Diecast #170: Luke Cage, Event[0], Nuka World DLC

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 3, 2016

Filed under: Diecast 104 comments



Hosts: Josh, Shamus, Campster, Mumbles. Episode edited by Rachel.

Show notes:
0:00:33: Mumbles Sadness

It’s a sad tale.

0:04:33: Mumbles Videos


Link (YouTube)

0:08:57: Luke Cage

I’ll admit that the only reason I know about Luke Cage is because he was one of the analysts in the Seanbaby museum of insane Hostess snack cake superhero-based advertising. Not familiar with that site? Take a journey to the internet of 2001 to see what you’ve been missing.

0:26:35: Event[0]


Link (YouTube)

0:41:56: Picross 3D


Link (YouTube)

Here is the Hexcells Infinite that I mentioned.

0:48:22: Halloween Horror Nights

Boo!

1:00:25: Nuka World DLC

SHAUUUUN!

1:08:35: TNA Wrestling

For the record, Kayfabe is not actually a wrestler. It’s what they call it when people within wrestling pretend that the staged events are real or true.

 


From The Archives:
 

104 thoughts on “Diecast #170: Luke Cage, Event[0], Nuka World DLC

  1. Ringwraith says:

    Re Luke Cage talk:
    Claire being quickly trusted by Luke makes sense as she saved his life in Jessica Jones (as Luke actually showed up first there and has quite a significant part).
    So I guess it seems pretty weird and sudden if you didn’t see that.
    Although Jessica Jones is really interesting due to a rare subject matter, even though it gets really dark, so worth watching!

    1. silver Harloe says:

      The Purple Man is one of the best villains I’ve ever seen in any genre. JJ is worth a watch for him alone. But I can’t rewatch it because it’s so well written in places that it really captures certain emotions that really hurt me to feel.

    2. Mormegil says:

      I was really happy to hear the podcast since I’ve just started watching Luke Cage and I was wondering how it would look to someone who hasn’t watched all the other Netflix Marvel shows.

      I have watched the others and found JJ and season 1 DD to be great with season 2 of DD being half great and half kind of pointless (didn’t get into the Elektra plotline). JJ I thought had a slow start but turned out very good. Luke Cage got me in from the start and I don’t know how much of that is because I’m already familiar with the character from JJ. Interesting to hear that SHamus liked it without having watched anything else.

  2. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Its funny to me how marvel movies are mostly goofy and jokey,but the shows are grimdark,while dc movies are drenched in blue darkness,yet their shows are goofy and jokey.

  3. Tizzy says:

    Somewhere in a California attic, there is a painting of Rutskarn that looks like Josh…

  4. Daemian Lucifer says:

    That was to disguise a loading screen,that wasnt like “Oh boy you sure do need this immersion of standing here for 20 seconds”

    It kind of is both.The whole following the procedure thing adds to the immersion that this is a real universe with real protocols for real spaceships.And people didnt notice how good it actually was until they ditched it in me2.

    1. Ringwraith says:

      It also didn’t work when entirely removed as you just warped to places via doors. So it makes everything feel disconnected.
      When the loading times weren’t horrible, they can work, I think the decontamination procedure is much better on PC in the first game, and by the third they’d somewhat learnt so some transitions came back in brief form.

    2. Henson says:

      Just wanted to echo this point. Even if people were annoyed by it, it definitely did have a purpose beyond map loading. I personally loved the interconnection, even if it did take up more time. Little details like that are why I play these games.

      1. Ninety-Three says:

        It’s like the way boats in early World of Warcraft used to run on a schedule, and if you didn’t get there at the right time, you could be stuck waiting five minutes to get where you need to go. From a usability perspective, it’s nothing but an unnecessary hindrance, but it did add a dash of the Morrowindy sense that this was a living breathing world that you were simply inhabiting and exploring, rather than a themepark built for you.

        1. Henson says:

          I never played WOW, that actually sounds neat. Not sure if it fits with the game’s raison d’etre, but I like the idea.

          1. felblood says:

            Yeah, that was in the early days of WOW before the whole streamlined, polished experience philosophy came to occlude all other considerations.

            There’s a lot of unexplored possibility space in MMO games, but all anyone wants to fund is the next WOW or the next Runescape.

            1. Andy says:

              All the boats and zeps are still there, if you feel like using them.

              Nowadays you can port to the capitals fairly easily, but that’s been true since BC.

              Me? I’m just glad that flight points are linked now, so you don’t stop at every one and have to choose the next.

              1. Trix2000 says:

                The flight point thing was a really old change, since they’d already fixed that before I started mid/late Vanilla (I think? Been too long).

                But the boats are still there…. they even added new ones and filled them all with NPCs!

  5. Bespectacled Gentleman says:

    The old Mumbles problem videos are surprisingly insightful and eloquent. I’d love to see more of them.

