Pieces of entertainment that made you want to punch someone.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Sun Oct 27, 2013 11:21 pm

Pokémon Bank. And Japan in general.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sun Oct 27, 2013 11:43 pm

Even though I can now use a voodoo totemmy mobile phone to connect my DS to the internet, I wish to agree with Shrapnel, and would love to take a running punt at the head of the coke addict who makes these "connect to intarwebz" ideas for Pokemon.

Actually, let's go right back to square one: Mew. It started with Mew (only available by going to a specific brothel to download it!), and just got progressively worse from there on out.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Sun Oct 27, 2013 11:46 pm

You can just hack your save with a cheat device like a normal person.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 12:12 am

I finally realize that neuroticism ruins books for me. My first encounter was the obvious Twilight, but I recently picked up On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome, with Love and Pasta. I should have liked it; it's totally my kind of book. The problem is that the author's neuroses are so annoying that you end up screaming (literally) at the pages while you read.

[*]You're learning about foreign cultures and people when the author interjects some stupid line like, "My husband was staring at me with incredulity. Incredulity at my incredulity that someone could ever love their partner enough to want to spend more time with them." (Not a direct quote, but really darn close.)
[*]Just because some married woman in Iran is oppressed and relegated to cooking the food in her household, does not mean that the absolute definition of "wife" is being a kitchen slave - subject to your husband's every whims. Or even that there's an absolute definition of "wife" at all.
[*]When you are Chinese, you will be a minority in the US, but when you travel in China, you no longer are a minority. Stop trying to convince other Chinese people that really, you are a victim, too, when they've been oppressed far worse than you can even comprehend.

I can handle reading about revelations that inspire personal change, and personal journeys and transformations. But I just cannot handle the constant peppering of your research, experience, and travelogue with interjections of doubt, self-loathing, insecurity, whining, and victimization.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 12:13 am

Indeed for 4Gen that's totally what I did. I have more than one Arceus, likewise for Darkrai. I didn't for 5Gen because I lost the stuff that let me update my AR and you needed to update the actual AR firmware before it could hack 5Gen, and also I didn't care very much.

For 6Gen, that can't yet be done. The AR for 3DS only actually works for normal DS games, because you can't hack the 3DS encryption.

YET

I know, their boast is totally a challenge.

erik · Post by **erik** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 1:11 am

Dammit. I need moar rage. Short of the news, I can't think of any entertainment that makes me want to punch people, and that's because the news shouldn't just be entertainment.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 1:13 am

Koumei wrote:I know, their boast is totally a challenge.

What game companies should do to reduce hacking of save files is to create a publicly available method of hacking. However, this method would take 30-45 minutes of effort to enact. Therefore, most people would be too lazy to use it, and the people who would are the same people who could figure out how to hack the game themselves. If the motivated people have a slow but workable hack, they are less likely to make one that's easier to use.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 3:53 am

Not too many things. To Aru no Index, FF XIII, 4th Edition's FR

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 5:09 am

Ancient History wrote:Back on topic: Perdido Street Station.

Iron Council's ending was worse. Casting that spell on the train was total cop out.

Archmage Joda · Post by **Archmage Joda** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 8:11 am

MGuy wrote:Not too many things. To Aru no Index, FF XIII, 4th Edition's FR

Well, since 4th edition sucks overall, and I have Spoony for FF XIII, I'm just gonna ask what's wrong with that first that makes you want to punch someone?

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 8:37 am

To Aru no Index makes me mad only because of the existence of many anime of its kind. A Certain Magical Index has a bunch of cliches in it but that's not what pisses me off. What I don't like about it is that what goes on is so stupid at seemingly every level. I'm not sure what the writer was thinking when they wrote this but in just about every episode I find everyone's fucking decisions to be seemingly random (made more to just keep the story moving or fill time) and idiotic. They make big deal about how "espers" are different from "magic users" but in all the episodes I saw (cause I could not be convinced to watch this garbage all the way through).

Now I wanted to stop watching the anime on the episode when the flame guy appeared but I was convinced to watch until the silver haired kid appears by friends who found my rant about how bad the show was to be hilarious. Now the reasons I stopped watching this anime are numerous.

