Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.

[Cynic]

I look forward to a Lich, Ghost, Dinosaur, Pixie, Djinn or Elemental Apocalypse: people will be so fucking at a loss of what to do. The plague of zombie movies and games has prepared people for zombies, but a wraith?

Pixie Apocalypse would be the best though, because of the basic absurdity of hordes of tiny winged people (if it's D&D pixies, they're also invisible) zipping around and killing the world population, with the world unable to figure out how to stop them.

Don't forget that a sudden mysterious plague causes 1 out of every 10 people to start dancing. The only people who'll know what to do are Denizens and Vin Diesel. Looking at the internet, nobody listens to the Den and Chuck Norris overrode Diesel's believability. So we're fucked.

[Prak]

I still maintain that the movie Rubber is about angry psychic dinosaur ghosts.

[Shatner]

DOUBLE POST

[Shatner]

World War Z (the book) is quite good in my opinion. Yeah, the whole "Romero zombies curbstomp humanity" is pretty implausible because Romero-style zombies are actually pretty underwhelming opponents. However, accepting that sort of thing happening is the price of admission for most zombie settings, from Night of the Living Dead to The Walking Dead to Zombieland. Anyway, World War Z is about how people respond to two things:
1) actually suffering predation from another species, which as an added bonus looks like your deceased friends and family
2) the total collapse of society, and the nastiness that follows a Malthusian Catastrophe

There are also the usual includings of a zombie story, namely people of humble origins and/or mild temperament become Ash-like badasses who viscerally slaughter hordes of monsters. The documentary-style of the book allowed it to explore the scope of the story, from tiny "Night of the Living Dead"-scale outbreaks in the beginning to "You must survive in the land of the undead as nomadic scavengers" in the middle, to "The Army vs. One Million-Billion-Hojillion zombies" at the end. It has:

• people trapped in farm houses
• people becoming cannibals during the winter
• a nerdy dude and a blind monk fighting zombies with a katana and a shaolin spade, respectively
• armies "doing it wrong" and being overwhelmed by a strange new foe
• armies "doing it right" and mowing down uncountablely many zombies to the point that the horizon is completely blocked out by the 30' high ring of bodies
• people performing gruesome practices and following bizarre faiths in attempts to cure themselves of the plague (e.g. raping virgins, human sacrifices, inquisitions, slavery, torture, etc.)
• zombies being nuked, zombies being caught on fire, zombies being shot with lasers, zombies being disintegrated with sonic weapons
• nations using (or attempting to use) zombies as biological weapons on one another
• people becoming infected and spreading the plague through the black market human organ trade
• mummies rising up and clawing at the walls of their tombs for eternity
• giant flotillas of random boats trying to survive "Water World"-style
• North Korea retreating the entire populace into a vast network of underground complexes to wait out the apocalypse like the scheme of a James Bond villain or the backstory to the Fallout games
• a crashed helicopter pilot receiving life-saving advice over a walkie-talkie by a person who likely never existed
• The Queen of England holed up in a freakin' castle and defended by guys with halberds and claymores
• a recounting of events from an astronaut who watched pretty much the whole thing happen while trapped for months (years?) on the International Space Station

And so on and so on. The above list is awesome, and should illustrate that we're dealing with a novel that is about exploring the spectacle inherent in the zombie genre. While it does take the subject matter seriously, this is not a very serious subject so it can come off as silly or stupid if you don't buy in to the conventions of a setting about zombies.

Yes, the zombies are physics- and biology-defying perpetual motion machines which can operate indefinitely at the bottom of the ocean or in the middle of the desert. Yes, they are immune to poison, radiation, pressure (including concussion waves from explosions), predation, decay (for the most part), bacterial and viral agents, and are somehow able to discern their surroundings despite being essentially badly-damaged humans. But it's about the zombies second and the people first. You know how George Romero has made a series of movies that show the progression of the slow-zombie apocalypse? Night of the Living Dead had scared people in a farm house out in an overrun countryside. Dawn of the Dead had scared people in a mall within an overrun city. Day of the Dead had a military base trying to survive and research a cure in an overrun United States. Land of the Dead had a fortified city having formed a new (though harshly unequal) society in an overrun world. Max Brooks took that entire progression and turned it into one book while including more locations than just "USA, population: Zombies!".