  6. Ninety-Three says:

    I quit on Luke Cage after three episodes, but the one bit I really liked about it was something I think the MCU needs more of. In a chat between Misty and her cop partner, her partner says something to the effect of “Cops are obsolete. Unless this gun turns into a magic hammer, there is nothing I can do about our problems.”

    Aliens came to New York and did a mega-9/11, and it doesn’t seem to have affected anything (despite multiple shows set entirely in New York). I loved that conversation because for once, the MCU actually reacted to itself. There was a hint of real continuity, the kind where events actually matter instead of simply being used for character cameos.

    All comic books have that problem to some extent, they’re set in “The real world, but with superheroes”, and the status quo has to be frozen to some extent to prevent “with superheroes” from making it no longer resemble the real world, but the MCU is especially bad about that. I’m convinced that the people running things are terrified of continuity: they’re realized that continuity alienates the casual viewer and it doesn’t matter if it dissatisfies the core superhero fan because nerds will buy their movie tickets no matter what.

    1. Hal says:

      In Daredevil, Kingpin’s entire schtick is that he’s a real estate mogul buying up property destroyed in the “crisis,” gentrifying Hell’s Kitchen. When Matt and Foggy go to buy space for their law firm, they even complain about the prices and the real estate agent says, “Well, the cost reflects the post-crisis market.” (Something like that.)

      I get your point, though. It’s sort of like how, for a long time, the X-Men were hated for being mutants, but people didn’t seem too bothered by people with powers that came from other sources.

      1. felblood says:

        Yeah, except that they aren’t allowed to mention that “the crisis” was an alien invasion more than twice a season, for fear of confusing some one who opted to skip The Avengers.

        It’s got to be a terrifying tightrope walk, trying to balance that continuity with the need to avoid looking like you are “forcing” your viewers to keep up with the other properties.

        It is worth pointing out that as the number of parallel franchises in a continuity grows, the cost of keeping up with everything also increases. You do not want a family that has a budget for a Netflix subscription, a couple of DVDs a year, and maybe a cinema trip around Christmas to feel like they’ve been priced out of the MCU, but maybe you like the billions of Chinese box office sales that come with releasing four movies a year, too. That’s a touchy place to stand.

        1. Although, think about it this way: Having these threads that touch on each other in a casual sense (i.e. “the crisis”) and mentioning things with enough depth so the audience understands why something is relevant (a bunch of stuff got destroyed, someone died, etc.) makes it a lot more realistic. Look at Reddit’s TIL section and how many real-world events people can be blissfully unaware of that seem critical to the rest of us.

          The real balancing act is events not contradicting each other.

          1. Ninety-Three says:

            Counterpoint: “The incident” was a dozen 9/11s at once, and it was also first contact with an alien species. It is arguably the most important event in recorded history, yet the MCU spends less time acknowledging it than they do on Stan Lee cameos.

            You could retcon the Battle of New York to have never happened, and pretty much the only thing about the entire MCU that needs to change is you have to come up with a different plot-irrelevant backstory for why Fisk is wealthy. The handful of passing references to “The Incident” are so vague and inconsequential that you wouldn’t even need to edit them out of the MCU: this is a superhero world, the audience can just assume “There’s probably some superhero stuff that went down in New York”. If superhero culture is big enough that you can drop Black Panther and Spiderman into a movie without backstory, then you can imply that superhero stuff is frequently going on and something not plot-critical happened offscreen.

            1. Was it, though? The ideology behind it wasn’t 9/11-ish at all, and if anything, it would probably be seen as either a reason to hate metahumans (if they count Loki as one) or a reason to keep them around.

              To be honest, it’s more like a natural disaster, since it wasn’t something that was done because of a political or religious belief, nor could we strike back against the aliens militarily, nor were they likely to return unless an Asgardian-level entity decided to open a gateway or something.

    2. Matt Downie says:

      The alien army from Avengers could be taken down with arrows, so I assume guns would have worked. Many Marvel villains aren’t bullet-proof. Hydra? Baron Zemo? Kingpin? Ninjas? Winter Soldier? That whip guy from Iron Man 2? And that’s just the supervillains. Regular criminals still exist.

      The only reason cops are obsolete is that if they were actually competent, the Punisher would have nothing to do.

      1. Ninety-Three says:

        Oh yeah, it’s not a literally accurate statement, just a flowery way to point out that cops are completely outgunned in a superhero world. Because the Avengers aliens weren’t technically bulletproof, but they still wiped the floor with the NYPD.

        1. Hal says:

          At some point, the question that really needs to be asked is why guys like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark keep all of this super tech to themselves.

          Like, Batman can whip up cures to never-before seen strains of Joker toxins in hours. If he passed that tech on to medical researchers, how many diseases could we cure that cause untold global suffering?

