SleepingSilence

What shows/movies are you watching?

Flow was what "The Wild Robot" trailer was. It was a nice little time waster with no dialogue/real plot. It's like watching all the cutscenes in a video game. (And missing out on further context and a true conclusion that this movie doesn't really have.) Maybe due to the fact that it only had six months of production time.

But it does manage to have more cat tropes than Stray did. While also making them more anthropomorphic in their behavior. Though "a golden globe" award doesn't mean much when you have scenes like this winning one too.

"Best Musical of 2024"



I don't even like Wicked. But c'mon Hollywood.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

Random leftover games in my Steam Library that I tried…

Beholder: Easily the best of a bad batch. Has a decent set up & an interesting idea for a gameplay loop. But the tutorialization is poor, and it’s not very clear what you’re meant to be doing.
The Marvellous Miss Take: Just play Werecleaner instead.
Distrant 2: There was a Distrant 1?
Else Heart.Break: It told me to answer the phone on my desk. But when I hung up to put it away, my character put it down on the floor. Quality at its finest.
Braveland: Might as well be a mobile game. A bad mobile game. Its dialogue text is too big for the text boxes.
Cloudbuilt: Incredibly clunky controls and you have to create your own saves. This is absolutely not worth its $20 asking price.
Kromaia: This instantly crashes on boot up.
Nex Machina: Almost every arcade shooter I’ve played was more interesting than this.
Distrust: Takes a literal minute of time to unlock a door that you have the key for.
The Flame in the Flood: I went on a raft and damaged it by crashing into nothing.
Tulpa: A worse Limbo, as if that was possible.

Finished Playing
Last Epoch: It’s okay. But I don’t think it does anything particularly well. (Skill and class variety aside.) The campaign is uninteresting, the difficulty is impossibly easy, until it’s suddenly not. The loot is endless trash to be used for its RNG crafting system, and the end game (doing monoliths ad-infinitum) sucks. So I’d recommend playing Grim Dawn instead.

Paper Trail: It’s a well made puzzle game. With nice visuals, no bugs, actual challenge and optional collectables for those who want more of it. With ambient tracks that my gaming group described as "Bloodborne music". But the narrative falls flat for me & I didn’t find the puzzles very fun to solve. (Too much trial-and-error & not enough variety in the puzzles themselves.)

Mercury Abbey: Gorgeous pixel art and very little else to recommend. I hoped to play a detective game, and I fought a giant spider boss from Zelda instead. A bizarre highlight (compared to the serviceable puzzles, the near non-existent deduction, and bad elements like a forced stealth section) in a poorly paced plot. With a narrative full of boring characters, stilted dialogue, and plenty of typos.

Currently Playing
Sekiro: Alright. I haven’t played enough of this game to give it a definitive thumbs up or down yet. But anyone who claims this game is the most polished FromSoft game. ‘Because it fixes problems that other Souls games have.’ Is absolutely full of it.

Between the camera that frequently has trouble showing the player on screen, the enemy mob spam, the off screen teleportation and weapon tracking of enemies, enemy attacks that go through the terrain, being vulnerable during deathblow animations, how the ‘stealth’ makes all enemies spot you from a million miles away - through walls - and takes them all five minutes to stop being aggroed, the early merchant NPCs being pointlessly hidden away within tiny corners. And all the other “meant to be frustrating” elements feel a lot closer to Dark Souls 2 than I think most will admit.

But there is still some fun (in overcoming challenges) to be had. So I’m going to “Git Gud” and keep going. (Though Lies Of P was both challenging and immediately engaging.)

Edit: After writing this earlier in my playthrough, I’ve defeated several mini-bosses that were giving me trouble. By spamming the Axe prosthetic and hit-trading them to death. (And I think it’s more than a little egregious that I’ve already fought three early bosses that require you to dodge all their attacks.) The NPCs feel less interesting than other Souls games. And I got to say, this game really isn’t impressing me. As I’ve spent so much time grinding mobs, that I’ve only just started to feel those “moments of interconnectivity” in Sekiro’s world design/and I’ve noticed maybe one notable background track in twenty three different locations.

What Are You Listening To?

A Basket of Undead

I've come to say that @Dark Cloud is dealing with things IRL and plans to come back later this week.

THE WAR FOR MYTHERIA - Isekai Adventure

I've come to say that @Dark Cloud is dealing with things IRL and plans to come back later this week.

What shows/movies are you watching?

I think 2024 was pretty good for media. There were some great movies and some pretty decent television shows.

@Fabricant451

Maybe there's a few gems sprinkled in there. (I think Amazing Digital Circus has made a few entertaining episodes.) But overall, I'd struggle to give myself a "Top Ten" this year. (Even for video games. And I played a hell of a lot more of those than watch films this year.)

I guess I'd have to ask what you considered to be great movies and good television? (And if you'd consider them to be better than last year's offerings?)

Honestly, most of this year seemed to be spent on making worse sequels and unnecessary (at best) remakes to better things.

Just looking at "Top Grossing movies" of the year in comparison. (Via Wiki.)

We have John Wick 4 & Oppenheimer, Barbie (a thing most people seemed to like okay.) The Super Mario Bros. Movie (a thing most people seemed to like okay.) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (a thing most people seemed to like okay.)

