It could be an album, movie, tv show, whatever.
Lost never delivered on its initial promise of cool science fiction mystery. It became increasingly clear as the seasons went on that the writers had no fucking clue where they were going with any of this stuff and just gave up and everyone-was-dead-all-along was the only way out even though they promised early on that wasn’t the case. Fuck that show and Abrams in particular.
I felt utterly betrayed that they never explained the smoke monster!!!
I think this aimlessness is more common than people realize.
For instance, dare I say it: Half-Life. The games were made with questions never meant to be answered, and even the supposed “concluding episodes” have kind of landed with a thud. Even the release of Portal with Episode 2, tying Aperture Science into the world, didn’t end up making much sense or having direct effect on anything.
I honestly don’t remember much of the plot of any of those games. Great games, though!
The Korean Netflix adaptation of one of my favourite Japanese books called 終末のフール (shūmatsu no fūrū, roughly ‘translate to fools in the end of times’). The book was about a collection of stories told from the perspectives of different residents of an apartment building in a world that’s come to accept the fact that a planetoid is going to destroy the Earth in a few years. Some struggle to decide whether to have a child or not. Some question whether there’s even a point going to school. Everyone has hard decisions to make but they’re all oddly cool with the fact that their time on Earth is limited. They felt enlightened to me because I think most of us spend our days ignoring the finiteness of our lives.
On the other hand, the K-drama was a generic apocalypse survival show. Everyone just screaming and yelling. At least, that’s how it started off as and I lost interest immediately. Even the English title was stupid—Goodbye Earth. Ugh.
Star Citizen. I’m less disappointed in the tech demo than how Chris Roberts has handled the business end of it.
I grew up on Wing Commander, Privateer, Starlancer, and Freelancer. I still have all those games on physical media with original boxes. And the Wing Commander CIC is the one website I still visit daily since 1997-ish. So when Roberts pitched a new space game back around 2012 I was thrilled. Well, we all know how that turned out. I’ve given up waiting for any release of Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
Freelancer.
I know everyone hates games publishers but this was a perfect example of a publisher untangling a mess. Microsoft bought Roberts’ company and immediately dialed back the unworkable ambition, put Roberts in a consulting role where he didn’t have a final say over anything, and actually got the game finished and released.
Star Citizen is what happens when the same guy who made such an intractable mess of development discovers an infinite money glitch as long as he never stops developing and never releases a full game.
I’m still mad about Interstellar
Assassin’s Creed has been going downhill since Revelations. The movie wasn’t good either.
65 was such a missed opportunity. It’s about a guy who crash lands on Earth right before the asteroid that kills the dinosaurs. Spoiler alert: he escapes just in time to avoid the asteroid. It’s just a generic survival movie with generic monsters. Waste of a premise. It should have shown the beautiful side of the dinosaur world and made us sad when they died
Moving away from physical buttons and physical media. I don’t mind touchscreens and I do enjoy downloading, but there’s nothing more satisfying than a good click of a button and actually holding something in your hand that you purchased.
I’m so tired of finger-touch interfaces. Especially when they lag and they don’t register your input right away.
Gotta use the cheapest processor to get the job done.
The Hobbit movies
One of my favourite books as a kid, I don’t think I’ll ever watch the movies again by choice
You could tell those were going to be a gongshow just from the production process. LotR had years of prepwork to make sure everything was sorted out and ready for filming, so they had a relatively smooth time filming. The Hobbit films were rushed and you could tell. PJ apparently was finalising scripts and storyboards the night before each shoot.
LOTR was bad to me, I absolutely loved those books as a kid, I even enjoyed the animated ones from forever ago, but the movies were far too long for what they showed.
When The Hobbit came out as a trilogy movie series I was a bit confused but gave it a try.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a LotR fan whose favourite film adaptation was Bakshi’s. That’s really interesting.
I think it’s probably because I saw them a long time before the new ones, it was something I remember from childhood. The live action ones came out when I was a young adult and they skipped the better parts and embellished others in my opinion. I know the “Tom” debate is overdone, but beyond providing the ancient weapons needed to defeat the Witchking, he provides a glimpse into the lore without making it a detour that just seems out of place.
