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Wow, 5 days and no new posts on this thread? Based on the original thread, I was expecting 50 posts a day and a struggle to keep up! To keep the questions rolling, James, what are your favorite TV shows you've watched this year? And any that were pleasant surprises (either had low expectations but were actually good, or simply weren't on your radar ahead of time)?
I actually enjoyed the last episode a lot. After the previous episode, it would have felt like they were just trying to top themselves with EVEN MORE POWER AND ACTION, and I'm glad they didn't. Giving a whole episode to have a denouement instead of just tacking on 10 minutes for it was pretty cool. And as for the visions Mark had, while I was about 80% sure that they were just his trauma response, I wasn't able to rule out that somehow there were alternate dimensional shenanigans going on until Thragg actually showed up for real, which kept the tension high.
Speaking of older games like CoC, I've recently gotten back into Magic the Gathering after 20 years, and will soon play in a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game for the first time in over 20 years as well (yay retirement!) James, what games haven't you played in a long time, but you'd love to get back into either as a one-shot or more regular play, if you had the time?
Just found the new reincarnated thread, and welcome back! I know that 13 Omens is still very much a to be revealed game, but can you talk in general about your thoughts on it, excitement level, etc? Have you played it, run it, or have ideas you're excited to use with it (either in your home game or as future expansion products?) I'd imagine that Paizo having a horror game would definitely be something you're highly invested in.
Mark's biggest power is generally how much he's able to pour his willpower into enduring physical pain/damage/beatings/etc. This time around he had a LOT more focus on taking out Conquest no matter what, both in general, and with his realization that he now has to double down and do whatever it takes to deal with some of the upper end threats out there because when he doesn't, they come back even worse and hurt or kill people in general and/or people he cares about. As for the breathing in space, there was mention when kid Omni-man was hurt, that he needed to take a breath, and went to the planet. It's implied/inferred by me that they essentially can just hold their breath in space indefinitely, but may need to take a breath to recover. And Mark didn't choke Conquest and stop him from breathing, he was strangling him and cutting the blood flow to the brain.
As for Wednesday early release, it's the week of Easter, and in the US at least, most kids have the week off school, so makes sense to release a very kid and family friendly movie to include more of the week. Especially since Sunday itself is likely to be less well attended due to the holiday. Similar to movies coming out around Christmas come out that day, regardless of what day of the week it is, everyone's off so they want to have it out more of those days.
Jean Grey is certainly the most obvious, combined with a big enough role to get Sadie Sink's interest. But Marvel has been known to do some misdirection for casting in the past, so who knows. Fun to speculate. I personally always like when they pull that off and it's some unexpected character, etc.
Daredevil is supposed to be in it, so the Hand makes sense from that perspective as well. Tombstone is also supposed to be in the movie. Also, there's at least 3 actors in it who haven't had their characters announced yet, including Sadie Sink (speculation for Firestar there, as well as Jean Grey). And someone is a mind controller based on the trailer. So we'll definitely get new characters. The only concern I've got is that there's too many characters, but since 3 or 4 years have passed, I'm assuming we'll get a montage of a bunch of villains Spidey dealt with during that time, leading up to his current status (getting the key to the city, etc). Speaking of which, the lady giving him the key in the trailer is Wilson Fisk's campaign manager/political adviser.
Teaser trailer released today! There's a LOT in the trailer, and don't think they've shown the main villain even.
As a partial Fallout fan (huge fan of Fallout 1 and 2, but never played or liked the newer ones for gameplay/story reasons) a lot of the references setting up next season were lost on me. I get that we're going to Colorado next, but don't have a clue if that's anything that's been done in FO3 or 4 (though it reminds me a lot of Wasteland 3 which is set in Colorado), nor the significance of the new armor blueprints from the post credit scenes. However, I also don't feel I'm missing out on much as a fan of the show either - it was clear that the armor is a big freaking deal that presumably will make the normal Brotherhood armor seem like a tin can.
