Diecast #175: Doctor Strange, Titanfall 2, Overwatch

By Shamus Posted Monday Nov 7, 2016

Filed under: Diecast 84 comments



Hosts: Josh, Shamus, Campster, Mumbles. Episode edited by Issac.

Show notes:
0:00:34 Doctor Strange (No spoilers.)


Link (YouTube)

Here is the new Marvel Logo that Chris complained about.

0:33:11 Titanfall 2

0:42:57 Mailbag: Starting a Let’s Play

Dear Diecast,

I’m interested in producing my own Let’s Play videos, but I’m nervous about getting started. Is there a certain type of game I should start with (one I know vs. blind?) How, and with what, should I edit my videos? I have zero experience in this field and any advice will be greatly appreciated.

With love,
Cute Boy Steven

0:50:12 Mailbag: Overwatch

Dear Diecast

Five months in, are any of you playing Overwatch?

Love, Christopher

0:56:23 Mailbag: Wrestling Games

Dear Mumbles

Do you play any wrestling video games? Or if not, do you play wrestling characters in fighting games, like Zangief and Rainbow Mika in Street Fighter or King of Dinosaurs in King of Fighters?

Love, Christopher

1:03:44 Mailbag: Anime

Dear Diecast

What are Shamus’ and Josh’s picks for anime this season? (yuri on ice obvi)

Love, Christopher

 


From The Archives:
 

84 thoughts on “Diecast #175: Doctor Strange, Titanfall 2, Overwatch

  1. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Its official now:Mumbles admits that she actually loves Benedict Cumberbatch.

  2. Christopher says:

    Oh my God, this list of e-mails

    1. Geebs says:

      Dear Diecast, you seem to be filtering the mailbag by the letter ‘C’. You might want to look into that.

      1. Matt Downie says:

        Completely concur. Ceaseless ‘C’-centric contacts create crass consistency.

        1. Christopher says:

          In my defense, I’m not forcing them to read my emails. I do send in one or two every week and get happy when they’re read, though.

          I seriously forgot that I put Yuri!!! on Ice in there. The way “obviously” is cut off, I guess I thought I erased it. Yuri!!! on Ice is what my fujoshi(fuYOSHI?) friends are watching, I have no idea how good it is beyond some very nice ice skating animation and a very shippable main cast.

          The only new show I picked up this season was Keijo!!!!!!!!, the butt fighting show. I expected it to be butts on the writing and animation side as well, but it’s a pretty fun shonen parody. Some of this stuff is straight out of Hajime no Ippo, just butts instead of boxing. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is still good, too. So those two are what I’ve actually been watching this season.

          I wanna know what fighting game Mumbles’ brother plays!

          1. Mumbles says:

            You didn’t put Yuri on Ice on there, I did heheheh. I thought the guys saw me add it so I’m sorry it got added to your ACTUAL email.

            And my brother was #8 in Killer Instinct!

            1. Christopher says:

              I never saw this until today. That’s awesome! and thanks for solving the yuri mystery!

      2. Echo Tango says:

        No, it’s fine; We just need to prepend the letter C onto all of our names when sending in questions! :P

        1. Caemian Lucifer says:

          How would that work?

        2. Christopher says:

          Christopher is just an alias. My real name is Kristoffer. I just changed it because I figured Americans would have a harder time with it. So yeah, adding a C the right idea.

        3. C/3223574.816 m/s says:

          I dunno, seems unwieldy.

          1. CGMichael says:

            Clever! :D

        4. Cetsam says:

          Cetsam has a decent ring to it, I suppose. (It’s not any more arbitrary than “Retsam” already was)

        5. Chiladelphus says:

          I guess it sort of describes my personality a bit better? Maybe? I think?

  3. Wide And Nerdy® says:

    “Forced humor.” In other words, its a Marvel movie. Their humor is almost always a bit forced. The only movies where the humor kind of landed for me were Iron Man (only the first one) and The Avengers.

    Thor had one good joke (‘Smash’ “I’ll have another”). For me, all the comedic stuff with the human characters really drags him down.

    Guardians of the Galaxy had a few good jokes but with the amount of supposed comedy in the movie, not enough of it was good (it was still fun).