The main character is a standard altruist and that in and of itself isn't bad. However he is continuously forced to make classically bad decisions and his power is so specific that he can only ever succeed if the plot snaps its spine in half in order to accommodate him. I'm not talking about something as simple as "he's just a little lucky" I mean he either needs gratuitous amounts of help from other 'real' characters, primarily through a rather effective idiot ball that everyone he fights likes to pass around, but worst of all the physics of the world are changed for his benefit.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 2:18 pm

I am honestly baffled by your entire post. I mean, he gets into fights with magic/psychic people and his power is to negate any and all supernatural bullshit. That's not uselessly specific, it's an unstoppable superweapon. Granted, the anime leaves out the explanation in the novels for why no one escapes with magical flight (basically, dispelling flight magic is really, really easy)

Likewise, the difference between Espers and Magic Users is pretty obvious; Magic Users have rune cards and chants and magic circles and crap while Espers just think things and they happen. I suppose Kanzaki (girl with the razor wires and positively ridiculous outfit) makes the issue slightly confusing because she uses no spells until her fight with Archangel Gabriel on account of being a huge badass.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 2:58 pm

Robert Jordan's series, starting with book 3, and culminating in book 5. By book 5, I just want to find him and punch him repeatedly until he stopped writing his women like that.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 3:10 pm

sabs wrote:Robert Jordan's series, starting with book 3, and culminating in book 5. By book 5, I just want to find him and punch him repeatedly until he stopped writing his women like that.

I'll go along with that one. The hundreds of pages of bitching during the traveling caravan broke me. I carried on for a while after that, but when it jumped the rails to full on harem anime I just gave up.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 3:37 pm

Hunter x Hunter:

The main character. I am only maybe 20 episodes in, but this show, which many relatively trsutworthy sources have recommended is driving me batshit because of this one shitty kid:

1) His entire motivation is to become a hunter so that he can find his dad/find out why his dad abandoned him to be a hunter.

Now, realtalk, this may be a personal thing for me, but this is literally the most offensive character motivation I have ever seen in a main character. Your father fucking abandoned you (also, it makes no fucking sense, because he apparently did that when he was like 12-14 when he became a hunter, but whatever). Why would you base your entire motivation for all your actions on this fucker?

2) He is dumb as a box of rocks in literally the weirdest way. At one point, there is a complex lopsided bracket of like 15 people, where only one of the 15 is going to fail at being a hunter, and the losers keep moving up the bracket, and the winners are hunters. He personally has the most number of fights to go before he wins, and his second bought will be against the shittiest fighter, who also happens to specialize in ranged and stealth, even though they start 20ft apart in an open room.

So what does he do? Refuse to give up against a guy who obviously outclasses him in every fucking way. The guy tortures him, pins him down, and demonstrates how much better, and he still doesn't give up. Then he threatens to break his arm. Instead of just giving up and then pummeling a super easy opponent, he steadfastly refuses to give up for no reason at all. And this is painted as a fucking good thing. This is supposed to be why we like him.

I don't fucking like him. He is mostly fine all the times that he is just present and interacting with other people, but when have an episode about his motivations and shit, it is stupid as fuck.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 3:46 pm

I read the entire Wheel Of Time, but yeah, I'll concur. It was Elayne who really got to me; Nynaeve might be objectively worse with the bitching but hers amused me.

Mass Effect 3, Bioshock Infinite, and Dragon Age II really ticked me off, especially with their endings.

ME3: There's this jackass named Kai Leng with infuriating cutscene superpowers. This is the series which actually invented a system for shooting people mid-conversation and yet you can't shoot him while he's charging up an attack. The ending reveals the Reaper's motivation and it's really really stupid

In order to prevent synthetics from rising up and killing organics, the Reapers come around and kill organics

Bioshock Infinite: The ending is not internally consistent.

The main character travels back in time in order to die before the point of divergence between his home reality and the one where he became an evil dictator. This plan cannot be both possible and helpful; firstly he traveled back in time physically and the copy from the future died, and secondly you can't have parallel realities and joint history and expect that to make any goddamn sense, and thirdly it seems like the infinite number of omniscient people who help implement the plan may possibly have been able to come up with a slightly better one. And it's a uniquely spiteful sort of ending because the entire setting is erased from reality and things would have been better if the main character had never been born

Dragon Age II had one particular asshole.

