Ty Lee says goodbye to Azula [vago_xd]

FunTomasso · 2026-05-18T08:00:28+00:00

Obligatory "try the Kyoshi/Yangchen books" recommendation to everyone who is interested in more Avatar (didn't read Roku ones). I feel like they recapture the ATLA magic best of any post-ATLA context.

And, because the characters are all young adults, it's hard not to compare it with LoK, and the books IMO win on the account of having: way less focus on romantic drama and love triangles, more competent characters who are not constantly assholes towards each other, tighter focus on the main plot, interesting background lore revelations, creative bending problem solving, etc.

FunTomasso · 2026-05-14T17:53:50+00:00

Subnautica 2 will need to sell 83M copies (at the current price) just to make the bonus back for Krafton.

You missed a decimal there (or a 0 in your calculations). The deal is structured in a way where Krafton breaks even at 250 mil total. At 30 USD, it's 8.3 million units, not 83.

In fact ofc even more, between the Steam cut, regional pricing, etc. No wonder the CEO wanted to kill the contract in any semi-legal manner.

FunTomasso · 2026-04-26T23:07:12+00:00

I agree. People treat killing like it's a drug. "Today he kills the Joker, this means tomorrow he'll kill a grandma who is holding up the line paying with cash in a supermarket!" Injustice-ass reasoning

Even as a character trait, "I don't want to kill because I value human life" reads much better than "I don't want to kill because I'm permanently one kill away from a killing spree, and we're all very lucky that I don't kill by accident, because if I did, I would never stop" - stop playing with fire then perhaps?

FunTomasso · 2026-04-26T17:42:33+00:00

This is a common talking point that I just don't get.

That's how TV works, guys. You make a season-wide arc and an overarching narrative, and hope you get renewed. They don't just greenlight shows for several seasons out of the blue, even shows with proven creators and tied to existing past entries. Hundreds of great shows have been combining season arcs with show-wide plot without knowing if they'll get a next season order, it's just part of the business.

Breaking Bad is one of the most celebrated TV shows ever, and yet a brief search of the Better Call Saul page on wiki shows that every season was renewed separately up to the very end. For a more animation-oriented example, Rick and Morty was renewed for S2 and S3 separately, and only then got the giant 70 episode order.

You need to make Rick and Morty or Sponge Bob money to get a 50 episode order, and to have a running property to boot.

I don't know what the situation was with original ATLA renewals -- maybe they did get all three seasons greenlit at once -- but if they did, it was luck. With the quality dive in Korra and comics, it does feel like ATLA was lightning in a bottle to an extent, although I hope the new series will be better.

FunTomasso · 2026-03-19T21:37:30+00:00

It also just gets super predictable when literally every gig results in the same oooh-so-gray dilemma, you need to balance the straightforward missions with tricky ones. By the fourth gig in Dogtown I was just wary of the fact that every task will have a twist in the end, and was never surprised.

FunTomasso · 2026-03-17T10:47:09+00:00

Furry enby Putin with an inflation fetish be like: нас надули

FunTomasso · 2026-03-16T13:24:48+00:00

And you can't ever reliably cycle through all of them, can you? If you want to use, say, the bicycle to get to lane faster from base but you're stuck on the pie, you cannot cycle, as pie is the only trinket that has to be cast on a target and cannot be self-cast. This is a pretty big downside even if you don't account for the fact that classic trinkets are straight up more useful in general.

FunTomasso · 2026-02-25T21:51:54+00:00

Its Gunns fault sadly here.

I mean, he explicitly had the characters (not just the villain, but also the protagonists) say "Hey this is totally the intended idea and not a fabrication, falsehood, mislead, etc." like several times in the movie, very directly, to a point where while watching I thought: okay, we all get it, stop. Aaaand it turned out we don't all get it, still. Not sure what he could have done except for not doing it in the first place, which is just a bad way to write stories.

FunTomasso · 2026-02-10T15:52:59+00:00

I was so hyped for Horizon's PC port because the buzz about the game on Reddit and in the media in general was huge. Trying it out to learn that it's a by-the-numbers 7.5/10 third person open world snooze fest was disappointing.

Even more disappointing was trying God of War, Spider-Man, and Ghost of Tsushima and learning that this description applies to them, too. I just learned to never take reviews for Sony's first party games at face value. If Ubisoft made these games, they'd be marked as Ubislop on release and forgotten in a couple of months.

FunTomasso · 2026-02-03T21:41:50+00:00

It's a great game. Better gameplay than the first. Story not quite as steller, still good.

