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Welcome to Talk Amongst Yourselves, the friendliest community on the web. Chat about recipes for dinner, drop locations for Apex, or just have a good old rant about work. Whatever works, you’ll find someone like-minded to chat about it here.
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Stumbled across the Syfy/Netflix series Nightflyers completely by accident last week, and finished it over the weekend. It’s sci-fi horror based on a novella by George RR Martin, with the basic premise following a ship on an expedition to make first contact with an alien race on the periphery of the solar system in the hopes their advanced technology will save the earth from a global pandemic.
I thought it was decent, although at times played a bit safe or slightly underwhelming. Still, was an enjoyable watch, so I’m a little surprised at how poorly it rated on Rotten Tomatoes (33%) and Metacritic (47%). It’s not groundbreaking by any means, and it’s certainly no Game of Thrones, but I’d still have given it a 65-70 score.
This is one of the reasons I tend to take reviews with a grain of salt these days. It seems that OK is no longer good enough, and ends up with moves (and games for that matter) being rated down for no other reason than not being The Best Thing Ever.
Look at Aquaman. Yes, not an all time classic, not even remotely, but its taken $1.1b globally so must be doing something right. Yet sits on 65% on RT. Anything resembling a popcorn show/movie tends to sit somewhere around that mark, and Nightflyers seems to be caught in that.
Its negatively reviewed simply because its not GoT. And you see it with so many shows and movies these days that its disappointing. In the end, I trust my gut. A show has 3 eps to interest me. If it does, I watch it. If not, I don’t. Not complicated, and doesn’t rely on what others think.
Gut is definitely the way to go. I don’t generally read reviews until after I’ve seen it. That and I try to expand my experience by trying new things every other go too, which is how I ended up watching Alias Grace, which I enjoyed.
The thing that tends to gets lost when it comes to reviews is that reviews are usually people trying to tell you whether something is “good”.
The fact is, when it comes to TV or Movies, I don’t want something “good” most of the time. I want something *entertaining*. Something can be really well made and so on but not actually fun to watch, and stuff that is objectively *not* good is often entertaining regardless.
Its why they made so many Sharknado movies… I don’t think you could accuse any of them of being good, but entertaining? That’s a different matter.
That may have been the most bizarre cricket match I’ve watched in recent memory. The recurring phrase in our house was “what is happening?!”
Could be worse. Two years in a row, I’ve been back in Australia over Christmas, and gone off to a Renegades game – my one chance to get some Cricket in before I go back to the wasteland that is Trump’s America, where you can’t even get decent cricket on cable TV.
Both times, they have lost terribly. At this point I’m thinking I’m bad luck. They play awfully when I can watch and when I can’t they seem to pull it together.
Morning. I played a lot of Anthem on the weekend, which is a very weird game when it comes down to it. It’s so much like Destiny in some ways, but then the endless conversations with NPCs does differentiate it in both good and bad ways.
My primary complaint though is with how it handles story missions. So the game wants to tell a compelling story, but then, because of matchmaking, will often throw you into the middle (or end!) of a mission giving you no context about what’s happening or what you need to do. Then you’re off to the next mission still slightly confused…
I liked Destiny 2’s story, to the point I was happy to replay it with all 3 classes just to go through it. As you could solo all of it, that wasn’t a problem and by the third playthrough, the parts that were remotely difficult weren’t.
For this, it doesn’t seem to be the case. Even if it is a decent story, it was fractured during the demo as well, to the point you just couldn’t get a feel for the story as a whole. Second demo was far better than the first, with everyone sticking together, but there were times we did things that I still never got a clear picture on what we were doing.
That wasn’t good storytelling. The story is one of the times you should have your hand held, particularly as the story in these games is usually just the path you take to get to the endgame. Its effectively the tutorial.
I don’t think it’ll matter in a month myself, everyone will have passed through those missions and get to whatever the endgame is at that point. Its then that the game either thrives or dies.
But its a shame that the story felt so fractured, because Destiny 2 showed me that when done right, its fun to do regardless of being anything other than the path to the endgame.
Played ~16hrs over the weekend – finished the campaign, one side-mission left, and still 4 levels until endgame, which is getting to be a bit of a slog.
I kinda worry about anyone late to the game who wants to experience the story. I played through the whole thing on Hard, which seemed to slow people down a bit… but I think the best solution might just be to play the story missions on Easy in a private session, either solo or with like-minded friends. As fun as it is in a group, it can be easy to miss vital bits of the story when people are just rushing to endgame. And the story they’re trying to tell is decent enough, and its world-building is really quite good – I’m interested to see where they take the story in future updates.
It also leads to situations where you get four people in a late-game mission encountering a puzzle for the first time (as the previous iterations of that puzzle were solved by other players), and all having to figure it out together. Had this situation with last of the dual-pillar code puzzles… Nothing quite so funny as four heavily armed exo-suits staring confused at a puzzle for five minutes, the colossus suggesting theories by shooting at various symbols on a nearby wall… To our credit, no-one tried to brute-force it, though it definitely would have been faster.
