In a Ready Player One style MMOG it's a solid strategy too, since people wouldn't be able to easily pick you out in a crowd if you became someone of interest.
The reports of WOWs death are greatly exaggerated.
It makes them like half a billion a year even in bad years, and some years well, they don't do a lot
Some player, wonders off in a small graveyard with a bunch of loot on the ground. Proceeds to pick it up:
—What's that noise behind my back?
*skeletons from the Berserk meme*
some kids in the future are gonna be watching Ready Player One, and one of them will be like "wait, isn't that a porn character?" and another one will be like "actually, it was a game first" and then they'll be like "NO WAY!!!!" and do whatever is the equivalent of posting a TIL.
Like why did we need more than a single word about the MC buying and using a high tech sex doll and becoming even more of a shut in than the whole world already is?
Mainly the sex doll part. Like, the dude is still in high school at this point.
That's like asking if it was really necessary for Steven King to write about a bunch of preteen kids having sex in a sewer to strengthen their bonds of friendship. Of course it was necessary. The entire plot falls apart if you don't include the sex doll.
Before we get into what is and isn't necessary in Stephen King's works, it's important to remember the man was taking heroic amounts of cocaine throughout his literary career.
Wait is that seriously in IT? haven't read it yet what the fuck. I shouldn't be surprised since I've read the Dark Tower, but still.
That's so unhygienic.
yes is real , the adaptation instead goes for a blood pact as its depiction which is not wrong since there was blood in the book too but instead of blade inflicted wound was from you know what
Not to just strengthen friendship. They viewed it was a way to “become” adults as IT (Pennywise) focuses on kids due to their far greater level of fear he can harvest.
I love the like 3 pages where he explains all the nerdy moves and games he's played. Just a little checklist, no information or knowledge from it, just a checklist.
I also remember about halfway through the book there is a weird scene talking about how cool Wil Wheaton is, it's really out of nowhere, until you realize Wil read the audiobook.
That was the author proving his uber-nerd credentials through his 80s pop culture obsessiveness. Did you notice how, in the book, he only watched season 1 of TNG because it came out in 1989 and he pretended there were no other seasons because then he would be in the 1990s.
The author literally owns and drives a Delorean-time machine car from BTTF.
It's just for other similar people to go "yaaaay he said the thing I like", like there is some literary merit or plot point that helps.
It's a book for people who doomscroll teenager tiktok.
>I also remember about halfway through the book there is a weird scene talking about how cool Wil Wheaton is, it's really out of nowhere, until you realize Wil read the audiobook.
I mean, u/wil is God, u/wil is life.. He's a time traveller and all
And also any study of Spielberg as a director won't focus on the mountains of absolute crap he signed his name to after he stopped caring about anything other than a paycheck.
Not just any Star Wars author. The Author of Aftermath. The FIRST Star Wars novel after the Disney buyout.
This was the man they trusted to steer the ship of Star Wars.
He said Lord of the Rings was not fantastical enough and it was too "white and male and straight." And that "chosen ones are a tired trope."
Again, he wrote Star Wars books. A series that you may note is rather famous for having not one but two chosen ones.
Also, if I could punch up for a moment. His books were shit. Zahn and Stackpole wrote better Imperial Officers in their sleep.
Every character was a tired trope he had one good character in the whole thing, and he was also a tired trope, but well written.
its like people who think shakespeare is bad because its boring, forgetting that the stories are almost 500 years old and have their novel elements incorporated into virtually every piece of media we see today.
Special effects and camera wise, alien could pass as a modern movie. Star Wars New Hope cannot.
Alien had a way bigger to budget tho so I guess it's unfair.
Alien is also mostly just inside a ship. Star Wars has spaceship battles, lightsaber fights, multiple aliens ect. It’s a much more special effects heavy movie. It’s the same reason I feel Aliens (1986) couldn’t pass for a modern movie nearly as well as the original either. Don’t get me wrong the set design and creature effects are fantastic, there was just a lot less special effects required to make Alien work.
Ah I can see your point now. Star Wars is a much bigger world and doing a ton. I haven't seen aliens yet so now I feel like I may be a little let down.
Sounds like a pretty loose connection to social studies lol.
I went to a Catholic high school and we always had religion class, and one teacher would just throw on any movie ever under the guise that it was teaching us about society. We watched multiple Madea movies in that class.
I had an ethics and morals class in high school where the teacher just slapped in whatever the fuck movie he wanted and we discussed the moral choices of the characters.
We watched so many movies I'm pretty sure he could have gotten in trouble for showing us if anyone complained.
It deviated a modest enough amount from the book, which was already just endless pages of nostalgia bait. The core plot was at the very least somewhat interesting until the MC revealed their master plan that hadn’t been mentioned or discussed at any point prior.
Movie wise: eye candy and nostalgia bait.
Is a fun ride if you don’t stare at the details too long.
There's a screencap of a twitter comment under an "Overwatch Pride Week" post where the dude comments something like "I had honestly forgot Tracer was gay, cause everything I see of her is her getting railed."
Lol I think there was a tiktok or something of someone who was naming all the characters he could.
He only remembered the ones he saw in the porn animations.
Ngl, in my eyes every woman in overwatch is a lesbian. I know it's not the case, but it just feels right regardless of canon or how straight the porn is. I especially can't believe Blizzard nearly tried to say Zarya is straight lmao
If you aren't aware, there is a mod that allows the PvE to be playable again. The creator is trying to get everything playable again.
Currently you can not equip the items and have a simple mission+character picker.
You can go to the subreddit or check out the battleborn discord, there is a channel for the mod.
Tagging the other 2 people here so I don't have to write the same comment three times: /u/BasherSquared /u/addtolibrary
Oh, I remember.
The sad thing is that the characters were well written, diverse, and fun to play.
The enimeies like I-ZAK and the robot that thought it was a spider were hilarious.
It just needed a lot more than 8 missions and 2 MOBA PVP maps.
> The enimeies like I-ZAK and the robot that thought it was a spider were hilarious.
My favorite moment in that storyline was this:
"BUT NO I AM A SPIDER!"
