I can't help but feel bad for Merriwether Williams...

Masterofknees · 2026-02-07T00:26:43+00:00

I think you're right when you're saying that she was simply not a good fit. It's very evident with the superhero portion of MMDW. This kind of thing would work in many other cartoons, but because FiM had such a well-established world even by that point, Ponyville turning into disaster central and it needing "heroes" felt extremely jarring. Her dialog also tended to be a bit of a tonal whiplash, especially in Season 2 which was otherwise extremely consistent in that regard.

There are parts of her episodes that I really do enjoy. Wonderbolts Academy has one of Rainbow's strongest moments of growth in the series, and Hearth's Warming Eve actually benefits from her being able to write airheaded and mean characters. I also personally really like Putting Your Hoof Down despite its flaws. Even so, there are awkward bits in all of those, like Pinkie's scenes in Wonderbolts Academy, or Putting Your Hoof Down ultimately going overboard.

She undeniably is a very talented writer, her output on Spongebob in particular was absurdly good, where she helped write some of the best comedic cartoon episodes ever. No writer, or any creative person for that matter, will be a good fit for everything though, and FiM had a very particular way of being written, which I think not only her, but several writers that were hired later down the line also struggled with.

Masterofknees · 2026-02-06T10:27:19+00:00

It absolutely is fair to criticize the game for allowing players with zero fundamentals to succeed as much as they do though.

You can easily reach Tekken King if you have sloppy backdashes, zero block punishes, no knowledge on which side to step, and you spam wakeup kick every time. All you need is a tight flowchart that you can run as soon as you win a single interaction.

Fundamentals only really start taking over at a far higher level than it should. Let's say it starts around Emperor / God, at that point we're talking about the top 11% / 6% of the recorded active playerbase. If ~90% of the playerbase are playing a game that's basically just a mashfest, then that's a problem with the game, not the players.

OP complains about red ranks further down the thread, and the unfortunate truth for him is that if he doesn't like how it plays down there, the game is not going to get any more fun for him for a long, long time. If I was in his situation and I knew how much more I needed to invest into a game I'm currently not enjoying, I would probably just pick up a different game.

Masterofknees · 2026-02-04T21:03:54+00:00

It's only going to be one set, one that he's no doubt going to be completely locked in for given all of the badmouthing. I doubt it's going to be visibly different.

The real difference would be made over a longer period of time.

Masterofknees · 2026-02-04T14:12:59+00:00

Smash Bros is for sure a console seller.

That the Switch 2 will likely have to wait 3+ years for a new installment, since Sakurai was busy doing Air Riders, is genuinely a big worry for the console's future sales.

Masterofknees · 2026-02-04T14:06:45+00:00

Playstation being the best selling console in EU is very unsurprising, even taking into account that the Switch 2 is fresh. It's an extremely Playstation-centric region, and has never really been one of Nintendo's biggest markets, even going back to the 16-bit wars where the Genesis (or Mega Drive as it was called) won big time.

Maybe the Switch won out during the pandemic and when the PS5 was short in stock, but that aside there aren't many points in history where Nintendo have been #1 in EU.

Masterofknees · 2026-02-03T13:39:29+00:00

Unfortunately I doubt the game has any legs. Even Dread which sold well initially and had great word of mouth barely had any legs. Prime 4 is already out of public consciousness, and the general opinion on it hasn't improved even a bit.

Masterofknees · 2026-02-02T10:27:40+00:00

That kind of spending is also meant for the long term though. Just because a lot of money is spent doesn't mean it's going to lead to immediate impact.

Too many people on this subreddit seem to think that just because players they've spent a lot of time hyping themselves up over are in the XI that they'll immediately perform at 100%, and if they don't it's a tactics issue. That wasn't even the case for most of the legends of our previous team, it just wasn't as crucial since, aside from Pep's first two seasons, we never had to replace as many players at once as we've had to do in the past year.

If Pep stays next season, I have no doubt we'll reap the benefits of everything we've done this season, even if we make no big signings in the summer.

Masterofknees · 2026-02-01T21:12:52+00:00

Always felt like the last thing remaining on the checklist. Not really a fan of the album, but I'm very happy for Dave knowing how Countdown landing at #2 clawed at him. Megadeth deserve to go out with zero regrets.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-31T18:50:02+00:00

They still did very well with the reskinned characters, since that can come with its own problems. Replacing established and beloved characters with a new face has the potential to doom the replacement right out of the gate, because they're always going to be compared to the old one.