!!!NOTE: MOVIE SPOILERS BELOW!!!
The movie... well, I went in with very low expectations. I knew that a faithful translation of the book would essentially be an 8-hour long documentary with zombies, which no studio would ever make, ever. With that in mind, I felt like they did a reasonable job of it, given the constraints of making it short and sufficiently action-packed while still trying to have it be about "observer goes to different places and sees them deal with zombies". Making the zombies fast and, early on, largely indistinguishable from humans made the scene of the panicked escape from the city pretty good. It was claustrophobic, chaotic, fast-paced, and did a good job of conveying that no one knew what the hell was going on. The "zombies going apeshit in Jerusalem" scene was also good: the undead ramp to get over the walls (as well as the zombies similarly overrunning fortified high-rise apartments and office buildings) was the sort of visual addition to zombie cinema that every action-oriented zombie movie must have to justify its existence. The scientist slipping and shooting himself in the head was confusing and could certainly have been done better, but at least it got a potentially annoying and unnecessary character out of the way quickly and early; he was just there as a story-justification for giving Brad Pitt a plane and told to "go find out the truth". And finally, and this is a big one, it didn't opt for a goddamn stupid, cheesy, religion-themed cure-all at the end like the movie I Am Legend. Brad Pitt finds a novel tactic for combating the zombies by the end of the movie. They implied it might be enough to turn the tide against the undead, in case no sequel is made, but still leaves it open for them to make another without having to retcon/shit on the first movie to have a story to tell.

Also, the aesthetic of the twitchy, lurchy zombies who make weird clicking sounds and behave oddly insect-like was really neat. The scene where Brad Pitt is locked in lab while a zombie paws at the glass is actually really fun. Think about it; that design decision made a scene about Brad Pitt waiting to get sick interesting because the ONE zombie (in a movie featuring tens of thousands of them) in the scene was damned interesting. Kudos to whoever made that happen.

The movie wasn't great but it was good enough. I was certainly expecting worse.

[Prak]

I have no clue what happened here.
(Fanservice advisory)

[Lago PARANOIA]

You know, I think I might be the only person in the world that disliked the Korgoth the Barbarian pilot. And not only did I dislike it, but I think that it highlights everything that's wrong with the post-John Krasinski adult animation era.

[Prak]

What specifically did you dislike? I thought it had some great absurdist humour moments, and was a pretty good send of Conan-style characters.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Korgoth doesn't work on any level. You guys know me; I love vulgar gross-out humor. But I hate vulgar humor when it's infantile and/or forced. It's the difference between Freddie Got Fingered and the Angry Video Game Nerd.

The pilot's story sucked, so it didn't have that going for it.
There was absolutely nothing to the characters except as a vehicle for gags. Including the main character.
There's a lot of padding in the pilot, especially the first act.
There are too many anachronisms to make the pilot work as a nostalgic period piece.
The humor is too sophomoric to be a scathing deconstructive parody and the gags too pathetically obvious and telegraphed to even work as a shock comedy in the Family Guy/South Park vein.

[Prak]

I think the plot sucking may have been part of the parody. "I've just poisoned you, go do this thing for me and I'll give you the antidote" is a pretty cliche story. I don't think they were trying for scathing deconstruction, or really even shock, just a general "amusing, funnier if you're drunk/stoned/sleep deprived/18" thing. The anachronisms, to me, implied a post apocalyptic "Humanity subsided and rose again" setting.

I'm not saying you're wrong, or really even defending it, I just think that it was what it was meant to be. Kind of like RIPD. It was a "paranormal police force" movie that was derivative of MIB. A lot of the jokes were forced, but that's about what I expected.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

I didn't care for it either, although I saw it a bit more as a send-up of Bakshi-Heavy Metal style animation then Kricfalusi gross-out, my massive distaste for the former being the largest factor for my dislike.

[Lago PARANOIA]

All right. So I'm trying to compile a list of Top-Ten infuriating endings to completed series or works. And I think I have a pretty good list.

Megaman Battle Network 4
Realms of Arkania: Shadows over Riva
Matrix: Revolutions
Neverwinter Nights 2: OC
Chrono Cross
Attack of the Clones
Star Trek: Voyager
Monster A-Gogo
One More Day/One Moment in Time
NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer

I am, of course, willing to shuffle things around as necessary given the bait. Especially near the bottom, since there is still plenty of room for shit-sucking endings. I mean, you'd think that you couldn't get much worse than a badly translated ending where people cheer you from planet Earth while you're outside of the gravity well so hard that it empowers your electronic Navi to hack an ancient civilization's doomsday rock. But as the ending to, say, One More Day shows things can get a hell of a lot worse.