I downloaded apex legends but can’t play it cause my right wrist is still bung.
The only thing I can play is a mobile game called tiny bubbles
Sounds like a great opportunity to binge Netflix. I just started watching Hero Mask, not sure what to think of it yet.
I live with Mum. She don’t like anime =P Although she did enjoy Another.
It reminds me of a *proper* (DS) JRPG. I know some people say it is too grindy, but I’m enjoying it.
Hope you get better soon.
me too. Typing is a high trigger (same as driving) so I also hope it’s get better soon
I can’t interact with others on this site because I took exception to a blatant spoiler and then our Aus editor came in, acted coy, meaning everything I said will be downvoted and everything he says gets up voted and it creates an unfair power dichotomy where he is empowered and I’m not. Simply because I had an experience ruined for me before I even had an opportunity to start it.
So now everything I say gets moderated. Hi Alex. Thanks for doing this again. Your morals when it comes to dealing with people like me are turgidly self-serving.
I’ve just gone through the comments queue. I’ve mentioned this before, but I tend to prioritise getting content written/scheduled before going through the comments, so sometimes things can stick around for a while.
The downvote system also has a protective benefit – it’s there to guard against spam bots that get through the filter, so people can preemptively take action against dodgy content or comments. Obviously that means it can be abused as well, and I do what I can to check and safeguard against that.
I don’t deliberately put people into the moderation queue without good reason (like one person who got banned for posting Holocaust denial shit last year, or someone recently who was just mass reporting comments they didn’t like). If you end up in there, and your comments are fine, I’ll approve them and it’ll all be fine.
But you do swoop in, make a comment, and then group mentality takes over and the person complaining about having their gaming experience spoilt before it even got to be an experience gets downvoted into silence why you get upvoted for taking the defensive. It’s like [mod edit: mob] mentality and you would have to be aware of the predicament you’ve put the now marginalised user in.
But like you said, it’ll all be fine. Until next time it happens.
OK, just to explain the mod edit: don’t use that phrasing mate, that’s way out of line. Come on. I get that you’re still upset, but don’t throw around wildly inflammatory stuff that you know isn’t great.
I’m doing what I can to engage and have a conversation with people, but I don’t control the response or how people agree/disagree from that point. I could not engage at all, but I don’t think that’s something people want, either. (Esp. factoring in other comments today, where there was some interest in local podcasts and/or streaming.)
I’d say “wildly inflammatory” is hyperbolic. You think that the term I used (from a purely anthropological definition) is “way out of line”, yet my not wanting things spoiled for me and to not be shut down due to voicing this expectation– WITHOUT using harsh language and/or insults, is “wildly inflammatory”. Seriously, go back and read it all.
This is why we’re not gonna get a resolution here.
I never asked you not to interact either. I don’t know why you put that in there. That has nothing to do with your reacting defensively to criticism. So I get to be “way out of line” and “wildly inflammatory” just because you don’t like having to deal with the exception that has been taken.
What I clearly should be doing is just STFU about any grievances so I don’t get the unwanted retaliation, but that would kind of be un-Kotaku of me. There’s just no compromise that’s available here apparently. You can literally change my side of the argument and then paint the hole in my comment as being something that is “way out of line”.
Anyway, the downvote button is just below people. Help yourselves…
I know you didn’t ask for that; I’m just trying to find common ground so we can move forward a little. I made amendments based on your feedback, and I’ll keep it in mind in the future so hopefully you and others don’t get quite so jarring an experience from the front page.
That’s probably the best way to proceed.
Thanks, dude. I appreciate that. I really do just want to be part of a good community– just like you. I will monitor my communication further so I don’t use as harsh sounding terminology (I sought feedback earlier, and yup, turns out I could be more conscious of how the descriptive aspects of my written communication comes across in general). I do have a tendency to spew out quite long sentiments (such as this) in several seconds without giving them a 2nd glance, meaning my emotion goes into it. I’ll sort it out.
Main point is this: Kotaku is good! Let’s not let let little squabbles ruin a legacy of what amounts to a good community talking about good stuff.
Hey, your sentiments aren’t that long. You should see what the Nintendo Bot account (is it really a bot? Regulars know the one I’m talking about) used to spew out before it started putting line breaks in.
We’re all trying to do the right thing here. As long as the intent is good, we can work out the rest with a bit of patience and trust. And thank you immensely for both of those, along with your time. I’m eternally grateful, as always.
The problem with the downvote system is that it doesn’t get offset by upvotes. The instant you accumulate enough downvotes on the site you seem to go into moderation hell permanently. It’s happened to me several times. If it’s designed to prevent spambots then it should probably take into account your entire history – at 26k comments on this site I’d have thought I would get the benefit of the doubt and not go into automoderation hell periodically.
We were having chats about this last year and looking at ways it could be fixed. There’s a ton of things that I’m not super happy with – editing comments, what happens when a thread gets to a certain point, the moderation tools – but overhauling those could have a whole range of effects. I’d rather go down that route than abandon comments altogether, which was the right thing to do for Gizmodo and what the discourse was like there.
