasn't up to the job of pulling off the gaming experiences they wanted, so Night Trap - according to reviews you can find from the time - was also fairly unplayable because of the timing required vs response lag and bugginess of the video. Sewer Shark dodged the technical issues (mostly) by using the tech to make a straightforward rail shooter, with superimposed sprites as targets, and somehow also getting legendary VFX dude John Dykstra and Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh in on the deal. "Adult" games also generally tend not to be brilliantly designed, since they're focussing on... er... other assets to get through. Having surfed the Worst Games Of All Time wiki, Lula 3D shows up, as does at least one Leisure Suit Larry entry. Also on that list is Dungeon Keeper: iOS, and sweet Freya knows I love a dungeon. But. Aside from being quite hard to play, this was the moment EA found out what micropayments were for. Shortly afterwards, they found out what the word "free" is for, courtesy of a painful set of lessons from the UK Advertising Standards Authority.