OmarBradley

42 minutes ago, rocknroll41 said:

The reddit thread which revealed these leaks seems to have been deleted from the Star Wars Spoilers Reddit now. Whether it was cause they were real leaks or proven to be bullshit, I have no idea. 

With that being said, I’ll summarize what I remember reading (edit; added in spoilers from other credible sources):

  Reveal hidden contents

-Rey visits Tatooine.

-Kylo/Ben pilots the Falcon.

-we get a flashback of Han and Leia delivering an 8-year-old Ben Solo to Luke. We see Luke asking him if he wants to be a jedi, and Ben responds by saying he wants to be a guardian of good for the Galaxy.

-Kerri Russel has an entire subplot with Luke Skywalker.

-The Knights of Ren play a very big role in the movie.

-Matt Smith was seen on set with black robes and a lightsaber (it was previously rumored that he was playing a young Palpatine of some kind).

-Naomie Ackie plays Lando’s daughter, Vera.

-Lando apparently does “some cool shit” and might also fly the falcon at one point too.

-Dominic Monhigan plays a rebel who works for Naomie named Avryl (not big but eh every little tidbit of info is cool I guess).

-Poe and Finn lead a new army of guerilla fighters. Rose apparently isn’t in the movie as much but does have at least one action sequence with Finn (other rumors suggest that she does stuff with Rey too).

-Daisy Ridley let it slip in an interview that Finn and Rey do a lot more together in this movie too.

-Hux, like, usurps Kylo or defects to the rebels or something? Can’t remember, but it was something like that.

-Both Kylo’s mask and Rey’s saber are reformed but more “scrappy-looking” now (confirmed from leaked marketing previews).

-BB8 has a new droid sidekick named D-0 (pronounced “dio”) that looks like a little megaphone with tiny robot arms and legs (confirmed from leaked marketing previews).

-the three planets are desert (likely tatooine), jungle, and swamp (supported by the highly-credible source MakingStarWars).

-we know for sure that the production sure had jungle and swamp sets near Pinewoods Studios, and also went to go shoot at the deserts of Jordan for a little bit, which adds credibility to the planet rumors.

-Kylo finds a Palpatine holocron that leads him to a new super weapon that’s like three Death Stars all combined together, which is an unused concept from Return of the Jedi (also supported by MakingStarWars).

-The swamp set is apparently for a big battle sequence with rebels and stormtroopers (from MakingStarWars).

Is anyone else just completely unexcited by plot points, SW leaks, and the prospect of episode IX?

Between TLJ being a mess, EA's atrocious handling of the SW gaming license, and SW turning into Marvel 2.0 I am just unenthused. Yeah I'll see the movie at the first showing and I'll be on line a few hours before, but man I have never felt so ambivalent about SW in my entire life. And much of my life has included SW in a big way, whether it was watching the prequels in theaters or playing SWG, Jedi Academy, Republic Commando, KoTOR 1/2, the original two Battlefronts, Starfighter, Rogue Squadron, Rebel Assualt, Tie Figher - the best thing about SW has always been the video games IMO. The books to a degree as well.

Since Disney has taken the helm, we've received just Battlefront I and II. Two mediocre games with heavy emphasis on monetization. The epic looking SW 1313 was cancelled, the SW Visceral game was cancelled in 2017, the SW open world game being developed by EA Vancouver has been cancelled as of a week ago (with it being reported the studio is working on a smaller scale project instead because EA wants a game out soon and the open-world thing was taking too long. If this is a mobile game, I will burn EA to the ground and gladly take credit for it <---- CONFESSION HERE, POLICE).

I hate that Star Wars no longer excites me.

2 hours ago, Raiken said:

Jeffries has notably fabricated facts before to supplement his comedy routine, who is to say he hasn't done it here for the same reason? 

Example-

https://www.quora.com/What-do-gun-activists-think-of-Jim-Jefferies’s-gun-control-bit

Problem is TB is about just as trustworthy as Jeffries. 