I highly doubt we'll get more than 8 episodes a season, for 2 reasons. First, it's an expensive show, so more episodes than 8 is hard to fit in the budget. Second, often contractually when developing IP there's weird terms that limit the number of episodes. I'm pretty sure I read that Amazon only has a contract for LotR for no more than 8 episodes per season, so there could be similar limitations on Fallout (in theory, this lets the IP holder sell separate rights contracts for shows with more than 8 episodes per season). That being said, the first reason is by far the biggest. Finally though, I'd seen at least rumors that Amazon was developing one or more spinoffs/separate Fallout shows, hinted at being with completely new characters in different parts of the country/world. Considering that Amazon is global and serves multiple large audiences in different countries, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Fallout: India, Fallout: Mexico, etc.
Teaser Trailer for Season 2 and Jessica Jones definitely has the best line (actually, I think the only line of dialogue now that I think of it).
While it wasn't explained in the finale, I didn't have an issue with the party harming the giant monster fortress. It's pretty easy to head cannon that on it's home plane it's vulnerable, but if it had made it to the upside down and then Earth, it would get greater and greater DR to the point where conventional weapons wouldn't hurt it.
Always forget blasphemy/holy word/etc don't treat neutral easier. As for the paladins not attacking fiends on sight, it's because they're not Lawful Stupid, which has already been well established. I'm sure they'll join the battle, but they weren't in on the OoTS immediately knowing the tell from what color was the god question necessarily and therefore weren't in the surprise round.
While Dane could be a commonwealth spy, I simply assumed that Paladin Harkness has his methods of knowing, which could be some sort of spy tech monitoring Brotherhood communications, or a spy, but not necessarily a character we know yet. I actually hope it's not Dane, since it's the obvious trope that a spy must be a character we already know - Harkness should be capable of lots without relying on that.
Sure, it would be smart for him to tell her all that stuff, but that's assuming he cares about her, which I don't think he does. His motivation seems to be to have her talk and chatter at him as little as possible, so literally almost anything he says to her is a waste of time to him, except in the specific tactical situation he's in, since he does acknowledge that having a combat companion and/or bait isn't a bad thing, he'd just prefer to have someone who didn't talk. Also, keeping her around as some type of leverage/pawn to use against her father should they catch up to him is another tactical reason he wants her around, but not enough to actually have long discussions explaining stuff to her that may extend her lifespan. I expect that over time he'll actually change that view, either due to her stoking the bits of humanity in him that cares about people other than his family, or by whatever he finds out about his family's fate causing a change of heart.
I'm excited about the concept of a high production value high budget movie of The Odyssey, but was very underwhelmed by the trailer. Considering that it's literally a story as old as time, there aren't really any plot points to keep secret, but the trailer showed a whole lot of nothing. Sure it had super quick, blink and you'll miss it, glimpses of things like the cyclops, or presumably soldiers/skeletons rising out of the earth, but as a whole, the teaser trailer didn't really do much for making me want to see a movie I'm already wanting to see. If I wasn't already wanting to see it, I don't think this would in any way make me interested.
On a side note, last week Rich shared to backers a long delayed Kickstarter reward from years ago, the OOTS Dim Sum spoof of the Dark Sun setting. 25 pages - which I haven't gotten around to yet, but will over the holidays. EDIT: It also seems to be for sale for $5 if you weren't a KS backer way back when.
Also, I wonder what else is worth watching on Netflix? I'm not so much a fan of horror, but Stranger Things is so well done. I've heard that Killing Eve is very good as well. The first 2 seasons of the Witcher are really good, and it drops off from there, still decent though. Wednesday is a lot of fun Killing Eve as you mentioned is fantastic (not a Netflix original, but great nonetheless) The Diplomat is great, and Night Agent is also pretty good (though Season 1 is better than season 2) Russian Doll is great, as is the Brothers Sun if you like humor mixed with action or sci-fi (the later of which unfortunately got cancelled after just 1 season) And while you mentioned you're not too into horror, I still need to recommend Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House, the Haunting of Bly Manor. There's also the fantastic Sex Education, Ozark and Adolescence, none of which are action or at all genre related, but top notch (comedy, crime drama, and dark ripped from the headlines emotional roller coaster respectively.)
