Bucket Guild | FUBU BH Forums

Speaking of the Japanese, I recently watched Bridge Over River Kwai again. (I am aware that the movie is 110% fiction). What I got out of it that I didn't get before, was the degree of irony and cultural depth - the comparison of Japanese and British values.

Americans fete the British, mostly because of lame Winston Churchill one-liners, but I've come to believe that the story of the British Empire was that of a deeply troubled country exporting the problems it didn't have the courage to solve, and that many of the problems that America has today are the direct result of our British heritage - that plodding and illiberal way of thinking they have.

It's not in the British nature to question how things are or look at social alternatives, and I think that comes out in both their notorious chauvinism as well as their incredibly stagnant society and constant need to exploit other cultures to survive. I think this is also the real reason they industrialized first - they couldn't exploit their impoverished people anymore, so they invented new ways of producing wealth for the wealthy rather than fix their age-old social problems. And when that wasn't enough, they plundered other cultures and the environment. And never really made any progress towards fixing the terrible poverty that has been a fact of life for most British since before the Norman invasions.

They still haven't. Instead, the British plod - consider no bigger questions than stupid stuff like currency policy. They pervert narrow-mindedness into a virtue.

American WASPs seem to have that same inclination to a great degree. The other great cultures of Europe - the Germans and French, and even the Russians - seem much more willing to look at the contemporary world critically and consider the status quo as a choice amongst infinite alternatives. Eurolanders don't seem to stare blankly at you when you suggest that things aren't as they always were or as they could be. Perhaps it's no coincidence Anglo-Americans refuse to learn their languages and instinctively fear mainland European cultures.

I think this is also why Anglo-American cultures typically only have 2-3 centrist political parties, while European cultures tend to be vastly more politically diverse. Anglo-Americans see the world as a given, Eurolanders don't.

I just finished reading Gulliver's Travels. The most interesting part of the book was the part that no one seems to remember, the sci-fi part of the book where Gulliver visits a society, Laputa, very much like modern America, with a lot of very twitchy, high-tech people who spend their lives on university campuses listening to overpaid dimwits and bombing everyone they don't like into submission. The author even foresaw the invention of the PDA, Babelfish, shrinkology, mass automation, the dynamo, the atom bomb, and processed food. (The book was written in 1726 AD).

I found it interesting how the author was very critical of the British way of life yet still seems to inherit the petty chauvinism that characterizes that culture. Which was to me the fault of the book, he complains about British society but doesn't seem to have any more answers than Orwell did. That's the British for you.

Thoughts from my brain. I hate my life. I wish I had other weird people to talk to. Sorry to clog the thread just don't want to make another.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

we stopped playing because of hardcore mode, actually. we died/wasted so many hours because of desync deaths that we just gave up. dying when there is literally nothing on your screen is only tolerable for so long.



if you enjoy FFT, you should definitely play Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. i'd say it's the better game in a lot of ways, and the branching story paths are actually pretty damn good, even more so for how old the game is. i know they remade it for the PSP a few years ago and the translation is much better, but i'm not sure what all has been changed gameplay wise, aside from them adding save states. it seems like it would really break the game, seeing as how making every move count is part of the genre, but at the same time, some of the later missions in my playthrough were so annoyingly difficult that i almost don't mind it. there were quite a few missions that you could have characters get killed before they even took a turn if the RNG wasn't kind to you, and if i remember right, there were only 2 spots in the entire game to learn a resurrect spell, one of which was impossible to get unless you felt like throwing away almost all of your leveled up characters up to that point.

The hero from Knight of Lodis is the bad guy Lans Tartare from Tactics Ogre Let Us Cling Together I believe. Not sure, haven't played either in a while, though I own the PS version of TO. I'm playing on emulator the N64 version, however it is complete crap. Probably going to have to download a GBA emulator and play tactics again, or the SNES ogre battle.

The problem with TO: LUCT is what Grimm mentioned. No rez spells = you have to be perfect every match, and fuck that's hard late on. EDIT: NOT TO MENTION trying to save some of the NPC's. FUCK.

FF VI is far superior to all other FF games.

Great SNES RPG's:

Ogre Battle
Any final fantasy for snes(emulator has more) but FF VI(3) is the best.
Mario RPG
Zelda 3
Lufia 2, rise of the sinistrals(personal favorite)
Secret of Mana(also Seken Densetsu 2 for emulator)
Secret of Evermore(not nearly as good as Mana, but not awful.)
Recently started playing through Earthbound, and its enjoyable.

I'm sure there's more but I'm tired.

i remember some map in a city, with an NPC swordsman who dual wielded that you had to save. every fucking time he would run out and get killed by turn 2. i can't even count how many times i reloaded that map. i remember that there weren't a lot of NPCs to save but jesus i hated the maps with them

edit: i'm looking into the psp version and it seems WAY tuned down, just in game mechanics. dying is more like FFT's system now, the whole 3 turn thing, and even if you fail to res someone it doesn't matter as they apparently come back to life up to 3 more times, and characters don't actually level up. apparently, the class they were levels up, and anybody made into that class, even a new recruit, is just magically good at everything. some of the stuff is just better visualized/explained which is fine, but changes like that are a major turn off, holy shit.

Please clarify, you stopped playing Diablo 3's hardcore or torchlight? :3

torchlight

Oh depressing.

I tend not to play hardcore because I hate the thought of literally dying away several hours of my life.

D&D is fun and I recommend it, Jushiro.

On topic: Rogues are awful at the moment. Buffs on that scale are probably overdoing it, but they do need some loving. Warlocks, for the record, had every nerf coming.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

I will never forgive blizzard for destroying my 3.0 pve affliction, even if ulduar was amazing.

I-It's not like I loved Ulduar b-baaka.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Anyway, I don't pvp in that game and never plan to. I'm sure warlocks are op in that department, they always seem to be.

My rogue hatred wouldn't even exist if not for the fact that I was dragged onto a pvp server.

~lol edit like 3 times just to get my post right. I should sleep now.

d&d is fun as long as you aren't playing with number-crunching, power-gaming munchkins

█▀█ █ █░█ █░█ █ █░ █▀█ █░█ █▀▀
█▀▄ █ █▀▄ █▀▄ █ █░ █▀█ █▀▄ █▀▀
▀░▀ ▀ ▀░▀ ▀░▀ ▀ ▀▀ ▀░▀ ▀░▀ ▀▀▀
sunshine.kittens.bubblegum.happythoughts

Explain.

If you're going to play a D&D game, play Baldur's gate, neverwinter nights, or icewind dale.

i've been doing baldur's gate recently, but i do miss actual D&D. a shame it's been so long



try hards aren't fun in most games. it's even worse in D&D. the best times are making up your own silly things or doing things that aren't "the best" for the sake of RPing. number crunching min maxing people would never stand for it, and unfortunately those people seem to be the majority of every game now. it's why i quit warhammer, same with my dad who has played it for as long as i can literally remember.

rolling a 1 with our old DM was probably the best thing that could ever happen.

idk number-crunchers are pretty fun. I've never had issues with powergamers because I've done my fair share of powergaming.

it took me far too many tries to get that sentence right and I'm pretty sure the only reason it worked is because firefox has a built-in spellchecker.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh