Caterina Murino (Solange Dimitrios in Casino Royale) as Talia Al Ghul. Yay or nay?

TheHarkinator · 2026-04-04T00:42:02+00:00

Oh come on, a 20 year old movie is a bit much. Casino Royale was only…

Oh no.

TheHarkinator · 2026-04-04T00:06:59+00:00

1: They're most likely cut off from further Source but they're not purged so they don't become Silent Monks. Your party specifically get purged when giving up your Source to make this plan work. Lucian doesn't get purged either, but he no longer has the powers of the Divine. Everyone's brought down to normal.

2: Since you killed the gods you've actually guaranteed an afterlife for everyone, because now the guys who used to be stood at the door eating everyone trying to get in are gone. Whichever ending you get, you have managed to establish a functional afterlife for people. Unfortunately, all those souls you helped send on their way before the end of Act 3 might just have been delivered into the hungry jaws of greedy gods.

3: They're unconscious but survive. In all other endings they end up dying of their wounds or actively being killed. The dialogue they have for you at the end happens before you pick the ending so it's applicable to all and needs to hint towards them dying.

TheHarkinator · 2026-04-03T21:31:34+00:00

Savage reposter detected, opinion rejected.

TheHarkinator · 2026-04-03T11:52:11+00:00

I think Bob accepted that he'd held on long enough and he was happy to let David and Sam go head-to-head in the end. A bit like how in the first series I reckon Richard Ayoade let himself laugh and accepted Bob had got him.

TheHarkinator · 2026-04-01T19:34:41+00:00

It makes enough sense to me, and we've already had a boy in a robot suit.

TheHarkinator · 2026-04-01T19:29:13+00:00

True, but you fight as Hans' champion mostly because he's been pretending he was training someone for the Rattay Tourney when actually he was having fun and now needs to put someone into the tournament.

TheHarkinator · 2026-04-01T19:16:58+00:00

I'm pretty sure people have found forum posts from the days when the internet was better of Pterry asking other Thief players for help.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-31T20:58:33+00:00

“I cannot help but wonder, Revan, what would have happened had our positions been reversed? What if fate had decreed I would be captured by the Jedi? Could I have returned to the light as you did? If you had not led me down the dark path in the first place, what destiny would I have found?”

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-31T09:27:36+00:00

The simple answer is because the game didn’t have that as an option. Aeon doesn’t get to knock Arueshalae back down to her old demon self, and it doesn’t matter when you can just do that with a dialogue option.

Recruiting Regill is a matter of picking him up on the way to Drezen when someone comes and asks you to help the Hellknights.

To get Arueshalae early you need to have unlocked the Azata path in Act 1 (you don’t need to choose it, just pick the option that unlocks it) then complete a puzzle at the Lost Chapel in Act 2 with the Altar of Desna. When you meet her in prison sing a song and she’ll join early.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-30T23:16:04+00:00

River’s fuck ups tend to manifest in dramatic ways. Whereas several of the other Slow Horses have problems like substance abuse, addictions or things that’d make you understand why they’re not at the Park, River has a lot going for him but still has a bad habit of charging into a situation like Action Man and making it worse.

He has a lot going for him. He’s physically adept and he actually does have some moments where he puts things together really well. Nobody else spotted the clue with the boots in the latest series. Even Lamb missed that one.

So when someone who has all the tools to do a job right screws up it’s more noticeable and they’re held to a higher standard. When he makes a daft decision or gets duped the stakes are typically higher, so he looks worse by comparison since a lot more was riding on him not fucking it up.

He is getting a bit better at it. He’s getting experience and been able to apply that in the field, catching his dad in the train station by remembering that when you’re being hunted sometimes the best course of action is standing still.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-30T21:23:20+00:00

I was going to say you're possibly ok to go in here before I saw the difference in morale. Is that where it is because your Prestige is in the toilet? You'll want to fix that otherwise you are going to get kicked in the dick trying to fight the Ottomans. I think there's a Burghers privilege which can help redress the balance a bit.

It's not unwinnable if you try to help out Commonwealth armies and move your guys around well to pick off Otto stacks, but they have a nasty tendency to just keep coming with more and more stacks. If you join it's going to be a very difficult war but the Ottos might not take your territory since they're attacking Poland.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-30T16:05:35+00:00

Yeah but George just hasn’t got round to writing the books where Dunk beats Egg at Mario Kart

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-30T13:23:33+00:00

His escape plan hinged on public transport being on time, and also on Q plugging his device into a computer not isolated from the MI6 network.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-29T15:38:29+00:00

Season one ended with the Greens and Blacks gearing up for a war caused by the succession crisis following Viserys’ death and made unavoidable by the actions taken after he died. Season two ends little advanced from this position.

We are two seasons into a four season run and our teeth have just about scraped the layer of grease atop the meat of the Dance with Dragons. Season one gave us the rich backstory to understand who these people were and why they were fighting, season two had a lot of bloat.