    1. Thomas says:

      The soundtrack is what makes Guardians of the Galaxy its got so much style and is so fun it really helps make everything else pop – including the humour which wouldn’t be super special by itself

      1. Wide And Nerdy® says:

        You raise a really good point. It was well chosen and if I was a little less cynical and critical, I’d could have just let go and enjoyed it more (I enjoyed it some).

        I’d blame Shamus but I know he loved Guardians.

  4. Phill says:

    I ended up accidentally seeing ‘Sucker Punch’ apart of my work a few months back. By all the gods it was so amazingly stupid and exploitative teenage boy wish fulfilment and titillation that it actually made me angry. It might have supplanted ‘starship troopers’ at the top of my ‘most needlessly stupid to the pointlessly offensiveness’ movie list

    1. ehlijen says:

      I was told, and at the time willing to believe, that the crass exploitation was the point. That Suckerpunch was trying to point out just how disturbing all the ‘strong’ female character eye candy franchises can be by turning it up to eleven and pulling back the curtain to show the lobotomised bimbo at the core. Just like Starship Troopers was trying to point out just how fascist the director thought the book was by being about oblivious McWhitey swallowing the propaganda hook line and sinker. Just like Spec Ops: The Line turned the broshooter hero into a war criminal.

      And then I heard Snyder trying to defend the Superman movies, and revealing himself to be a self absorbed out of touch weirdo. A director of Verhoeven’s calibre he is not. Now I don’t know what to think about Suckerpunch anymore.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Well,even self absorbed out of touch weirdos can do clever things once in a while.’member the original star wars?

        1. ehlijen says:

          I do, and I wouldn’t call them clever. Fun, enjoyable, impressive and delightful, yes, but not really clever.

          But back on point, I can see the elements that would make Suckerpunch a clever subversion of what it pretends to be on the surface, but I can also see it embrace that surface appearance just a little too much to stay fully on message.

          I enjoyed the movie (despite the fight scenes that dragged on). I thought the juxtaposition of dancing prostitute in the male POV, kick-ass superhero in the female POV and waifu-body pillow/vegetable in reality to be blunt but essentially true in many cases. But apart from the soundtrack (as you mentioned above for Guardians, a good soundtrack can make an otherwise meh movie great), it really doesn’t hold up to rewatching, unlike Starship Troopers which can be enjoyed on multiple levels, depending on your current frame of mind.

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      I actually agree with MovieBob on this one:You just didnt get it.Also,like he said,people not getting it does not mean its good.And the same thing goes for starship troopers.And full disclosure,I did not like sucker punch,but I did like starship troopers.

      Anyway,thats one of the few MovieBob videos Id actually recommend.First part:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gXir4Pu0f0

      1. Ninety-Three says:

        I thought Sucker Punch was 40 minutes of cool action scenes, stitched together with 50 minutes of connective tissue that accomplished absolutely nothing. I wouldn’t be opposed to a just-action-scenes edit of the movie, but as a whole: did not like it. I’ve seen a decent number of people saying “You just don’t get it, man” and at this point I can’t help but notice the trend that one hundred percent of people making that argument are attracted to women. I’m with Mumbles in saying “this isn’t for women, this is for dudes who like that sort of thing”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Listen to that video again.He doesnt say that its a good movie,just that many people did not get its intended message.Heck,one of his first sentences is “I know people who got the message and still did not like it”.

          1. Thomas says:

            The thing is, its blatant that Snyder came up with the character designs first and the message afterwards. Its not that I don’t get the message, its that the message is a self deception on the part of the director.

            (I think Film Hulk wrote an article about that?)

            1. Mark says:

              Yeah, but Film Hulk is literally unreadable.

          2. Ninety-Three says:

            Listen to that video again.He doesnt say that its a good movie

            You are arguing with an imaginary version of my post, because I never said it wasn’t a good movie. I said whether or not I liked it, agreed with Mumbles re: the movie’s target audience, and made an observation about the “You don’t get it” argument.

            1. Daemian Lucifer says:

              The way you worded it implies that the argument is “you dont like it because you dont get it”.