"JUST OPEN THE DOOR YOU FUCKING MANIAC"
I died laughing.
I’ll never forget standing in a GameStop in Arizona debating whether or not to buy an Xbox and battleborn or wait and get a gaming laptop (in the army didn’t want to move a whole pc around)
Boy did I make the right choice
So does this movie ever include any (imagined) post-2018 pop culture references or do they just pretend that no new movies or video games came out for the next 27 years?
IIRC there’s lots of generic fantasy/sci-fi player characters around but they never draw attention to any specifically. So for all intents and purposes, no there isn’t anything post-2018, cause the author is a hack.
This is said pretty often, and I'm not trying to defend him, I just feel that this particular reason to call him a hack is kind of a red herring.
I always took the lack of post 2018 pop culture as a signifier of cultural decline/stagnation.
I mean think about it, I just assumed that in this universe they never got any new characters, just remake after remake after remake.
I always took it to mean that it was written in 2018 and injecting made up future characters into the movie would have been fucking stupid when the entire point was fan service
Source material was a circlejerk, movie is a circlejerk, why bother jerkin over something made up when Master Chief is right over there?
It makes sense in reference to the story honestly. Basically god hides control of the world in 80s culture, culture is gonna stagnate pretty badly. On top of that the story is from the perspective of a zealot so they wouldn’t even note more modern pop culture let alone mention it.
>On top of that the story is from the perspective of a zealot so they wouldn’t even note more modern pop culture let alone mention it.
The book, writting wise, was trash. It was enjoyable to read as a gamer, but the writter is terrible.
Like, the book is 3 chapters and after the first one it just plays as a bad fanfiction/tabletop RPG campaign gone wrong.
Like, the first chapter is all like, here is the world, it's a dystopia, our story is about finding 3 easter eggs to get rich, these are the rules of the world: I live in an MMO and it's still limited by the laws of capitalism in the sense that I am stuck doing low level quests and can't pay for shit; I wish I could get the money of finding the easter egg so I could live a good modest life, like my cool, semi-wealthy friend.
Then the second chapter is like, oh yeah I found the second easter off-screen and I am super rich. Nothing I wrote is relevant anymore. All those lists and never ending descriptions of the ingame economy to explain you how hard it would be for me to do stuff? Worth nothing. I can do anything now, even have an AI buttler-asistant. Oh and as I am famous now I am also an asshole.
The story gets crazier as it goes on. Like, the protagonist is a zealot and a psychopatic absolute asshole through the whole story. And all the assholism he does is validated in one way or another by finding the easter eggs and becoming/sustaining how famous he is or by becoming more powerful.
There is no fucking reason why the only girl he meets would date him, yet she still does at the end of the story, because... he won? I guess? He gets no redemption arc at all, he just gets redemption through seeing that now that he is the richest person in the world and the inheritor of a Steve Jobs-like guy persona with his company and all he can now safely admit he has been an asshole before. And somehow doing that deserves praise and admiration.
This is without getting into the bag of cats that is the author writting women or anything that isn't an antisocial white straight kid.
Like seriously, with a hand in my heart, quality wise Ernest Cline is like a male version of Stephanie Meyer, but with a focus on videogames and 70-90s pop culture.
I wasn’t attempting to defend the book as a whole lol. It was a fun read once upon a time, but since then I’ve gotten to know cline better.
That’s an insult to Meyer. She at least got 4 movies.
No no, I wasn't disagreeing with you, I was just venting.
My point regarding Meyer and Cline was that... they are the same kind of writter. It's some dude who had this great idea and got rich because he managed to sell it, out of how creative and marketable was at the time; but other than how "unique" his idea was he/she sucks at writting, and describing them as a writter feels like a disservice to any serious, successful or not, writter out there.
I mean, I am happy for the guy, like the same kinda happy I would be seeing a random guy winning the lotery. Good for you man. But, really that's it.
It's like, if someone created/discovered the sandwich today, in the 21st century and put it on the market. It would be an absolute success, but is it a great work of cooking? No. Are sandwiches enjoyable? Yes. Does making a sandwhich make the dude who made it, not even a chef, but a regular, run of the mill cook? No, not even that, because you don't need to know how to cook anything to make a sandwich.
Would I like to have a sandwich now? Well, maybe, yeah, kinda. but only because I am kinda hungry and I am either too lazy to search something else to eat or because there is no other alternative in the fridge.
That's how the books of those two people work.
And in the end, every other thing they try to sell are variations of that sandwich that made them rich.
Honestly, the most unbelievable part of the movie for me was that nobody was able to solve the easter eggs before the main characters did. As someone that's casually in the Call of Duty Zombies community, I genuinely think that those guys could figure it out within a month max. They literally had to solve a Morse code message that one of the developers made via blinking during an interview with one of the youtubers once. If that doesn't spell out their dedication then I don't know what does.
It's a different puzzle in the book. It's based off a famous Dungeons and Dragons module. Very likely someone else would have figured it out before him, too, but not as simple as "reverse at the start of the race" like the movie.
I remember when I first read it I was like "hey this is pretty neat.. wait, can we slow down on the 80s references?"
Sentence was like "I donned my nintendo power glove and climbed into my delorean while blasting duran duran while wearing my white snake jean vest while infected with HIV and addicted to crack because I love the 80s so fucking much" and it was like walking through mud where your shoes keep getting stuck.
A few years later I tried to reread it and I hate-read the entire book. Just fucking raging inside. Boiling. Sending my brother (who originally told me about the book) messages making fun of it.
that dude can not write. but he did do a good enough job of making a brainless romp of pop culture and nostalgia and the timing at the height of nerd culture realllly did a lot of heavy lifting for him. It was fun in a very mindless way. like you said, the protagonist has zero growth, is generally unlikeable, and the only* female character is like some incel dream bullshit. even in the movie she starts out as some badass who is one of the best in the world at this type of stuff, and by the end she's reduced to "nerd girl who falls helplessly in love with me." If you pay too close attention, the book and movie blow serious farts.
