Open Thread

Open Thread #302

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35 thoughts on “Open Thread #302

  1. Have you guys ever seen Cruel Intentions? It’s a late 1990s movie staring the top actors of the time, Ryan Philipe, Reese Witherspoon,and Sarah Michelle Gellar. It’s based of the classic French tale, Dangerous Liaisons, which also has a movie from the 1980s. Basically the movie is about sex, deceit, love, jealousy and self discovery. I watched in in the theater way back in the day. I enjoyed it. Curious if you guys have seen it, and your opinions.

    1. Thanks for mentioning this movie! I watched it this afternoon, and found it surprisingly good. I think that if falls off a cliff in the last 20 minutes and overplays the back-and-forth between the step siblings, but apart from that it is a well-made movie. It is also pretty based, showing women to be easily available to the lead character, a rich Chad who has “dark triad” written all over him.

    2. I’m glad you liked it. One thing Sebastian does is grab the girls hand when he’s interested. I thought that was a good example of physical escalation. I watched a review of this movie from a really cute chick recently. She noticed how he stuck up for his crush when his bitch stepsister mocked her for getting emotional over the book she was reading. That was a pivotal moment I think

  2. I recently went down a Legacy of Kain rabbit hole as I remember playing the Soul Reaver trilogy quite a long time ago. I’m convinced it’s one of the more narratively brilliant game series of all time and it was probably the one first game series to have great voice acting. Something that didn’t add up to me until a little bit of investigation, however, is Amy Hennig’s heavy involvement with those games. She was recently given writing credits for the extremely cringey and disastrous woke trash game Forspoken.

    What I learned is that Amy was actually heavily involved with the first three Uncharted games also. On he Wiki, she is given credits as the sole writer of Uncharted 3 as well as one of the directors. Uncharted 4 is where the series went way off the rails. I found an interesting short clip where one of the voice actors for U4 discusses how they all got together and almost abandoned the project, as Amy Hennig was fired from the project and Neil Druckmann was brought in. Neil was also responsible for the incredibly woke The Last of Us series, for reference: https://youtu.be/5FdUkVP3MlE

    It makes me wonder if Amy was let go from Naughty Dog for not being woke enough, and if she has since adapted to the current political climate out of necessity to maintain employment.

    1. Legacy of Kain is an IP that is not at all on my radar. I recall that it was one of the more popular games on Dreamcast, but I am not sure whether I ever tried playing it. I also did not know that there was more than one game.

      I first learned about Amy Henning in the context of Uncharted 2, whose story I found pretty cringe-worthy. It also had strong feminist undertones. It is nothing compared to Uncharted 4, in which Nathan Drake gets beaten up by a black, skinny female. The second Uncharted is the only decent game in this series, but it has little replay value as it is essentially only a collection of set pieces, with relatively uninspired gameplay.

      I recall reading about Neil Druckmann allegedly conspiring to get Amy Henning out of Naughty Dog so that he could be fully in charge of the writing. He did not waste any time, as we know from The Last of Us II, which promotes the tranny-agenda, kills off the beloved white male protagonist that carried the first part, and tells a lot about the chosen people. It is quite likely that Amy Henning was not woke enough for Sony, so Druckmann’s machinations could succeed. Also, if I look at her career, I do not see anything that would deserve high praise. Legacy of Kain is widely held in high regards for its story, it seems, but the same cannot be said for any of her other work.

    2. Speaking of games, I recently learned about a new Metal Slug game, sadly only for phones. This franchise peaked over 20 years ago. Looking at the interpretation of the source material by some Chinese developer is quite sad:

      They fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of the game. When 3D gaming became popular, a problem game studios faced was transitioning 2D franchises into 3D. In some cases this worked better than in others. Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time are probably prime examples. However, it seems that the transition from 240p to 1080p 2D games is even more challenging. This has hardly ever been done successfully. The best example I can think of is Ghouls and Ghosts Resurrection, which uses highly detailed sprites and very well captures the style of the 1980s and 1990s prequels.

    3. Soul Reaver certainly stood out during its time, I think. The gameplay even had this mechanic that aided in puzzle solving, which was essentially that your character could phase in and out of dimensions on the fly. I believe it may have even been the first attempt at a 3D metroidvania style of game. Combine the unique gameplay with the cinematic cutscenes (the PS2 era of Soul Reaver games actually had great in-game face/body animations, solid voice acting, compelling characters and story, and you end up with a pretty awesome game. Check out the opening cinematic for the first game, it’s got to be one of the best openers in all of gaming: https://youtu.be/tkkmm9vqbHQ

      Soul Reaver may have been Hennig’s pinnacle of creativity, but if youvtake that and the first three Uncharted games then her legacy completely dwarfs some fag’s like Druckmann’s. Even if many modern soy gamers think that The Last of Us 2 is some kind of brilliant masterpiece in gaming.

