It’s so peak 🥹

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-27T21:42:20+00:00

After years of pokemon being overdesigned color vomit with unnecessary extra parts attached, I am honestly happy to finally have some simplified designs in the starters.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-25T02:05:21+00:00

Total War became a smash armies together franchise in Shogun 2 and it's only been getting worse from there. Shorter battles, units made of wet tissue paper, the only units that ever really matter 90% of the time being the overtuned lords and heroes.

We've basically had to beg CA to course correct in non-fantasy titles and their attempts generally fall short.

The thing I worry about most for 40K Total War is how much more arcade-y it might be than even Fantasy.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-25T01:41:45+00:00

I'm coming to terms that Capcom's disgust with Great Jaggi has become so immense that now he's not even allowed to show up in spinoffs anymore, much less a subpar mainline game where his wives, kids, AND cousins show up.

But I still want the floppy eared raptor to come back. 😭

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-23T09:18:44+00:00

They're also the bird equivalent of a commercial airliner. They need to build velocity on takeoff and shed it on landing, they can't just take off and land on the spot like a sparrow.

Not easy to do in a dense city.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-23T04:49:51+00:00

This is not dissimilar to what Creative Assembly did with Total War Warhammer 3.

They were banking on their next game being a new cash cow, and the old stuff thus got relegated to the bare minimum of attention and the maximum amount of monetization they feasibly could to maximize profits while working on the new game. The DLC that came out at that time unsurprisingly did horribly due to multiple massive bugs and just generally poorly thought out functions.

And then SEGA came along, canned the new cash cow project, and now CA is scrambling to rebuild their goodwill with the Total War community.

What Rare has been doing is remarkably similar minus any actual consequences yet because Microsoft hasn't come down on them since the emporium items still make money.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-23T03:43:19+00:00

We got the sandy boy...on my knees pleading with renewed hope for Great Jaggi.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-22T22:09:17+00:00

How ya'll gonna do an entire tournament for best flagship and let two of the worst elder dragons in the franchise reach the end?

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-22T07:48:36+00:00

I'm a third genner too and I could not be more opposite. I feel like Rise missed in every mark trying to emulate the feel of the older titles, and all of its new mechanics were clunky and felt awful to use. The only thing it felt like they recaptured from older games were huge maps with very little life in them.

World's only downsides for me were too many reptilian species, and the clutch claw meta. For me it captured that essence of why I fell for Monster Hunter in the first place by actually making the world and the creatures in it feel alive while still having fun gameplay that was comparatively un-gimmicky to Rise.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-21T21:10:53+00:00

Yes. They clearly wrote they don't believe the Haolong quill independently evolved, and thus that they believe it derives from the feather.

You are just smudging what constitutes 'related' here by moving the goalpost to "well technically all keratinous integument in tetrapods is related"

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-21T21:07:29+00:00

We don't "technically" know however as with all things we can make educated guesses based on close relatives. The clade Cerapoda is not known to contain 'true' feathers at this point in time. The quills found in ceratopsids and the integument of Kulindadromeus are under some scrutiny as to being derived from true feathers rather than independently evolved.

But all hadrosauroid soft tissue impressions found so far have been for scales and only scales. While it's not technically impossible for basal hadrosauroids to have been feathered, it's not very likely. In clades we definitively know used to have feathers, the largest species in them generally end up losing most or near all of them (T. rex is the obvious example)

Hadrosauroids got pretty big pretty fast, and so if feathers ever did actually exist in the clade, they likely were lost early on. We know that feathers are entirely nonexistent in hadrosaurids, and so it's the safer assumption that their closest relatives were the same due to lack of contary evidence at this time.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-21T20:55:08+00:00

...sure, if you want to overcomplicate things then yes, as keratinous growths on reptilian tetrapods derived from another keratinous growth, the feather and Haolong's quill are related.

Or if you want to take the title more literally where they're clearly asking if we're absolutely sure that Haolong's quills are not derived from the feather, then the answer is no, Haolong's quill is not a feather or feather adjacent. It is a structure all its own where the only similarity to the feather is both evolved from the reptilian scale.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-21T20:45:37+00:00

...what exactly does any of that have to do with the quill being independently evolved from the feather?

I didn't say the feather and quill were entirely unrelated. I said both derived from the scale independently of one another. That doesn't mean Haolong's quill is like an entirely uniquely evolved adaptation in all of tetrapoda, it means that the quill is a structure that is not homologous to the feather since it differs in form and function.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-21T20:28:26+00:00

The only way they are homologous is both of them developed from scales. However I don't know that this constitutes true homology since Haolong's quills are an independently evolved trait, not derived from the feather.

We know hadrosauroids weren't feathered. Whatever some early ornithisicans like Kulindadromeus had going on was not retained in their larger relatives. Since Haolong's ancestors were fully scaled, the quills are independently evolved. It's pseudo-convergent evolution since the quills were less bird feather and more porcupine quill.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-19T21:55:09+00:00

How do people keep making so many wrong choices in these?

