Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.

[erik]

Wow. I bought Dungeon! for my 10 year old thinking it was going to be a quick and dirty dungeon delving game that we could get some fun out of. What a terrible game. I wish I could mark all the Amazon reviewers who said it had tactical options etc. as unhelpful. Clearly these people have no idea what tactics even are. Your meaningful decisions are either go to a random room and fight a random monster by rolling 2d6, or follow another player and try to loot the items if they lose vs the monster. I wish I'd read the few 1-2 star reviews since they're the only ones honest about the game. I have no idea what the 5 star people were smoking.

Complexity-wise it is somewhere between Candyland and Sorry. You basically move to room locations and roll 2d6 comparing to the TN of the random level appropriate monster in a room and that's about it. For the amount of cards and chits and crap you'd expect there to be something to it. Mostly is just a big waste of space. And despite having so many cards and things to sort, there's not enough monster cards to even cover the rooms as laid out so you have to reshuffle them. The food is terrible and portions too small!

My kid was wanting to make new rules for it before we even played and I was like, cool your jets buddy, let's play at least once before we decide to reinvent the wheel. Now I guess he was right and it's time to invent the wheel since there's essentially no depth to this game. No way to advance characters via XP. Items almost entirely are just victory points (win condition is to accumulate gp and return to start once you have enough).

There's chamber rooms that have 3 monsters in them and zero treasure, and near as I can tell, zero incentive to encounter those rooms. There's only 4 item types that do anything, two of which let you peek at what random monsters will be in the rooms, but since you cannot do anything about it that knowledge is pretty useless and you have to waste your turn to get that knowledge when you could have just gone into the room and encountered the monster instead.

I reckon we are going to throw away the useless rule pamphlet and write up our own. It should be a fun exercise in game design for him, but it chafes my butt that we paid money for what can only charitably be called a game starter pack where you need to create the game yourself.

[violence in the media]

So, basically you're saying it's the same sort of vaporware we've come to expect from the D&D brand?

[erik]

Yeah. I probably shoulda known better since this non-game has been around forever masquerading as a board game. But dang. I'd just never played it before.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I have no idea what the 5 star people were smoking.

It is pretty common on freelancer sites for patrons to offer 'writing' gigs that are literally 'write a positive Amazon review of [insert product here] (and rate it five stars).' I would not be surprised if that was a factor in this case.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Is that a crime? It really fucking should be.

[rasmuswagner]

30 years ago, when I was a shit-for-brains 13 year old, and I would sniff a hobo's underwear if it had dragons on it, I still threw this game in the trash after two plays.

[Iduno]

Is that a crime? It really fucking should be.

Nope. Yelp still offers the service of removing incorrect reviews for business partners, which only coincidentally looks identical to removing low scores for pay.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Paid reviews can be a form of fraud, but companies use middlemen to distance themselves and also it’s hard to prove that a reviewer doesn’t just have really poor taste.

[honeyko]

Teal & orange color-grading will take me right out of anything, instantly.

[Maj]

Maleficent 2 was meh. It was a story that didn't need to be told. I mean, there's not really anything wrong with the fact that it was told, but meh. It's not anything to write a review about.

[Thaluikhain]

This year's Dakar rally is in Saudi Arabia. Sigh.

[Prak]

Tred to watch the new Addams Family movie, since it hit the cheap seats. I walked out about half an hour in.

Putting aside the character designs*, the movie felt like cargo cult shovelware, created by people who had a checklist of "Addams Family tropes" but no real understanding of the humor or point of the Addams Family. And the main plot, ie, a home and garden network home renovation show creates an ultra conformist housing development around the Addamses and wants to makeover their home, feels like a ten year too late update of a plot from the cartoon.

The jokes are largely just regurgitated bits from previous Addams Family things, and when they're not, they basically contradict established Addams Family tropes. Personally, I think that the Addams Family "double plus unfun" style language inversion is tiresome, but if you're going to use it, then stick to it. Don't have characters go from using negative words positively to using negative words negatively in the same scene.

I only made it a half hour in, but the only thing truly funny on any level was the implication that Thing has a foot fetish and Morticia caught him looking at "porn"

*I understand they were intended as an homage to Charles Addams' original designs in the comic strips, but the artists went way too far.