      Likewise as with Metal Slug, Konami completely managed to allow Contra get completely out of hand with their last attempt. The last good “Contra” game was Hard Corps: Uprising, which featured some neat hand drawn art.

    4. The opening cinematic you linked to is very good. In particular, I like the slow and deliberate camera movement, which lends gravitas to the acting and narration. This is in stark contrast to today’s ADHD-style cinematics.

      Thanks for reminding me of Hard Cops: Uprising! I missed the chance to play it when it came out, but it should run well on Xenia, looking at its simple but beautiful graphics. The company behind it nowadays lives off the Guilty Gear franchise.

    5. “This is in stark contrast to today’s ADHD-style cinematics.”

      What do you think is a good modern example of this?

      I would also like to emulate HC:U at some point. I only know about it because my shmup buddy introduced it to me some time ago. I believe it’s decently difficult as well.

      Btw, I recently realized that the first Clock Tower game is being ported for all modern platforms. I was initially pretty excited as I was never able to get the English hack of that game to work, but then I found this video which I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of (wait for the 1:51 mark): https://youtu.be/3gfUIOkvZYs

    6. Thanks for the heads-up! There is no chance that WayForward will mess up this remake. Even the trailer description informs us that they only want to introduce this game to “new, modern audiences”.

      An excellent example of an ADHD intro is the montage at the beginning of Cyberpunk 2077, a game that runs surprisingly well on my laptop thanks to FSR, but which is so crappy that I could not even tolerate it for an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV-PiOdtDXs
      When watching this clip in isolation, you may think that this is a parody but this is really in the game.

    7. Ah, I see your point with the Cyberpunk montage. Not only did it have a TikTok/Youtube Shorts sort of vibe to it almost, but the melody of the song selection is as if it was chosen because it’s easy to grasp and its repetitiveness will make it more likely to stick in the player’s memory. I was actually wondering if Cyberpunk 2077 was playable or not today. I understand DLC is being released soon and people are talking about the game essentially upgrading to “2.0” status, which will supposedly fix a lot of the in-game issues involved with the nature of the base game.

    8. There are a number of reviews on YouTube covering bugs and performance of this game, two years after release. As it turns out, there are still many glaring issues. Also, I found the atmosphere of the game really off-putting as it does not put you into a world you want to explore.

    9. It is a shame that Cyberpunk was such a disaster. I think it will be equal parts entertaining and heart wrenching to see the beautiful world of The Witcher get pride-ified.

    10. Let us not be so negative! I am sure that we can learn a lot about the middle ages this way. Did you know that there were multiple kinds of dildos even back then and that even the remotest villages housed sizable numbers of blacks? I did not know about it either, but according to recent science it really is true.

  3. Alek and Aaron have both touched on the issue of men who lack the capacity to celebrate the victories and rejoice in the successes of their male “friends”.

    IIRC, Alek has even had the experience of having someone say something similar to “slow down with all that progress your making with the programming stuff”. And the dude wasn’t kidding.

    Anyone else feel profoundly sad at their lack of real brotherhood in life? My literal brother cut me down nonstop when we were coming up. I had friends that got bullied, and i was always the first to stand up to the bully and provide reassurance/encouragement for my friends. When the situation was reversed, I was hung out to dry.

    I had some opportunities in university to make some worthwhile friends, but I was too fucked in the head at the time and fucked that up.

    I don’t have any friends that I’m in regular contact with who have good habits, and are looking to support and be supported by friends doing the same.

    I have one male friend like that, but we are in opposite time zones. He lives in Toronto (he and his wife both hate it), so I won’t say I wish I lived in the same city as him, but damn, I do miss his company.

    Andrew Tate talked about how having Tristan push him was instrumental in his success. Never really had anything like that.