          Tony Stark has created a capacity for walking arsenals that fit around a man’s body. Maybe he could provide a fraction of that tech to, say, police departments. Doesn’t even have to be the whole suit. In the first movie, in mere moments, he targeted a handful of hostiles with tranq darts with enough precision to miss their hostages; you think law enforcement wouldn’t want something like that on hand?

          I’m sure there’s the “slippery slope, only I can be trusted with it, blah blah blah” sort of rationalizations. Still. These guys regularly throw around tech that would earn a Nobel Prize for even a half-implemented prototype.

          1. Peter H Coffin says:

            Tony Stark has created a capacity for walking arsenals that fit around a man's body. Maybe he could provide a fraction of that tech to, say, police departments.

            Suffice it to say that not every American out there believes that arming up police departments and making them even more anonymously threatening is really a good idea, and why is deeply political. Shamus’s ban-hammer is probably already rattling on its hook.

            1. Hal says:

              Well, okay, real world politics aside, we’re talking about a world where people with magic artifacts and laser guns and killbots and mutant powers (etc.) regularly create mayhem in the public square. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask, “Hey, why hasn’t Tony Stark given the NYPD a few laser guns of their own?”

              I mean, if there was a 9/11-equivalent event caused by super heroes, I’m fairly certain you’d end up with Sentinels at every airport in America, and the general public wouldn’t bat an eye about it.

              1. felblood says:

                Hail Hydra!

              2. I thought most big-city PD’s had anti-superhero stuff. I don’t know if they’ve been established enough in the films, but most animated TV and comics often have a kind of anti-powers SWAT team showing up to escort a villain to jail or to get stomped by a villain to demonstrate how tough they are.

                Mostly it’s high-tech bazookas and body armor, if I recall correctly.

              3. The Other Matt K says:

                Luke Cage actually touches on this point. There is a discussion about getting the cops access to super-powered tech, and someone points out that any weapon the cops get almost always ends up also showing up on the streets, and when both the cops and the gangs both have super-guns, you end up with a lot more potential for both escalation and catastrophe.

          2. Ciennas says:

            The reason is simple. For the same reason that Fallout is never going to truly get over the apocalypse and rebuild, tech heroes can’t share their gadgets. Then it would stop being our world + and move on to being its own thing.

            It does have the side effect of making our heroes look like pricks in some cases though.

            At least Age of Ultron established there was a lot of work being done to replicate the tech hero stuff, as shown in the opening.

          3. Ninety-Three says:

            As I said above, it’s a genre problem. Superscientists aren’t allowed to radically reinvent the world or the setting starts to shift from “Modern day with superheroes” to “Sci-fi utopia”. There can be no satisfying in-universe explanation, the same way you can’t really address questions like “How does the Joker keep breaking out of prison and why hasn’t anyone done anything about it?”

            1. Ciennas says:

              You could make it a cosmic horror story.

              The Joker identity is like a disease. Every time you put one away or kill one, the mantle moves on to someone else. It would also explain why Batman is hesitant to kill the bastard too- you know he’ll jusf show up again in a month or so, and maybe this incarnation will just shoot people or really make use of Jokers inexplicable resources to more horrifying ends then the current mantleholder.

              And I would love to see them go all the way and just do that already. Make it resemble our world less and less because it stopped being our world the moment someone donned a mask to fight or commit crimes and got a gimmick better then ‘The Robber’ or ‘The guy who is still wearing his maquerade ball mask way past the point of social acceptability while punching criminals’ and didn’t get prosecuted.

              1. felblood says:

                So basically the idea they have been dancing around with in Gotham for two season, but not stating outright, because they don’t ever want to be explicit with anyone having mystical powers, because that is somehow way less believable than this goofy 50’s sci-fi stuff they’ve got going on, and would totally lose the audience.

                1. Ciennas says:

                  Since I haven’t watched Gotham, sure. If that’s what they’ve been doing.

                  Fun thought experiment: Batman isn’t a superhero. At least, that’s not the world he most normally occupies.

                  Look at Arkham City. You had magic and mysticism bouncing off government conspiracies and regular people fighting beings who may as well be eldritch abominations.

                  What genre is he?

                  DISCLAIMER: Yes, he hangs out with superman on occasion. That’s not really my point though. Looking at Batman on his lonesome, what Genre are his stories? His world?

                  (I suspect he and Harry Dresden are in the same bar after they call it a night.)

              2. ehlijen says:

                That would drastically change everything batman is about.

                Shamus did a post on that a while back http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27382

                Batman can’t kill for a mix of two reasons: he wouldn’t be a hero anymore, and the stories would run out of bad guys.
                The punisher, from what I hear, runs into both problems and ends up a less compelling or popular protagonist (judging by how many mass media incarnations both have had).