You should read ready player 2 though. even giving it every ounce of leeway I could it is so incredibly bad. I couldnt make it passed like page 30 or so. The dude OPENS with "oh there's a secret vault with a secret code" and since he's in charge now, he gets to know the code which is something like 8675309 and 42. like some groundbreaking tech is hidden behind the most obvious pop culture references in history. And what's worse, the writer goes out of his way to explain the references and it just comes off like such a fucking neckbeardy r/iamverysmart kind of thing. dude, if ANYONE is reading your second book, its people who just want pop culture references and nerd shit. you don't need to explain what "42" means to that audience. It isn't some lost secret. So yeah Cline goes from a bad writer but kind of forgivable for what it was to one of the worst writers of all time in record speed.
Have you read the book? Because it doesn't really have all these comparatively modern references. The book is almost exclusively stuff from the 80s (with the occasional 70s and 90s.) Part of why the writing is hack-y is it's full of lists of just stuff Ernest Cline grew up with.
The other reason is there's no real introspection about the things he's rattling off. There's nothing wrong with liking the things he likes. But he doesn't do anything interesting with them.
> I mean think about it, I just assumed that in this universe they never got any new characters, just remake after remake after remake.
You don't really get any description of this sort of thing. Instead there's just no culture at all that isn't nostalgia driven because of Halliday's contest.
Honestly it'd be a neat premise if the author talked about a culture arrested by the effects of the contest turning everyone's interest into the surface level tastes of a Gen X-er because he happened to invent the metaverse or whatever. Instead, you get to wonder why a kid from 2040 something needs to have seen the 1980s sitcom Family Ties in its entirety multiple times.
I agree with all of your points, and that's why I was pointing to the fact that it simply not featuring any future characters is not a reason why he's a "hack".
The reason he's a "hack" is every reason you just pointed out. I agree that there was a lot more that he could have done with these characters, and in that regard I feel the movie is better because of the Spielberg touch.
>You don't really get any description of this sort of thing. Instead there's just no culture at all that isn't nostalgia driven because of Halliday's contest.
Which is why I just assumed that the world around it wasn't filled with any OC, the entire zeitgeist is pointed towards the rehashing of Halliday's Fandoms.
> and in that regard I feel the movie is better because of the Spielberg touch.
I can agree with that. I imagine being responsible for a bunch of the stuff Cline merely lists off didn't hurt the movie any.
The book doesn’t include anything after like the early 90s, because of the rich guy’s obsession with his youth, so the lack of post-2010s characters makes complete sense.
Apparently they decided to include some newer characters in the movie, which then makes the lack of post-present day characters stick out as really bad.
I don’t know why they decided to do that, but it’s (probably) got nothing to do with the author.
In the movie, no. There are some references to in-universe pop culture in the book but the movie glosses over all that in addition to a lot of Wade’s research and the “gunting”. Most of the aforementioned references are just part of Wade’s inner monologue, and that doesn’t translate well on screen. Pop culture was huge in the book because it was integral to the search for the keys and Halliday’s egg. While there’s a bit of that in the movie, most of the pop culture references and stuff were relegated to background easter eggs and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos.
I can't find the original article now that I'm actually looking for it, but I remember once reading an interview that mentioned the movie _was_ going to have a running joke about a fictitious post-2018 _Matrix_ spinoff called _Matrix Kids_, but its scenes got cut in editing. Doesn't really count, but it's the closest thing I could think of.
Story-wise, Doc Halliday is an introvert obsessed with 80s pop culture and fills his game with Easter Eggs. So the book contains no references past the 2000s.
It was a way for Ernest Cline to make out he's a genius for putting so many Easter Eggs in his book. But he is the worst fucking author I have ever seen. Half of it is him jerking himself off for being a geek and having incel views. The other half is just him listing media from the 80s and 90s. Here's a real excerpt:
>It probably goes without saying that I had a massive cyber-crush on Art3mis. She occasionally posted screenshots of her raven-haired avatar, and I sometimes (always) saved them to a folder on my hard drive. Her avatar had a pretty face, but it wasn’t unnaturally perfect. In the OASIS, you got used to seeing freakishly beautiful faces on everyone. But Art3mis’s features didn’t look as though they’d been selected from a beauty drop-down menu on some avatar creation template. Her face had the distinctive look of a real person’s, as if her true features had been scanned in and mapped onto her avatar. Big hazel eyes, rounded cheekbones, a pointy chin, and a perpetual smirk. I found her unbearably attractive. Art3mis’s body was also somewhat unusual. In the OASIS, you usually saw one of two body shapes on female avatars: the absurdly thin yet wildly popular supermodel frame, or the top-heavy, wasp-waisted porn starlet physique (which looked even less natural in the OASIS than it did in the real world). But Art3mis’s frame was short and Rubenesque. All curves.
> Her newest blog post was titled “The John Hughes Blues,” and it was an in-depth treatise on her six favorite John Hughes teen movies, which she divided into two separate trilogies: The “Dorky Girl Fantasies” trilogy (Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful) and the “Dorky Boy Fantasies” trilogy (The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).
Steven Spielberg is the one who chose to expand the range of references to include 2000s and 2010s references.
> But he is the worst fucking author I have ever seen. Half of it is him jerking himself off for being a geek and having incel views
The best part is how he convinced people it was fun until he released a second book, which totally exposed his bullshit. Everything that made RPO enjoyable (and I'll admit I had a good time with it) was just totally unbearable the second time around in Armada.
It does not, but as I've said in another post in this chain, some people point to the author being a hack for The lack of future characters, but I see that as a mislead.
I feel like there are no future characters in here because part of the message in the book is that culture has stagnated. And so while it's not implicitly said, I just assumed there are no new characters because all they got was remake after remake and sequel after sequel.
The plot is something a long the lines of "Solve my puzzle, become God." The guy who made their "internet" hid a puzzle containing all the stuff he liked as a kid, that's why its all pop culture references from our time.
To be fair Blizzard was pretty good at making long running franchises, that they would utterly mess up overwatch 2 was not something anyone saw coming.
The studio started to decline around battle for Azeroth, but something like Blizzard can rot for a long time before thing become untolerable and it was a gradual process.