I was tempted to put Sins Past on that list, but this ranking and list is specifically for endings. Granted, I never read the ending to Sins Past; I only got to the splash page where the twins were in tight bodysuits wielding guns. So it may have been stupid above and beyond the basic premise of the story. Like I said, the list is fluid.

[Darth Rabbitt]

I'd say that Doomsday Machine should be on the list, but it doesn't deserve even the recognition that being on a bottom 10 list would earn it.

[John Magnum]

I wasn't personally enraged by Mass Effect 3's ending, but everyone who was has a really good case for it. It's really stupid, and it's really stupid in a way that's very different from the style of stupidity the rest of the series (including the rest of Mass Effect 3) generally went for. It's also clear that they had very, very different ideas for how the trilogy would end when they were making ME1, making ME2, and halfway through making ME3 before the final version came out.

There's the ending of Bioshock, especially if you include "everything past the golf club" as "the ending". But maybe not enraging enough.

The way the Foundation series ends by discarding psychohistory in favor of ever more powerful, invasive, and arbitrarily-granted forms of Jedi Mind Trick is annoying to me on several levels, but I don't know if anyone cares about it enough to be infuriated by that ending.

I'm trying to think of endings where, like, everything that happened is rendered not just completely pointless, but also risibly offensive in some way.

[Kaelik]

I'm trying to think of endings where, like, everything that happened is rendered not just completely pointless, but also risibly offensive in some way.

Lost.

[Tumbling Down]

Star Wars: The Old Republic.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Damn, how could I forget about ME3, Bioshock, and especially Lost?

SW:TOR, though? You gotta explain that one to me, TD.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Battlestar Galactica (2004)

[John Magnum]

Oh, Fable 2. You can see they were going for haha anticlimax but it was just a deeply stupid culmination of an idiotic story.

[name_here]

I must object to Mask Of The Betrayer.

I'll give you that the ending where you just toss out the Spirit Eater curse sucks and the ending where you are stuck in the Fugue Plane forever is not great, but there's two more endings.

First, by collecting Mask fragments you can straight-up restore Akachi's soul, send it off to a real afterlife somewhere, and go on with your life.

Second, comedy murder option! If you devour enough major NPCs, specifically including Myrkul, you can master the curse and go on a murder spree until the gods band together to take you out personally, and when the dust settles several of them are dead and no one can find your body. And Kelemvor figures it's pretty likely you're off somewhere way far away gearing up for a triumphant return.

Both of those are pretty nice.

I'm also going to suggest adding Bioshock:Infinite.

The short of it is that the entire fucking game, its whole setting, the main character, the main villain, and the girl who is central to the plot, never existed.

Now, when time travel is about, often the goal is to entirely rewrite all previous events. But this is missing two critical prerequisites for that working. First, there's supposed to be a happy ending montage showing how life is much better in the new timeline. Second, in this case you actually get a happy ending where the corrupt leadership of the city and the fanatically, Rob S. Pierre-like revolutionary leader are both taken out and you rescue the girl prior to going back in time to murder yourself. Allegedly this is necessary because an arbitrarily-large number of parallel worlds full of bad shit exist, but in a parallel-world time travel setup this plan shouldn't even work. Furthermore, you get to see that you've succeeded in a bunch of alternate timelines as well, and the girl(s) providing you with time travel to do this are omniscient and incredibly powerful now. Powerful enough to, say, murder your villainous alternate after the point of divergence.

The game attempts to hide this by sticking most of the exposition on the subject into the final ten minutes or so to make you too confused to ask questions

[Lago PARANOIA]

No, fuck you, name_here. That is not a sufficient consolation prize. I didn't sign on for 'and you erase yourself of a curse and put the hearts of a couple of people at ease'. I signed on for

Leading a crusade to destroy the existence of Hell, But More Unfair.

THAT is an awesome fucking goal suitable for an epic-level character. And the entire game was building up as to how you could plausibly do it and why it was so important for you to do so. And it actually makes me kind of angry that people keep trying to pretend that if you just forget everything that made your adventure meaningful and cool and unique and instead focus on your character's personal and selfish happiness the ending wasn't the worst thing in the history of video games.