                You are right in that the batman world is not our world. It is a specifically crafted world to give us batman as he is. What you propose is a different crafted world with an entirely different message, and it wouldn’t be the one a lot of batman fans want to read/watch.

                1. Ciennas says:

                  I didn’t say Batman had to kill him. A big moment at the end of Arkham City comes from somebody else getting sick of the not quite bromance those two have going and just trying to straight up kill the clown.

                  I suspect multiple people would come to a similar conclusion.

                  1. ehlijen says:

                    Someone else killing the joker still runs into most of the same problems though: How do you keep the franchise going and keep a strong line of recognisable villains?

                    The real reason the joker always lives is so that there’ll never be a Final Joker Story, so that there’ll always be room for one more that can come after.

                    If you take out the joker and replace him with a chain of new villains, you’re abandoning a lot of the groundwork that has been laid with the rogue’s gallery and will likely reach audience burnout and/or villain decay pretty quickly. Why risk that if you can just say the same old villain is on the lose again?

                    It’s not a perfect solution, but it works for those who want their masked vigilante stories where the hero stays a hero.

                    The way I’ve always seen it is not ‘the joker always escapes and kills more people’ but ‘batman always gets the joker in the end’. Each individual story ends that way (and stands separate from any that follow).
                    And this is where I think the continuity and crossover obsession of the two main US comic houses is getting in the way of good stories.

                    1. Ciennas says:

                      I know all those things you said. You missed the parts about the Joker identity being a mantle. Which could ditch its current host for whatever reason.

                      So you wouldn’t have a string of replacements. You’d be dealing with another incarnation of the Joker sooner or later.

                      And maybe this time, instead of helping Lex Luthor steal 40 cakes, he just shoots an orphanage full of Joker Gas. Or is otherwise played by Jack Nicholson.

                      (Has anyone seen Mark Hamill and the Joker at the same time? ;-) )

                      That said, movies lend themselves well to a more realistic take on things, as they generally make it so that villain roles are nonreprisable. It’s only with Marvel that they haven’t killed EVERY adversary they come across. Just most of them.

                      Maybe a long form manga style story? You know there is an ending coming up, but you get to tell the complete Batman story? Like Fullmetal Alchemist?

                    2. ehlijen says:

                      I didn’t miss the bit about the Joker mantle. I said it would change the central message from batman of ‘one man can make a difference by punching crime in the face’ to ‘nothing can ever stop crime for good’.

                      If nothing can stop a new joker from popping up every time, the there will be clear in-universe statement that batman can’t win.

                      As of now, that statement is purely out of universe: ‘there will be more batman stories’, but in each story batman wins. If you put that out of universe contrivance into in-universe justification, you destroy the wish fulfilment aspect of the batman stories.

                      You could do it, but you’d have something very different, and I personally don’t think call of cthullhu and batman are drawing on the same audience.

          4. silver Harloe says:

            warning: tv tropes may consume hours of your life before you realize it: Reed Richards is Useless lists several possible reasons Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark aren’t busy changing the world

    3. Daemian Lucifer says:

      All comic books have that problem to some extent

      No one came here to say “except watchmen”?And you people call yourselves nerds.

      1. ehlijen says:

        I think it’s fair to say that statement was meant to be read as ‘all superhero comic books set in ostensibly modern day earth’, which watchmen kinda/kinda not falls under as it is explicitly set in a different timeline.

        Guardians of the Galaxy and Asterix wouldn’t run into that specific problem, either.

        1. Mike S. says:

          Watchmen also isn’t an open-ended serial. There are lots of things you can do if you’re prepared to ring down the curtain at the end that you can’t if you want to keep using the characters going forward.

          The 80s got some good stories out of testing the limits of the genre. But it also taught lesser creators a lot of lessons that don’t apply so well when you have to leave the character and setting usable for the next guy.

          (Alan Moore: “Superman is driven to kill– but just as he’s always said, that means he can no longer be Superman.” John Byrne: “Superman is driven to kill, and… I’ll leave the details for the next creative team to deal with!” Next Creative Team: “Um… he feels bad, goes on a vision quest, and decides he shouldn’t do that again, we guess? Hey look! Mongul!”)

          1. ehlijen says:

            “Watchmen also isn't an open-ended serial. There are lots of things you can do if you're prepared to ring down the curtain at the end that you can't if you want to keep using the characters going forward.”

            Absolutely. It was also an independent setting, meaning they never had to worry about including other line’s continuity (e.g. Jessica Jones needing to prove Kilgrave’s powers in a world that had seen what Loki can do).