14 hours ago, Draguns said:

I have to respectfully disagree with you regarding Don't Damn Me. It 's far from  "cutting a lot of fat" as you stated. It's one of the most powerful songs on either UYI albums.  I wish that GNR played it live back in the day.  It's a song that resonates with me throughout my life. 

 

I agree with you. And there's not a lot of fat I'd trim off UYI in general. But Don't Damn Me shouldn't be anywhere near a list of "things to cut from UYI."

2 hours ago, Underhardy said:

Slash’s story about him running around one of those golf resorts that Goldstein brought him to. He was tripping out so hard he had to escape out of his room because millions of weird little critters were chasing him. He ended up running around the golf course like a mad man avoiding the army of little shits of his imagination. So whacked out 

Pretty sure he was nude too.

41 minutes ago, soon said:

Slash sneaking his Mountain Lion Curtis into a hotel room.

Axl jumping out of moving car in response to being asked not to sleep on Slashs' Grand Ma-Ma's couch.

Yeah the car story is classic. Slash recalls they were moving around 40 mph.

I've only read Slash's book, though I've heard good things about Duff's, Steven's, and of course Marc's. 

A story that I always remember from Slash's book was about him driving drunk in LA - probably early to mid 90s. If I recall correctly, it was very late at night with not many people on the road.

Slash, being drunk, got into an accident with another motorist. Apparently, that driver came up to Slash and said something like, "Hey man, you're drunk, wtf."

So Slash, in his infinite wisdom, replied, "Well... you're drunk."

And the two continued on their merry way, not involving the police or insurance companies. 

I don't really think of them as two different albums. I just know all of the songs are from "Use Your Illusion" and I don't really give any thought as to whether something was on I or II. Thematic separation makes sense, but past certain stylistic quirks, all of the UYI songs have a UYI tonality to them due to being recorded with the same gear in the same studio. It would be interesting if they had different mixers/masters for each album instead of using the same person/hardware, but my guess is all of the songs were recorded, mixed, and mastered together and then split into two albums.

EDIT: Right, this was supposed to be comparing UYI and Appetite... oh well.

34 minutes ago, arnold layne said:

HeartGold and SoulSilver are among one of my favorite Pokémon games. They are very well done remakes. 

I'm playing New Super Mario U Deluxe. I like Mario 2D games, but my biggest complaint is that you have to get to a checkpoint to save. I find myself trying to get there instead of casually enjoying the game. You would think Nintendo would have changed this after twenty or so years.

Switch is awesome though. I hope they make abother 3D world. 

I was greatly enjoying my playthrough, but apparently the iOS DS emu is not approved by Apple, meaning you can only use the app for X amount of days (7 or less, seems random but always less than a week). The workaround is to delete it and reinstall, which I've done once without issue, but just I spent the last 45 minutes fighting the reinstalled emulator to get it to recognize my saves, without success. Just beat the E4 too, not interested in starting over. Very annoying. I've always disliked Apple for reasons like this, among other things.

Don't think it's Blind Melon. If it is it would be an obscure deep cut or something off the later releases. 

Cool driving videos though. Wish we had roads like that near me.

Playing HeartGold for the first time, played Gold/Silver/Emerald years ago.

Just noticed this, are we no longer tolerant here?

When expletives were posted they used to be replaced by "Hooray for tolerance!" if I recall correctly. 

12 hours ago, DeadSlash said:

I would counter that this is no different than being excited to hear Axl on Angel Down.  

Yes, I am a massive GnR mark, but that does not preclude me from being a massive Axl Rose mark.  These are not mutually exclusive things.  Axl is my favorite singer of all time, I would be willing to wager he is for a great many people on these forums.  There is no magic wand waved that makes me dislike his voice if it is not singing something he wrote with Slash.

This is a new, crystal clear studio track with my favorite vocal artist of all time.  Starved or not, I would dig this.

Angel Down was a real project by a real band. By that I mean, it was music made for sake of making music, not to accompany a scripted animation. Axl sounds GREAT on Angel Down and pretty good on Rock the Rock. I like them both and I'm glad he did them, but I can see each project for what they are. 

