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Zablorg wrote:I don't get E.T. Not only do I not get it, I fucking despise the thing. I hate Elliot, I hate his sister, and I fucking hate E.T.

THANK YOU!
Every time I said anything negative about E.T. everyone looked at me weird. I hate that movie, I despise it. I was starting to think that I was the only one that felt this way.

andrewgpaul wrote:If you've got a story to tell, write a fucking novel. Or make a movie.

They tried that and it bombed horribly.

If you've got a story to tell, write a fucking novel. Or make a movie.

That reminds me of Half Life 2. Why bother making a game if it is an interactive movie ? I think people once joked about paper thin plots in FPS games. Now it's the opposite. The player is forced go along a scripted rail road ride so he "appreciates the story". Many people praised Half Life's lack of cutscenes as a step forward. I think it was a step in the wrong direction. Plot should stay in cutscenes and not affect the gunfights in form of scripted bullshit.

Sarevok wrote:

If you've got a story to tell, write a fucking novel. Or make a movie.

That reminds me of Half Life 2. Why bother making a game if it is an interactive movie ? I think people once joked about paper thin plots in FPS games. Now it's the opposite. The player is forced go along a scripted rail road ride so he "appreciates the story". Many people praised Half Life's lack of cutscenes as a step forward. I think it was a step in the wrong direction. Plot should stay in cutscenes and not affect the gunfights in form of scripted bullshit.

There's a good and a bad way of doing these things, and I think that's why I never got into the original Half-Life. They gave you only one path of progression, with the illusion of interactivity. All too often, you found, for instance, a scientists hanging on for dear life, waiting for your help, but as soon as you got close, a script would trigger and he'd fall to his death. Scripts are all well and good to give the illusion of freedom, but it is a chimera. And if it's obvious I don't have a say in what happens, whyever should I bother playing?

Contrast that with Thief: The Dark Project, whose overarching story was equally linear, but which in essence let you do whatever you wanted within the context of a given mission. In terms of character, of which the game's protagonist had a lot, the actions he took always made perfect sense. Someone tries to kill you? Follow the bastards home and rob them blind. You got shafted by your employer? Get even.

Uraniun235 wrote:

andrewgpaul wrote:If you've got a story to tell, write a fucking novel. Or make a movie.

They tried that and it bombed horribly.

That's because The Spirits Within was shite. From what I've heard, the FF7 plot is interesting, but I don't want to wade through the god-awful game around it (things that bug me: random encounters, especially when I'm trying to chase an NPC; needlessly complicated levelling up procedure; well-rendered (for the time) backgrounds, ruined by the bobble-headed character sprites - at least make them match).

Oh, and from another thread; bottled water. Why?

OK, I'll grant you, perhaps in countries with shitty drinking water, like parts of England, but in Scotland? Eh?

Eleas wrote:There's a good and a bad way of doing these things, and I think that's why I never got into the original Half-Life. They gave you only one path of progression, with the illusion of interactivity. All too often, you found, for instance, a scientists hanging on for dear life, waiting for your help, but as soon as you got close, a script would trigger and he'd fall to his death. Scripts are all well and good to give the illusion of freedom, but it is a chimera. And if it's obvious I don't have a say in what happens, whyever should I bother playing?

Contrast that with Thief: The Dark Project, whose overarching story was equally linear, but which in essence let you do whatever you wanted within the context of a given mission. In terms of character, of which the game's protagonist had a lot, the actions he took always made perfect sense. Someone tries to kill you? Follow the bastards home and rob them blind. You got shafted by your employer? Get even.

Halflife1 is still much better in this regard than Halflife2, where not only are you railroaded down a plot, but the plot is STUPID. Being chased by the army? Quick, run into the secret resistance base! OH GOD HOW DID THEY FIND US?

Games like Thief that required timing and paying attention to take advantage of convesations/distractions/etc were often criticised at the time. People want to 'watch the funny conversation', not 'use distraction to penetrate security'. If you have to take advantage of a limited opportunity, most people will miss it.

andrewgpaul wrote:Oh, and from another thread; bottled water. Why?

OK, I'll grant you, perhaps in countries with shitty drinking water, like parts of England, but in Scotland? Eh?

According to one of those "Hard water " tables you get around the place, the majority of the UK has perfectly decent water. Its only the likes of London and the Midlands that have particularly rubbish supplies.

Scunthorpe, and Leamington Spa, by personal experience, have tap water that makes the tea nice and crunchy. Anywhere else, I'll take your word for it

Stark wrote: Games like Thief that required timing and paying attention to take advantage of convesations/distractions/etc were often criticised at the time. People want to 'watch the funny conversation', not 'use distraction to penetrate security'. If you have to take advantage of a limited opportunity, most people will miss it.

Oh hell yes. I could talk for ages about how the average gamer seems to want everything spelled out for them, but I'll shut up for the sake of the thread.

RedImperator wrote:I don't get grunge. It's the most listless and grating genre of rock that ever went mainstream, and whatever limited charm it once had was long ago beaten out of it by endless radio airplay of the same boring shit over and over (and over and over and over) again.