            2. ehlijen says:

              Yes, but you didn’t address the argument made by the post and video link you replied to regarding who the supposed target audience of the movie was, namely not the dudes attracted to those kinds of scenes. Those are supposedly the demographic shamed by the movie, laid bare as lusting over literal objects and fantasies rather than people, if you accept that interpretation.

              You may be right, you may be wrong, but you seemed to talk straight past that proposed interpretation to argue against a completely different one.

              I don’t believe ‘Listen to that video again’ was meant as ‘you don’t get it’, but rather ‘I’m not sure how this is a response to the video, you seem to have replied to something else’.

      2. GloatingSwine says:

        “You didn’t get it” is a poor argument. A lot of people did get Sucker Punch and still thought it was puerile exploitative trash.

        Because it is.

        Zack Snyder (and Moviebob) might think it’s satire, but the failure mode of satire is being the thing you’re attempting to satirise, and Sucker Punch does fail as satire because it spends far too much time just being the thing that Moviebob argues it is criticising and thereby undermines any argument it might be alleged to have been making about it.

        1. Phill says:

          You beat me to it.

          There is no point (for example) satirising pornography by making a porno movie and then saying “oh, didn’t toy get that it was ironic”. Anyone getting off on it is getting off on it regardless of the creator’s intention, and the creator thinking they are making some kind of point doesn’t really matter.

          If you want to make a movie that makes a point about fetishising women in the guise of female empowerment, there are certainly better ways to do it than by making a movie that fetishises women and completely panders to male gaze, and having a supposed ‘point’ that is almost entirely lost on the people who actually see the film. Thats on about the same level as “I had my fingers crossed when I made it so it doesn’t count”

        2. Daemian Lucifer says:

          A lot of people did get Sucker Punch and still thought it was puerile exploitative trash.

          Thats literally what he says in the video.He never claims that its a well executed satire.

          1. Ninety-Three says:

            “You don’t get it” is either missing the point or implying the complaint is invalid. If we all agree that Sucker Punch is exploitative trash, how are Snyder’s aspirations to satire in any way relevant to the complaint “I didn’t like it because it was exploitative trash”? Responding to the complainer with “You just don’t get it” implies disagreement about trashiness because the only other way to interpret the statement is that it’s a complete non-sequitur.

          2. GloatingSwine says:

            Right, but the point is that you can’t say “you didn’t get it, it’s a satire of exploitative trash” because the failure mode of satire is being the thing you purport to be satirising.

            Because the satire is poorly executed, the movie is just left as exploitative trash, there is no satire present.

            1. ehlijen says:

              I think there is enough satire left to mark it as something other than just exploitative trash, that part just doesn’t really work well enough. So what the movie is is a somewhat confused mess with conflicting statements, i.e. neither a working satire, nor just the thing it was trying to satire.

  5. Baron Tanks says:

    My new favourite out-of-context Mumbles quote (at 29:50):

    “…blood, sex, more, butt-killing dudes.”

  6. Daemian Lucifer says:

    This is how doctor strange + luke cage would end up looking:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFuMpYTyRjw

    1. Tohron says:

      I wouldn’t quite agree with this – Strange definitely outclasses Cage by a couple orders of magnitude, but Luke Cage is still able to hold his own in a fight. It would probably end up more like that scene in Iron Man 2 where Black Widow and Tony Stark’s security chief assault a Hammertech facility.

    2. ehlijen says:

      I was very confused before I started the video. I didn’t get what Luke Cage and Dr Strange had to do with BMX – Bandits, the australian feature film.

  7. Wide And Nerdy® says:

    I will never forgive the 90’s for being the 90’s (since they brought it up). Comics featured blood and grittiness and sex and guns and pouches. Music was going through something similarly gritty that I hated. The 80’s and the 00’s were so much better.

    1. tzeneth says:

      But the 90’s had Batman the Animated Series and a great Spiderman animated series!

      1. Kelerak says:

        I love describing the events of the Spider-Man animated series to my unknowing friends, especially the part when Spider-Man was bit by a vampire, turning him into the Were-Spider, and The Punisher was called in to take care of him.

        Superheroes are weird.

      2. Wide And Nerdy® says:

        Yeah and Superman was only dead for a year. And Kingdom Come (in my mind) began the reconstruction in 1994 (continued with Grant Morrison’s JLA, Alex Ross’s Marvels, culminating in Brian Michael Bendis’s Ultimate Spiderman.)