Oh, Fable 2. You can see they were going for haha anticlimax but it was just a deeply stupid culmination of an idiotic story.

I remember ferretbrain.com complaining about that awhile ago. That sounds like it sucks monkey butts, but it isn't on the level of, say, Shadows Over Riva.

[Shrapnel]

Majora's Mask.

Mega Man X5, X6 and most especially Zero's ending in MVC 3 are all full of shit.

Oh, and Oblivion's Main Quest ending can go fuck a barrel of dead cocks.

[Darth Rabbitt]

Zero's ending in MVC 3 [is] full of shit.

Unless Zero's ending in the original is different in the Ultimate version, I have no idea as to why you would single that out as a bad ending (at least for the game's standards, it was mediocre; a few series in-jokes centered around the premise "A Capcom character and a Marvel character meet up, TOGETHER THEY FIGHT CRIME or possibly each other.")

The others you mentioned I all agree with, although they're far from the worst endings I've suffered through.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned KotOR II's piece of shit non-ending.

Another really bad one is Mortal Kombat 2011's Story Mode.

If I remember more I'll post them.

[Shrapnel]

Zero's ending in MVC 3 [is] full of shit.

Unless Zero's ending in the original is different in the Ultimate version, I have no idea as to why you would single that out as a bad ending (at least for the game's standards, it was mediocre; a few series in-jokes centered around the premise "A Capcom character and a Marvel character meet up, TOGETHER THEY FIGHT CRIME or possibly each other.")

The reason I singled it out is because his ending is a confusing and inconsistent clusterfuck on several levels:

His ending is that the Silver Surfer is bringing Zero back to his own world after the events of the game. SS brings Zero to Neo Arcaidia, which Zero for some reason knows about, but then says that "this is the world of Megaman Zero", so SS and Zero leave to find the "right" world.

This is shit and stupid on many levels.

First, it claims that he's a different character from Zero in the Mega Man Zero series. This is false. Zero is still Zero in Zero.

Second, going off the claim that Zero and "Megaman Zero" are separate characters, yet Zero claims to know about Neo Arcaidia. How the hell would Zero know what Neo Arcaidia is, when its a location that only exists a hundred years after Zero's time? If Zero is indeed separate from "Megaman Zero", then he wouldn't have any knowledge of it.

Third, Silver Surfer is bringing Zero back to his own world. Ignoring for a moment that no other character returns to their world this way (from what I can remember, I may be wrong on this one), Zero somehow recognizes that the place SS brought him isn't his world, but they never say how he knows it isn't.

Fourth, "Megaman Zero" is the title of the series, not the character.

Fifth, "Megaman Zero" and Zero are the same guy, and neither is ever referred to as "Megaman Zero" at any point.

Sixth, there is no six.

Seven, it's like the writers didn't know a thing about the Zero series and it's relation to Megaman X. Which is bizarre given the games generally high level of attention to detail and canon.

[Darth Rabbitt]

Maybe it's that I never really got into the Zero series (and therefore do think of it as an alternate continuity), but that didn't bother me at all.

That's kind of like complaining that Wesker's ending implies he starts Marvel Zombies but in Frank West's ending it's shown that the Marvel Zombies universe is separate from the Marvel vs. Capcom universe.

Or, perhaps more to your knowledge, any and all Transformers continuity errors.

Alternately, I'll pick your complaints apart, just for the fucking hell of it:

First, it claims that he's a different character from Zero in the Mega Man Zero series. This is false. Zero is still Zero in Zero.

Isn't Zero in a different body in the Zero series? To the point where his old body becomes a separate character in one of the games? It doesn't seem unreasonable that the old Zero wouldn't recognize the new one. Anyways, it's moot because Zero doesn't meet his future/alternate self in the ending, and he only claims that there's no one called Megaman Zero (which actually is agreeing with complaints #4 and #5 of yours.)

Second, going off the claim that Zero and "Megaman Zero" are separate characters, yet Zero claims to know about Neo Arcaidia. How the hell would Zero know what Neo Arcaidia is, when its a location that only exists a hundred years after Zero's time? If Zero is indeed separate from "Megaman Zero", then he wouldn't have any knowledge of it.

This point I'll give you, but it doesn't break kayfabe any more than Wesker being able to somehow contact the Marvel universe when he's a chemist. They probably used Neo Arcadia because it's the only named city in either series.