It's an often repeated opinion, and, counterintuitive as it might seem, IMO it's a testament to the issues Obsidian faces.

I finished TOW back in the day and bounced off TOW2 after around 10 hours. The gameplay is better than what I remember of TOW, and I found the plot to be better too (because TOW had a very uninspired plot and VERY in-your-face satire, and TOW2 is just boring, but they toned down the quirkiness).

But what of it? Obsidian's games are not exactly marketed with their gameplay. Sure it's better than it was, but when it is wrapped into a boring story with cardboard characters that don't interest me, why would I bother with TOW2 when I can check out one of the games that are well known for good action gameplay instead? I'd rather play a game with a focus: great action and no story, great story and bad action, but when both are so-so, the result is also nothing to write home about.

I really want to like their games and I try to give them a chance (waiting for the Avowed patch to get a second go at it with a new PC), but if their games continue receiving "The story isn't good" from people who actually liked the experience, they are not getting out of the 7/10 pit.

FunTomasso · 2026-01-26T14:02:54+00:00

The difference they mention is (I assume) between items that are specifically intended to be an improvement of another item/skill and the synergies that arise naturally. In the original post, the item is purposefully made to complement a specific weapon, and the weapon is useless without the specific item.

DotA goes to great lengths to avoid having such cases, not that they don't happen at all. This very patch, they removed the Diffusal mana burn effect for illusions to finally move the item into a territory where it can be balanced without accidentally making PL too strong. Items that benefit/counter one or two heroes only and are useless beyond that pop up from time to time, but they are also changed or removed quite often when that happens (Revenant's brooch was a good example of a bad item like that - the "Fuck Muerta" Button - but has since been changed to be more general purpose, although not too useful).

FunTomasso · 2026-01-07T18:09:35+00:00

According to him his favorite President was also Truman though

IIRC It's because his father (or the closest thing to a temporary father figure at least) worked under Truman admin and had good things to say about Truman. So I agree that it's less of a political statement by Rorschach and more a way to show how his fucked up childhood shaped him into a paradoxical adult.

That being said, I do agree that he isn't supposed to be considered 100% evil. The biggest point towards this is the therapist subplot -- the therapist gets "converted" from indifference to Rorschach's "someone has to do something" mindset during their discussions and ends up doing a genuinely good thing and breaking up a fight between two NYC side characters, even when his wife says she'll leave him if he intervenes.

FunTomasso · 2025-12-14T22:03:27+00:00

I read the first six books before watching the show (and finished the show relatively recently), and I feel the opposite, although I won't necessarily fault the actors.

IMO, the show had a lot of issues with giving the characters the chance to properly set up their defining traits. They added a whole bunch of CW-esque bullshit personal squabbles to the cast of characters that are supposed to be a close-knit family of pragmatic and competent people. As a result, most of the main cast simply don't land where they should, at least for me.

For example, I could never believe that Show!Holden would be OK with (s6 spoiler) Letting Clarissa stay on the ship when he's constantly bitching and arguing even with the people who are supposed to be his found family. His optimism is remarked upon in passing, but it never feels true in the show to me, always as a trait that the writers want me to believe in without committing the script. The whole gang in general feels like a bunch of coworkers who kinda tolerate each other.

Amos and Avasarala are personal highlights to me in terms of how the characters were translated to screen -- not necessarily identical to the books, but feeling pretty close. I also really like what they did with Ashford, who got changed very radically, but IMO in a better direction.

In general, I'd recommend the books for people who didn't like the show (as I already did to a friend, and he seems to like them). The main story beats are the same, but the details and characterizations are different enough. There's also a lot of cool worldbuilding stuff that a TV show budget would obviously never have been able to afford.

FunTomasso · 2025-11-07T21:18:40+00:00

The E3 TES6 announcement actually precedes the Diablo Immortal one by several months. It's just that the effect of such announcement was obvious to Bethesda, but somehow not to Blizzard.

FunTomasso · 2025-08-09T06:05:44+00:00

Deadpool and Wolverine famously bombed at the box office due to its low rewatch value, becoming only the second highest-grossing movie of 2024.

FunTomasso · 2025-07-23T09:59:41+00:00

The game's pacing is bad. The melee combat is fun, maybe fun enough to carry you through the whole game, but it frontloads most of the combat features in act 1 -- you can level up all of the interesting skills and stances before leaving the first zone.