I would prefer Axl continued to do guest spots on his friends' albums rather than a random Looney Tunes appearance. 

I may have not explained my initial post well, but I wasn't implying people should dislike Rock the Rock because it wasn't written by Slash or GNR. My point was Axl did pretty much the same thing Slash did (appear on a children's program), but the community's reaction to each was very different, without a good reason other than "I like Axl's voice and I haven't heard it in a while."

Slash was derided for being a sellout (even though the Phineas and Ferb thing was about his kids) and the song not being good. The music to Rock to Rock pretty much sounds like the producer for the soundtrack said to the session band, "okay, write exactly what you think a typical hard rock song sounds like." I'm glad people are enjoying it, but other than Axl's voice it's just a 2 minute session song that most people probably wouldn't notice or take any significant liking toward. Slash actually sat down to write a full song for his soundtrack appearance. Obviously, Axl is a singer so he's probably not usually writing the music and arrangement to the tracks he's on, but I'm not faulting him for that. 

I agree, starved or not I'm sure people would dig this. But if GNR was putting out original music and being an active band other than touring a near identical set-list for 2 years, I'm skeptical a Looney Tunes appearance would generate 32 pages worth of discussion. 

Just now, ZoSoRose said:

This is definitely all true but I am still happy to hear some studio vocals from the guy so its exciting for me for that reason. 

Agreed, it's exciting and I like the track overall.

I just like to rain on parades. Especially when the parades are hollow. 

On 12/31/2018 at 8:01 PM, wasted said:

I somehow got my sister killed but I’m living in a mansion. I keep pressing the joke option, does it make any difference what decisions you make? 

I actually manage to control my whole team to defeat this ancient wraith thing. It kept nuking the area. 

I also realised I’ve been running around with much better weapons and armour in my back pack. And leveling up is manual too. 

I’ll probably get origins and inquisition if I see them somewhere. Maybe Mass Effect 2. 

I'm pretty sure one sibling has to die - if not a sibling, someone definitely dies in that intro, so you didn't do anything wrong, I don't think.

I believe DA:II works similar to Mass Effect's system where standard dialogue choices color how your character is viewed/acts, and then there are set story decisions that change either the process in getting to an outcome or the outcome itself of an event. Unsurprising given DA:II would have come out as BioWare's next release after ME:II.

11 hours ago, wasted said:

Is it for 360? I’ll look out for Witcher  in the second hand bins. 

Yes, should be for 360. Also, The Witcher II is well worth playing as well and should be for 360 - it's much less open world and a lot more streamlined (hesitant to use linear because you can wander certain areas). But CDPR's narrative abilities are quite strong in the second Witcher game, and combat/other game mechanics are well polished. It was good enough in fact that the prime minister of Poland (at the time) gave a copy to Obama when they met.

I (and many others to be fair) have been saying this for years. 2006 should have been the reunion.

The combination of @wasted talking about Dragon Age and the rumblings from The Game Awards has got gotten me replaying Dragon Age: Origins. Heavily modded this time and first time not playing as a male Cousland. The lore depth is more than I remember, in a good way. So far, being a male Dalish really does make for a (moderately) different experience in dialogue/cutscenes.

On 12/21/2018 at 2:57 PM, MillionsOfSpiders said:

 

I like the other one slightly better, but I think both are just fine and they sound like they could be JW solo songs (with the exception of Brendan singing on the other one). I love their two albums, so I hope this one ends up being just as good.

The judges have deliberated and we have our winners!

Clean:

Crunch:

High Gain:

Judges are still deliberating. We'll have an update for you soon!

Yup. Pretty sure I've seen all of the side-specials: Apocalypse, Of the Pops, Bond Cars, etc.. I've even watched a bunch of Hammond's and May's shows. 

So, we'll be seeing this game sometime between 2022 - 2026 it seems.  

I'm eager for Skywind and Skyblivion though. We should get those before ES VI.

Was looking for the Top Gear/Grand Tour thread and found this!

As far as I've seen, still no news on a release date for the series.  