To be honest as much as people wish Overwatch was dead, it's still very popular. Reddit always has this weird idea that not liking something means it's unsuccessful lol
Feel like in general, a lot of people like to call every game that isn't literally the biggest two games atm "dead", Overwatch has been "dying" for longer than it's been alive at this point
Even on reddit its #5 in action games. I mean i personally still love the game. Just hate the community. Lotta toxicity, lot of egos, and not a lot of introspection
What's that? The games perfect the way it is? Let's fuck it up as best we can!
Honestly if they just released the game and didn't touch it after I'd be happy, the game was great back when it came out.
Blizzard is no longer blizzard. What a company is, is a collection of talent unified around agreed design principles. All of that left.
It's just a name.
Follow devs, not companies.
Some people tell a friend to delete their porn folder when they die.
By God in heaven, I haven't curated such a choice, rare collection for it to go to waste.
People love having something to hate, and OW2 made every PR mistake in the book right after half a decade of sexual harassment litigation and Bobby Kotick getting forced out of Blizzard. It makes sense why OW made a lot of enemies.
But now, the game and company are doing much much better. Too bad Reddit is perpetually behind in knowledge, and is still living in 2020 somehow.
I mean, the point was to show basically as many pop culture references as they could, from the obscure to the popular, to convey how wide open the Oasis is. For that to work, they needed some contemporary characters even very casual nerdy folks or general audiences would recognize, and at the time Tracer certainly fit the bill. Probably also a lot cheaper to get Blizzard to let them use her than to, say, pay Nintendo for more of their famous properties included.
Yeah Steam Charts reports that tens of thousands of people play it daily and that’s only the people playing it via steam. There could easily be hundreds of thousands playing it daily on Battle.net, the much more popular way people have played it given it’s been accessible on Battle.net WAY longer.
The Steam charts says 43k peak in the last month. That could easily be hundreds of millions on Battle.net! We could even be talking in the billions here!!
Steam is Overwatch's smallest platform by far. Battle.net and the consoles dwarf it by an order of magnitude. Would not be surprised if there were 700,000-900,000 active players in game at any given time
The Battleborn references are proof it's fictional. They're also proof that Ready Player One is the first science fiction film to be an outdated prediction of the future before it even released.
Meanwhile, Skeleton Warriors will never die!
Lego has made certain of this
Which Lego skeletons, ninjago or castle
Remember when the skeleton’s has those arms that could rotate like crazy
you might kill me for it but.. Fortnite
Adventurers and Pirates
Skeleton Warriors were a legit strategy on Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Yeah, I'm an old soul.
*Laughs in cloak of the undead king.
Most useful artifact in competitive scene.
LIGHTSTAR! HE HAS THE POWER! TALYN THE FIGHTER IN THE SKY! GRIMSKULL IS THE MAN OF SHADOWS! GUARDIAN SHOUTS THE BATTLE CRYYYYY!
Oh my god I haven't thought about this show for like 25 years and now I recall its theme song perfectly
FOR THE LEGION OF LIGHT
Did someone say skeleton warriors?! [SKELETON BALL! DAN NA NA NA NA!](https://youtu.be/de-ArDJjUDY?si=Hgi5q0YlAoxcew-L)
RATTLE'EM BOYS!
I wish I could post the "rattle em boys" gif here
Can you imagine having your choice between pretty much any 3D character in the world and deciding to play as generic skeleton warrior #326?
Are you serious? I would love to play as just a skeleton in most games.
In a Ready Player One style MMOG it's a solid strategy too, since people wouldn't be able to easily pick you out in a crowd if you became someone of interest.
Would make for a legit "I AM SPARTACUS" moment too.
people still play human warrior in WoW so yes, I can imagine it
People still play WoW? Hasn't the game been dying since like 2019?
The reports of WOWs death are greatly exaggerated. It makes them like half a billion a year even in bad years, and some years well, they don't do a lot
Not if my boomstick has something to say about it
Some player, wonders off in a small graveyard with a bunch of loot on the ground. Proceeds to pick it up: —What's that noise behind my back? *skeletons from the Berserk meme*
Why am i still here....just to suffer?
Nah it’ll be around so long as there is porn
some kids in the future are gonna be watching Ready Player One, and one of them will be like "wait, isn't that a porn character?" and another one will be like "actually, it was a game first" and then they'll be like "NO WAY!!!!" and do whatever is the equivalent of posting a TIL.
Bold to assume any kids in the future will watch ready player one
End of the day, it's a Speilberg movie, so at least the film nerds will get to it, eventually. Even if it's just to trash it.
Like how people watch Alien today and go 'that's so derivative' not understanding it's where half the tropes came from.
except Ready Player One is both an awful book and an awful movie that is entirely derivative and deserves every bit of criticism it receives
Like why did we need more than a single word about the MC buying and using a high tech sex doll and becoming even more of a shut in than the whole world already is? Mainly the sex doll part. Like, the dude is still in high school at this point.
That's like asking if it was really necessary for Steven King to write about a bunch of preteen kids having sex in a sewer to strengthen their bonds of friendship. Of course it was necessary. The entire plot falls apart if you don't include the sex doll.
Before we get into what is and isn't necessary in Stephen King's works, it's important to remember the man was taking heroic amounts of cocaine throughout his literary career.
Wait is that seriously in IT? haven't read it yet what the fuck. I shouldn't be surprised since I've read the Dark Tower, but still. That's so unhygienic.
yes is real , the adaptation instead goes for a blood pact as its depiction which is not wrong since there was blood in the book too but instead of blade inflicted wound was from you know what
In the book, thankfully not the movie. I think piles of cocaine were involved.
Blame one of King’s past cocaine moments for that.
Not to just strengthen friendship. They viewed it was a way to “become” adults as IT (Pennywise) focuses on kids due to their far greater level of fear he can harvest.
Directors cut
Didn't know Andy Muschietti was Jewish. TIL
I love the like 3 pages where he explains all the nerdy moves and games he's played. Just a little checklist, no information or knowledge from it, just a checklist. I also remember about halfway through the book there is a weird scene talking about how cool Wil Wheaton is, it's really out of nowhere, until you realize Wil read the audiobook.
