The Gaming Den

148minutes plus break it says here on the cinema page. so not 3 hours plus break, but it certainly felt like it to me.

OgreBattle wrote:
Rick & Morty is a great show, watched the Meeseeks episode today. Not many American shows do good rape jokes nowadays.

I remember the scene in question, and it didn't feel like it was being played for laughs.

Bump for Stranger Things 2, because it neither rocked (unlike the first season) nor lost me. Here's what I disliked:

- too short, doesn't even pretend to try to tell a complete story
- too much time is spent crying, shouting, or both
- Will is benched for a season; I couldn't tell him apart from Mike in the first season; this time I can because he's the benched kid. Not an improvement.
- random pedo perv
- the label on the vodka bottle is misspelled
- Nancy is a slut for real this time
- babyface and the old murderous pig get to live
- the mind flayer angle is wrong
- general stupidity (spoiling for fights, barehanded monster-hunting)
- everyone is so fucking blase about the spores.

Has anyone given Netflix's The Witcher a shot? I've made it all the way through, but, as with most of Netflix's original content, it feels like something I'll have completely forgotten about in a month.

As context, I've played the first two games but not read any of the books. I don't have any real investment in the series/setting/characters for their own sake, but I genuinely enjoyed the games.

Good:

• The main cast of Geralt, Yen, Ciri, and Dandelion/Jaskier all work well and have good chemistry.
• The "monster-of-the-week" structure is good; it's refreshing to watch a streaming series in which episodes have beginnings, middles, and ends.
• On reddit, book fanboys are raging over the fact that it's not a sentence-by-sentence adaptation, and it's fun to read their rants.

Eh:

• Aside from some specific fun moments, most of the dialog is at best bland. If you drank every time a character said "destiny", you would be dead.
• Most of the series is told in three separate timelines that sync up toward the end. This isn't a "spoiler" per se, because if you memorize all the proper nouns, you can figure it during the first episode, but it's never explicitly stated. The obfuscation doesn't add any depth or complexity, but it does make things harder to follow.

Bad:

• A lot of the CGI, cinematography, and set design look cheap and cosplay-ish. Netflix spent a lot of money on this show, but you'd be hard pressed to tell at times.
• The series often feels bland and "Americanized". Playing the games conveys a depth of mythology and unfamiliar slavic-ness that I don't think exists here at all. Similarly, the complexity of being a witcher (mixing certain potions against certain enemies, silver vs. steel blades) never comes up.
• The tactics on display are really bad. A veteran commander leads their army against a much larger force and is surprised to learn of the numerical imbalance. A bunch of centuries-old mages decide to fight on the front line against a vast enemy with minimal military support. Swords cut through plate armor like cheese.
• Ciri's plotline is really minor in comparison to Geralt and Yen's, but it still gets too much screen time.

Honestly, I generally lean towards the side of the book fanboys. I got burned by Game of Thrones and Harry Potter too hard to not at least give them an ear. Unfortunately, I could never get into the games, so I'm pretty sure all of my exposure to The Witcher on Netflix is just going to be seeing the first 5 minutes before someone playing it at the family holiday party realized there were ass and titties.
He seemed to think that Netflix didn't do that sort of thing, for some reason?

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:Honestly, I generally lean towards the side of the book fanboys. I got burned by Game of Thrones and Harry Potter too hard to not at least give them an ear. Unfortunately, I could never get into the games, so I'm pretty sure all of my exposure to The Witcher on Netflix is just going to be seeing the first 5 minutes before someone playing it at the family holiday party realized there were ass and titties.
He seemed to think that Netflix didn't do that sort of thing, for some reason?

Harry Potter and Game of Thrones aren't great examples because the visual media goes off the rails when the print media goes off the rails. Everyone agrees the final bits of Game of Thrones were bad, but of course that happened when they ran out of road. The show runners couldn't stick the landing, but George Martin hasn't been able to stick the landing either. And spoiler alert: he isn't going to be able to. He's mostly painted himself into a corner and his methodology isn't going to get him to a satisfactory ending in a satisfactory way - assuming he even survives long enough to finish the fucking thing, which is doubtful.

Harry Potter of course gets increasingly bad in a visual medium until you have one movie split into two parts because it's over four and a half fucking hours and is literally about teenagers listening to the radio. But remember that JKR is actually a stupid and terrible person who was only able to write good things when she was writing at her middle school level and being bailed out by heavy editing. Once she started trying to write adult themes and also got big enough that she could tell her editors to fuck off things started going downhill there as well. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is over a quarter million words long, and the central plot point of Deathly Hallows about death being irrevocable and shit is total fucking gibberish because it's book seven of series with ghosts you can talk to. For fuck's sake!

So you got movies that went completely AWOL from the good books that they are nominally based on and turned out well - my go to example would be Starship Troopers. Its relationship with the book is merely that it is a scathing indictment of the political philosophy espoused by the book. But it's fucking amazing and you should see it. And then you got movies that went completely AWOL from the good books they are nominally based on and were total trash. The go to example would probably be On Stranger Tides.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: Everyone agrees the final bits of Game of Thrones were bad, but of course that happened when they ran out of road. The show runners couldn't stick the landing, but George Martin hasn't been able to stick the landing either. And spoiler alert: he isn't going to be able to. He's mostly painted himself into a corner and his methodology isn't going to get him to a satisfactory ending in a satisfactory way - assuming he even survives long enough to finish the fucking thing, which is doubtful.

I checked out of the show way before the abysmal final season. I hatewatched it from seasons 4-6, and quit halfway through 7 because it was just fucking boring. I couldn't even make fun of it anymore or get upset. I just wanted to do something else. The showrunners couldn't stick the fucking landing even when they had material to adapt because they are hack frauds who should never work in Hollywood again. Just to be fair, GRRM is a fat old fuck who will NEVER finish the series because he's fucking lazy and has had writers' block for a goddamn decade. It's a shitshow all around. He WILL die before he finishes the series because he keeps fucking around with side stories nobody cares about.
I'm one of those assholes who would argue that most of GoT was bad, not just the last season. For some reason, it just took that long for most idiots to figure out.

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:I'm one of those assholes who would argue that most of GoT was bad, not just the last season. For some reason, it just took that long for most idiots to figure out.

Yeah, not having read the books and hearing lots of people say "keep watching, it gets good later" I watched the first 3 series, I think. Every now and then it looked like something good was going to happen, then the writers seemingly realised that was happening and went back to most grimdark rape and the like.