On 12/6/2018 at 5:46 PM, OmarBradley said:

Bethesda's faux pas is reaching staggering levels. In addition to the unstable servers, buggy gameplay, and content issues, Bethesda is dealing with a slew of new problems (that were pretty avoidable).

People who ordered the Power Armor Edition ($200) received a nylon carrying bag instead of the canvas carrying bag which was advertised with the edition (and was still advertised that way well after release) - the nylon bag was apparently of considerably noticeable low quality compared to canvas. A Bethesda Store employee responded saying something like, "The materials (canvas) were too difficult to source. We have no plans to change this." Naturally, the already frustrated community was very upset. Then Bethesda-proper put out a statement saying, "The store employee was a contract employee and does not know our plans. We were unable to secure materials for the canvas bags. Everyone who ordered the Power Armor Edition is entitled to receive 500 Atoms (micro-transaction currency, $5 value), please contact support to receive them." This enraged the community further, prompting jokes about how canvas was so difficult to source and there must be a canvas shortage, etc. and pointed out you can order canvas bags from certain manufacturers in bulk for about $5 per bag...

Bethesda finally released a statement a few days ago saying they were ordering the canvas bags and would let anyone who received the 500 Atoms keep them as well. OK, took them a few tries, but they made it right (after a pretty significant outcry).

Well, they released a patch on December 4th and apparently it included a bunch of gameplay changes (mostly nerfs that were very unpopular with the community) that were omitted from the patch notes. This prompted a further response from the community and lots of anger that game mechanics people enjoyed were being nerfed when the game still has awful performance issues, gamebreaking bugs, unstable servers, and exploitable content.

THEN, yesterday it was revealed that Bethesda somehow accidentally leaked personal information (name, address, some CC info) of everyone who bought the Power Armor Edition/or filed a support ticket. The form of the leak was somehow their customer service software sent a copy of every ticket submitted by Power Armor Edition recipients, to random players' email accounts. Turns out all of the tickets were viewable through Bethesda's customer support website, not in email accounts.

Pretty nuts. And sad. There is a considerable anti-Bethesda bandwagon forming in the gaming community. Some of it is regarding the healthy competition from CDPR, R*, Ubisoft, etc. who have all recently put out well received products and haven't had similar marketing/communications issues. Really hope Bethesda comes back from this with force in Starfield, they have a long road ahead of them in regaining a large portion of the gaming community's goodwill.

The saga continues.

A new exploit/bug has been discovered that allows players to steal each others' weapons. Apparently, all you have to do is get someone to accept a "Trade" offer and open the Trade pop-up/window; not sure what steps follow after that, but apparently it's easy enough that players are incessantly following other players and spamming them with Trade requests to steal weapons.

Players are also now taking issue with the Atom Store (FO76's micro-transaction interface) - allegedly, Bethesda raised prices in the store after giving out the 500 Atoms for the nylon bag compensation. Combined with the fact prices in the store were already a bit high, this has enraged the player base further. Things like armor paint jobs, emote skins (not new emotes! just emote skins) are costing $10-$20. That's 1/6th - 1/3rd the price of the entire game for some of these cosmetics. And of course the game is still a buggy, unstable, end-game contentless mess. I really don't know what Bethesda is thinking, it's been one PR debacle after another, and after the first few issues in November they came out with an apologetic message to the community about communication going forward and weekly update posts and yadda yadda yadda... but there doesn't appear to be any difference in their PR/game maintenance approach.

And honestly, the more I think about it, I am not as comfortable with Bethesda's approach to micro-transactions as I initially indicated months ago. Cosmetic micro-transactions in shooters/fighting games/sports games make a lot of sense. But RPGs are supposed to be about customization and the player creating their experience - this creativity of the player is stifled when a lot of color options, armor skins, and furniture items are held behind a paywall. I think there is a way for Bethesda to monetize this "game as a service" in a fair way, but this is definitely not it.

If an admin or mod wants to cut these last few posts out and start a new thread on the topic of Fallout 76 that would make sense, but at the same time if this keeps going this way, "Bethesda-style sandbox open world RPG" may well be a genre I thought I'd play forever that dies a premature death .