flyingtoastr

Dramatic, no. Comedic, absolutely. I’ve seen nothing by him that shows that he has the timing or aptitude for comedy. Good comedy is difficult, and talented dramatic actors aren’t always good at it.

That being said, he might be playing this straight based on the trailer.

I was a little worried about the same thing with Hela, but it turns out that Cate Blanchett chewing the crap out of every piece of scenery she could get her teeth into was one of the best villains in the entire MCU.

I’m not quite sure Bale has that in his range, but I’m pumped to see him try.

It’s also just fan art done in the style of a game, not a game itself, something Nintendo is generally permissive of people creating. They don’t let people rip their code, but they haven’t particularly seemed to care when people draw their characters.

Some people won’t be happy until every report is just titled "Disney Plus 2022 Original Film #4 Article" with nothing in the body. Because, after all, including the actual title might spoil that Chip and Dale are in the movie.

It’s getting a little nuts.

It’s actually the opposite for the exact reason you mention.

I can’t remember the caption off the top of my head, but in one of the WOTC lawsuits in the 90s, the court was actually somewhat sympathetic to the argument that physical booster packs of cards were closer to gambling because of the secondary market value. Since part of the value of opening a pack was that you might be able to flip the contents for more than you paid, it was closer to gambling games in which you put money in with the hope of getting more out. I don’t recall the exact disposition of the case either, pretty sure it ended up dismissed like all the other TCG lawsuits at the time.

Since digital boosties don’t have secondary market value, they don’t fit into that analysis.

Again, whether loot crates and Skinner Boxes are bullshit and predatory (they are) is independent of their legal status.

Possibly. IANAL in California, so I won’t pretend to have knowledge of their family law definitively, but their argument (according to this summary) also relies on "failure to implement parental control features," a statement which is just patently false (there are parental controls built into the account system of Battle.net to turn off transactions, helpfully labeled "parental controls"). The argument becomes even more tenuous because those parental controls are enabled by default on a minor account; he would have had to go into the settings and disable it for his son to even begin to spend money. Which means that either he knowingly gave his son access to spend money or his son was using dad’s account to play. In the latter case, dad is the one who agreed to the adhesive contract when creating the account, and dad can’t disaffirm a contract under CA Family Code § 6710.

I’d need to see the complaint to go any further and I’m too tired to dig through Bloomberg now. Why didn’t Polygon link it?

Anyway, while I loathe Skinner Boxes and loot crates and would love to see them legislated into oblivion, I also just find these sorts of lawsuits scummy. This isn’t a kid getting ahold of a parent’s phone and randomly charging massive bills: it’s a kid using his parent’s credit card for years, potentially with his parent’s knowledge! At some point, some personal responsibility does have to come into play here.

Sounds like they may have a case.

Not really. US courts haven’t historically been particularly sympathetic to arguments that trading card packs are gambling when those packs contain game pieces (there were a couple high profile cases in the 90s about MTG and Pokemon cards). It becomes even more dicey of an argument because Blizzard explicitly discloses odds and provides control methods for purchases (parental controls).

You may personally feel that loot boxes are bad and should be regulated more heavily or banned (to which I’d agree), but that’s not how the law sees it.

Yata getting unbanned is also surprising. I haven’t played Yu-gi-oh since around 2007, but the game much have changed a lot if they’re okay with the bird back.

For me personally (and, to make it clear, not trying to speak for everyone), I think there’s a happy medium between Ubisoft and From Software. Breath of the Wild is the most recent game which did it best for where I’m at; it had quest markers for the main scenario but left pretty much everything else up to me to discover. I like that kind of compromise; I don’t want it to be a chore to figure out how to progress the story but enjoy not just checking off the list of each treasure chest icon on my map screen. Dark Souls, on the other hand, was such a giant "fuck you, you get nothing, not even the slightest help finding the first tutorial for how to play the damn game" that I bounced off of hard. But everyone has different amounts that they’re willing to tolerate, and that’s fine.

What worries me, though, is that other developers will take the wrong lessons from the success of these Soulsborne games with regards to player choice. One of the reasons I have never been able to stomach From Software’s games is the complete lack of player choice in difficulty. Some days I don’t want to spend 3 hours bashing my head against one particular encounter that’s necessary to advance the story. Difficulty sliders are great. Letting a player choose to play on Casual vs Legendary doesn’t decrease the entertainment value for the people who want to play on the most punishing difficulty possible. But given how much of the conversation around these games is of the "it’s so hard and that’s why it’s good" variety, I’m worried that developers are going to draw the wrong lesson and decide that games must be difficult.

It’s fine for hard games to exist for people who want a challenge, but not everything should be that way. And with the success critically and commercially of Elden Ring and how often the game industry chases trends, it could be a miserable decade for people like me who don’t mind a little bit of hand holding.

I’m happy for the developers and the people who like this sort of thing, but I desperately hope the industry doesn’t take the wrong lesson from this success and decide that every game needs to be punishingly difficult and obtuse.

The coverage is what the piece and the comments are mostly talking about, I believe.

The first comment you responded to was literally asking why the cameras (the physical cameras themselves) are in the courtroom.

They’re not there for advertisements. John Doe suing Jane Doe for bilking him on a subcontractor payment isn’t interesting for most people, but it’s still going to end up recorded. No one is rushing to advertise in front of that. The cameras are already there because many courts in the US record their sessions and it has nothing whatsoever to do with making money.

Here’s Pennsylvania’s livestream page for their appellate courts and you can get to the livestreams of every Florida county through this handy online directory. I could keep going, but you should get the idea.

Are there still courts that prohibit cameras? Sure. SCOTUS is famous for it. But the balance over the last decade has been heavily weighted towards more and more jurisdictions adopting video recordings and livestreaming. And your dislike of one particular "shitstorm" because of toxic trash on the internet does not defeat the overall benefits of allowing every citizen easy access to take an active interest in judicial proceedings that could effect them.

It has nothing to do with ads.

Nearly every jurisdiction has cameras rolling for trials (minus SCOTUS, because they’re assholes), and a large number of them even livestream all their arguments nowadays (here’s the 9th Circuit’s page for their various YouTube streams, for example). Lawyers like to be able to watch and rewatch oral arguments and it’s vitally important to a functioning judiciary in a democracy to have open access to the public for legal proceedings.

The ads are certainly a driver for the coverage, but the cameras have been there the whole time.

Trial courts in the United States are (generally) publicly accessible, so it’s not that strange that it’s being broadcast.

As for why this case in particular is getting so much coverage: a combination of paparazzi media frothing at the mouth from two recognizable public figures in a spat, the fandom angle presented in this article, and a proxy war of backlash against Me Too pushed by the dregs of social media.

I actually completely believe it. For all his faults, Cruise has demonstrated over the last decade that his particular brand of action film is generally pretty solid (and I’d argue that the most recent couple Mission Impossible films have been straight-up great movies). I don’t think it would require a vast conspiracy by studios to buy dozens of positive reviews. It’s far more likely that it’s just a reasonably enjoyable popcorn flick, the same kind of thing Cruise has been competently producing for years.

I am completely unashamed of the dozens of times I’ve rewatched the trailers for XC3. "Borderline feral" doesn’t begin to describe how much I’m anticipating the game.

Stupid name, but FIFA is the worst and anything that impacts their revenue stream is a positive win for humanity so I’ll allow it.

It’s a friendly warning to take vague statements from people in positions of power with the grain of salt they deserve.

No it wasn’t, it was you going completely off-topic in order to complain about Blizz.

The original post was worried that this game would have NFTs. The President of the company came out just a couple weeks ago and flatly stated that they don’t have any plans for NFTs right now. It’s a pretty safe assumption therefore that this game (again, the topic of the comment thread) won’t have NFTs. Then you came in with grave warnings that someday in the future they might include NFTs in some game. That isn’t relevant at all. It has nothing to do with this game. It’s just you grinding an axe, like you do in the comment section for every article in which ActiBlizz is mentioned.

He said it two weeks ago and this game launches this year. Yes, he isn’t promising it will never happen, but I think it’s pretty damn safe to assume that for this particular game there won’t be NFTs shoehorned in at the moment.

I know you feel the need to come in here and justify your holier-than-thou-art crusade against the evvvvvvvvviiiiillll ActiBlizz, but come on.

Fortunately, Mike Ybarra already shot that down.

I’m going to make a Bear Force One deck just for that Bearscape. Absolutely incredible.

YMMV but at least in my guild, people are hyped for Season 4. For all its other faults, raid design in Shadowlands (aside from a few encounters; looking at you Sylvanas) has been exceptional, so getting the chance to once again go through Nathria and the like with relevant difficulty and fun affix remixes is something we’re all extremely interested in. And when we get bored of that, we’ll take a break until Dragonflight launches, just like we’ve done every expansion from Burning Crusade through today.

Player churn is part of playing an MMO. It’s okay and natural for people to take breaks and play other games during content droughts, and it doesn’t mean the game is doomed. WoW has done it many times in the past and it will continue to do it long into the future. No game should demand a monogamous relationship.

Also, New World isn’t competition. On Steam it has an average daily playerbase of around 21k, a lower population for the entire game than a single large server on WoW. XIV is definitely "competition," but like all competent MMOs it also has content waves and player churn. That’s just the nature of the genre.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe also launched a month after the console, so they had a pretty safe "party game" hit too (which was the correct move because the attach rate for MK8D remains to this day absolutely absurd).