        Thankfully, there were creators who were annoyed by the excesses of the Dark Age.

    2. ehlijen says:

      The 90s brought good scifi, I thought. B5, SG1 and DS9 first and foremost.
      It also brought about the age of gaming, with such classics as XCOM, X-wing, TIE Fighter, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Civilisation, Tomb Raider and many more.

      There was also Batman and Robin the movie, which was about as ungritty as comic book content could get. (No, it wasn’t good, but it was hilarious!)

  8. Ninety-Three says:

    Before Overwatch came out, my fear was that it would be like MOBAs, where you need to memorize a gigabyte of hero powers and items and map details, and if you don’t then you will die because you failed to plan for detail #37.b subsection gamma. I played for something like fifteen hours trying to find the fun, it never really clicked for me, and I think it ultimately did come down to the MOBA stuff.

    Blizzard did an admirable job of keeping character complexity down, but I still had the exact same problem I have with MOBAs. The skill ceiling is in the stratosphere and the feedback is as minimal as possible (give me a bloody scoreboard Blizzard). I died because Reaper popped out of nowhere and used his ult: I have no idea how to make that not happen. I don’t even know if I did something wrong or if using his ult like that is supposed to be a free kills button and I should just take my lumps.

    My problem with Overwatch is that I wanted to play skillfully, and not only did I not know how to do that, I didn’t know how to learn to do that. One night I played two payload games back to back: in the first one my team pushed it about twenty meters total, and in the second one our payload was moving for the entire match. Neither match was fun, and I didn’t understand the difference between those two games. I could not even begin to explain why one was a curbstomp and the other was an effortless glide to victory. I quit right after that, maybe because learning seemed impossible, or maybe just because the game had proved that it could serve up a boring match where I lose and a boring match where I win back-to-back.

    1. Kelerak says:

      I was looking forward to Overwatch initially because I thought it was going to be the successor to Team Fortress 2 (because people aren’t sick of that comparison), and from what I can tell, it is and isn’t.

      I was the type of TF2 player that enjoyed dicking around more than actually pushing the objectives, considering I hung out mostly on 24/7 2fort and MARIO_KART servers, and Overwatch doesn’t seem to allow for that. No dedicated servers at all, and the game takes a very MOBA-esque approach to focusing on competitive matchmaking and skill. It’s lower than what you would call “traditional MOBAs” (which my only example is League of Legends, so feel free to discredit me), but still omnipresent in the game’s mechanics.

      It’s sad, because I absolutely adore the characters in the game.

    2. IFS says:

      My advice for trying to figure out how a hero did something is to try playing that hero, you might not be very good with them but you’ll get a better feel for how their kit works by using it. When you play as say Pharrah for example you’ll start using routes that other characters can’t access as easily and gain better understanding of the maps, what paths to watch and so on.

      As far as actually learning to follow the flow of the game the best advice I can give is to turn on the feature that highlights allies through walls. Supports have it on by default (since it shows how injured allies are) but you can turn it on for other characters as well. This will let you see when your team is scattered, when they’re coordinated, pushing, etc more easily. Actually playing support will help as well since that will make the positioning of all your allies more important to your role, but playing tanks can also be good for learning since they can dictate the flow of the game in a lot of ways.

  9. Gold says:

    My biggest problem with the Doctor Strange magic was it looked identical to Iron Man’s holograms. :/

    1. Matt Downie says:

      If Iron Man’s portable glowing energy thingy in his chest really worked through engineering, he’d be using it to make money and solve the energy crisis. Logically, therefore, his gadgets must be magic items in disguise.

      1. Thomas says:

        He did do that right? I think that was a plot point either in one of his films or the Avengers. Its just they need to make their world feel like ours, so solving the energy crisis doesn’t actually do anything

        1. ehlijen says:

          In Iron Man, Tony wants to build a bigger arc reactor having supposedly figured out the key that eluded them before in the terrorist engineering cave. The bad guy then takes his company away and they fight and the plot point is never brought up again or resolved. Tony decides to go career superheroing instead.

