Get Your Goon On

Cronican posted:

One week last summer, my brother, a friend and I decided to see if we could get 100% on GTA 3, GTA:VC and GTA:SA in less than seven days. We took rotating shifts, printed out maps, order of completion, bought bags and bags of doritos...everything. There was always one of us playing the game, one sleeping, and the other helping, except for the 1 am to 9 am shift, which was done alone.

Our time: 5 days, 13 hours and 43 minutes. Would have been shorter but my brother couldn't handle taking the 1 am to 9 am shift one night and fell asleep.

edit: we've never played a gta game since

Oh believe me, there was a lot of morale problems. Plenty of arguments over who had to do the taxi/firetruck/ambulance/vigilante missions. The races were the fucking worst, especially when you're tired, angry and running off sugar from coke. I'm surprised we actually finished to be honest.

moths posted:

Oh Jesus Hell, I bought Rune Farmer Factory Harvest whatever last night. I played for about half an hour, and I'm actually going to take it back to the store. Partially because it's like someone sucked all the fun out of Animal Crossing, and partially because it introduces motherfucking slavery to children.

No shit. You defeat monsters, and then they work on your farm. You can pay a guy in town to build 'monster pens' where they live.

I could handle the Pokemon cockfights - but I'm finding this intensely more disturbing than violence.

Ironically, I'll probably trade it in for Pokemon Pearl. vv

e: I didn't make it to monsters yet - there was crazy crap about weapons just free the monsters 'souls' so you can trap them in your pens and put them to work on your [s]planta[/] farm.

I can't say that I've ever understood the appeal of these kinds of anime cartoons. You have some central character, who is often a kid, who possesses some kind of ability or skill to manipulate power in some way. The kid is then sent on a mission or into battle to acquire a talisman or object that will give him even more of this power. Along the way, he battles other kids or creatures who want the same thing. And that's pretty much it.

The central characters usually only have three emotional states, at most. Anger at his enemies. Surprise that his enemies are as powerful as he is. Anger at his "friends" for not helping him enough. I guess these cartoons appeal to angry kids. And their friends are usually just some stupid mix of oddballs and whiners who constantly get in trouble, and who you would just as soon see die.

The "power" concept is always a little shaky here, too. Whether it's beams of some undefined kind of energy, or the ability to control huge monsters, or whatever, the power is usually pretty ineffective against the enemies. There's a lot of talking and bragging about the power before a fight, but the fights themselves rarely settle anything.

I don't get it. I understand that Japanese companies crank this stuff out daily, as the Japanese market has a kind of insatiable thirst for it.

As far as I can tell, this stuff appeals to emotionally and socially stunted people who in real life feel as if they have absolutely no power over their lives. The only thing worse are the cartoons like Spongebob Squarepants, where the goal of the central characters is to be liked and accepted by the community.

In the old days, Bugs Bunny didn't care if people liked him, and was pretty much all about introducing as much chaos as possible into a situation. His power was anarchy, which is more "realistic" in some ways than shooting lighting bolts out your ass at some dragon. And even though Bugs Bunny was licensed, selling an endless stream of stupid collector cards wasn't his sole purpose.

I don't want to nerd out but I've got to reply to this, because I don't think you can really call the phaser a multipurpose tool, it's a weapon, just because the writers were lazy in an episode and thought "Hey the phasers have batteries right? Well Scotty could use those to recharge the shuttle craft and that way we won't have to create a new prop!" It was just bad writing, and heating up rocks is just a result of what the phaser does; it's basically just a plasma beam.

Okay so maybe that's just nitpicking, but you were wrong in saying this: "it makes sense to use cell-destroying 'beams' on a spaceship; that machine gun could put holes in the hull (or inadvertently destroy valuable equipment) which is usually a bad thing while in space."

I refer you to Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan where its clearly shown that phasers can do significant damage to starships, ripping through hulls and destroying any valuable equipment onboard just as effectively perhaps more so than conventional weaponry. Also where it is stated in Trek that the Cardassians are wearing anything more than just a bulky uniform? Even if they are its hard to imagine that man wouldn't have improved the projectile weapon from where it is today (though I'd be willing to bet that a shotgun blast would still take down a Klingon) hell even in Trek we see that they have in an attempt to combat the Borg (DS9).

If you can't tell I happen to agree with Yellicopter on this, in Trek and pretty much any Sci-fi when energy weapons are used they are always shown as being slow and really not that impressive, but I think it has more to do with the way the special effects are done. In fact I'd say the problem with this whole argument is that we're both talking about the phaser as if it were a real thing. The Phaser, Disruptor, Blaster, Laser gun, Jaffa Staff Weapon, ect would all be fine if it didn't take their beam/blob of energy an hour to reach its target. I'd just like to see a laser beam act more like a laser beam for once and streak across the screen in the blink of an eye, but they'll never do that with a energy weapon in a sci-fi show because if they did what would be the point of having an energy weapon if you're not going to see the beam/blob of light for more than an instant (or at all)?