[Iduno]

The jokes are largely just regurgitated bits from previous Addams Family things, and when they're not, they basically contradict established Addams Family tropes.

That reminds me of the 2008 Get Smart movie. A few of us watched through the series shortly before it came out, which made it more obvious that every single joke was recycled from the show. The major difference was they made the chief, formerly the straight man (who makes the jokes funny because they're crazy things happening to the only sane person) just another goofy character.

I understand the desire to keep with the feel and humor of the old show, but straight ripping all of the jokes out of the old show is just a lazy way to avoid having to figure out why something is funny.

[Leress]

I watched this a while ago, but man...

It's the reveal trailer for a new Dark Alliance game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEXgaEGpfHc

Fucking GoPro

[Iduno]

I watched this a while ago, but man...

It's the reveal trailer for a new Dark Alliance game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEXgaEGpfHc

Fucking GoPro

I love that they run with their arms to their sides, just flopping all over.



Edit: In Ironman, a movie about a weapons manufacturer who grows a soul and builds a flying suit that can shrug off tank fire and machineguns powered with a phlebotinum pacemaker, the least realistic part is where the bad guy has the right size and attachment tool to remove the generator from Tony Stark's chest, and it fits correctly on the first try.

[Thaluikhain]

The Legend of Tarzan.

Guns aren't just for pointing at people, you can also fire them. C'mon.

[Maj]

Black and Blue was terrible and stupid. It was a cop movie wherein everyone made ridiculously idiotic and irrational choices at pretty much every turn. I do not understand how it got to the making of a movie stage because it made so little sense that the actors should have taken one look at the script and said no. Its attempt at fleshing out characters just resulted in random disconnected shit happening at different points in the movie.

[Username17]

Black and Blue was terrible and stupid. It was a cop movie wherein everyone made ridiculously idiotic and irrational choices at pretty much every turn. I do not understand how it got to the making of a movie stage because it made so little sense that the actors should have taken one look at the script and said no. Its attempt at fleshing out characters just resulted in random disconnected shit happening at different points in the movie.

Sometimes movies can turn out like that because of editing around scenes not coming out right. Most modern movies end up shooting a lot more footage than ends up being used in the final cut.

Sometimes parts of scenes end up on the cutting room floor for pacing issues. Sometimes whole scenes end up getting binned because of technical problems such as bad sound pickups, poor lighting, or bad camera tracking. Sometimes actors don't sell a scene particularly well.

Once you end up losing scenes that were integral to the original script, the edit has to work around that. The usable footage may have setups with no payoff or scenes that haven't been properly established. Making an edit that makes a coherent narrative out of a situation like that is hard. And sometimes people don't succeed.

Foladable Human has a number of good videos on how movie editing works (and various ways it can fail to make a decent movie), with discussions centering on movies where the edit does fail like Justice League, Suicide Squad, and The Snowman.

Anyway, the long story short is that by the time movies have been shot and scenes have been reshot, and the usable footage is edited into a movie, it might not look very much like the script. An actor can accept a script that looks good and have the actual movie go off the rails in any of a number of ways.

-Username17

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Its attempt at fleshing out characters just resulted in random disconnected shit happening at different points in the movie.

Unless you have incredible instincts and intend to direct things yourself it's hard to get a sense of what the pacing will be like just from reading the script. Even worse, all that extraneous shit you're talking about can breed a false sense of security among the actors and crew because it assures people that everything has been thought through even if there's no earthly way you can include all of this detail without killing the pacing of the film. And like Frank said, sometimes things just get presented in the wrong damn order, and that can critically undermine a movie even if you don't change any of the core ingredients or themes in the film.

For example, let's look at some huge ass spoilers for Up!, Finding Nemo and John Carter of Mars. On paper all three films are presenting the same core formula: a flawed, emotionally damaged protagonist goes on an adventure and becomes a happier person after overcoming their baggage. Indeed, the protagonists from all 3 films even share the same tragic background: the loss of their wife and family. However, only Up! and Finding Nemo were any good. And that's in large part because those films open with the tragic losses and you spend virtually the full run time understanding and forgiving Marlin and Carl for their flaws. And once that sort of emotional investment is in place filling out the rest of the script and film becomes immeasurably easier. The audience is willing to march through the gates of hell in support of Carl Fredericksen so you don't need to make sure every scene features some new mystery or dramatic event to keep people paying attention long enough for other pieces to fall into place.

John Carter of Mars, on the other hand, treats the loss of his family as something of a mystery for some dumb ass reason. Oh, they hint at his background but they never properly hit you in the feels with it. This not only renders John Carter rather unlikable for the majority of the film--he's basically presented as an emotionally distant alcoholic--but it virtually scuttles any interest the audience could have had in his budding romance with Dejah Thoris. I seriously know someone who thought Carter was a married man macking on space princesses because he wears his wedding ring throughout the film and trust me, she did -not- approve. Without any of that empathy in place the movie is then left to live or die by how intriguing the plot machinations happen to be and that's a formula that virtually never works outside of the mystery genre.

[erik]

I seriously know someone who thought Carter was a married man macking on space princesses because he wears his wedding ring throughout the film and trust me, she did -not- approve.

Hey, he's only Earth-married. Space law doesn't care about your gravity well customs.

I honestly forgot John Carter was previously married. Didn't seem relevant to the movie as presented. He's a civil war hero lone wolf and that was enough adjectives for me. I actually liked the movie since it had nice designs and interesting aliens.

[Thaluikhain]

Second that. There were a lot of things that could have been better, but the romance (IMHO) was the usual tacked on stuff you have to put in your action movie for some reason, rather than anything particularly important to the film.

[Whipstitch]

I applaud them for having tried at all but John Carter of Mars was bad and you guys should feel bad.

Second that. There were a lot of things that could have been better, but the romance (IMHO) was the usual tacked on stuff you have to put in your action movie for some reason, rather than anything particularly important to the film.

I'll grant you that it didn't necessarily have to be a major character beat but if you read between the lines you can definitely tell the film intended it to be and that you guys forgot is really super damning. I mean, for one thing, Dejah Thoris isn't a throwaway character and they were planning to mine a trilogy out of the endeavor, so they likely wanted the audience to give at least a tiny fleck of shit about the relationship beyond her just being a continual plot device. For another, they interleave the reveal of how his family died with a big Hulking in the name of love action scene, even opting for somber "You can hear his pain!" music rather than something that would get your blood pumping. In a backwards way I sorta understand how they thought this could have been a good idea in the script writing stage. On paper, it sounds like you've got action plus character motivation for said action presented in such a ham-fisted way that the audience couldn't possibly miss it. On screen though, it's a fucking mess. The audience doesn't get a chance to really take stock of or appreciate the emotional impact of either the sad flashback OR the action that's going on-screen, so they're basically ruining two scenes with one horrible edit.

Seriously, just don't do this. Motive first, then action. For fuck's sake.

[erik]

That is terrible. I don’t even remember those midbattle cuts, memory purge probably. That said. If they made a sequel I’d watch it! #johncarterunderrated #jctrilogynow

[Whipstitch]

Oh, trust me, I wanted it to be good. I wanted it to be good so badly that I demonstrably forget that the title was shortened to just "John Carter" because I am the sort of nerd who refuses to reject tacking "of Mars" onto things out of hand. But we genre enthusiasts are already partisans and it's everyone else that the movie needed to win over to achieve any commercial success. I am genuinely sorry that the Andrew Stanton--ironically the same Pixar guy who directed Finding Nemo-- won't get a second crack at things to get shit right. But well, it's been long enough that Disney's rights to the novels and such has already reverted to the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate. There will be nothing resembling direct sequel.

[Thaluikhain]

Eh, I saw his motivation mostly being that there's an evil king doing evil king stuff and mysterious evil sorcerers doing evil sorcerer stuff mysteriously, and he's learning to care about the world/s again in general. The love story was tacked on because that's what you do, and the midbattle cuts were because that's the sort of thing that theoretically makes your movie all deep and meaningful if you're lucky. They've given him (or anyone) a reason to care about Dejah Thoris saving her coincidentally saves the world or whatever, not solely because she's the stock Burrough love interest who is less interesting than Bella Swan.

Admittedly, that might not be how other people saw it or what they were going for, but works for me.