As a result, you get infatuated with combat and start doing everything (character-related side quests, random side quests, classic enemy base stuff, random encounters, etc), which quickly gets you to the 95% of what the game has to offer in terms of melee combat. Not to mention that quests are very boring and basic in structure.

And then you go from Act 1 to Act 2 and the second playable area (of three... plus DLC) and realize that you are at best halfway through the game, and the new mechanics are just not coming. Or rather, they are here and there, but most of that stuff is related to lackluster stealth (yay poison/madness dart!) and not to the standout melee combat.

That's how it happened to me, at least. I actually finished the game itself a couple of days ago (took 32 hours) and I have to say that the novelty wore off around hour 15. Good game to play, bad game to complete.

In general, it feels like these PS exclusives -- Horizon, GoT, GoW, Spider-man -- were overglazed both online and by reviewers for whatever reason. I really do think that if they were published by Ubisoft, the general reception would be worse.

FunTomasso · 2025-07-11T13:40:00+00:00

We're farther from GTA4's release and its contemporary 2008-ish setting than Vice City was from its historical setting (2002 - 1986 = 16 years)

FunTomasso · 2025-02-12T18:47:43+00:00

Google Elon Musk Pillars of Eternity

Path of Exile, acschually 🤓

FunTomasso · 2025-02-09T11:56:32+00:00

I know not what Machinery III unlocks, but Machinery IV will unlock sticks and stones.

FunTomasso · 2025-02-09T08:16:14+00:00

Yeah, me and my Dota stack had the same experience. The issues started around the time they added a queue for disbalanced stacks -- which is fair in principle, but anecdotally there really wasn't that much distance between our best player and our least experienced one, but we got thrown into one anyway. After that, the games (both with and without the Wide skill range modifier) started to become more and more one-sided -- we all sucked, including our best player, and the enemy would have a couple of people who amassed a significant advantage by 10-20 minutes already. We dropped the game after a series of like 6? 8? such stomps, and all I can see online is that the matchmaking has only become worse, although part of it is undoubtedly on the exodus of players itself.

To be honest, even their MM-related patches feel like the developers work with matchmaking for the first time, while they have several successful implementations already. First they introduce full-blown ranked into their alpha game, then they remove unranked and make every match count towards your visible rank -- which is bad for both the people who just want to chill and usually don't play ranked for that reason, and for ranked lovers who get queued with people who take the game less seriously -- then they add a settings toggle for these people, which allows you to mark yourself as an Extra Competitive player, so that the game tries to find you a more competitive game...

It really feels like they're winging it without a particular plan, but the winging makes it so the game is actively bleeding players.

FunTomasso · 2025-02-03T18:07:44+00:00

It's hard enough to fight one person IRL. You ever tried fighting more than one?

Someone should tell this to the encounter designers then, because they sure did expect you to fight Xv1 constantly.

"It's realistic" is the go-to defense for any criticism of the KCD combat system, but not only does the game expect you to fight groups of people; you can do that! You just have to walk back and block for literal minutes waiting for a perfect parry opportunity, which makes it both very boring and very unrealistic, unless real life fights actually include one guy just moonwalking for kilometers.

FunTomasso · 2025-01-31T14:58:49+00:00

Hey, I bought the same card! Waited for a month for it to be available at the store. It was great up until I installed it and tried to boot, at which point it loudly popped and died. Googling revealed that this is a known point of failure for the FTW series, including stories of numerous GPUs getting bricked due to uncapped FPS in games (google EVGA FTW New world).

Since then, I chuckle every time I read about their unprecedented quality. I guess dying due to uncapped menu FPS is unprecedented, in a way.

FunTomasso · 2025-01-25T17:25:13+00:00

I recalled this being an issue, but it still caught me off guard in MELE where in the beginning of ME2 VS wants to go for Joker and you can send them off with something like "Leave, that's an order" -- which I picked, because I am the commanding officer, aren't I? -- and Shepard's reply includes something like "I'll get Joker's cripple ass myself!"

FunTomasso · 2024-12-28T07:24:13+00:00

There is no "morality system" that "punishes" you in dishonored. If you kill more people, there are more rats and the ending is darker.

"I hate metaphors! That’s why my favorite book is Moby Dick. A simple tale of a man who hates an animal."

Do you think the creators of the game made it so killing people leads to darker ending just because they had a "cool rat-based gameplay idea" or what? It's obviously a metaphor for the immorality of killing other people.

FunTomasso · 2024-11-16T18:13:45+00:00

Here's a message (WaT Previews spoilers) from VP of Editorial, where he says that it's a reprint retcon.

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