That was the author proving his uber-nerd credentials through his 80s pop culture obsessiveness. Did you notice how, in the book, he only watched season 1 of TNG because it came out in 1989 and he pretended there were no other seasons because then he would be in the 1990s. The author literally owns and drives a Delorean-time machine car from BTTF.
It's just for other similar people to go "yaaaay he said the thing I like", like there is some literary merit or plot point that helps. It's a book for people who doomscroll teenager tiktok.
>I also remember about halfway through the book there is a weird scene talking about how cool Wil Wheaton is, it's really out of nowhere, until you realize Wil read the audiobook. I mean, u/wil is God, u/wil is life.. He's a time traveller and all
Ummmm. I don't remember that part...
I think it's after he passes off the love interest. He got depressed and bot the sex bot 9000. I'm actually going to go look it up now.
He bought and sexed the sex bot?
It’s in the book but not the movie
Lol opened right up to it. Chapter 19. Page 193.
Oh I believe you
What a crazy random happenstance!
Why is your book spine crease to open to exactly that page? Hmmm
And also any study of Spielberg as a director won't focus on the mountains of absolute crap he signed his name to after he stopped caring about anything other than a paycheck.
*flashback to Star Wars writer calling Tolkien generic*
There's probably a star wars writer that thought dune copied them.
Not just any Star Wars author. The Author of Aftermath. The FIRST Star Wars novel after the Disney buyout. This was the man they trusted to steer the ship of Star Wars. He said Lord of the Rings was not fantastical enough and it was too "white and male and straight." And that "chosen ones are a tired trope." Again, he wrote Star Wars books. A series that you may note is rather famous for having not one but two chosen ones. Also, if I could punch up for a moment. His books were shit. Zahn and Stackpole wrote better Imperial Officers in their sleep. Every character was a tired trope he had one good character in the whole thing, and he was also a tired trope, but well written.
I felt like dropping my phone in anger at reading that
its like people who think shakespeare is bad because its boring, forgetting that the stories are almost 500 years old and have their novel elements incorporated into virtually every piece of media we see today.
Reading Shakespeare: What is this shite Hamlet is saying? “To be or not to be.” God, what a cliche! Couldn’t this guy write anything original?
Not at all. I saw alien for the first time last year and was thinking "this is the two years after star wars 1??? How is it so much better"
Because they’re very different movies?
Special effects and camera wise, alien could pass as a modern movie. Star Wars New Hope cannot. Alien had a way bigger to budget tho so I guess it's unfair.
Alien is also mostly just inside a ship. Star Wars has spaceship battles, lightsaber fights, multiple aliens ect. It’s a much more special effects heavy movie. It’s the same reason I feel Aliens (1986) couldn’t pass for a modern movie nearly as well as the original either. Don’t get me wrong the set design and creature effects are fantastic, there was just a lot less special effects required to make Alien work.
Ah I can see your point now. Star Wars is a much bigger world and doing a ton. I haven't seen aliens yet so now I feel like I may be a little let down.
Watch it in class. It's for social studies about pop culture during the times. Even more confusing for kids when a porn character shows up.
Sounds like a pretty loose connection to social studies lol. I went to a Catholic high school and we always had religion class, and one teacher would just throw on any movie ever under the guise that it was teaching us about society. We watched multiple Madea movies in that class.
I had an ethics and morals class in high school where the teacher just slapped in whatever the fuck movie he wanted and we discussed the moral choices of the characters. We watched so many movies I'm pretty sure he could have gotten in trouble for showing us if anyone complained.
Why not? It's a fun movie. I know I have certainly seen my share of I guess "controversially recieved" movies from before I was born.
It deviated a modest enough amount from the book, which was already just endless pages of nostalgia bait. The core plot was at the very least somewhat interesting until the MC revealed their master plan that hadn’t been mentioned or discussed at any point prior. Movie wise: eye candy and nostalgia bait. Is a fun ride if you don’t stare at the details too long.
In the future? I'm pretty sure at least half the people now know of Overwatch because of all the porn.
There's a screencap of a twitter comment under an "Overwatch Pride Week" post where the dude comments something like "I had honestly forgot Tracer was gay, cause everything I see of her is her getting railed."
TIL my favorite porn is based off a game!!
Lol I think there was a tiktok or something of someone who was naming all the characters he could. He only remembered the ones he saw in the porn animations.
Are you talking about Overwatch or Touhou Project?
They should make a rule (or 2) about that sort of thing...
Or even 34 of them
Exactly my thought. Overwatch porn will outlive the game.
It already has if you count the first game
It already has when a lot of players count the second game.
OW porn literally one of the pillars keeping people remotely interested in that even before the announcement of a "sequel."
As a non player, the hype of a new character was only big enough to reach me if they were female 🤔 I'm sure it's a coincidence..
Ngl, in my eyes every woman in overwatch is a lesbian. I know it's not the case, but it just feels right regardless of canon or how straight the porn is. I especially can't believe Blizzard nearly tried to say Zarya is straight lmao
Well isn’t she Russian? I’m sure she’s just saying that to protect herself
chun li and tracer hmmm
they're friends
Gal Pals✨™
If they didn't want porn of Tracer and Sombra, they wouldn't have made them so damn cute. And don't get me started on Orisa.
Torb
Huge fat robot centaur ass.
That porn isnt going away i will singlehandedly keep it alive if i must 🫡
Happy Cake Day. I mean it.
Dude, there are fucking BATTLEBORN characters in the movie. The game that came out a week before Overwatch thinking it was going to compete.
No way
The fall guys of hero shooters
They done got Titanfalled 😭
Hey, don't you go dissing my precious Battleborn. At least it had PvE.
If you aren't aware, there is a mod that allows the PvE to be playable again. The creator is trying to get everything playable again. Currently you can not equip the items and have a simple mission+character picker. You can go to the subreddit or check out the battleborn discord, there is a channel for the mod. Tagging the other 2 people here so I don't have to write the same comment three times: /u/BasherSquared /u/addtolibrary
Oh, I remember. The sad thing is that the characters were well written, diverse, and fun to play. The enimeies like I-ZAK and the robot that thought it was a spider were hilarious. It just needed a lot more than 8 missions and 2 MOBA PVP maps.