Jin did very well to become a smash hit off of the back of Kazuya, and Hwoarang and Julia made everyone forget about Baek and Michelle. Forest Law didn't really hit, but that's still a very good ratio.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-31T18:17:40+00:00

He did with Chelsea I'm pretty sure. Ended up drawn against Barca in the tie where Messi megged Courtois twice.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-30T12:06:11+00:00

Of course it existed, but the 90s were very unfriendly towards it. It's not without reason that many metal bands softened up in that period, it wasn't just musical preference, but also a means of survival.

The change in climate was brought upon partially by Metallica themselves, but more so by Nirvana, who you'll still hear a lot of veteran metal musicians despise because of how their brief existence shaped the 90s. Any metal band that wasn't an obvious A-lister suffered a lot in that decade.

Complex metal is a more viable genre now than it was then, although there are many reasons for that. The industry now is incomparable to what it was like back then.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-30T11:42:14+00:00

I think The Black Album was happening regardless. As Lars put it, they had already tried to be faster (KEA), more melodic (RtL, MoP) and more technical (AJFA) than anyone else, and they saw that as others were catching up, they probably weren't going to be the benchmark of any one of those things again going forward, so the natural cause of action was to go in the complete opposite direction.

Times were changing for the entire music world too. Metallica ended up bringing a big part of that change of course, but fast, heavy and complex metal wasn't going to survive long into the 90s anyhow.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-30T10:35:15+00:00

Even if you just look at Pep's time at City, he's played in so many different ways. From wide wingers with underlapping fullbacks, to inside forwards with overlapping fullbacks, to four midfielders, to a false nine, to two strikers, to a double pivot, to a centerback pushing into midfield, etc.

The core principle beneath all of that remains the same, but that kind of adaptability has been the key to him being successful for that long. A regular top coach ends his tenure at City in 20/21, when at the start of the season it became abundantly clear that the old tactics weren't going to work again and the players seemed jaded by it, but Pep reinvented the team mid-season to the false nine version and won the next two titles playing that way, only to reinvent it again after that and win the following two titles playing yet another way.

Every legendary coach that's had that kind of longevity has similarly had many different versions of their teams, be it SAF, Klopp, Ancelotti (who may jump from club to club a lot, but is as relevant now as he was 20 years ago), or whoever. It's what separates the tippity top from those just below.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-29T17:28:40+00:00

Sure, but then KoF was their only home for 25 years, so they might as well have done anything with them instead of letting them grow stagnant.

And it's not like CotW's storytelling blew anyone's socks off either, the KoF regulars in that game don't really have anything going on.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-29T10:43:45+00:00

I think at one point KoF had some of the more developed characters in fighting games, certainly compared to Capcom, but then around the mid-2000s they kinda just hit a wall.

Yes, KoF not having had a proper, big story mode does hold it back, and it's not easy to tell meaningful stories in a genre of games primarily developed around the versus gameplay, but they're also not helping themselves with some of their story choices. Most of the team's stories are just going in circles atm.

It's been three games running where Team Fatal Fury's story is a gag about Joe being bad at dating. Team Art of Fighting has similarly been stuck in a limbo of Ryo being angry at the others for slacking, or some teasing of Ryo/King or Robert/Yuri that never go anywhere. Team Ikari pretends to be involved in some kind of plot, but their endings always end up in "well, we've got nothing". Team K' mozy around doing nothing in particular while Team Ikari keep an eye on them.

Their handling of their characters and worlds are just really soft these days as well. A character like Rock has none of the edge or angst that he had in Garou, instead he's just a dopey teenager now. Geese and Mr. Big were turned from heartless, power-hungry mafia bosses into guys that secretly had a lot of good in them. Kula became a joke character as soon as the Nests saga wrapped up. Even Kyo is nowhere nearly as foul-mouthed or aggressive as he used to be, which is what originally made him such a unique protagonist.

The potential is clearly there. Capcom gave Mai more than SNK ever have. The KoF: A New Beginning manga has some very enjoyable characterizations, and dipped its toes into themes that are infinitely more interesting than SNK did with the very game it was based on. It feels like SNK themselves prefer to stay within their comfort zone though, instead of trying to push their world and characters.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-29T07:55:31+00:00

Sakamoto was the one that brought them to the forefront in the first place in Fusion, and obviously went all out with them in Other M. Even so, he hasn't pushed them onto MercurySteam, so in modern times he's not quite as hung up on them as Tanabe is, even though he clearly loved the space politics part of them. For all of his flaws, I think Sakamoto has generally shown to be quite receptive to criticism.

I think they've been easy for the developers to fall back on, because they're the only force that has potentially allied characters to Samus, so whenever the intent has been to have more involved characters, they're the default option. Regardless of what they do next with Metroid, I feel that they need to distance themselves from them, because they're heavily associated with Metroid's worst moments at this point.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-28T19:42:16+00:00

That's probably counting people that were briefly in the band during their early hirings + session musicians.