    1. With a lot of men, ego simply gets in the way. In my private life, I was sometimes quite outspoken against Covid in 2022 and, later on, the vaxx as well, but did not engage in any of the schizo thinking I exhibit on my two blogs, albeit I was proven right in the end. There were people who thought they could deride me, and two of them ended up with vaxx injuries. They did not deem it necessary to apologize or simply say that they were wrong. Also, last year I cautioned people to perhaps dampen their enthusiasm with regards to a Ukrainian victory in the Great Gay War. As you can guess, I have not heard a lot from those people in a while either. In essence, spouting the mainstream narrative is easy, and it surely provides a level of emotional comfort. In contrast, taking a stand against MSM opinion is a pretty brave act, and apparently average people do not look kindly at you if it turns out that you have repeatedly been right whereas they have to constantly change their supposed firm beliefs.

      On a more general note, I recall reading somewhere, perhaps on 4chan or The Daily Stormer, that men who are based want to assess a statement for its truth value. In contrast, weak men, and almost all women, perceive statements as being more or less independent of truth. To them, “truth” is what the supposed mainstream opinion is. The provided evolutionary explanation for this was that most men are simply followers and, just like women, they would have been at a distinct disadvantage had they challenged whoever warlord ruled their tribe.

    2. I didn’t even consider that my having opinions outside the mainstream contributed to this, but it makes sense.

      Can you state what the vax injuries were?

    3. One had skin issues, some kind of eczema that covers a fair bit of his hands, so this part cannot really be hidden. Other parts of his body may also be affected. The other has gotten “long Covid”, which I perceive to be just plausible deniability. This seems to be quite common as it allows people to save face, in particular the hardcore vaxx pushers.

  4. I am currently in the third season of the succession. I really liked the first seasons but then the show got much worse. the show became extremely political focussing on “destroying” the republicans.

    1. Keep at it! The show becomes more red-pilled towards the end. I quite enjoyed the fourth season, which is also the final one.

    2. Roman was hilarious in the last 2 seasons.

      I found myself missing the trash talker side of Kendall from season 1, but he couldn’t have the same swagger after what he went through in the season 1 finale.

  5. Serious question for anybody reading, but is Elon Musk actually kind of stupid? Maybe stupid isn’t the word, but I feel like renaming Twitter was genuinely stupid.

    1. I have been wondering if he is mentally unstable. Some of his behavior is so bizarre that you could be forgiven for thinking that he is bipolar.

    2. This is indeed quite interesting. I was aware of a tweet in which he spoke about the genocide of white farmers in South Africa, but him directly attacking the ADL was news to me. It is surprising that he can act with this level of impunity, so I wonder if he holds some information the other elites are afraid of him sharing. He smacked the mainstream across the face by releasing the “Twitter Files” a few months ago already.

    3. He is simple the master so he can act with impunity. We need more people like him to smack the Leftie into comma.

    4. I skimmed through it. Nothing too surprising here. Same behavior I’d expect from from every other giant social media platform of corporation.

  6. A new report came out, detailing the exploits of giga-Chad Hunter Biden who smokes crack cocaine, makes millions in the Ukraine, and bangs hookers with taxpayers’ money on the regular:
    https://media.marcopolousa.org/pdf/Report.pdf
    For some reason, if you search for this report on Google, you do not get any results. I have no idea why this is happening. It must be a bizarre edge case.

  7. It seems that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a massive commercial success. This may very well be the best cRPG in recent years, which is a somewhat low bar, but it unfortunately seems to be the case that the game studio behind it went with the times. Not only can you fuck a bear, the game also steers you towards a lot of gay sex. Apparently plenty of party chat dialogues lead to romantic encounters, no matter the sex of your interlocutor. If you did not want it, why did you ask the mage in your party about why he became a mage?

    1. That’s terrible! Romance dialogue options should always be obvious, not something one might pick on accident. And I always felt it was obvious in Baldur’s gate II and the imitators I played like Pathfinder Kingmaker and Pillars of Eternity.

      Perhaps the people who wrote the party interactions thought “the player won’t bother speaking to a party member who they don’t want to have sex with”.

      But besides romances it is traditionally the case in proper western RPGs that speaking to party members and choosing certain dialogue options would affect their actions later on in the story or activate quests that you can only get if the party member really trusts you. This is a great feature and it would be a shame if players were deterred from pursuing these interactions because they might accidentally end up getting buggered by the half-orc barbarian they were trying to become bros with.

    2. I was not even aware that this game is on Steam. Blizzard seems to need to boost the revenues for this game. In some article I just read one of their PR shills talk about how much they were “looking forward for feedback from the players”. It is save to say that this did not quite unfold as expected. On the other hand, they surely were aware of the dismal reception of this game on Metacritic.

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