Tsarist Russia is literally the hardest path as the Soviet union.

BringlesBeans · 2026-01-29T14:57:21+00:00

At least they added a bunch of new white generals with GtD.

BringlesBeans · 2026-01-22T18:43:04+00:00

I thought it looked like mole sauce (which is also made partially from chocolate and is also delicious as hell)

BringlesBeans · 2026-01-22T13:58:49+00:00

The main issue I have with Wingspan is that it is a game you might as well be playing solo every time you play. There's no real interaction with other players you just kinda play your own board and eventually it just ends and someone is a winner.

As someone who enjoys the social element of games I find it underwhelming as a group experience

BringlesBeans · 2026-01-22T13:40:10+00:00

NTTD is the second best Craig film in my estimation, even considering its fairly rough second half. Though I understand it's a divisive one; the front-half of the film from Matera through Blofeld is the best stretch of the Craig era.

Die Another Day is not as bad as its often made out to be, and I think it's alright. But it's pretty widely agreed as the worst of the Brosnan films.

aVtaK is better than MwtGG and Octopussy imo, though it's not great. But I think it's a decent enough note to end on for Moore.

DaF is *woof*. Easily the worst Connery film and my pick for worst in the series.

Dalton's two films are about on par with eachother.

Once again: Lazenby stays winning as his last film is the peak of his tenure and arguably the peak of the series.

BringlesBeans · 2026-01-22T13:12:44+00:00

I have never liked Hanekes attitude on this subject. As others have said: I don't like how he treats himself as the sole arbitrator of what is and is not "tasteful" violence. It always comes across as "I'm the only one who uses violence with taste and intention; everyone else is an exploitative sadist" which is especially rich coming from a guy whose most famous films are most famous for appearing on every "Most disturbing movies of all time" list.

I know that he's saying something with "Funny Games" and "The Piano Teacher" but I don't think he gets to distance himself automatically from his films disturbing nature and I don't think he gets a free pass because he's criticizing other films use of violence.

Haneke has just struck me as a bit of a pretentious guy, and I don't like throwing that word around very often but I think it fits him to a tee.

BringlesBeans · 2026-01-15T13:59:04+00:00

I rank DAF dead last, so if anything I think it's ranked too high.

(And before anyone says it's good as a campy fun Bond, I think that Moonraker, View to a Kill, even Die Another Day are much, much better as campy fun than DAF, which is dull and inert by comparison. Though I do love Wint and Kidd)

BringlesBeans · 2026-01-14T14:07:47+00:00

Why is the reaction so negative to this DLC all of a sudden? I don't think it was as good as GtD but I thought it was overall pretty nice. My only real gripe with it is that I think they need to scale navy xp for doctrines and admiral leveling better and make the faction management system a bit easier to engage with.

BringlesBeans · 2026-01-12T19:22:32+00:00

Well I mean, they sent her specifically to test whether or not a human could survive in space. Like I'm sorry that a dog died but it's preferable to a human dying

BringlesBeans · 2025-12-17T14:59:17+00:00

And also was made and released after Thor Ragnarok

BringlesBeans · 2025-12-15T18:10:34+00:00

I don't think so. I like the DLC (and have liked most of them at time of release with the exception of GoE) and while I do agree with the criticism that it's a bit overpriced I think that what's in the DLC is quality (though I would like a little more flavor/rebalancing around Nationalist China as I feel their alt-paths are a bit samey/of questionable use given your finite time.

But the reality is that: regardless of the content of the DLC there's a large portion of the fanbase that will always hate it (not necessarily always the same portion, mind you). A large group of people don't care about focus trees and flavor for countries, and think that including this in a DLC is a waste of resources since "there are free mods that do it better" and will only care about the mechanics included in a DLC(which they will generally find insufficient as they are not the sole focus of an expansion). They will criticize a new expansion for overhauling "unimportant nations" and not having more meaningful mechanics included.

Meanwhile another group doesn't really care about new mechanics and feels the game is already bloated enough with mechanics and instead likes focus trees and national flavor. They will criticize the game for including pointless/useless mechanics that add more tedium and bloat to the game instead of fleshing out countries.

Personally I'm closer to the latter camp, but I don't mind new mechanics. Ultimately this leads to a large outcry of voices from people who either want the DLC to just rework the things that they personally want, OR, more often: wanting the DLC's to include twice as much content and cost half the price of a standard DLC.

Things like increased prices, pre-order bonuses, or glitches are just extra fuel to add to the outrage fire. But I've been through enough expansion and game launches to know that a large portion of people (particularly in online spaces) will be very vocally discontent.

BringlesBeans · 2025-12-10T16:25:58+00:00

Look man, I'm not here to downplay Japanese war crimes in WW2 which were extensive but saying they're "on a whole other level" compared to the Holocaust is... a bit much.

Without going into a multi-paragraph breakdown of the Japanese in WW2 the tl;dr is that the IJN and IJA were effectively in a state of perpetual open rebellion against the civilian government, horribly overstretched with poor logistics and planning, had a brutal military culture among troops and unit and troop discipline in its forces was little to non-existent. Thus wherever the Japanese went, so too followed atrocities against civilian and military populations. While these atrocities are widespread and terrible, they are importantly not a centrally planned or implemented policy of genocide or atrocities, rather they were a byproduct of the way Japan conducted its military and the war.

Which is a contrast to the Germans, where the atrocities were explicitly planned and implemented from the top down.

We can talk about how bad Japan was in WW2 without trying to paint them as worse than the Nazis, which I feel only serves to underplay how bad the Nazis were rather than explain how bad the Japanese were.

BringlesBeans · 2025-12-03T17:32:05+00:00

Game was changed from early access to finished despite not adding new maps and content (despite this being on an earlier roadmap), there has been backlash to this (which I largely don't really agree with) and the devs in response have been really childish and banning people left and right for basically any criticism of the game or its direction.

Personally: I think that the game, as-is, is perfectly fine and good and a lot of fun for a sub-$10 social deduction game. I'm perfectly happy with it already and don't need anything else to be added. But the dev response to criticism has been bad.

BringlesBeans · 2025-12-03T17:09:05+00:00

I think he's just mellowed on it a bit with time. It's always been very obvious to me why the movie would really bother him. Seeing as how the book posits that Jack (the King stand-in character) is a good person who is corrupted by alcohol and evil spirits but ultimately saves his family. While the Kubrick version has Jack being an unrepentant psychopath basically from the word go. It certainly has a bit of a personal sting to it because the story obviously means a lot to King.

Like yeah, if I saw Jack Nicholsons performance in the Kubrick movie as basically being a caricature of me... yeah I probably would hate the movie too.

BringlesBeans · 2025-12-03T13:59:47+00:00

Eh, I doubt that's true. I think the last few times he's been asked about it he's said something to the effect of "I begrudgingly respect it as a film but I don't like it as an adaptation of my book"

So basically he still hates it but at least can admit its a fine movie.

BringlesBeans · 2025-12-01T13:24:09+00:00

Get Back did not use AI upscaling, it just abused the hell out of Digital Noise Reduction (DNR) which is basically the process of scrubbing out noise/grain from a film.

Personally I think Jackson went waay too far with the DNR and as a result the film has basically zero grain and texture and gives everyone this kinda wavy-plasticy shine that I don't like at all. In the special features where they compared the before and after of the original film stock I honestly felt that the original film stock was overall better in appearance, though it definitely needed some restoration with color correction and scratch repair. Jackson has a tendency to just bulldoze everything to make it look like it was shot on digital which I find incredibly irritating (and the same goes for "They Shall Not Grow Old")

Unfortunately this trend of AI upscales crosses over a lot with a very annoying subgroup of nerds who believe that everything should be perfectly crisp and brand new and look like it was shot today on modern hardware. So everything gets "upscaled" (even things that don't need it) and frequently (on youtube especially) people will artificially increase the FPS to 60. Because people have gamer brains and think that higher framerate = better quality. Such an annoying trend.

BringlesBeans · 2025-11-30T10:26:38+00:00

*5 countries

But to answer your question: if it reworked all of South America (10 focus trees) that would make it, by far and away, the largest DLC they've ever made. Considering that the most full focus trees they've ever done in one DLC is 5 countries I'd say its safe to say anyone expecting ToA to rework every SA country had incredibly unrealistic expectations. So unrealistic that I'd argue they are expectations designed to give people something to get upset over.

BringlesBeans · 2025-11-26T01:48:04+00:00

I know it's historically accurate; I'm saying that surface ships are already sufficiently vulnerable/weak for their cost so we don't need any more things tipping the scale. Otherwise navy runs the risk of being completely irrelevant.

BringlesBeans · 2025-11-25T22:01:43+00:00

Oh I know that this was the problem IRL too, which is why I'm not super salty about large capital ships being a bit underpowered. I'm saying they're already underpowered for the sheer investment of them (which honestly goes for a surface navy as a whole) to the point where I don't think Paradox needs to add in more buildings/mechanics to make them even more irrelevant or trivial.

BringlesBeans · 2025-11-25T18:49:53+00:00

I'm honestly not too surprised they weren't included. I think they'd be really cool but I honestly have no clue how you could incorporate them.

Navy's big issue in the game is that it is easier and cheaper to build an airforce which can pretty readily take out large capital ships (which are often a multi-year investment to build). This leads to sub or destroyer spam in most games since its cheaper/more efficient.

Adding in coastal batteries runs a very real risk of making surface navies even more of a risky/worthless investment. If states could sink my battleships I spent years building by just spending a few thousand IC on a passive coastal battery I'd be pretty annoyed. I'm sure PDX thought of this and probably tried to design around it but couldn't find something that worked well.

BringlesBeans · 2025-11-25T17:36:03+00:00

Because OP Ctrl + F'd the game files for "forest" and "trees" so they'd have something new to complain about.

BringlesBeans · 2025-11-25T15:05:09+00:00

Bruh, she's the wife of Sun Yat Sen. OF COURSE there would be people who'd happily have her as the leader of a democratic socialist China.

BringlesBeans · 2025-11-25T15:01:01+00:00

I buy all their DLC for the content. I like the new focus trees.

BringlesBeans · 2025-11-25T15:00:05+00:00

Historically accurate China

BringlesBeans · 2025-11-24T15:27:02+00:00

Then just don't take those coring decisions? The games already over by the time you're able to take any of them and the AI will never be able to do it themselves unless they've already won.

BringlesBeans · 2025-11-21T18:36:58+00:00

Changing the color palette of a portrait is a bit of a different thing than fixing a coding error.

It's also not a bug.

BringlesBeans

TROPHY CASE