It's long been my theory that grunge is an outgrowth of the Pampered Generation. A generation which has been so hopelessly coddled, pampered, cushioned, and gingerly protected that they need to create a miserable mood with the music they play on their iPods, in order to feel like they possess something resembling emotional depth.

His Divine Shadow wrote:

Gullible Jones wrote:Stephen King.

It's not that he's a bad writer, exactly; but four out of five times it seems he just can't get his shit together. He creates great characters and great scenarios, and then pulls some random crap that breaks SoD. He takes an interesting idea, and turns it into an artifically hopeless situation that he resolves with a literal deus ex machina. Some of his stuff is good all the way through; but more often than not I find it tremendously frustrating, in some ways more so than that of authors who are pure hacks.

Take his magnus opus for that, around the middle he fucks up the whole story and it just gets progressively worse until the end, and it was such a fucking good story at first.

That's how I felt about the Dark Tower series. I felt my suspension-of-disbelief-meter drop a few points every time a character from this world was introduced. Sure, the self-referential stuff was great, but it didn't make up for the hokiness of having Roland play therapist for a junkie. I kind of stopped trying to suspend my disbelief when Susannah joined the party.

(She has no freaking legs! And no prosthetics! And they have to travel through hundreds of miles of wilderness carrying 45 kilos of her on in crappy makeshift harness!)

What got to me, though, was that there was still good stuff after that. The white bees and their poisonous honey? The crazy shit in Lud, with the road lined with missiles, the people living underground, and the misplaced elements of WWII? Brilliant. And then he goes and fucks it all up with the hokey insane monorail, and none of the characters remembering what fucking prime numbers are. The man has an incurable habit of coming up with amazing ideas and then shitting all over them, and it is utterly infuriating.

I've heard that King actually inserts himself into one of the later books as a major character. I'm glad I didn't get that far; at this point, I prefer to think of The Gunslinger as a standalone work and the rest of the series as semi-crappy fanfic.

Stark wrote: Halflife1 is still much better in this regard than Halflife2, where not only are you railroaded down a plot, but the plot is STUPID. Being chased by the army? Quick, run into the secret resistance base! OH GOD HOW DID THEY FIND US?

In HL2's defense, the whole deal with Xen in HL1 looks pretty stupid to me. (OMG look, our portal opened into a dimension full of monsters controlled by the big fetus-shaped boss! Wheee!) The Combine at least strike me as fairly creepy,

But of course, there's the Vortigaunts to make up for that. It seems to me like the unspoken rule in RPGs is that there must be at least one element that makes the player say, "Wow, that's retarded".

How do you know the Combine are creepy? They aren't even in the game! You see one for a second on a poorly-textured monitor. Spooky!

PROTIP: Saying 'in HL2's defence' and then saying 'in HL1...' doesn't really help. If I said 'Xen wasn't as bad as the stupid platform puzzle at the end of HL2' does this somehow make it okay? Complaining that HL1 involved a dimension full of monsters when HL2 is about... another... dimension full of monsters that ruled the other monsters and now rules us is hilarious. Did you notice Halflife is about dimensions full of monsters?

so in HL three do we get to see HPL's pals, you know Mr. N., Mr. C., Mr. H, Ms. Y.-S.

Gullible Jones wrote:I've heard that King actually inserts himself into one of the later books as a major character. I'm glad I didn't get that far; at this point, I prefer to think of The Gunslinger as a standalone work and the rest of the series as semi-crappy fanfic.

Yes he does insert himself in the books, he is called the "wordslinger" by Roland, the bad guys are trying to kill him because doing that will prevent him from finishing the Dark Tower. Yes Stephen King is writing about writing a book and being visited by the guys he's writing about. It was a pretty fucking weird.

Oh and the kid dies to protect him. As does everyone else later in the book, down to the dog himself who dies protecting roland from that stupid fucking monster they invented (son of the red king), some retard with magical powers joins up at the last minute but goes back where he'll live with a nice robot.

Oh and when he gets to the top of the tower, we discover he is in a loop and he's been here loads of times before, and the tower deposits him at the beginning of the story again, against his lamentations. This time its different however, he has a special horn belonging to one of his friends that he lost the other times, so this then ends with the hope that maybe this time Roland will find what he is looking for. I suppose I can see there is no real good way to end so okay, but the books turned to shit before that.

Darth Wong wrote:

RedImperator wrote:I don't get grunge. It's the most listless and grating genre of rock that ever went mainstream, and whatever limited charm it once had was long ago beaten out of it by endless radio airplay of the same boring shit over and over (and over and over and over) again.

It's long been my theory that grunge is an outgrowth of the Pampered Generation. A generation which has been so hopelessly coddled, pampered, cushioned, and gingerly protected that they need to create a miserable mood with the music they play on their iPods, in order to feel like they possess something resembling emotional depth.

The grunge kids have since had children of their own, thus giving birth to Emo.