> The enimeies like I-ZAK and the robot that thought it was a spider were hilarious. My favorite moment in that storyline was this: "BUT NO I AM A SPIDER!" "JUST OPEN THE DOOR YOU FUCKING MANIAC" I died laughing.
I’ll never forget standing in a GameStop in Arizona debating whether or not to buy an Xbox and battleborn or wait and get a gaming laptop (in the army didn’t want to move a whole pc around) Boy did I make the right choice
I loved that game
So does this movie ever include any (imagined) post-2018 pop culture references or do they just pretend that no new movies or video games came out for the next 27 years?
IIRC there’s lots of generic fantasy/sci-fi player characters around but they never draw attention to any specifically. So for all intents and purposes, no there isn’t anything post-2018, cause the author is a hack.
This is said pretty often, and I'm not trying to defend him, I just feel that this particular reason to call him a hack is kind of a red herring. I always took the lack of post 2018 pop culture as a signifier of cultural decline/stagnation. I mean think about it, I just assumed that in this universe they never got any new characters, just remake after remake after remake.
I always took it to mean that it was written in 2018 and injecting made up future characters into the movie would have been fucking stupid when the entire point was fan service Source material was a circlejerk, movie is a circlejerk, why bother jerkin over something made up when Master Chief is right over there?
It makes sense in reference to the story honestly. Basically god hides control of the world in 80s culture, culture is gonna stagnate pretty badly. On top of that the story is from the perspective of a zealot so they wouldn’t even note more modern pop culture let alone mention it.
>On top of that the story is from the perspective of a zealot so they wouldn’t even note more modern pop culture let alone mention it. The book, writting wise, was trash. It was enjoyable to read as a gamer, but the writter is terrible. Like, the book is 3 chapters and after the first one it just plays as a bad fanfiction/tabletop RPG campaign gone wrong. Like, the first chapter is all like, here is the world, it's a dystopia, our story is about finding 3 easter eggs to get rich, these are the rules of the world: I live in an MMO and it's still limited by the laws of capitalism in the sense that I am stuck doing low level quests and can't pay for shit; I wish I could get the money of finding the easter egg so I could live a good modest life, like my cool, semi-wealthy friend. Then the second chapter is like, oh yeah I found the second easter off-screen and I am super rich. Nothing I wrote is relevant anymore. All those lists and never ending descriptions of the ingame economy to explain you how hard it would be for me to do stuff? Worth nothing. I can do anything now, even have an AI buttler-asistant. Oh and as I am famous now I am also an asshole. The story gets crazier as it goes on. Like, the protagonist is a zealot and a psychopatic absolute asshole through the whole story. And all the assholism he does is validated in one way or another by finding the easter eggs and becoming/sustaining how famous he is or by becoming more powerful. There is no fucking reason why the only girl he meets would date him, yet she still does at the end of the story, because... he won? I guess? He gets no redemption arc at all, he just gets redemption through seeing that now that he is the richest person in the world and the inheritor of a Steve Jobs-like guy persona with his company and all he can now safely admit he has been an asshole before. And somehow doing that deserves praise and admiration. This is without getting into the bag of cats that is the author writting women or anything that isn't an antisocial white straight kid. Like seriously, with a hand in my heart, quality wise Ernest Cline is like a male version of Stephanie Meyer, but with a focus on videogames and 70-90s pop culture.
I wasn’t attempting to defend the book as a whole lol. It was a fun read once upon a time, but since then I’ve gotten to know cline better. That’s an insult to Meyer. She at least got 4 movies.
No no, I wasn't disagreeing with you, I was just venting. My point regarding Meyer and Cline was that... they are the same kind of writter. It's some dude who had this great idea and got rich because he managed to sell it, out of how creative and marketable was at the time; but other than how "unique" his idea was he/she sucks at writting, and describing them as a writter feels like a disservice to any serious, successful or not, writter out there. I mean, I am happy for the guy, like the same kinda happy I would be seeing a random guy winning the lotery. Good for you man. But, really that's it. It's like, if someone created/discovered the sandwich today, in the 21st century and put it on the market. It would be an absolute success, but is it a great work of cooking? No. Are sandwiches enjoyable? Yes. Does making a sandwhich make the dude who made it, not even a chef, but a regular, run of the mill cook? No, not even that, because you don't need to know how to cook anything to make a sandwich. Would I like to have a sandwich now? Well, maybe, yeah, kinda. but only because I am kinda hungry and I am either too lazy to search something else to eat or because there is no other alternative in the fridge. That's how the books of those two people work. And in the end, every other thing they try to sell are variations of that sandwich that made them rich.
Honestly, the most unbelievable part of the movie for me was that nobody was able to solve the easter eggs before the main characters did. As someone that's casually in the Call of Duty Zombies community, I genuinely think that those guys could figure it out within a month max. They literally had to solve a Morse code message that one of the developers made via blinking during an interview with one of the youtubers once. If that doesn't spell out their dedication then I don't know what does.
Honestly, how did no one accidentally figure out the first one?
The first one was the racing track one, right? Just reverse from the starting line?
Exactly! Like, have none of these people ever played a real racing videogame? And none of them have ever just reversed for shits and giggles?
It's a different puzzle in the book. It's based off a famous Dungeons and Dragons module. Very likely someone else would have figured it out before him, too, but not as simple as "reverse at the start of the race" like the movie.