Third, Silver Surfer is bringing Zero back to his own world. Ignoring for a moment that no other character returns to their world this way (from what I can remember, I may be wrong on this one), Zero somehow recognizes that the place SS brought him isn't his world, but they never say how he knows it isn't.

Silver Surfer himself doesn't explicitly bring anyone else back, but a lot of people are seen back in their old worlds with no explanation. Also, Zero just says "Something isn't right," and then Silver Surfer points out it's the wrong world. Zero is just acting on a hunch; it's the dimension/time hopper who realizes that he hopped to the wrong dimension/time/whatever.

Fourth, "Megaman Zero" is the title of the series, not the character.

Fifth, "Megaman Zero" and Zero are the same guy, and neither is ever referred to as "Megaman Zero" at any point.

These are basically the same complaint, and also the same complaint as the first one. Also, Zero points out that there's no one called Megaman Zero (in fact, that's the only time he comes close to saying that anyone isn't Zero, see my rebuttal to your first point), at least that he knows of, (which is actually agreeing with you). Finally, Silver Surfer may be breaking the fourth wall here, because the ending is literally a joke.

Seven, it's like the writers didn't know a thing about the Zero series and it's relation to Megaman X. Which is bizarre given the games generally high level of attention to detail and canon.

See points #1-5, and the whole ending's a parody of how fucking convoluted the X and Zero series get, and the Marvel continuity even more so. Silver Surfer even says "I cannot tell the difference between any of these worlds" and hopes that trying another dimension will get Zero to the point where he came from. He clearly doesn't know what he's doing.

Seriously, it's by no means super well though out but I thought it was pretty funny.

[Tumbling Down]

SW:TOR, though? You gotta explain that one to me, TD.

Ahem, okay, I hope you like rambling rage-posts, 'cause you just asked for one.
See, the thing about TOR is that it is KOTOR III, that got turned in to a shitty WoW clone halfway through production, for reasons that may-or-may-not involve shortsightedness and greed on part of EA. Unfortunately Bioware evidently felt that TOR needed its own Lich King - cue, Darth Bad-Ass here:

Sith Emperor[/url]]The Sith Emperor was a Dark Lord of the Sith who reconstituted the Sith Empire after its destruction in the Great Hyperspace War and went on to rule it for over 1300 years. Born in 5,113 BBY as Tenebrae, the illegitimate Sith son of Lord Dramath of Medriaas and a poor farm woman, the child who eventually became the Emperor killed his own father at the age of ten and was granted the title of Lord Vitiate by the then–Dark Lord Marka Ragnos three years later. Vitiate renamed his world Nathema and ruled it for the next century, content to exclude himself from Sith power struggles and even the Great Hyperspace War when the Galactic Republic destroyed the Empire in 5,000 BBY. Summoning the remaining Sith Lords to Nathema with the promise of salvation from the Jedi, Vitiate turned on his fellows and used their strength to perform a ritual that made him immortal, at the expense of every living thing on Nathema.

ORIGINAL CHARACTER, DONUT STEEL!

And herein lies the crux of the problem, because in order to pump up their new uber-boss, Bioware decides to worf some established characters (specifically, Revan and the Exile, the main characters of both KOTOR games) and shit all over everything for good measure.

Basically, both of your old Player Characters end up jobbing to Emperor-Sue and get turned in to his personal bottom bitches (and the Exile gets Other M'd and fridged as well).
Also, nothing you did in KOTOR mattered, because the sith were just a distraction and the real threat was Empy Sue all along and everything was keikaku doori; as a final insult, Revan becomes a Boss Monster, which you kill so you can steal his actual fucking pants.
And nothing you did in KOTOR II matters either, because everything is retconned and also fuck you: stopping Darth Nihilus never mattered, because he could never eat planets anyway -that's Empy Sue's unique power, and he doesn't have to share it with any one; stopping/helping Kreia never mattered, she was just insane, and there were never any truth to her assertions about being able to kill the Force; also, the Exile were never a souleater wound in the force, she was just on her period or something. You know. What ever.

The thing is, that TOR takes place some 300 years after the KOTOR era, so it has every excuse not to shit all over the previous games, but it fucking goes out of its way to do that anyway -even going so far as to unnaturally extend Revan and the Exile's lifespans, so the game can continue to shit on them for literal centuries.