  7. Christopher says:

    Although it’s almost certainly a sign of the end times because there are only so many hours in the day, I like that the Spoiler Warning crew is pairing off or going solo for games that only one or two people care about. I couldn’t be assed to play DA2 for myself after not liking the first two hours, so having Mumbles walk me thorugh it instead sounds great. Romance Isabela this time! I wanna see the hot pirate. Alternatively, romance the Tevinter slave so I can see what all the fuss is about. The girls I know that played DA2 all love him, there’s just no competition.

    1. Henson says:

      I never played DA2, but from what I’ve watched online, that entire intro sequence is one of the worst narrative starts to any Bioware game I’ve ever seen.

      1. Christopher says:

        Sure is the worst one I’ve tried myself! So sudden, with weird pacing and timeskips and unfamiliar, dull characters, and retconing a dead one to be alive again with some lich “soul in an item” stuff. I guess they didn’t want to do the slow DAO thing again, but I really didn’t like how they did it. Combined with the ugly and gray environments, me not liking the combat at all, and hearing about the repeated dungeons and the Templar/Mages conflict resolution… I just never came back to it after quitting for the first time.

        But I have been told the juicy character stuff is just as good as ever! So that’s what I’m excited about seeing. The Qunari chapter’s supposed to be great too.

  8. Xedo says:

    ‘Rectangular prism’ might have been the 3 dimensional term you were looking for in the picross 3d conversation. They are alternatively called cuboids.

  9. Merlin says:

    Maybe Mumbles getting banned from her dating sim is just a verisimilitude thing. You moved, long distance relationships are terrible, time to break up with everybody. :P

  10. Hey Mumbles, The Nuka Cola Future world has a functional rollercoaster “Nuka Girl” ride. Did you get to try that?

    1. Wide And Nerdy® says:

      I was impressed at first. I thought there would be other functional rides.

      Not that I checked closely because it was at about this point that I uninstalled and deleted everything Fallout 4 related including save files and mod archives to save me from myself.

    2. Aspeon says:

      Does Nuka World have a Club Nuka where you get to sample all the random international Nuka Cola brands? That’d actually explain the flavor creep.

      1. Hmm. Not sure. But I do know you can find a terminal that has emails about Nuka Cola buying up smaller competitors, and re-branding them as their own.

  11. Echo Tango says:

    Man…can’t Mystic Messenger just check the location of the phone from GPS? If they’re going to be hard on cheaters, it’s not unreasonable to only allow the game to be played with GPS enabled. It’s only slightly more of an inconvenience than demanding WiFi / data, so if they’re already being jerks, they could be slightly less jerk if they had a sane check to validate you actually moved time zones. Also, they could just straight up have the server keep track of time zones / hours played on it’s side, so they wouldn’t even need to check time zones to stop cheaters! :S

    1. Matt Downie says:

      GPS probably isn’t the right way to do it. You need to get user permission to use it, and it’s not 100% reliable.

      In the mobile game I’m developing, I check the difference between server time and user time every time they log on (or switch back into the game). I then store the difference and use it to calculate server time, so we have a reliable clock to work from. I use timezone only for ‘make the next daily event available at X o’ clock, local time’. I store their timezone, and allow it to change once a week maximum, to allow holidays but prevent exploits. If they try to change it more often than that, I just make them continue to use their previous timezone. I don’t ban anyone. That would be silly.

      1. Decius says:

        So if they change time zones and thus local time while in the app, or if their cell tower adjusts time while they are in the app, they time travel?

        1. felblood says:

          Only once a week!

          1. Matt Downie says:

            Not… really? It just means that the things that are supposed to happen in the middle of the night (like the ‘Tuesday event’ being replaced by the ‘Wednesday’ event) will happen a few hours earlier or later.

    2. silver Harloe says:

      “if you change timezone once in a week, that’s fine, if you change it 6 times in a day…” – Shamus (paraphrased)

      So if I take my phone with me and fly to London (8 time zones away from me, pretty sure it takes less than 24 hours to get there), I’m a big cheatz0r?

      Perhaps we mean the phone should be smart enough to count ‘flying to London’ as one timezone change because a human can clearly identify that those 7 changes were really one change – but I’m not sure to write that code (so this is argument from lack of imagination, I guess) – it can’t be by speed alone, because I can also take a train across several time zones in a day, or a cruise ship where I change time zones every day for a couple weeks.

      1. Flock Of Panthers says:

        Why would you change to each timezone that you went through in your flight?

        When I fly between Sydney and London (24+ hours including a layover), I change timezone once upon landing.

        1. silver Harloe says:

          You get to voluntarily tell your phone the TZ? I thought it would change itself based on your location.

          1. Mike S. says:

            You can set it manually. When I’ve traveled internationally, I’ve kept my phone in airplane mode and used Wi-Fi to avoid roaming charges, so it never gets the new time zone from a cell tower.

      2. Peter H Coffin says:

        There’s no lack of places where you can change timezones just by having a cellphone lock onto a different tower.