The Demogorgon in episode 2 didn't seem to have DR vs thrusting weapons. Trying to solo one of the with a broken bottle would get said person reduced to hamburger.Yeah, I thought that scene didn't fit to well. Especially with the big battle in the final episode, where three Demogorgons tore through a whole bunch of heavily armed soldiers. She was a named character, protecting her daughter, and on top of that burned all her hero points at once. And all it did was slow it down a bit, and get her almost killed (one hero point to survive otherwise certain death). But more in cannon, I felt that the Demogorgons fighting the soldiers were fully bolstered and buffed by Vecna who was personally directing things before he stepped through himself, while the one going for Holly was his more tentative first trial and wanting to stay under the radar.
Thanks - got the reply - but at 8:44pm PST last night, which was far too late for the customer service gnomes to be working on a holiday week! Hopefully that was simply flexible hours of their choice and they all have a great time off for the holiday, even with the backlog and store migration!
I opened a ticket a few days ago, and while the screen showed a ticket was created, I didn't get any type of email confirmation, or ticket number. Is there a way to actually see tickets you've submitted and any replies/status on them?
Just watched it streaming now that it's out, and thought it was okay. Possibly my least favorite MCU movie in fact. The characterizations were fine to good even, but there was a lot more to dislike than to like I felt. The biggest problem was the pacing and the plot. Pretty much the entire first half of the movie nothing much really happens. there's a lot of recaps of the prior 3 movies which didn't exist, to make it REALLY CLEAR that this FF4 was well established and had done a lot of things. But for a movie that supposedly skipped the origin story, it spent a lot of time on the backstory of their origin as well liked heroes who DID STUFF. As for the aesthetic, I was okay with it conceptually, but felt that it didn't really match the plot very well. So they have FTL drive, and a) hadn't used it for years because I guess reasons? and b) despite having that and developing teleportation, etc. they had tape driven HERBIE command modules, super primitive computer graphics, etc. I think the TVA in Loki did a much more believable art deco style without it feeling completely off in terms of how things actually worked. Speaking of HERBIE, I was never a huge FF4 fan, read some of their early issues, but that's it, so don't know the robot, but it felt really off to have it "speak" more like R2D2 but everyone understood it, rather than actually talk in English. Finally, for their last ditch plan, they really did a horrible job planning, knowing that Galactus didn't seem to care when Sue made their spaceship invisible, swapping out the baby pod with an empty one before Galactus got there seemed pretty dumb. I had expected that they would have had Johnny Storm fly in and yank it away AFTER Galactus was in the target area. There was a lot of other stuff that felt crammed in, slow moving and not really worth the screen time, and because of that, combined with the other problems, I'd have much rather had a movie where they actually spend the first third dealing with Mole Man, showing how the FF4 works as a team, and use their powers, and then moving to Galactus, so the Subterania evac wasn't also completely tacked on. Unfortunately, this movie broke a basic rule of story telling and chose to "tell, not show" much too often, instead of the other way around.
I enjoyed S2 a lot, but it was a bit too focused on character stories and plots and was lacking an actual bad guy threat. That doesn't mean I didn't like what S2 had, but more missed what S2 didn't have. James Gunn has said that he has no current plans for a Peacemaker S3, but I suspect he has lots of plans for the characters. Whether that means it will feature in a future movie, or if it will simply be the new show titled Checkmate, and be a bit less Peacemaker-centric. And fully agree, Eaglie was badass and awesome in this season.