Anders is a mage and one of your party members. He's also been possessed by a semi-demon. No matter what position your character takes on demonically possessed mages, it is impossible to kill him until very near the end, after he fucks everything up forever by bombing a cathedral containing the only person who might possibly be able to peacefully resolve conflicts between the mages and templars.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 5:01 pm

name_here wrote:
ME3: There's this jackass named Kai Leng with infuriating cutscene superpowers. This is the series which actually invented a system for shooting people mid-conversation and yet you can't shoot him while he's charging up an attack. The ending reveals the Reaper's motivation and it's really really stupid

In order to prevent synthetics from rising up and killing organics, the Reapers come around and kill organics

I'll agree the ending sucks, but I go for different reasons: Denial of choice being a big one, and there's no way to talk them out of it.

But that's a misunderstanding of the Reaper motivation

They don't kill everything. They prune back the species capable of spaceflight and AI development. It's still not a really good motivation, but it IS internally consistent; they don't care about individual species, but making sure organic life as a whole doesn't get overrun. Because the only thing tenacious enough to exterminate all organic life, everywhere, would be AI.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 6:30 pm

I've mentioned it before, but now there's a proper thread for it: Legion. While terrible, the movie was entertaining up to the last fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes that made me want to go find a baby and punch it.

For those who did not see my previous rant, basically Legion starts with the Archangel Michael rebelling because God decided it was time for "Great Flood 2- The Angelling," and sends down a horde of "angels" to destroy humanity through looking freaky and cursing and swearing and killing large numbers of people (it makes more sense if you assume he actually opened Hell, and unleashed fallen angels). The action all centers on a diner out in the middle of nowhere after Fallen Michael loots an arsenal. He tells people what's going on, arms them, and helps them defend themselves.

Then Gabriel comes down because he was promoted to God's Right Hand Angel in the absence of Michael, and has been sent to deliver a more personal ass whupping.

There's some half-aborted side plot of the new messiah or something. It's been a while.

So, towards the end, the last couple humans, including New Mary, make a break for it, deciding "Fuck it, we'll make our own way."

That was all awesome. It's the last part that makes me want to [EDITED] punch a baby.

Michael and Gabriel have a big giant fight, Gabe wins and Mike dies. Mike goes to see God, and convinces him to stay his hand even as Gabe's about to lay the smack down on the new messianic family.

The moral of the story is "You're alive because God allows it."

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 8:16 pm

The Scarlet Pimpernel. I hate this book.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 8:52 pm

The IT character on every TV show, that can somehow hack toasters, and break through wifi protected by firewalls, because they're a Java Programmer on their day job. Oh, and it's 10pm at night, and they're still at the office working, because they have no life.

WTF, being an IT person does not mean you are the unstoppable hacker god of all things electronic.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 9:05 pm

Hicks wrote:The Scarlet Pimpernel. I hate this book.

OK. I have to ask why because it's one of my favorites.

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 10:03 pm

Because when you squint at the author's name, it looks like "Badness Orgy".

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 10:48 pm

Maj wrote:OK. I have to ask why because it's one of my favorites.

the book is over 300 pages, the story is like 30 pages. Seriously. The plot summary is "My husband is boring, I wish he was exciting like the Scarlet Pimpernel! My husband is boring, France Is dangerous! My husband is boring. My husband is boring. My husband is boring..."

290 pages later...

OHMYGODMYHUSBANDISTHESCARLETPIMPERNELTHISHEISSOEXCITING!!!!!111!!!OMGWTFBBQSEVEN!!!!!!!

It is a pamphlet masquerading as a book; its quality would have been improved by leaving page 4-290 blank, at least then I wouldn't have wasted my life expecting something to happen.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 11:10 pm

OK. You realize, though, that most books are like that? That's seriously why Cliff Notes exist.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Oct 29, 2013 12:06 am

Maj wrote:OK. You realize, though, that most books are like that? That's seriously why Cliff Notes exist.

If Hicks had to read it in school, that would explain a lot. Much how anyone who went to school in Britain 30 years ago would love to step into a time machine and punch Shakespeare in the dick.