Same. I still have the discs around for no particular reason. I watched Desolation of Smaug in theaters, but then I watched all three of them in a row at somepoint.
My point still stands, so much unnecessary clutter for an otherwise short book.
Like okay, I know people were probably eager to see something Middle-Earth related after they felt like it’s been ‘forever’ ago since the LOTR films up until the Hobbit ones. But, they didn’t need to do the Hobbit that dirty. But, Amazon raised the ante later on. I’m not watching the Rings of Power, ever. Not even because of the diversity issue, but, it supposedly is based on the Silmarillion and I consider that my sacred book not to be fucked with and I don’t want to see a show that probably is going to mess with it.
Dragon Age 2 just that one at some point it was unbearable. 1 and 3 (inquisition) are awesome.
cant think of anything other atm (but probably incoming)
Cyberpunk 2077. Hands down.
Disappointed doesnt even fully encapsulate my feelings throughout knowing this games existance
Heres a list of a 100 words that describe what I felt at various stages; Since its been announced all the way to the last hour I sunk into playing this game
7 years of developement time for one of the worst releases in gaming history
Not even an RPG as orignally promised, just another futuristic shooter.
Just missed damn near every mark, I’d time machine back just to tell myself to let that game go
I’m kind of annoyed that it’s still used as a benchmark performance basis despite the game coming out in a buggy and subpar visual state lol.
Batman Arkham Knight being peak visual fidelity a decade later is really not so funny anymore when no one seems to use actual high fidelity games to compare instead of the latest EA or Ubisoft slop.
thanks for the dictionary piece! i watched a lot of videos but it didnt get me.
Have you played it? Like after the stability fixes it’s probably one of the best modern rpgs.
From start to finish, and its not that I didn’t have fun with it after they made it stable. Its that fact that as someone who is heavily into the genre of cyberpunk and love rpg gameplay with wide range of customization and choosing your own adventure in a content rich world, it was underwelming for all the hype.
At first, it was severly lacking, not getting what was a major selling point for what could of been a revolutionary AAA cyberpunk game was a big slap in the face for peeps like me who waited so long to play the game.
Sure its fun now, it was fun even with the hilariously game breaking glitches; however, thats not what was promised and that disappointing part of the experence cant be push asided
I think the Eurovision Song Contest has lost the innocent magic it once possessed.
…of its own choice.
Yep ,go back to 80s
Yeah it sucks since around 1994
I am still mad that I paid actual money to see Valerian and the city of 1000 worlds
I found that movie simultaneously really good and really bad. Somewhere under there is a deep story about colonialism, but it’s really poorly executed
I know it’s ancient history, but I still can’t get over the spectacular train wreck of Star Wars Episode One. So much hype, so much hope, and then you get a two hour arcade game promo with Jar Jar Binks. It was like George Lucas had picked every single terrible trope of 90s movies and packaged it neatly into a movie.
Man, Phantom Menace being the worst Star Wars movie when it came out is like George W. Bush being the dumbest US president: those were simpler times, somehow.
I’ll say the prequels aged better than I’d remembered them, though. And they get a lot better with the existing fanedits, especially HAL9000’s take on Episode I, which trims a lot of the dumb humour, dials down the Jar Jar antics significantly and tightens the plot a nice bit, to make it more of a classic Star Wars adventure.
Yeah, at least the prequels had an actual story to them and were cohesive with each other. The sequels are just a jumbled mess with each director doing their own thing. I’d take the prequels over the sequels any day.
I haven’t witnessed the edit you mention, but it sounds like it fits in 20 minutes. 🤣
I think Topher Grace was behind an edit that only used about ten minutes of episode one.
Yes! That’s what actually got me into Star Wars fanedits and fanedits in general, he made the whole prequel trilogy into a unified experience. Saw one based on his editing notes and liked it, but through the years I’ve come to enjoy other takes from the movies, as well.
The funny thing is, having been born several years after it was released and having probably played the lego games before seeing the films, I liked it! Hell I loved it!
But if i put myself in the shoes of, well, you for instance, then I can see that it’s as dissapointing as the disney sequel trilogy. And then I can see how lame some aspects are on further rewatches
Phantom Menace was great for lore expansion of Star Wars, but it was weird to see it get more infantile than the previous trilogy, seeing as original fans were actually getting older.