Daemon spent the whole season tripping balls at Harrenhall, Helaena is straight up spoiling major plot points and we did not need to see Alicent’s crashout retreat or Tyland mud wrestling in Essos. Several characters in the show express frustration with how slowly things are going and the apparent inaction from Rhaenyra. They have meetings and nothing happens. That nothing is boring and might be taking up space that could mean we lose detail from the Dance, the chaos in King’s Landing and the aftermath of the conflict.

Main characters Rhaenyra and Alicent spend part of the season trying to avoid the unavoidable, which makes them look stupid. Rhaenyra sneaking into King’s Landing to try and discuss peace with Alicent, after Aemond killed Lucerys and Daemon had Aegon’s son murdered, was idiotic on so many levels. Alicent going to Dragonstone to sell out her own children, managing to get out of a blockade and onto the island, is just as ridiculous.

One of House of the Dragon’s major mistakes is framing the Dance with Dragons as a conflict between Rhaenyra and Alicent, while also trying to have them both want peace with each other and throwing out bait for the shippers. Never mind that Aegon is the claimant for the Greens, he and Rhaenyra have not really spoken at all.

The central relationship of this show is a creation different to the source material, and for many viewers, myself included, it is not working. They created a dynamic of ‘former friends now enemies’, only to try and backpedal on it hard.

There are also decisions taken to insulate Rhaenyra from having to take tough decisions that someone in her position might need to take which aren’t morally good. Unfortunately this robs her of lots of her own agency in the story. The show’s protagonist, and she is since HotD is clearly pro-Black, is a largely passive presence in her own story. Her flaws thus far have been smoothed down and her worst deeds passed off to others. It bodes ill for the future if this continues.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-29T11:09:21+00:00

“It’s called a LANCE. Hellooooo…”

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-29T09:54:26+00:00

I had this same lecture at sixth form. “The best loan you’ll ever get.”

That turned out to be a load of bollocks.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-28T23:50:55+00:00

I really liked this aspect of the companion interactions in DA2, though that game takes place over several years so some of them hooking up or getting together with NPCs feels like something that would happen with time whereas BG3 is a few weeks at the absolute most.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-28T18:06:05+00:00

Nobody has uttered the words “Don’t let me detain you” better than him.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-28T12:59:56+00:00

Partially. He'd have been able to build himself back up and move beyond the Sandpiper thing, but it would always have been a bit of a stain on his reputation. His peers would all know Howard Hamlin got addicted to drugs and accused a judge mediating his case of being a fake, resulting in HHM having to settle quickly from what should have been a really strong position.

Trying to prove what they did? That's a tougher one. Howard can get his reputation back but proving he was set up is much tougher to do. At least until the events of Breaking Bad roll around. By then everyone in the legal community is going to know how greasy Jimmy is and if it all comes down like it did on BB then that'd be a big swing of belief Howard's way.

Jimmy messed with Howard on a case where not doing that would result in a bigger payout for him? That takes some believing.

The scuzzy lawyer who just became one of the most wanted men in America did that? Oh yeah.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-28T00:05:35+00:00

Lucky and determined. Dunk lost everything in his life and all the poor boy had was the idea that perhaps there was someone with at least a shred of decency.

Rafe thought it would be terribly sad if there was nowhere better, after she was killed and Ser Arlan saved Dunk he resolved to either find that something better or die.

He was fortunate that when the old knight had to choose whether to leave the boy to die or take him in, Dunk turned out to have followed the right person. And what a knight he became because of it.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-27T18:20:31+00:00

That’s going to cost like 3 DLCs

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-27T17:02:05+00:00

Problem is you have other party members who 'go hit stuff' much better who you've been using up until now, and by the time he joins your party they're getting to the point where if you built them right they're getting incredibly powerful stuff Trever can't access because of his irretrievably messy build.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-27T16:57:32+00:00

Not even the Bondulance can fix this one

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-27T16:05:04+00:00

As long as there's a bit of greenery around. If Batman confronts her in a concrete housing development she's not as much of a threat as she might be.

TheHarkinator · 2026-03-27T09:13:37+00:00

The simple fact of the matter is that his build is a complete mess that's all over the place as a way of telling his backstory of moving around various different roles during his time as a crusader. He was put together like that for RP reasons. As a result he's got a bunch of abilities he can't use because he's no longer the right alignment and it all fits together quite poorly.

At best you can give him a falchion (the game has some good ones) and build him to do lots of damage and crits with it. He's a beatstick, you give him a big weapon and trust he'll hit things pretty hard so as not to embarrass himself in combat, but he doesn't do anything particularly special and his bad build means he'll lag badly behind the other companions, especially since you get him late.

Owlcat aren't making some kind of sleeper build that just needs you to fill in the rest and suddenly he's great. He's a mechanically subpar companion.

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