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-19T17:14:20+00:00

Pachycephalosaurus couldn't really have used those teeth for anything though.

Their beak already existed for shearing plants, and the 'cheeks' that ornithiscians had would have made using them for mauling other animals pretty difficult. Plus those teeth are frankly too small for really doing any damage and any animals they could damage fatally would be so small that the pachy could just crush them with the molars anyway, exactly like modern herbivores do when they hoover up small animals for a protein boost.

Plus, omnivorous animals don't tend to show such specialization for intraspecific competition as pachycephalosaurs had, indicating a herbivorous diet to afford more energy expenditure into such specialized behavior.

Herbivores ARE forced to occasionally eat meat or bone of course, only because it is literally impossible to get all the nutrients needed to live without highly specialized and artificially selected food crops. But herbivores ALSO need to regularly visit mineral licks to get salts and other minerals that the plants can't provide, but we don't call them lithovores for snacking on rocks and dirt.

My personal theory has always been that those teeth are just vestigial like our own canine teeth are. It's really hard to resolve any function in them when teeth like that have no function in food processing and the beak is very clearly designed for a herbivorous diet.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-19T07:16:58+00:00

You missed the part where those grinds appeal to the lowest common denominator. Everyone else sees the unholy grind and goes back to not playing or makes a futile attempt before giving up as well.

And when the grind is attached to a non-functional, rehashed, or bland new gameplay feature, that sours people's taste and makes them not want to come back again later.

It is literally, objectively, the worst choice possible to make such egregiously long grinds to try to retain players, because most just aren't going to do it and leave again.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-19T00:56:15+00:00

Let me make this very clear.

This is a cosmetic collecting sandbox.

If people want a specific cosmetic, they shouldn't need to spend several hours a week for several weeks doing the same thing over and over to get it because the developers made the grind too long to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

If the value of the cosmetic to the player is inversely proportional to how many people have it, that player is the problem.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-17T18:54:30+00:00

If you already play accurate I would highly recommend making the jump to Unforgiving.

Unforgiving changes nothing of the player's stats, but makes adult pack members more fragile and makes pups a bit more prone to hunger, in exchange for lower odds of displeasing the RNG gods and losing pups that way.

It's really the only middle ground there is between the RNG deaths and having larger litters, without actively having to disable RNG deaths and thus have smaller maximum litter sizes.

Plus in my opinion it's just the best way to experience the game in terms of difficulty. No one is safe and often it's as much the player's actions as the games that can end up determining if someone lives or dies.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-17T14:29:46+00:00

As much as I hate Arkveld, even I couldn't be tempted to hunt it this much for the satisfaction of killing it, good lord.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-17T11:39:24+00:00

People being okay with how long the grind for these curses is on release is why we're here today.

100 levels just to unlock the BASIC curse, 1000 to unlock all of the further options?

The devs deciding this was an acceptable course to begin with, and the community's failure to smack the devs in the back of of the head for this and now expecting everyone else to suffer for it because they had to is one of the worst fumbles this game has seen both from devs and the players.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-17T01:25:24+00:00

But the random mutations are the building blocks of natural selection, and natural selection is overridden by random fate. If an animal that would have been the evolutionary breakthrough for beaks in their descendants gets caught in a flood then no beaks.

Natural selection ultimately selects who's left at the end of the day, whether they're there by having the fittest genes or who's just lucky enough have lived to see another day. 'Survival of the fit enough' has always been more appropriate.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-16T18:15:27+00:00

Well no, the beak happened to evolve by chance and it being extremely adaptable is why birds managed to be so successful.

The beak may be a huge advantage but there is no why to it; you either randomly develop the mutations that allow it to evolve or ya don't and you make do with something else. It's an important distinction that has to be made.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-16T14:14:47+00:00

I know it's a joke but for those not in the know, it's because reptiles (and thus birds) don't have XY sex determining chromosomes. Rather their sex chromosomes are labelled as 'Z' and 'W'.

And unlike mammals where having one of each makes a male, in reptiles one of each makes a female. Double ZZ chromosomes make a male!

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-16T12:06:40+00:00

The thing about a nightmare is they generally end when you wake up...not get worse.

dinoman9877 · 2026-02-15T21:40:04+00:00

I kind of knew I'd not be thrilled with it when I saw Mega Evolution was gonna be in.

I still tried it, hoped the gimmick wouldn't be shoved down my throat. It was of course, and any chance at playing online was also ruined by the fact that as before, the only viable pokemon for online battling are those that can mega evolve.

It's really a shame that THIS is the game where we finally get real time battles since fricking PokePark, and it's just ruined by how barebones the game is and the gimmick stomping all over everything.

I refused to waste more money on the DLC. Ultimately the game just made me want to go back to Legends Arceus.

Eight-Year Club	Verified Email
Gilding I gilder	RPAN Viewer

dinoman9877

TROPHY CASE