It has really low rewatchability too. The in-universe gap between phantom menace and attack of the clones is reallly long, making it less relevant to the rest of the trilogy. And it has huge swathes of boring stuff in the middle. Politics stuff, very hard to follow.
Jar Jar doesn’t bother me as a character.
I say this everytime phantom menace is mentioned, but the original plans would have had appropriately aged characters and been really fun.
It’s because it was for Star Wars fans to take their kids too.
Phantom Menace was great for lore expansion of Star Wars, but it was weird to see it get more infantile than the previous trilogy, seeing as original fans were actually getting older.
I find this a fascinating thing to think about.
I’m the same age as the original Star Wars film and grew up on the Original Trilogy. Those three were some of the best stuff ever to my kiddie brain. The older I get, the more I feel like the OT was pretty much just as childish as the prequels when it comes down to it, just without access to 1990s cartoony CGI. I’m not saying this as a bad thing, I still enjoy the OT, but it’s clear to me now as an old fart that the prequels felt more kiddie than the OT when I watched them in the theaters because I was watching the prequels for the first time with a grownup’s brain.
I still enjoy the OT, they poke those childhood brain cells that have been hooked on them all this time. I can enjoy the prequels a bit, but it’s mostly in the form of memes and cracked-out fan remixes. The sequel movies, though, always struck me as a goddamned mess and I still haven’t figured out who they were meant to be for.
I was born the same year episode 6 came out, so I was 16 when Phantom Menace came out, and grew up loving the original trilogy. And my teenager brain enjoyed the Phantom Menace too. Yeah, Jar Jar was annoying and the CGI was jarring sometimes, especially growing up watching the practical effects they used in the originals, but I still loved it. I just really think they should have aged Anakin up in TPM though, he should have been a teenager instead of a kid because it just made the scenes with him and Padme really weird.
I’ve seen it twice. I bought tickets to two showings on opening day because after sixteen years of waiting there was finally going to be a new Star Wars movie. I had one for the very first showing in the morning and the other for that night. There hasn’t been a more exciting moment in a movie theater than when I saw the Lucasfilm logo and “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” and then that blast of trumpets. And then the movie happened. After the closing credits rolled, I spent the next few hours debating on whether or not to use the second ticket. I bit the bullet and went, surrounded in the line outside by all of these hopeful, happy people. I didn’t have the heart to warn them.
Nobody would have believed you, anyway. Expectations were so high, you would have just come across as a hateful troll.
Star Wars : The Parliamentary Debates ?
I actually walked out somewhere in the middle of it
my two favorite media franchises are Star Trek and Sonic. how long have you got?
Oh god… Star Trek just got… I dont even know how to describe what had been done to it.
Basically star Trek died after ST: Enterprise
Anything after that was vapid shitty pew pew cgi flare fest sci-fi, and the Picard series ruined TNG for me for years. I used to watch ST at least a few times per week, DS9, TNG, mostly. After ST :Picard i stopped. I couldn’t anymore, it was ruined for so fucking long
But there was a small ray of light, though
Watch “The Orville”, it’s made by Seth McFarlane after he rejected what the execs wanted for star Trek. It’s basically TNG updated for the 2020s and the first two seasons are amazing and have a BOBW episode, even, and hell, even a “family” type episode after. Seriously, it looks and feels like modern TNG, has great episodes like TNG used to have. The third season kinda went the pew pew direction as well, very few very long episodes where the good writing got replaced with loads of CGI, but it’s still doable.
There isn’t a fourth season, yet, anyway, but Seth recently said he is finishing writing the fourth season, let’s see what happens
Those first two seasons though, are star Trek magic, the Orville magic
First, The Orville is excellent and for anyone who watches Trek I always recommend The Orville. It’s a little crude when it starts, but it’s levels out and is really great.
Second, since you didn’t mention it, Strange New Worlds is the modern Star Trek in universe show you’re looking for.
SNW can be ok, but it leans pretty heavy on the action, and the moral quandary episodes are hit or miss to a high degree. I can’t think of a single high concept scifi premise episode of SNW that made me say “Wow.” and stuck with me. The war PTSD episode with the transporter buffer triage was very good, but more emotional and less scifi high concept. And I’ve already seen MASH.