I saw it coming, but it was still done very well. And again, Hamish Linklater killed it just as much as Dean Cipher afterwards as he did before. I also had the thought that Marie Moreau may be a critical plot point in S5 of the Boys, curing Butcher of his cancer (and likely taking the cancer super powers away at the same time).
Also, "making money" is much murkier with streaming services involved. Not only are there direct TVOD rental/purchases which are pretty easy to account for, but there are the harder to measure benefits of how many subscriptions to HBO does it drive - I did read that it had 13M viewers in the first week on HBO (and I myself subscribed yesterday for a month to watch it and Peacemaker). When you factor that in, I'm sure it made money, not to mention all the licensing.
Just saw it, and enjoyed it overall. I still think it would have been a better Superman 2 movie, even if they skipped the origin story, having more set up for Lex/Superman rivalry before this story would have made it better. Also, while I get that the movie is 3 years into Superman's appearance, Lex felt way to accomplished to just in backstory have created a pocket universe prison, as well as having a baby kaiju ready to go as a distraction when he chose. Also, aside from just being there to be introduced, it felt like Hawkgirl could have easily not been in the movie at all. It would have also helped a bit with the huge cast of characters by having one less. As for the message, I assumed that a) it was "real" in the sense that it wasn't doctored, but b) was still manipulated. We know next to nothing about how much was restored - so it could be that every frame of footage was real, but there was still a tone unrecovered, and if you were to fill in the blanks, the message could have meant many other things. It's possible that what was recovered was still less than 50% of the full message, or that other parts were recovered, and conveniently just kept secret by Lex and not shared with the world. More convoluted explanations could also work, but it's super common in the real world to conveniently exclude bits of footage to give a very different message, and in fact, that's often what's done with political attack messages.
And the Kickstarter has launched, met it's funding goal, and blown through it's first 3 stretch goals, and likely will have hit their 4th (as yet unannounced) by the time it's morning in Spain and they can send another update.
Thought some folks here might be interested in this. Invincible TTRPG Kickstarter launched today!
I'm really happy with the first 3 episodes of season 2. Not only is it simply always good to return to the world of The Boys and Vaught, but Hamish Linklater is fantastic as Cipher, the episode descriptions continue to be perfect, but they also really did a fantastic job of handling Chance Pedromo's passing in the show. I'm not sure I've ever seen a character so present without being there at all in how his passing impacts all the other characters.
Finally saw it yesterday, and enjoyed it quite a bit. The earlier talk about losing money is a distraction, it definitely didn't lose money, even if it didn't make big bank in the box office, but it was close enough to break even there that it certainly made it up with direct sales, and whatever accounting they do to have D+ "pay" for it at fair market value. I loved the post credit scene at the end, not cause of the reveal, which really just was saying what the next movie was in what like 2 months? But the banter of them as the new avengers was a blast. Glad it was a long enough scene to flesh that out, and I'm really wishing there was a way to see more of that, I'd be there for a New Avengers TV series with at least 20 minutes an episode of banter opportunities for them, and more fleshed out discussions about why Sam isn't a fan, and what he's been assembling instead.
Season 2 trailer. First half of the season comes out in December!
Owlcat had Pathfinder Kingmaker as their first game, so that's not a negative by any stretch, just makes it harder to see what their track record and inspirations are like. Hopefully they'll introduce themselves and that type of background soon either on the forums here and/or the KS campaign itself. And yay for the original story. I loved the Owlcat games, but had wished they'd have done original stories.
Looks like a CRPG based on Starfinder 2e was announced:
Other than the information on those pages, not a whole lot I can find, including on the developer,
Also, is this an original story, or an AP adaptation? I expect more details will eventually be shared, and even a dedicated sub-forum for the game, but I'd definitely like to find out a bit more before the Kickstarter launch.
That could be why it's lower priority. Coogler is currently deep into Black Panther 3 development from similar recent articles I've read, so if there's interest and/or plans of him picking up Blade, then would make sense for it to be lower priority for after BP3.
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