          It’s skipped in Iron Man 2, but brought up again in avengers. But it wasn’t a plot point, more a random anecdote. The Stark Tower was built to be completely self sufficient, energy wise. But it informed nothing else in the movie, other than confirming that yes, Tony has a penthouse suite in New York, so he can get another stashed suit from there in the climax.

  10. Deadpool says:

    I REALLY liked Dr. Strange… I thought I might not because I really liked the comic and while this was super different… It was solid.

    1. Matt Downie says:

      I liked it, but it had another forgettable MCU villain.

  11. Kelerak says:

    So, is there a day that’s best to send in emails? I sent in a couple emails in the past and haven’t gotten them read, so I’d like to dethrone Christopher.

    1. Ninety-Three says:

      I would also like to know what we have to do to get our emails answered, as I’ve sent in a few that never made it onto the show. Are the unanswered questions just not good enough, are you drawing questions out of a hat, do you only answer the ones where everyone in the pre-show discussion has something to say about it…?

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        You need to change your name to Christopher,obviously.

      2. Shamus says:

        The biggest mistake people make is sending in LONG questions with very specific outlines for the discussion. Christopher sends short open-ended questions.

        How it works:

        I paste all the questions into a common document. First we go over them and veto the ones we don’t want to answer: Too controversial, too personal, or we just don’t have anything to say on the topic.

        Then we look at the remaining questions. “Does anyone have anything to say on this topic?” The more people that say yes, the higher on the list it goes.

        It’s not quite as organized as I make it sound. Sometimes I’ll accidentally skip a question we intended to answer. Sometime one question will eat up 20 minutes and displace 5 others. It’s random and goofy and not particularly fair, but we do what we can.

        1. Wide And Nerdy® says:

          The biggest mistake people make is sending in LONG questions with very specific outlines for the discussion.

          I totally see your point on that. But you do realize you all cultivated this kind of a fanbase, right? I mean that’s not a criticism. I just think its funny that it worked out this way.

          You guys do respond to long form stuff in the comments. Text works better because responses require composition and that wastes minutes when you’re on air.

          It would probably be helpful if you guys decided which questions you were going to answer and let them hang out in the back of your head for a few days.

          1. Shamus says:

            “I totally see your point on that. But you do realize you all cultivated this kind of a fanbase, right?”

            Yes.

            And for the record, that’s a very good thing in my mind. It’s just that the shoot-from-the-hip style of mailbags doesn’t mesh well with that.

            A LOT of mailbag questions would make excellent column topics. Once in a while I paste one into a new document, intending to turn it into a Tuesday column. So far they’ve been shoved aside by current events until I manage to forget about them or they become moot, but it still might happen.

      3. John says:

        The last time somebody–and I’m sorry that I can’t remember who it was–had a hot streak like this, he suggested that the secret was to send your e-mail right before they record the show so that it’s at the top of the stack. So that’s, what, Friday?

  12. Cybron says:

    I totally sympathize with Josh about Overwatch. It’s hard to go from competitive to quick play and I just don’t have time to stay competitive.

    Kenny Omega and Xavier Woods both actively associate themselves with video games and the fighting game community in particular. Kenny Woods is pretty good at SFV even (better than me, that’s for sure).

    Re: Mumbles’s alarm about fujoshi and joshi wrestling – joshi just means girl/woman. Fujoshi means “rotten girl”. The more you know.

    I haven’t watched anything besides Jojo’s Bizzare Adventure recently, but I’m happy to hear Mob is good. It’s on my to watch list. Drifters is a recent series based on a manga written by the same guy who did Hellsing, so if you’re into that sort of thing might be worth a look.

    1. Christopher says:

      Xavier Wood(or Austin Creed, rather) has even got his own video game channel on youtube. I vaguely know it because he’s done some videos with current Giant Bomb and former Gameinformer guy Dan Ryckert. It seems fine, but I don’t really have room for that many more let’s plays to watch in my life.

      Mob Psycho 100 is awesome. If the artstyle doesn’t grate, it’s definitely the kind of show that people who don’t giva a crap about anime can watch and have a good time with. I think it’s better than One Punch Man, and I like One Punch Man a lot.