Season 2, episode 2, Ad Astra per Aspera is my go to answer for best episodes that I think about. It’s clearly inspired by TNGs The Measure of a Man while that episode will always be the best, the SNW episode still scratches that itch.
I’ve watched them all, and none of them really felt elevated for me. Ad Astra per Aspera was fine, but I didn’t come away with any new interesting thoughts about anything from it.
Basically star Trek died after ST: Enterprise
Many trekkies said that Trek couldn’t be a Saturday morning cartoon and that after TAS would never survive, there are people who said that after TNG came out star trek was dead because the captain was bald, and some people who said DS9 killed it as a space station was not exploring, then some people complained that VOY killed it because the ship had infinite torpedos and a lot of people said ENT was the franchise’s death knell because touch screens, and OMG what did JJ Abrams do? After DSC came out some people said Star Trek was over because people dont cry in space, After PIC came out some people said it ruined everything that came before because space captains can’t change, some people said that LDS was turning ST into Rick and Morty fan wank, a horde of people said that PRO was trying to be be Clone Wars and that it gave the franchise a terminal diagnosis, it was the consensus of many fans that SNW was shitting on the memory of Kirk and crew, a loud group of trek consumers suggested that there couldnt be female Jem’Hadar and therefore SFA caused the franchise to flatline…
Yet there is more trek in development, that will be loved by some and derided by many
*edit: Section 31 definitely murdered the franchise because Rachel Garrett something something, irish vulcan space robots?
I’m honestly so confused by (presumably) adults who consider Sonic as their favorite media franchise… Just… What?
Have you, like, tried reading books or watching movies since you’ve become an adult, or…?
I don’t want to sound judgmental, but I kind of feel bad for people like this. If you enjoy it, you enjoy it, I guess… But you’re missing out on like actual good shit lol
Edit: hurr durr gotta go fast!
Heaven forbid an adult should enjoy video games. It’s also possible to have a favorite franchise and read books, including outside of that franchise.
Prole, why do you always have so many hot takes?
People who grew up with the games have a certain fondness for the series that even better written franchises cannot replicate.
What’s wrong with people deciding the franchise that made them happy in their childhood should continue making them happy in their adulthood? None of this suggests they haven’t tried or enjoyed better written stories.
None of this suggests they haven’t tried or enjoyed better written stories.
It kind of does though. They said it’s their “favorite media franchise,” not just that they were a fan.
It’s for literal babies
And I have a problem with it, because it’s not a rare thing and it demonstrates a lack of curiosity that I find to be dangerous for a modern society.
If the video game for babies that you played when you were 10 is still your favorite media franchise, then you need to expose yourself to more media.
You are very judgemental and keeps repeating the same argument I’ve already addressed as to why someone can have their favourite franchise be something that is not the best thing they’ve ever read. I think you need to expand your perspective a lot more about the world. Being so narrow-minded is even more dangerous for modern society.
Oh no I’m judgmental whatever will I do.
Maybe it’s the person who’s a grown adult and still considers Sonic the Hedgehog to be their favorite media franchise is he one who needs to expand their perspective.
I want you to be honest, do you actually know what the plots of these games are like?
You could, you know, be less judgemental, especially for something simple like a favourite media franchise.
You’re still refusing to acknowledge my point about why someone would consider it their favourite, and it has nothing to do with not expanding their perspective. It’s you that refuses to expand your perspective beyond your own capacity to understand stuff.
Do I need to care what the plot is like? My favourite media franchise has a pretty terrible plot, as well. It’s not the reason I love it. You seem unable to grasp such a simple concept.
you can enjoy all types of media at the same time. Someone who enjoys Sonic or a franchise of similar caliber doesn’t ONLY enjoy Sonic and nothing else.
They said it was their favorite media franchise, not that they enjoyed it.
Have you ever seen the “plot” of a Sonic game? If you’re an adult, and that’s your favorite media franchise, then you should be embarrassed
The movie birdman!
I read about it as an piece of art and what I saw was simply boring.
I might not have understood it or have been in the wrong state of mind, idk.