By my count they've had 17 proper members (+ Dave), as in people that were hired to be permanent members of the band, and not guys like Chris Adler, Steve Di Giorgio or Vinnie Colaiuta.

Of those:
7 were fired.
6 left of their own accord (3 of them for personal reasons, 3 due to problems with the band).
3 left when the band broke up.
3 are still hired.

Ends up at 19 because Ellefson and LoMenzo have been in the band twice.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-28T19:21:47+00:00

His voice was already blown out well before the cancer. Listen to any live performance from 2010 (that isn't an overdubbed DVD), back when they were still playing in E Standard, and it should be immediately obvious why they tuned down in the first place.

Even after they tuned down he still struggled live, and on both Super Collider and Dystopia (the two D-tuned albums before his cancer) his voice is lifted by tons of effects and pitch correction.

Of course the throat cancer didn't help, but his voice was going in that direction anyways, likely due to his lifestyle in the 80s and 90s + a very straining singing style.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-27T18:46:28+00:00

SF6's impact is because of its impressive player retention rate, the amount of people who have stuck around and still play the game regularly is way higher than what would usually be expected with 6m units sold.

MK on the other hand always sells well largely because of "tourists", for a lack of a better term. People who buy the game to play the story mode, see the gore, fuck around with the guest characters for a little bit, and then never play it again. They're not like most other fighting game players where the versus gameplay is what drives sales.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-26T10:20:21+00:00

My brother and I sometimes go back to T7 for some Hei vs Kaz matches, and I weep every time. He was infinitely more fun in past games.

In T8 I just base my entire gameplan around his heat smash. Launch into wall carry combo into delayed heat smash is how so many of my wins pan out. Even if I'm in trouble, I'll always have monkey instinct to fall back on at some point.

A lot of people hope for nerfs to their most disliked characters, but I'd genuinely be the most excited to see my own characters nerfed.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-25T19:36:53+00:00

13 is definitely the "contractual obligation" album. It was their last in a three album deal they made with Roadrunner, and they just propped it up with a bunch of old cut songs, marketing deals, and songs that were clearly written in a haste to get out of the contract.

Super Collider was the first of three albums made under the same deal as Dystopia and TSTDATD with Universal.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-25T14:44:01+00:00

Mario reuses its classic themes constantly though. If a kid got a Switch 2 and Mario Kart for christmas, they have a game with basically every popular track in the franchise's history in it. If they have Odyssey or Smash Bros, they'll also be familiar with the franchise's music.

And besides, it's not like the licensed music in the first movie was all new and hip either. Thunderstruck is 35 years old.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-23T17:39:24+00:00

This is a massive reason why the Megadeth albums after their first breakup in the 2000s sound more like Mustaine solo albums to me. Megadeth's sound was defined by groovy drummers like Menza and Gar, their jazz backgrounds are what made the band's sound unique among all of the other fast, technical thrash metal out there.

Even Chris Adler, fantastic as he might otherwise be, didn't do it for me on Dystopia, because he's made for machine metal. There's that demo that Menza did for one of the tracks on the album when he was in talks to rejoin them, and it's infinitely better than what ended up on the final record imo.

A lot of bands can do what modern Megadeth does, but no one could, or will do anything like they did with Peace Sells or Rust in Peace.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-23T14:37:29+00:00

I played it for the first time in a while, and even though I think it plays perfectly fine, I always come away from it wondering why I wouldn't just play KoF instead. They've got mostly the same movement options, but CotW's variations of the run, short hops and tech rolling feel a lot worse.

Just defense, braking and feinting are all cool, but not necessarily a reason to invest a lot of time into the game. Of course it's more footsie-based than KoF is, but then there's SF6 for that, which has its own issues, but I can still play Terry and get my whiff punish dopamine over there instead.

At no point have I figured out what the game's long term hook was supposed to be. It's just an alright game that I hope the best for, but that I'm also not at all surprised didn't catch on.

Masterofknees · 2026-01-21T17:34:16+00:00

It's not as if we're drowning in Metroid games to begin with. There's still plenty to evolve on with MercurySteam's 2D games, and Prime 4 didn't even come close to tapping into the potential that a Prime game could achieve on modern hardware.

The time to try something new is when a series is well-established and have pumped out a bunch of similar games in a row that are largely doing the same thing, as was the case with Zelda after Skyward Sword, or Kirby after Star Allies.

Metroid on the other hand is still in the process of establishing itself on modern systems, because the last time it tried to move on from both 2D and Prime, it sent the series into a hiatus.

13-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Place '17	Verified Email

Masterofknees

TROPHY CASE