        1. Matt Downie says:

          Some people must presumably live very close to the border where the time zone changes…

      3. MichaelGC says:

        Starting to sound a bit nesty, this problem…

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

      4. SlothfulCobra says:

        Presumably the whole system was just designed with South Korea in mind, the nation with a grand total of 1 timezone.

  12. Tizzy says:

    Listening to Josh describe the Event[0] setting, it suddenly struck me how lazy a vaguely dystopian setting can appear. I haven’t played the game, so I don’t know if it applies in this particular case, but the mention of “maybe the people who control space travel are not that well intentioned” gave me flashbacks.

    Dystopian for specific reasons can be interesting. Vaguely dystopian feels just like a cheap way to inject some edginess into a setting.

  13. Ilseroth says:

    I eat a ton of junky foods and I am still around 140 lbs (at 6’1″) and I am 28 years old. That’s not to say I didn’t get screwed by some old habits I had in my late teens and early 20s though. Fresh out of highschool I was downing a 12 pack of soda every 2-3 days and so my teeth are pretty messed up; but for whatever reason my metabolism is still fine with me chowing down on pizza and chips on the regular; which is great since I absolutely adore pizza.

    1. Wide And Nerdy® says:

      I am amazingly jealous of you. Its not fair.

      Its not fair.

      Its so not fair.

      Its so much better to be skinny as a rail than it is to be fat these days. Not even talking about health here.

      1. Peter H Coffin says:

        Then you get to be 70 and start realizing that the fat guy is so much more likely to survive a heart attack than a skinny dude that the increased incidence doesn’t even it out anymore, much less how survivable things bouts of pneumonia when the body reserves are there to feed it.

        1. Wide And Nerdy® says:

          I’d rather risk that than be me in modern society.

          I’m working on it, I’m just jealous of people who never have to. Especially when I get judged and he doesn’t.

        2. Philadelphus says:

          What does body fat have to do with surviving a heart attack? I’m genuinely curious here.

          1. MichaelGC says:

            This article reckons that: “fat surrounding damaged blood vessels releases chemicals that starts to battle heart disease.”

            http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11657811/Why-obesity-protects-against-heart-disease-and-heart-attack.html

            Presumably a difficult balance to get right? Reminded me of Mr. Burns and his Three Stooges Syndrome:

            http://youtu.be/aI0euMFAWF8

            1. Philadelphus says:

              Huh! Interesting. Thanks.

    2. silver Harloe says:

      I was like that until about 32, then it stopped and I started gaining a massive “beer gut” (I don’t drink beer, but the appearance is the same)

  14. bhleb says:

    mumbles was talking about gotham central, one of the best comic books I ever read, written by greg rucka at his best and featuring one of the best underutilized comicbook characters, renee montoya

    it’s a wonderful comic and one of the best parts of early 2000s batman mythos (before dan didio decided to change everything for the worse)

    1. Matt Downie says:

      It had two writers: Greg Rucka wrote the GCPD’s day shift storylines and Ed Brubaker took the night shift.

  15. Wide And Nerdy® says:

    I think Nuka World probably works best on a fresh playthrough. Its better if you decide from the beginning that you want to be a raider. Though its not too bad if you ignore the Minutemen.

    1. Ciennas says:

      Right up until you go back. Or right up until raiding becomes stupid. Once you have the park operational, most of the impetus for being a raider is gone. You have farmable land, food sources besides that, robotic labor, shelter with easily repaired point defenses, discarded suits of power armor that are literally the most advanced available, etc.

      After a certain point you’d legitimize yourself.

  16. Christopher says:

    Can I get some spoilers on Luke Cage content here? The Diecast says the first few episodes are a mob story, but after that, are there regular superpower battles or is it vague martial arts stuff? Because I’m not that interested in Agent Carter style martial arts + one very good hypnotist, but I’d love if an Electro-type villain showed up, if you see what I’m trying to get at. I wanna see some superpowers and supervillains in my superhero shows, and I want them to look cool and or/goofy. The Flash show has some of that, but it didn’t spend enough time on them(or cool enough effects) for my tastes, and I feel a vigilante show loses something when the hero has his own professional support team solve every villain for him.

    1. Falterfire says:

      Haven’t finished the series quite yet, but I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that the style and tone are not a bait & switch. If you want flamboyant costumes and Avengers style super-fights, you’ll walk away disappointed.

      If you watched Daredevil or Jessica Jones, that should give you an idea of the sort of thing to expect. If that’s not your bag, Luke Cage probably won’t be either.

      1. Ringwraith says:

        I think it’s important to remember that most of the non-movie Marvel stuff isn’t “superhero” genre, it’s other genres with superheroes in.