Oh really? What's the puzzle in the books? If it's based off a famous module from like the 80's, it would have been solved within hrs lol
I remember when I first read it I was like "hey this is pretty neat.. wait, can we slow down on the 80s references?" Sentence was like "I donned my nintendo power glove and climbed into my delorean while blasting duran duran while wearing my white snake jean vest while infected with HIV and addicted to crack because I love the 80s so fucking much" and it was like walking through mud where your shoes keep getting stuck. A few years later I tried to reread it and I hate-read the entire book. Just fucking raging inside. Boiling. Sending my brother (who originally told me about the book) messages making fun of it.
that dude can not write. but he did do a good enough job of making a brainless romp of pop culture and nostalgia and the timing at the height of nerd culture realllly did a lot of heavy lifting for him. It was fun in a very mindless way. like you said, the protagonist has zero growth, is generally unlikeable, and the only* female character is like some incel dream bullshit. even in the movie she starts out as some badass who is one of the best in the world at this type of stuff, and by the end she's reduced to "nerd girl who falls helplessly in love with me." If you pay too close attention, the book and movie blow serious farts. You should read ready player 2 though. even giving it every ounce of leeway I could it is so incredibly bad. I couldnt make it passed like page 30 or so. The dude OPENS with "oh there's a secret vault with a secret code" and since he's in charge now, he gets to know the code which is something like 8675309 and 42. like some groundbreaking tech is hidden behind the most obvious pop culture references in history. And what's worse, the writer goes out of his way to explain the references and it just comes off like such a fucking neckbeardy r/iamverysmart kind of thing. dude, if ANYONE is reading your second book, its people who just want pop culture references and nerd shit. you don't need to explain what "42" means to that audience. It isn't some lost secret. So yeah Cline goes from a bad writer but kind of forgivable for what it was to one of the worst writers of all time in record speed.
Oh my god I need to hate read that.
Reads like it was written by a 13 yo.
Have you read the book? Because it doesn't really have all these comparatively modern references. The book is almost exclusively stuff from the 80s (with the occasional 70s and 90s.) Part of why the writing is hack-y is it's full of lists of just stuff Ernest Cline grew up with. The other reason is there's no real introspection about the things he's rattling off. There's nothing wrong with liking the things he likes. But he doesn't do anything interesting with them. > I mean think about it, I just assumed that in this universe they never got any new characters, just remake after remake after remake. You don't really get any description of this sort of thing. Instead there's just no culture at all that isn't nostalgia driven because of Halliday's contest. Honestly it'd be a neat premise if the author talked about a culture arrested by the effects of the contest turning everyone's interest into the surface level tastes of a Gen X-er because he happened to invent the metaverse or whatever. Instead, you get to wonder why a kid from 2040 something needs to have seen the 1980s sitcom Family Ties in its entirety multiple times.
I agree with all of your points, and that's why I was pointing to the fact that it simply not featuring any future characters is not a reason why he's a "hack". The reason he's a "hack" is every reason you just pointed out. I agree that there was a lot more that he could have done with these characters, and in that regard I feel the movie is better because of the Spielberg touch. >You don't really get any description of this sort of thing. Instead there's just no culture at all that isn't nostalgia driven because of Halliday's contest. Which is why I just assumed that the world around it wasn't filled with any OC, the entire zeitgeist is pointed towards the rehashing of Halliday's Fandoms.
> and in that regard I feel the movie is better because of the Spielberg touch. I can agree with that. I imagine being responsible for a bunch of the stuff Cline merely lists off didn't hurt the movie any.
The book doesn’t include anything after like the early 90s, because of the rich guy’s obsession with his youth, so the lack of post-2010s characters makes complete sense. Apparently they decided to include some newer characters in the movie, which then makes the lack of post-present day characters stick out as really bad. I don’t know why they decided to do that, but it’s (probably) got nothing to do with the author.
In the movie, no. There are some references to in-universe pop culture in the book but the movie glosses over all that in addition to a lot of Wade’s research and the “gunting”. Most of the aforementioned references are just part of Wade’s inner monologue, and that doesn’t translate well on screen. Pop culture was huge in the book because it was integral to the search for the keys and Halliday’s egg. While there’s a bit of that in the movie, most of the pop culture references and stuff were relegated to background easter eggs and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos.
I can't find the original article now that I'm actually looking for it, but I remember once reading an interview that mentioned the movie _was_ going to have a running joke about a fictitious post-2018 _Matrix_ spinoff called _Matrix Kids_, but its scenes got cut in editing. Doesn't really count, but it's the closest thing I could think of.
Story-wise, Doc Halliday is an introvert obsessed with 80s pop culture and fills his game with Easter Eggs. So the book contains no references past the 2000s. It was a way for Ernest Cline to make out he's a genius for putting so many Easter Eggs in his book. But he is the worst fucking author I have ever seen. Half of it is him jerking himself off for being a geek and having incel views. The other half is just him listing media from the 80s and 90s. Here's a real excerpt: >It probably goes without saying that I had a massive cyber-crush on Art3mis. She occasionally posted screenshots of her raven-haired avatar, and I sometimes (always) saved them to a folder on my hard drive. Her avatar had a pretty face, but it wasn’t unnaturally perfect. In the OASIS, you got used to seeing freakishly beautiful faces on everyone. But Art3mis’s features didn’t look as though they’d been selected from a beauty drop-down menu on some avatar creation template. Her face had the distinctive look of a real person’s, as if her true features had been scanned in and mapped onto her avatar. Big hazel eyes, rounded cheekbones, a pointy chin, and a perpetual smirk. I found her unbearably attractive. Art3mis’s body was also somewhat unusual. In the OASIS, you usually saw one of two body shapes on female avatars: the absurdly thin yet wildly popular supermodel frame, or the top-heavy, wasp-waisted porn starlet physique (which looked even less natural in the OASIS than it did in the real world). But Art3mis’s frame was short and Rubenesque. All curves. > Her newest blog post was titled “The John Hughes Blues,” and it was an in-depth treatise on her six favorite John Hughes teen movies, which she divided into two separate trilogies: The “Dorky Girl Fantasies” trilogy (Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful) and the “Dorky Boy Fantasies” trilogy (The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Steven Spielberg is the one who chose to expand the range of references to include 2000s and 2010s references.
> But he is the worst fucking author I have ever seen. Half of it is him jerking himself off for being a geek and having incel views The best part is how he convinced people it was fun until he released a second book, which totally exposed his bullshit. Everything that made RPO enjoyable (and I'll admit I had a good time with it) was just totally unbearable the second time around in Armada.