I've always agreed with Red's statement that grunge killed rock. Everyone was having fun with the likes of AC/DC, KISS, Bon Jovi, Poison and the like. Everyone was getting paid and laid, there was nothing to bitch about. Then comes Cobain and his whiny bitching. My only regret is that he didn't shoot himself sooner.

hey, I still enjoy rock, but I also like grunge for the same reason I like slow time blues.

The Yosemite Bear wrote:so in HL three do we get to see HPL's pals, you know Mr. N., Mr. C., Mr. H, Ms. Y.-S.

Oh yeah, that reminds me. I don't get Lovecraft. Oh boy, a bunch of ancient gods that feed on terror, that sure does fill me with amusement.

Is THAT what he was talking about? My ability to decode Bear's insane ramblings is minimal, I'm afraid.

And you missed the point of Lovecraft, man! It's about boring dudes who do boring stuff for ages before something vaguely fucked up and unnameable happens in the twist ending!

I don't get ITunes, why pay for songs one by one like that?
Maybe it's cause I don't use our I-Pod shuffle (which we got for free) since I don't go anywhere without the car for any length of time. I just don't get why people pay so much for just one song.

Which brings me to another one.. XM Sattelite radio... and others.
My parents got a free 3 month trial when they bought their new car and I've travelled with them in their car a few times. One things we've noticed is that it's all the same material played over and over again, yeah there are lots of stations to tune into but not a lot if you don't like listening to sports. My parents listened to the Comedy channels and noticed that they replay the same comedians and the same jokes. They also listened to the generations music channels and noticed the same thing, the same music played over and over.
They also noticed that there are in fact some commercials, they're just shorter and spread out more so they're less noticable.
Why someone would pay over 100 bucks a year for something like that is what confuses me. I know 100 bucks a year doesn't sound like a lot but when you think about the free radio you can get that comes with your car, it just doesn't make sense to me.

Now, I'm just going on what my parents have told me about XM Sattelite so I could be wrong.

Mrs Kendall wrote:I don't get ITunes, why pay for songs one by one like that?
Maybe it's cause I don't use our I-Pod shuffle (which we got for free) since I don't go anywhere without the car for any length of time. I just don't get why people pay so much for just one song.

Well, you can buy the whole album, often for a bit less than the cost of a physical CD. That said, sometimes people just want the single song.

I've always agreed with Red's statement that grunge killed rock. Everyone was having fun with the likes of AC/DC, KISS, Bon Jovi, Poison and the like. Everyone was getting paid and laid, there was nothing to bitch about.

This is a nice neat segue into my own personal 'I just don't get", which is 80's glam-metal. I'm not a fan of grunge, but thank god somebody killed this shit. I have records from all these bands (except for KISS, they never did anything good), and I can enjoy them on their own terms (and AC/DC is a Top 10 band) but they're creatively bankrupt and most of it is terrible. Just like we needed punk rock to kill off progrock in the mainstream, we needed grunge to get rid of the power ballad. Thankfully grunge died and now we have good music again.

High school football.

Sure, it's natural that the students would be into their team, and their families. But I live in an area where it's being followed religiously by people who haven't been in school in twenty, thirty years and still are caught up in the old rivalries even after all that time. But, it's high school football. Not even NCAA Div III ball but high school football. That fell off my radar screen when I graduated and the only time I took any notice of it recently was when I'd heard my old school had actually made it to the quarterfinals in the Louisiana state playoffs.

HemlockGrey wrote:

I've always agreed with Red's statement that grunge killed rock. Everyone was having fun with the likes of AC/DC, KISS, Bon Jovi, Poison and the like. Everyone was getting paid and laid, there was nothing to bitch about.

This is a nice neat segue into my own personal 'I just don't get", which is 80's glam-metal. I'm not a fan of grunge, but thank god somebody killed this shit. I have records from all these bands (except for KISS, they never did anything good), and I can enjoy them on their own terms (and AC/DC is a Top 10 band) but they're creatively bankrupt and most of it is terrible. Just like we needed punk rock to kill off progrock in the mainstream, we needed grunge to get rid of the power ballad. Thankfully grunge died and now we have good music again.

80s glam metal was mostly considered shit by music fans even in its time. Even when Poison was a brand-new band, almost everyone I knew thought that their presentation was a fucking embarrassment to popular music. And a lot of bands back then sold records on the basis of the "one radio hit sells the other 9 piece of shit songs on the album" technique. The music business was different back then: customers put up with a lot of shit, like not being able to preview albums before they bought them. Why do you think the RIAA is so nostalgic for that era?

Worse yet, the "power ballad" was a popular format for that one radio hit, because people were trying to find a style of music that appealed to both male rockers and their female girlfriends. In the years since then, people have mostly given up on that bizarre attempt to create a fusion of easy-listening and hard rock. Mind you, there are still some examples of that half-assed "metal + easy listening" style that are popular today, like that fucking Metallica "Nothing Else Matters" song that keeps getting airplay for some inexplicable reason. But it's shit too.

Bands like AC/DC and Iron Maiden still have a following today, in part because they rejected the whole "power ballad" idea and stuck to making straight-up rock and roll.