raktheundead

King of England, beware!

Do you hear that? It sounds like the squeak of tank tracks, circa 1968 in Prague. Or maybe 1956 in Budapest.

The T-90 of air defence systems.

I think the PRC lacks something in the soft power stakes; they’ve created some degree of good will outside the West, but they suck at projecting cultural output that doesn’t stem from the imperial Chinese era.

You hang it out the side of the plane when you want to get out and taunt your enemy face-to-face. Well, face-to-face with a separation of a few miles, that is.

I’m guessing there is also some schadenfreude, at least among some people, at seeing a European country getting colonised by a semi-Asian one.

All this tells me is that Indians’ objection to colonisation is that they weren’t the ones doing it.

First of all, it suffers from what TV Tropes would call the Eight Deadly Words: “I don’t care what happens to these people”. I won’t fault the acting; I feel the actors did the best they could with the writing they had. It’s just that I thought the writing was extremely uncompelling and there was nothing about the characters which made me want to learn more about them or their troubles.

Secondly, I don’t like the structure of the film. It’s a melodrama, a type of story that I do not enjoy by default, with some plot points that are so heavily telegraphed that it sucked the energy out of the film. The multiverse structure that the film relies on was uncompelling to me. The action scenes lacked any sort of visceral impact to bring them back down to Earth; they were so obsessed with flashiness that there was nothing for me to connect with.

And thirdly, while I can enjoy absurdist humour, this film felt like it thought it was cleverer than it was throughout. I’ve heard a description elsewhere of this film as “nicecore Rick & Morty” and while that’s awfully reductive, it still gets to the root of some of the problems I had with the film.

I don’t know how to do spoilers on Kbin and frankly, most of that movie is a walking spoiler alert. Without giving too much away, it had to do with an oblique reference to another movie.

Contrarily to the general opinion, I found this a turgid and unpleasant experience to watch; there was a single moment in the film that amused me in passing, but they ended up taking that joke and beating the dead horse so hard you could use it as a dynamo.

I’ve heard that a Tiger II took more manhours to complete than an American heavy bomber.

German tanks still best cannons.

Heard you talking shit about my 17-pounder.

They failed at that before Denuvo was even developed; their predecessor company developed SecuROM, which I was burnt with a couple of times. Once bitten, twice shy.

I’m inclined to think the Mega Drive port is actually more enjoyable than the arcade version, even if it gives up a bit in terms of graphics and sound. It’s definitely the version I prefer to play. It is always interesting, though, to see how widely Sega’s arcade games were ported in that era, even considering that they were console manufacturers themselves.

Actually used to be a member of a forum focusing on the Golden Sun games. I was very impressed with them back in the day; they felt like a prime SNES-era JRPG designed for the GBA. I especially liked how the Psynergy system was used for puzzles outside of combat; non-combat uses of magic is something I’ve considered to be lacking in JRPGs generally, so it was a nice curiosity.

My line is at the transition from 2d to 3d mostly.

Strictly speaking, the two co-existed long before 3D became the vogue on consoles; Revs is a proper racing simulator in 1984.

I’ve played Colossal Cave Adventure on an ICL 2900-series mainframe from the 1980s at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley.

Most of the things Psygnosis did; the Wipeout series, G-Police and Colony Wars being the most obvious choices. Tomb Raider is another good one, as are the Tony Hawk games. X-COM: Enemy Unknown is meant to be a solid port of the classic turn-based tactics game. I’ve heard praise for the Twisted Metal games and Syphon Filter, but haven’t played them myself. While I know that old sports games are often considered anathema in the retrogaming sphere, Jonah Lomu Rugby is often considered one of the best games depicting rugby union ever made.