    2. John says:

      I know nothing of this thing you call “wrestling”, but I have heard of Kenny Omega because I watched a lot of Street Fighter 5 videos from CEO back in June. (He plays Alex.) The interesting thing about Mr. Omega as far as I am concerned is his super-Canadian voice. I am given to understand that Mr. Omega is a heel when wrestling but it’s hard for me to believe that anyone who sounds that Canadian could be evil.

      1. Mumbles says:

        Kenny is really a huge sweetie and kind of impossible to hate, but he tries hard to make it work lol. Here’s him singing to the audience after he won lol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efz-yg3S30s

  13. Kelerak says:

    I wish I could get into more anime than just stuff Gen Urobuchi worked on.

    I would count Danganronpa as something I like, but Danganronpa is primarily a visual novel, so…

  14. Ninety-Three says:

    So Shamus, now that FFX has wrapped up, are you going to be doing a new long-form analysis, and if so, will it be up this Thursday?

  15. Groboclown says:

    For video editing, maybe this isn’t right for everyone, but I now have settled on using Blender. There’s a ton of instructional videos to get you going. Best of all, it’s Open Source and free. You can even get it installed through Steam.

    Yes, Blender is primarily designed around 3D modeling and animation, but the video editing tools are really quite robust, and allows you to get more and more advanced things thrown in.

  16. IFS says:

    From the talk about Titanfall 2 (and that I’ve heard people comparing it to Half-life 2) I wonder if it would make for a good season of spoiler warning. I know we already had a special on CoD that provides a nice counterpoint to the HL2 season but it’d be kind of cool to get another look in some of the directions modern shooters have gone in.

    1. Chiladelphus says:

      I wonder if Spoiler Warning will ever do a season of Half-Life 2: Episode 2? It’s been a long time since they did Episode 1.

  17. Agamo says:

    I can’t be the only one who automatically appends “love” to “Doctor Strange” every time I hear it. I’m not even sure why; I knew about Dr. Strange well before Dr. Strangelove. Maybe it’s because “Dr. Strange” sounds so…well, strange, and “Dr. Strangelove” sounds a little more natural.

    1. Jsor says:

      Should’ve called him “Weird, M.D.” IMO

  18. Benjamin Hilton says:

    For the record in the comics, with in the last 6 six years Luke cage was the leader of the Avengers. He may not be a household name, but in the comics he holds his own with the best of them. Hell one of the best runs of the Avengers in recent years, the team was composed of Spider man, Luke cage, Hawkeye, Wolverine, and Dr Strange. Oh so good.
    Edit: For bonus fun times check out the Luke Cage and Blade team up. yeahhhhhhhhh

  19. Jsor says:

    How far are you in DB Super, Josh? The animation was kind of iffy for the movie retread arcs, and part of the whole sorta boring tournament arc, but I feel like it’s really improved in the current arc. There are still slip-ups now and then, but the last episode in particular was really well done.

    I’m really liking DB Super, but I wasn’t totally on board until the current arc. I’ll agree it’s sort of a “retread” bringing Future Trunks back in a re-ruined future, but Black is possibly the best villain DB’s ever had IMO.

    Also, I appreciate Super having more focus on Bulma and more personal things like Gohan’s family, which is part of why I like the current arc. Up until now it was kind of just the Goku and Vegeta show, but this arc is giving a lot of development to other people like both Trunkses, future Mai, Bulma, and even Goku (who has almost never had character development since the first episode of DB) in the pre-season arc with Pan.

    1. Bloodsquirrel says:

      My big problem with Super is that it’s just completely unnecessary.

      All of DBZ’s character arcs were wrapped up by the time of the Buu saga, and Super isn’t interested in opening up any new ones. There is something charming in the slice-of-life stuff that the original manga never had time for, but it’s basically just fanservice that plays off of pre-existing investment in the characters. The rest of it is the Goku and Vegeta buddy show, which was a fun dynamic during the Buu saga when it was new, but gets really one-dimensional after a while when there isn’t anything there to challenge it.

      One of DBZ’s strengths is that Toriyama was always mixing things up- it’s what kept his relatively simple storylines interesting. Super really doesn’t offer any of that. It’s not terrible, but I have no interest in keeping up with it.

  20. Cetsam says:

    The discussion of Zach Snyder and his view of “growing up” comics reminds me of an appropriate C.S. Lewis quote that I happened to see quoted on reddit earlier today:

    Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development.

