Lit Apropos of Nothing - ACKBAR IN CAPITALS - The Lit Forum Social Thread, v2.0.15

Not at all. I mean in terms of design. Were someone to convert the original LoZ into a 3D title, today, it would be MUCH more like Dark Souls than it would be like, say, Skyward Sword.

Though it does have some similarities with later games in the LoZ series, too. For instance, the first game (and suspect the second, too, but I'm not far enough in yet to say) shares an almost identical type of progression to that found in ALttP and OoT, with a scenario directly analogous to Link's quests of the "first half" to gather the spiritual stones.

 

Latest X-Men trailer, get to see some of the action scenes this time:

 

Magneto is like a jedi master in this one although Im not a fan of X-men, this movie has my interest. Hopefully they balanced the character focus

 

Interesting, now I understand what you meant. I am not exactly the best judge of LoZ, because the first two LoZ games have always been defined as being extremely difficult to me. Which why I made sure to get ALttP once I discovered it existed.

 

Gotta say, it looks great. Only X-Men movie I've ever seen was the newest Wolverine movie, and I was less than impressed, but this looks awesome!

 

I really liked the last X-Men First Class movie, especially in comparison to any of the original three X-Men movies. Nice to see both casts in the movie and I expect good things from this one, and my fingers are still crossed 2 more mutants from the original show up in it

 

My wife and I drove down on PCH-1, which was absolutely amazing and gorgeous, and only added an hour and a half to our travel time, about twenty minutes of that being stuck behind a cop car because they'd closed the road so a film company could shoot something at the Bixby Bridge.

We also took a chance and used Silvercar, which is an app based service where you rent an Audi A4, and was simpler than going through a rental company. I had no intention of driving down Highway 1 in my wife's Mini Cooper, and I must say that the ride in the Audi was absolutely brilliant in every way. It wasn't that expensive either, tbh, when compared with what you end up spending on a regular rental car to get some compact thing. Their service was absolutely wonderful, and we stayed at the Hotel Indigo just a few blocks down from the parks.

I'd recommend the Indigo for anyone going to Disney or Wondercon. It's not far from the convention center from what I understand and it's about three or four blocks from the park entrance.

As to Star Tours, we got Vader stopping our ships and then fleeing to the podrace, and the finale being the race through the uncompleted Death Star while Fett chases us.

I did the original Star Tours years ago and the new version is great. I actually had no idea there were so many permutations to where the story could go or I would have perhaps tried to jump in a few more times, but we had a Fastpass for Space Mountain that was calling us.

Taking the Star Tours ride is a good way to remind one of the absolute joy so many people, young and old, take in Star Wars. I confess to grinning from ear to ear by the time the ride was done and I salute the programmers and Imagineers who did all the work there and on the rest of the park.

 

I liked X-men and X-2, Last stand and Origins were lame, I thought First Class was ok, and the Wolverine was passable. This one looks like it might be the proper conclusion to the original X-men movies

 

Catching up with last week's Arrow, which introduced the Suicide Squad. Everyone's raving about the Harley Quinn cameo.. but, for me, the highlight was this:

Spoiler

 

What is the reference?

 

John Ostrander

 

Ostrander (as in John Ostrander of Legacy and AotE fame) created Suicide Squad. The modern iteration of it, at any rate.

 

Aha, then I get it, gracias

 

I need to start watching Arrow. I've heard it's fairly family friendly aside from the violence. Is this so?

 

A lovely showcase for next gen, and one of the first games to really, really feel next gen. There's a side that always says; "Well, they just put more polish on the previous game!" and my answer is that I bought inFamous: Second Son expecting an inFamous game and that's exactly what I got...except better in every way.

The power leveling is slightly changed, for some reason I've seen people complain they replaced the power sets based on morality. This isn't true, it's still there but they're just branches off a singular tree. I'm not totally sure how people could miss that they're still there, but anyways...

If I had a complaint, it's that your powers mean you sometimes end up behind a partition with an object between you and the camera. It really doesn't take much to reset the camera, but it can throw you off to suddenly smoke behind a barricade and be staring at the barricade that you're behind. Mild movement usually resets the camera, but in the middle of a fight it can be weird.

The voice acting and writing are surprisingly good, and the story is solid and a nice continuation. The evil baddie seems a little too EVIL! OTOH, it may come out that she has her reasons.

They nicely establish WHY you're doing what you're doing, and do a good job of setting up the characters.

There's a DLC that is supposed to bridge the game which you get if you pre-ordered, and the devs added something like ten missions as a DLC on release to boost play-time. I've seen play-time estimates at everything from five hours to twenty hours, so YMMV, but my opinion is that everything feels organic, the touchpad of the PS4 controller is put to good use for the first time in any game I've played, and the powers and sense of environment are all nicely established.

It's very much an inFamous game without feeling cookie cutter and gets points for having a Native American protagonist and cast. The Kotaku review slighted an early bit in the game for being a bit on the nose, but (imo) the reference to Rosa Parks was something the character would say and comes across as partly petulant instead of being a ham-fisted attempt at social criticism. So far, the fear the public has over Conduits is justified and the game nicely offers reasons for the character to pick an "evil" path without quite being at the level of "help an Ewok into a furnace" vs "help an Ewok buy a furnished apartment" (Penny Arcade ref +10 Nerd, -20 Char).

ETA: One thing I REALLY, REALLY like is that when you do something like smoke through the vents (you see this in the commercials where the character launches into the airs from a building) is that time slows down. They didn't just do that for the commercial or a pre-rendered bit, that happens every time you do a wild smoke ride, and it gives you time to mentally reset to where you are. Otherwise you'd just shoot up and be totally thrown off as to your location and trying to orientate yourself to targets or the ground.

It's a simple mechanic, but it's one that vastly helps the game flow, as well as making it really feel incredible as a power and allows you to line up shots or attacks without resorting to button mashing and praying.

 

They even say the name outloud, later on.

 

Oh hey, look at that, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch are filming for Avengers 2.
http://screencrush.com/avengers-2-scarlet-witch-quicksilver-set-photos/

 

Scarlet Witch looks reminiscent of her appearance in X-Men: Evolution. So they're Hawkeye's buds? In any case I'm looking forward to it.

 

See, DOFP haters? Quicksilver looks dumb in every iteration.

 

It's going to be interesting to see how Joss & co work it, since thanks to Fox, they can't refer to anything related to the X-Men or Magneto or even call them mutants.

At least he doesn't look like a member of a European boy band.

 

Side note: anything inspired by the XME Wanda is good in my book.