        1. Thomas Lines says:

          That’s only kind of true. Even Winter Soldier absolutely spins on superhero tropes. I’d say it was a superhero film with paranoid thriller tropes in it, not the other way round.

          1. Ringwraith says:

            Well, the movies are more strictly superhero-genre-feeling, which is why I excluded them from the definition, but even they often attempt to fuse a couple together rather than simply be ‘superheroes’.
            The non-movie stuff is almost always ‘x genre which just happens to have superheroes in’.

      2. Christopher says:

        Thanks, in that case I’m not interested.

  17. TMC_Sherpa says:

    Kayfabe? Really? I mean I appreciate the work they put in over the years but they’ve been a jobber for how long now?

    I’ll stick with 11 time champ Vacated thankyouverymuch.

  18. potatoejenkins says:

    Mumbles, Mumbles – romance everybody! And then, after boinking Anders, you ask if he wants a sandwich. And then you dump him and run away with Fenris or Isabella. I mean Isabella. Fenris is cool an all, but Izzy is more fun.

  19. I think Rutskarn’s secret of youth is that when he was in grade school, he accidentally created the Fingerpainting Portrait of Dorian Gray. It’s being kept somewhere in his parents’ house, lost in his other childhood papers and scrapbooks, preventing him from aging. Someday, it’ll get thrown out, wind up on a trash fire, and he’ll suddenly age decades in the span of a few minutes.

  20. Roddenberry wasn’t right for Star Trek: TNG. However, Berman & Braga weren’t able to do Trek any favors past aping Babylon-5 for Deep Space 9, not realizing Voyager needed a head writer, and wrecking everything about Star Trek Enterprise except for the final season, minus the finale.

    If you don’t mind the cast, watch Enterprise’s last season. It was stories of 2-3 episodes each, they were about the early days of the Federation, and they were actually good. Then, for contrast, watch the finale, which was a Berman & Braga product. It pretty much destroys the previous seasons and shows why those two are the Kurtzman and Orci of their time.

  21. Steve C says:

    We’ve been talking about Luke Cage in the Marvel thread on the Twenty Sided forums. Reactions are far more mixed than the Spoiler Warning crew (who all liked it). I didn’t like Luke Cage for a lot of the reasons mentioned on the Diecast that they liked it. For example I hated the prison episode.

    I don’t think anyone really liked the first 3 episodes. It’s been a fairly uniform ‘meh’. But after those I really started to dislike the show. It is interesting that is where it starts to define it’s audience by polarizing opinion.

  22. Philadelphus says:

    Poor Mumbles, getting banned from Mystic Messenger. :(

    Here, maybe a game about dating cute boy cats will help.

  23. NotSteve says:

    Considering he wasn’t here, I take it Rutskarn didn’t survive Halloween Horror Night.

  24. SlothfulCobra says:

    The marvel movies are alright, but it’s really disturbing to me what the feedback from the movie marketing machine is doing to the comics. Back in the day before the Marvel movies were reunited under one roof, the comics did little nods to whatever the movies were doing at the time, but now it’s starting to get out of hand. God knows the first civil war crossover was bad enough, but doing a whole second one just to tie into the movies? Ugh. It also feels like there are broader plans where messy, complex characters are “cleaned up” so that they’ll be ready for the silver screen and wider audiences.

    I don’t think Marvel will ever be so petty as to just get rid of the X-Men just because they don’t have the movie rights, but it is really hard to not see that as Marvel’s plan when they are LITERALLY dying off to the less popular, but more fully-owned-by-marvel Inhumans. I think the idea is just to force their “rogue” IPs through a lot of wild transformations so that their movie competitors have nothing to tie into, because Disney just wants to starve out its competition rather than build bridges and prosper in tandem with Fox.

    1. Christopher says:

      How widespread is their “make it match the movies” approach, besides the X-Men/Inhuman/Fantastic 4 stuff? I am vaguely aware of some stuff through internet osmosis, like a black Nick Fury introduced to the regular Marvel universe. But most of the big news I hear about Marvel comics, like woman Thor/Iron Man or Captain America Falcon isn’t reflected in the movies at all. Or for an example the opposite way, I haven’t heard anything about a Black Widow/Hulk romance in the comics.

      1. krellen says:

        Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury precedes his first appearance in Iron Man. That’s actually from the comics.

        1. Christopher says:

          Yeah, but not the regular universe. It was an Ultimate thing, right? I guess you could make the point that it’s the comics influencing other comics. I always got the impression that after they used him for the movies, they replaced the old Nick Fury in any other tie-in, like Earth’s Mighties Heroes.

          1. I’m not sure if they replaced him in the comics, but I’m guessing they haven’t used him on the show or movies lately because Samuel L. Jackson is likely very, very expensive or has other things he wants to do with his time.

            They left the door open for his return, though. He’s still “out there, somewhere,” having left SHIELD in Coulson’s hands.