But a lot of that stuff has just been put on the back burner in the last few months while other priorities are sorted out first. Not ideal, but I can at least confirm it’s something that we’ve actively discussed and looked into solutions for.
The editing situation is really awful. The main reason I edit is for spelling or grammar, but I still get put in limbo and I assume the comment either disappears or users see the unedited comment in the meantime.
Yep. Been there. Unfortunately, this ultimately results in being silenced for voicing an unpopular opinion, and that silencing continuing to unrelated topics. Not everyone is going to agree with everyone else; that fact should not be grounds to suppress one’s ability to speak.
Also, comment editing needs to be fixed. It’s currently more productive to reply to yourself rather then edit your own comment.
Apparently spambots were using editing to get around the moderation. Remember, back in the day every comment had to be authorised by a moderatore
Hmm I guess that’s an adequate justification. I hadn’t heard about that.
It sucks, but we have to do it
After years of me banging on about it, my brother played Subnautica… and shortly after, declared it the best game he’s ever played. Weirdly, I saw he had 50 hours in it (in a single week) and hadn’t yet been to the lost river (I’ve complete the game three times in that same amount of hours).
He was up until 5am this morning and finally launched the Neptune. Now he’s working on my next-most strident recommendation… SOMA.
Aaaand for me… just unlocked High Risk hunts in Monster Hunter World and wondering if I’ve got the time in my life to make a good go of it.
I picked up Subnautica when it was in Early Access (late 2014/early 2015), played it a bunch shortly prior to 1.0, but forgot about it until a few weeks back when I heard that they’re making another game in the same vein, and realised I’d never actually finished it. Started a new game, and finished it in about 20 hours. Such an amazing game.
I’m kinda sad that the cyclops is so cumbersome/power-hungry, and effectively a single-use transport to get to the last two stations. It’d be cool to have to use it to explore the deep, fill the storage with a bunch of resources you can only get down there, and then get it back to your base…
I clocked up a ton of time in Subnautica but never got to the Lost River either. The game’s RNG can actually block you out of stuff. In my case, it was the moon pool fragments. Every spot they could spawn at that was within my depth range didn’t spawn them, so I was left in the catch-22 situation where I needed the moon pool to develop the depth of my Seamoth, but my Seamoth couldn’t go deep enough to get the fragments I needed to get the moon pool.
By the time I realized this, I had played enough of the game that I didn’t want to start over, so I never went back.
I started a playthrough recently and had to cheat in the beacon fragments because they just didn’t spawn. I have no idea why but there wasn’t a single fragment in about 12 hours of play. It’s pretty frustrating trying to mentally keep track of bases without it.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t find any beacon fragments until after I was readying my cyclops for the final area, and was frantically looking for titanium for upgrades. I ended up getting really good at orienteering, kept notes on depths/distances/directions from spawn habitat for my base and a couple of important caves… think I built one beacon the entire playthrough.
I just learnt that in the recent Nintendo Direct it was announced that Rune Factory 4 is coming to the Switch this year. And that Rune Factory 5 is 2020 (probably in English the year after).
My life changed today.
Happy birthday. Don’t worry about ‘old’, its just a state of mind. And extra trips to the doctors.
There aint much you can do about it anyway. Personally, I’d rather get older than the alternative.
So how funny was the whole verge copystriking saga.
Days after writing an article about people exploiting the system. They copystrike 2 people who reacted to their joke of a PC build video because they thought one was racist and the other wasn’t fair use.
They then proceeded to act like they were the victims because people were calling them out.
Ain’t a good time to be a YouTuber these days.
Easy abuse (and more recently, outright exploitation) of the strike system (Mauer and other bad actors).
Easy abuse of the defamation reporting system (Andrew Watt, #NotAPrivacyViolationF**OffAlready)
MCNs going under and taking content creator money with them (Defy media).
The only reason YouTube exists is it’s size and that no better alternative of the same size exists.
The problem is that there is no penalty for fraudulent takedown attempts. Any pootube competitor is going to be just as shit once they get to the same scale, because the Copyright Police are going to need their DMCA shit and the instant you give them that you either need an absolute army of humans to vet it or you end up exactly where Youtube is now – trying to write an algorithm to do it for them because paying enough humans to do it isn’t viable at their scale.
What’s that old saying?
“The Verge cries out in pain as it punches down.”
Something like that. It goes will with the children’s tale:
“The Verge who cried victim.”
Great news for the weekend: Village Roadshow’s Graham Burke is retiring. If you can’t remember who Graham is, here’s a reminder:
– Village Roadshow Is Shafting LEGO Movie Fans (Again)
– How Village Roadshow Plans To Sue Pirates
– Village Roadshow CEO Graham Burke’s Latest Piracy Letter To The Government Is A Bizarre Trainwreck
In the politest terms I can think of, good fucking riddance.
I don’t know if this will make it through moderation but I think a more straight forward “Fuck off Graham Burke” is more succinct.
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