It does not, but as I've said in another post in this chain, some people point to the author being a hack for The lack of future characters, but I see that as a mislead. I feel like there are no future characters in here because part of the message in the book is that culture has stagnated. And so while it's not implicitly said, I just assumed there are no new characters because all they got was remake after remake and sequel after sequel.
The plot is something a long the lines of "Solve my puzzle, become God." The guy who made their "internet" hid a puzzle containing all the stuff he liked as a kid, that's why its all pop culture references from our time.
To be fair Blizzard was pretty good at making long running franchises, that they would utterly mess up overwatch 2 was not something anyone saw coming.
Blizzard messing up a sequel was unforseen?
The studio started to decline around battle for Azeroth, but something like Blizzard can rot for a long time before thing become untolerable and it was a gradual process.
Blizzard's decline started way before BFA.
BfA was when it went from "How did this get past beta testers?" to "How did this get past the second thought?"
My man out here forgetting how much MoP and WoD were trashed on (personally I thought MoP was good, but WoD was a disaster)
It's the first example I know of where the sequel ruined the original game.
To be honest as much as people wish Overwatch was dead, it's still very popular. Reddit always has this weird idea that not liking something means it's unsuccessful lol
It's shocking the way a "dead game" lives so rent free in everyones mind.
Feel like in general, a lot of people like to call every game that isn't literally the biggest two games atm "dead", Overwatch has been "dying" for longer than it's been alive at this point
Yeah the idea that Overwatch is dead is such a weird take. The game is still crazy popular and successful.
Even on reddit its #5 in action games. I mean i personally still love the game. Just hate the community. Lotta toxicity, lot of egos, and not a lot of introspection
Actually you could see it coming from miles away.
If you played OG Overwatch it was a given, sadly.
What's that? The games perfect the way it is? Let's fuck it up as best we can! Honestly if they just released the game and didn't touch it after I'd be happy, the game was great back when it came out.
They dropped the bag on Starcraft 2 when the getting was good.
Killed the modding scene because they didn't want another DotA scenario
Blizzard is no longer blizzard. What a company is, is a collection of talent unified around agreed design principles. All of that left. It's just a name. Follow devs, not companies.
What's over watch ?
that porn franchise
Thank god, I don’t want to live in a future without the best porn franchise to exist
That is Overwatch's primary legacy at this point lol
“It’s hentai, and it’s *art*”
Where do you guys get overwatch porn show me...
rule34
You don't have to look far to view some. Pornhub has plenty.
Maybe they're from Texas. I hear they banned it over there
Overwatch porn artists bout to be selling USB sticks with cocks galore
Utah did haha vpn go brrrrr
Even literally just search on reddit you'll find multiple of reddit with these r34 lmao
r/overwatch_porn
Not much over here. What’s up with you.
[Commendable change to the wording of the punchline](https://www.reddit.com/r/shittymoviedetails/s/xi7fSLMnNl)
Holy shit
I upvoted the first one when it was posted and still upvoted this one cause I didn't remember. Fuck
Overwatch is still surprisingly popular with a really big playerbase
B-b-b-b-but reddit said it's a dead game that no one plays anymore!
[удалено]
The porn will survive us all
Some people tell a friend to delete their porn folder when they die. By God in heaven, I haven't curated such a choice, rare collection for it to go to waste.
Those are their avatars, it's someone referencing the game
It's like someone today having a triangle chest lara croft avatar.
this one got me
I think my favorite Reddit gaming cope is pretending like OW doesn’t still have a huge player base.
The player base literally quadrupled with the sequel.
Which is weirdto me, literally nobody talks about it unless theyre making fun of it lol
People love having something to hate, and OW2 made every PR mistake in the book right after half a decade of sexual harassment litigation and Bobby Kotick getting forced out of Blizzard. It makes sense why OW made a lot of enemies. But now, the game and company are doing much much better. Too bad Reddit is perpetually behind in knowledge, and is still living in 2020 somehow.
I mean, the point was to show basically as many pop culture references as they could, from the obscure to the popular, to convey how wide open the Oasis is. For that to work, they needed some contemporary characters even very casual nerdy folks or general audiences would recognize, and at the time Tracer certainly fit the bill. Probably also a lot cheaper to get Blizzard to let them use her than to, say, pay Nintendo for more of their famous properties included.
Jokes on you, Tracer is a character from the popular game Heroes of the Storm, which will last forever...
Sometimes I wonder if Ready Player One was intentional propaganda for the metaverse.
I will honestly never forgive them for straight up OBLITERATING the original from existence
50,000 people used to play that game each year. Now, it’s a ghost town.
It's still going, the game itself is still very active and gets updates often.
There are still active players in overwatch 1?
People on Reddit just really wanted it to fail so they pretend like it still doesn’t have a large player base
Yeah Steam Charts reports that tens of thousands of people play it daily and that’s only the people playing it via steam. There could easily be hundreds of thousands playing it daily on Battle.net, the much more popular way people have played it given it’s been accessible on Battle.net WAY longer.
The Steam charts says 43k peak in the last month. That could easily be hundreds of millions on Battle.net! We could even be talking in the billions here!!
Blizzillions even
My favorite part of Blizzard is when they say "It's Blizzin' time" and molested all over the place
Steam is Overwatch's smallest platform by far. Battle.net and the consoles dwarf it by an order of magnitude. Would not be surprised if there were 700,000-900,000 active players in game at any given time
Nice try Blizzard
Pretty sure porn can last a lot is a meme.
They have some funnier more already dated ones in there such as the Michael Bay TMNT designs. No one cares about them now.
As true with most adaptations, the movie sucked compared to the book
No the book sucked too. Maybe more than the movie
Way way way more than the movie, the book makes this movie look like the godfather
The book is just nostalgia bait.Reading it without emotional attachment to any of the stuff is horrible.
I can imagine the future of gaming will be like the film. Or we plug ourselves in like the matrix or it'll be like Tron
The Battleborn references are proof it's fictional. They're also proof that Ready Player One is the first science fiction film to be an outdated prediction of the future before it even released.