        2. SlothfulCobra says:

          Ultimate Samuel Jackson Nick Fury predates the comics, but they introduced some weird new Samuel Jackson Nick Fury in the main universe who may be the son of the original Nick Fury or something, I’m not sure. More importantly, original flavor Nick Fury was written out of the picture after he killed the Watcher.

          Nick Fury #2 comes and goes though; I think they’re trying to keep him a simple and clean character, so he gets to do simple action stuff while now SHIELD is being run by Maria Hill, who I think is the best director of SHIELD, but Marvel has just been using her as a scapegoat whenever they want an authority figure to yell at.

          Civil War 2 is the biggest way that the comics have tried to emulate the movies so far that I know of, but for the most part I hadn’t been following the characters who had movies to tie into. I know Scott Lang and Captain America got un-benched so that they could take advantage of movie buzz, and the Guardians of the Galaxy exploded into 4 or 5 separate titles after the movie came out. Before the MCU there was a little movie tie-in as well, but it was never so pervasive to take over so much of the Marvel canon as it does now. Back when Spider-Man 3 came out there was a little story where an alternate-universe Uncle Ben showed up so that the Sandman could kill him while for some reason Spider-Man decided to go back to his black costume, but it was a quick thing and it was over.

  25. So, anyone else catch the holy Sony is digging that is just getting deeper?

    First the PS 4 Pro does not fully support 4K bluray.
    Now it turns out that the PSVR passthrough box does not support HDR, so if you want to game in HDR you have to unplug the PSVR box from the PS4Pro.

    I wonder what the durability of that connector is.

    Now Microsoft is releasing their new box in less than a year I think. And I’m pretty sure it will have full 4K bluray and full HDR. Then again Microsoft do not have their own VR headeset (yet).
    Microsoft’s Xbox boss did say that there was no point in them releasing a XboxOne+, which seems to be reflected in the Xbox Scorpio which does look more like a new console than Sony’s PS4 Pro is.

    Maybe in a year or so Sony will blindside everyone by announcing a PS5 but that brings an issue. They would need to release a PSVR2 with HDR support.

    And due to the commitment to PS4 and PS4Pro any devs will have to target:
    PS4, PS4Pro, PS5, PS4 w/PSVR, PS4 w/PSVR2, PS4Pro w/PSVR, PS4Pro w/PSVR2 , PS5 w/PSVR , PS5Pro w/PSVR2
    That’s 9 configurations to develop for on the PlayStation platform alone.

    Unless they make PSVR2 only work on PS5 and PSVR only on PS4/PS4Pro in which case it’ll be:
    PS4, PS4Pro, PS5, PS4 w/PSVR, PS4Pro w/PSVR, PS5Pro w/PSVR2
    That’s still 6 configurations devs will have to juggle.

    Whereas Xbox will be: Xbox One/One S, Xbox Scorpio
    (The Xbox One S is just more or less a revision of the Xbox One.)

    When the PS4 launched Sony had the upper hand, this time around Sony jumped in a hole for some reason and let Microsoft take the lead.
    I’m guessing Microsoft’s Scorpio spooked Sony and made them jump the gun.

    To me it looks like the Xbox One S is Microsoft just matching the horsepower of the PS4 and adding on 4K bluray and HDR, and that’s it. Over time the Xbox One S will replace the Xbox One.

    And before anyone throws fanboy accusations around, I don’t own/use consoles. The last console I owned was a Playstation 1 (the first/original) which broke like decades ago.

  26. Phantos says:

    …Wait… isn’t Mystic Messenger a dating sim? Those are single-player games, right?

    Why would anyone get banned?

    Is this like a competitive multiplayer shooter where cheating gives you an unfair advantage over the enemy team?

    Am I missing something here?

    1. Ninety-Three says:

      It’s one of those “Either wait for a lengthy timer in order to keep playing the game, or give us $1” microtransaction schemes, so cheating gives you an unfair advantage over the developer’s ability to bleed you dry.

      1. To play devil’s advocate, it’s kind of neat that a game has people willing to throw some money at a developer to get more of a narrative more quickly rather than to get a better weapon to kill mooks with.

  27. Joshua Rowlison says:

    If the code in Event[0] can be brute-forced faster than playing the game, does that make the game actually just a protracted Yak-Shaving simulator?

  28. Riley says:

    Nuka World is actually a really good showcase of how good Bethesda is at marketing now, that they’ve realized they can weaponize it and use it inside the games too
    The DLC was short as hell and disappointed me in nearly every aspect, but dang do I want some nuka cola

    Hilariously, not many people know about this, but aside from the sad and possibly ironic Vim HQ in Far Harbor, they also tested this in the Contraptions DLC with two other power armor paint jobs, for abraxo cleaner and sugar bombs, of all things

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