Versus, bad sequel no one seemed to like, bad sequel no one seemed to like, bad sequel no one seemed to like, a lesser Barbie Wicked, and Dune 2. (And I really doubt this one is a better action movie than John Wick.)

And the shows everybody hyped up this year like "Shogun" & "The Gentleman" are pretty terribly written. (Even if I like "The Penguin", the plot is incredibly contrived.) And I refuse to believe the show featuring Concord characters was a good piece of entertainment.

(And my favorite anime of the year, was left unfinished.)

So, I don't know. Please do give me your recommendations to prove me otherwise. (Can always use a film to watch when I'm bored.)

What shows/movies are you watching?

Squid Game Season 2 is the best example of "The Idiot Plot" I've seen in recent memory. Where all the characters in it have to be impossibly stupid for the drama to work. (Every twist and character death is easy to see coming.) And aside from liking some of the actors. There's very little to recommend about it. It's far less compelling than Season One was. Every character arc and plot thread introduced goes unresolved, for what will very likely be a terrible 3rd season.

And an example of that blatant stupidity, is in the third game where it's trying to be a "999" (The game), where there's a limited number of rooms. (Fifty of the fuckers.) And you need to go into those rooms in pairs of a specific/basic number.

But it instead becomes closer to that one Saw trap with the four giant spaces that FIVE whole people needed to go into. And it was impossible to believe that so many fucking people died here, when the amount of rooms (versus the people who needed to go in them) only became relevant at the very end. So your only conclusion in the last few episodes is that these adults cannot count.

I really do hope there's some better television, movies, and anime on the horizon. Because 2024 was *not* a strong year for media.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

Rise Of The Golden Idol is a pretty tedious follow up to a game that had promise. The narrative is really lame and inexplicably watered down, compared to the prior game's murderous death cult plot. And unlike the last game's too long final chapter, I was getting a little sick of solving "How did bumblefuck steve hurt his leg?" mysteries past the first decent chapter.

Inspector Waffles was a more enjoyable narrative for its amusing puns and wholesome vibes. But its point-and-click adventure puzzle gameplay was *very* typical of its genre propensity for using moon logic.

Example: You need to give your female colleague a cinnamon coffee, before she'll give you a warrant for a murder case. (And you can't immediately call for her firing.) So you find a coffee machine in a unique painting and trinket selling shop, where the owner won't allow you to use it until you can find her something worthy of selling to her clients. So what do you do? Well, find an old love letter related to your murder case and spill some worse coffee onto it. Then seek help from a stranger in the apartment next door, that'll let you use their hairdryer to blow your soggy/ruined piece of evidence. And that...somehow...translates to being something that the art owner can sell...(Glad I looked that up, instead of wasting too much time on solving that.)

And I'm going to hold off on buying more games on Steam. (Tempting as it may be.) So I can focus on all the stuff that I got for Christmas. Last Epoch, you're next in line. Sekiro, you have to wait for the holidays to be over. I want to be happy for those...

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

I'm finally writing again. Huzzah. (But I am still playing a few games, and I do know what games I'm planning to play next. So I'll share that.)

Just finished Destiny 2's "The Final Shape" campaign. (For the most part anyway.) And it isn't going to change anyone's mind about how they feel about the game. The world's atmosphere looked pretty in places & the story is endless rambling between characters that I can't imagine many care about. I've always hated the platforming sections in this game. (This campaign is no different.) And adding yet another gimmick where more enemies are immune to all damage, is the only unwanted addition brought to us in the newest campaign. (The gunplay remains its strongest element. But I also think games like Titanfall 2 have it beat.)

Also, I've only just started "The Last Epoch". So my first impressions are all I can give. But the impossibly slow start up time for the game (that may have been partly due to my parent's lousy internet) made it hard to start and continue playing. And while I can already tell that the game will have a good variety of builds to play around with. (I'm the kind of person that likes to play a game to end credits and quickly moves on to something else.) So in terms of an immediate "I have to keep playing this" addiction, Grim Dawn clearly has this beat. (In part due to how the subpar voice acting/plot beginnings don't do this game any favors.) But most importantly, the start of the game is pretty easy. (Borderline challengeless.) So I haven't felt engaged in the combat yet...

Marvel Rivals is a little more interesting than Overwatch. (As someone with minimal fanfare for Marvel-related products.) But I don’t know how the balancing and everything else will hold the general audience’s interests. (I enjoyed Pokemon Unite when it first came out & that ruined itself pretty quickly.)

Fortnite’s season is more enjoyable to play than others. (Compared to recent seasons.) But it’s still plagued with poor balancing and the monetization has only gotten more egregious (it has four fucking separate battle passes) and they’re all slow to progress.

I plan to start the Rise Of The Golden Idol next. (Hoping it’s on par with its predecessor.) And then I’m finally giving Sekiro a shot. If I endured Lords Of The Fallen all the way through. Surely I’ll do the same for the game everyone claims is FromSoft’s best.

SleepingSilence's Tavern (Want 1x1 RP's? Please come in...)

Well, after the longest writing hiatus/break I think I've ever had.

I'm finally looking for an RP or two to get myself back into the swing of things. So bumped.