    When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

  21. Retsam says:

    I’m always a bit sad I missed the period of time where Shamus had thoughts on anime. (Though his FFX series was pretty much close enough) Did Shamus watch Planetes back when he watched anime? Because that seems like the sort of show he’d really like, and it does well at largely avoiding tropes.

    Personally, the current season of anime seems to be butts. It’s the first season for awhile where I haven’t seen anything that looked worth watching. (Though I hear Yaoi On Ice is pretty good; but it’s not really my genre) So far the only thing from this year as a whole that I’ve really loved has been ERASED.

    1. Echo Tango says:

      Planetes is so good! It’s got all the best features! Action, suspense, comedy, romance, inter-planetary garbage disposal! :D

  22. Mumbles, you might not get the same mileage I got out of it, but I loved SLAMMED! (from Choice of Games). As someone who has never followed or understood the wrestling world, it (and the awsome Triple H video from Max Landis) helped show me what people who love wrestling see in it.

    Plus it’s nice to get a good text-based game, false choice and all…

  23. Nate A.M. says:

    The day has finally come when Diecast talks about Japanese cartoons and I’m actually qualified to comment.

    Shamus might do well to ask around for some recommendations on anime that have come around since late 2007. A lot has changed in the industry since then, and if I may be so bold, 2007 was a low point in the creative development of Japanese animation. Since then, we’ve seen the growth of a completely unsustainable bubble that will probably collapse soon, but which has given us an unprecedented variety of shows and techniques unimaginable in any other era – not even during the OVA boom.

    I think falling out of anime for a while is completely natural if you got into it because you were impressed by how different it is, and if seemingly your only way of finding new things besides obvious gotos like Miyazaki is diving into the home video diarrhea of ADV and Geneon during the mid 2000s. Funnily (and unsurprisingly) enough, the US licensing industry collapsed right around the time Shamus checked out.

    Anyway, the reason why there hasn’t been a Dragon Ball anime with One-Punch Man level animation is, as Kevin Cirugeda points out, because OPM was the product of many of the industry’s most talented animators and artists getting really exited about the project and volunteering to put lots and lots of time and effort into it. This would be completely unsustainable for a long-running series, since it’d be very difficult to make sure a team like that remains organized and doesn’t fall behind schedule, and because all these animators are in high demand and have other things to do. Delays and staffing problems are deadly enough in short running anime – they would absolutely ravage a long one.

    I don’t actually watch Dragon Ball Super, but the situation is a lot like other Toei children’s cartoons: cheap animation to fill in the long stretches with the occasional fight animated by one of Toei’s go-to heavy hitters like Naoki Tate or Naotoshi Shida. Precure is the same way, as is Sailor Moon Crystal. Unfortunate as it may be, this is probably the best way to produce a show of its type. And after all, this method has given us wonderful directors like Rie Matsumoto, so maybe it’s not so bad after all.

  24. Guile says:

    I thought the humor in Doctor Strange was great. The Cloak of Levitation was not only basically a character all on its own, but it replaced the execrable sidekick character so common to superhero movies. And since it CAN’T TALK, it can’t outstay its welcome or make me cringe with stupid catchphrases or pop culture jokes.

  25. As someone who has done 1/4 of a Let’s Play, I’d like to take a stab at the question by giving some thoughts about my own experience.

    I haven’t tried Bandicam, but I have settled on using Mirillis Action! for my recording. It also supports streaming and recording with Intel Quicksync which seems to produce pretty good quality files without overtaxing my laptop. I edit with Premier Elements (although I’ve used other tools, some of them free, and they all seem to work equally well once you learn them).

    I chose to do a game I liked from a franchise I know well (Star Trek), and I did commentary in post since I wanted to do more analysis than minute-to-minute reaction. I stopped partway through the game because I’m finding it difficult to fill airtime by myself, and I want to try some live commentary with a friend.

  26. Steve C says:

    I planned to watch Doctor Strange today. All the cinemas are playing it in 3d only. I will have to wait until blueray. 3d gives me eyestrain.

  27. Kyte says:

    Whenever you guys talk about Titanfall’s movement system I think about Warframe, has already been doing the same for a couple years.

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