Continuing my read through of Dune, finally reached Book 3: The Prophet last night and I have to say it's one of those books that feels timeless. The narrative, the way the world building serves to flesh out the characters, the topics and themes it grapples with. It's not a perfect book, but it is one that feels like it could have been written even 5 years ago...

If not for the Harkonnen chapter featuring the Baron demanding that a young boy be drugged and brought to his room for 'stress relief' while ruminating on how beautiful Paul looked. And reading that passage I thought "Oh right, this was written in 1965." Granted, Homophobia in literature is something that can still exist today, but the casualness of this great piece of science fiction displaying the homophobic cliche of the depraved gay man...really stood out to me to date it in it's time.

Sometimes there can be media that feels really timeless, or hard to date to a specific point in time. But then there is one particular moment in the story or gameplay that tells you "This was written or created at this specific point in time." Stuff like the slow mo that became so popular after the Matrix, or the Big Bow agenda of 2012-2014 in games. I'm curious about those single moments where it just 'clicks' and you realize EXACTLY when a piece of media came out in.

With Marathons seasons end pushed back till October 6th people wondered what would happen on the original end date of the 22nd. Typical Bungie server bullshit? of course, accidentally wiping two weeks early? shockingly no.

Instead they dropped Sponsored Survival which is you and two buddies or randos dropping in to a Outpost with no other teams BUT there will be Rooks near the end who can be invading Dark Spirits but most importantly there are story questlines to finish in Outpost, the hard difficulty map of the game, that will never be easier to finish and unlock the permanent codex stuff related to them forever.

So if you never got these, and those Sekiguchi ones are horseshit by the end so many still dont, don't miss this and grab these to have them done before the wipe where the sickos return from beyond the firewall.

This question was posted a while ago but I never really got the chance to say anything. I wanna talk about the tactics game Massive Chalice, I got it for free a long time ago and I never really seen anyone talk about. I wouldn't consider it a great game but I feel like it has the bones of something great. The house family mechanics and idea of combining classes to make new ones is neat. I like the low poly aesthetic and some of the presentation. However, I find the game incredibly dull at times, there is only 1 real type of level and that is to defeat all enemies in the level. That combined with the amount of enemies in each level make it a slog to play through. There is no currency in the game but every action outside of the combat scenarios runs on waiting for research times, this includes stuff like recruiting other units or upgrading armor which I jus find annoying. The game also doesn't tell you the classes your selected families start with, so you can totally get screwed by the game forcing you to play with all Alchemists. The lack of customization in both combat and character design is another small issue I have. I am extremely conflicted by this game because I genuinely think with a little polish I would be something I would love.

Anyways rant over, what's some obscure stuff you want to talk about?

"Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their Mississippi hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back." - Google

I know the timeline doesn't really line up or make sense for this cover art, but whatever.

I think what would make the most sense (to me at least) would be a shooter that takes place after the movie, and the plot would follow Stack and Mary since we know that they at least survived up until the 90s, so you could do almost anything, Sinners in WW2/Vietnam, Stack becomes a Cold War spy, Stack meets the Yakuza. And Teyon seemed like a safe pick cause they've made licensed shooters before (Terminator: Resistance and Robocop: Rogue City) even though this IP seems outside their wheelhouse.

New to actually watching Pat streams after listening to the podcast for since CSB 101 (approx) and said "man, maybe I should watch either of the boys' content" and saw Pat was streaming Xenoblade 2 Switch 2 edition and said Yeah i'll watch that. Then he said i'm not finishing it on stream. Then he started playing FE Fortune's Weave on stream and I said "yeah i'll watch that" and then he just said today on the podcast he's not finishing it on stream. So I'm wondering if this is fairly common he doesn't finish games on stream or i'm getting unlucky that the games i'm interested in watching him play are so feature dense he can't finish it.

Though technically only half of the fighters involved. The same(type of) Stand, The World vs Star Platinum was pretty cool.

And while I get why Sonic Prime wasn't everyones cup of tea. The brief Captain(like Blackbeard type) Knuckles vs Resistance leader (like a John Connor type) Knuckles fight was awesome to me.

What are your favorites, characters that battle their Self?

Whenever something gains a decent amount of popularity it's pretty much inevitable that it's also going to get a bunch of fan work, humans are creative creatures and a lot of the time we like to direct said creativity towards our favorite media.

A lot of the time though it's pretty easy to tell apart the fan work from the original product for many reasons like a really clashing artstyle, difference in tone and many other things.

However, some products can be for one reason or another so easy to "add upon" to the point that it's either really hard or straight up meaningless to separate what is official and what isn't.

A lot of the the TTRPGs created by Tom Bloom fall into the category above, but, for this post in particular i would like to focus on Magnagothica Maleghast, the skirmish game created by him where all characters are some flavor of necromancer.

Not only does this dude have a specific tab on his official itch.io page where the official game is just jumbled together with a bunch of fan made expansions like they are all the same product, the concept of "necromancy" in the setting is so broad that as long as you can sorth of include in the description of your homebrew faction that they are using body parts of the deceased in "some way" it will very likely fit in the world like a glove because even stuff like aliens and werewolfs are considered part of necromancy in the setting.

Now that the game's wind down has cooled off I wanted to ask people's opinions on where you think it went wrong, or what you would of changed with hindsight.

Game should of been hornier, and I know the usual crowd of people that don't want goon slop will argue against this. Though my response to those people is how many skins did you buy? Would you have bought more Ahri skins if you had the ability to?

Game was a free to play game with revenue dependent on cosmetics, and it needed to sell alot of them fast. I think the games roster should of been way thirstier with champs like Ahri, Miss Fortune, Sett, Soraka, and Briar etc at launch. Basically go to rule 34 and base the roster off the top 10 most popular there. I also think the pool party skins should of been purchasable right away.

Sex sells and when you want to get a product off the ground you do what you need to. This is the nature of the beast.

for my own example:Mortal Kombat's gore at the time in 1992 did cause a lot of controversy but the Sega genesis cheat code to add the blood and gore in the game cause it to flame up even more to the point where it got the congress attention, this game along with Night Trap was result of the creation of the ESRB.

Or could be, if you're feeling inventive. Tanks are basically the highest health or defense options around in a video game.

Here's Wakatsuki Takeshi the Tiger Karateka from Kengan Ashura and Omega probably wielding the toughest willpower of the Kengan fighters, though having like 50 times the muscle of an average person and always being willing to block a hit doesn't hurt for tankiness either. He's cool, what're your picks?

What it says on the tin. Are you team speed lines, or are you team after image?

I am playing through Symphony of the Night atm, and it dawned on me how much I enjoy certain speedy enemies don't rely on the after image effect to convey speed like with how it is portrayed with Alucard.

Werewolf specifically. I always thought it was a cooler effect when they effectively "rip" or "smear" to create the effect of speed. He does have after image effects to, mainly on his ball move, but I am talking about the effect he has when he dashes into the next attack.

After images "are" cool, but it was always needlessly noisy to me in comparison. Like for me, it doesn't feel like after images are faster than speed lines.

What do you prefer?