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I thought about my answer, since many mechanics I don't like can have good implementations, or at the very least are a sort of lesser of two evils kind of thing.
What I can't stand are tactical or RPG games with realtime or turn based combat option toggles. I play many games with one or the other and enjoy them, but when I play a game with both that can be toggled in options I always feel like neither setting feels perfectly right. The balance is always off no matter what. Understandable with game devs having to double the amount of work for creating combat and tuning items and it ends up feeling a little soggy every time.
It's very obnoxious. What's worse is when the secret areas provide armor or weapons that feel mandatory to beat the level with. If the secrets are just for a score I can at least ignore them.
Level scaling. It's a mechanic designers put in because they think the game needs to stay challenging, which is true but I've never agreed with level scaling as the answer.
The least bad implementations (but still not good) at least replace low level enemies with different kinds of enemies entirely. The worst, most lazy implementations just increase existing enemy HP and damage.
I think it is much better to have different locations or zones where different ranges of enemies spawn, with more powerful enemies tuned to the expected level of a player character for the quests in the zone.
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You're not getting your deposit back if those creative juices soak in.
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Foundation was so strange because it felt like the writers split into two isolated groups.
The team that was trying and failing to "reimagine" the original story, and the team the totally abandoned the original story and was doing their own thing with the clone emperors story.
Unlike other examples where the show felt like an existing story twisted into the framework of an unrelated franchise, Foundation felt like the clone emperors story came out of the talented writers getting frustrated by the quality of the adaption.
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I don't consider anything I watch a guilty pleasure, since I'm pretty open about watching B and bad movies.
I enjoy movies where a director has made a surprisingly successful cult movie and on the back of that got creative freedom and a big budget from a studio, which they then used to create something beautiful and terrifying. My exemplar movie for this is Southland Tales, which I absolutely love on all possible levels.
I really like movies that commit to a sharp genre turn. The Guest (2014) is a great example.
Lastly, spaghetti westerns. This seems like a maybe more mainstream choice, but had a conversation in real life not too long ago with somebody who had no interest in any kind of western and didn't know about the distinction between classic and spaghetti. When I was articulating the difference I was able to boil it down to classic westerns being nostalgia and romanticization of the American west, while spaghetti westerns were made by people with no nostalgia for it. It creates a subgenre which is grittier and more morally grey than the John Wayne era movies. My favorite is Once Upon A Time In The West, though I'd recommend people work up to that by watching other genre movies first.
What’s your favorite movie that uses lots of practical effects?
The Thing has to be up there if the criteria is just an overall great movie heavy on practical effects.
Do you have a favorite practical effect of all time?
The "digital" wireframe view of the city from Snake's glider in 'Escape From New York'.
It was accomplished with miniature buildings which is rad.
Something that is popular (or sells well) despite having no apparent appeal to anyone the commenter can think of.
I don't enjoy Bloodborne. I think I can figure out why there is a lot of hype for it.
It seems like all of the answers are "I personally didn't enjoy this game therefore I can not conceive of anyone else enjoying it."
I find that interesting.
I suspect the headline was written to be intentionally confusing to be more eye grabbing.
From the article:
It’s unclear how much the 62 per cent drop in sales [in Canada] translates to in dollars, but the company’s total sales were down three per cent for the quarter.
Total sales are down 3% for the quarter, so some very rough head math would say at absolute most Canada is 6% of sales. Assuming the entire 3% overall drop was caused by Canada.
The headline is a little unclear and just for clarity, the sales are down 62% in Canada, rather than a 62% drop in overall sales. The Canadian boycott is still likely having an effect, however in the interest of not just skimming a headline that effect seems smaller than first impression.
It’s unclear how much the 62 per cent drop in sales translates to in dollars, but the company’s total sales were down three per cent for the quarter.
The headline is a little unclear and just for clarity, the sales are down 62% in Canada, rather than a 62% drop in overall sales. The Canadian boycott is still likely having an effect, however in the interest of not just skimming a headline that effect seems smaller than first impression.
It's unclear how much the 62 per cent drop in sales translates to in dollars, but the company's total sales were down three per cent for the quarter.
The closest that ever happened to me was an interview that ended up turning into a two hour plus long tour of the facility with my interviewer pointing out a lot of little details in more of a first day orientation than interview kind of vibe.
The job seemed like a lock until I got a generic rejection email. I didn't reach out, but the same day that I got the email I also got a text from my interviewer apologizing to me because he had recommended me for the job and thought I was a good fit, but management above him had an internal person that they'd already planned to give the job to.
Normally I'd be skeptical of a story like that, but given that he'd really gone above and beyond the scheduled amount of time for the interview and that he sent the text unprompted, I really do believe there were shenanigans afoot above him.
Do those detectors even work against LIDAR? A lot of police use that now anyway.
I travel a lot throughout the US, and sometimes the changes are obvious while other times I can be driving and not entirely sure which state I'm in just from looking around on the highway. As others have said while driving on a major highway a clue can be a huge store full of items like fireworks just across the border from a state they aren't legal in.
The geography and environment can certainly be a big clue. Driving through West Virginia there are tunnels through large mountains, Pennsylvania around the Pittsburgh area has steel bridges, Louisiana has highways raised up from the muck, there are mountains that the highways wind around in North Carolina that give way to pretty flat highways as you go south. Kentucky has long depressing stretches of straight boring road. I've noticed even traffic patterns can say things as Georgia highways always have a higher number of semitrucks than anywhere else for example. Nevada is flat and open but as you go into Utah it gets windy and rocky, and cell signal usually goes out for a bit.
Staying in different states I notice alcohol sales rules are different. In some states you basically don't see any alcohol outside of designated stores for it including no beer at gas stations, in other states you see beer for sale widely but hard liquor only at designated stores, and in other states hard liquor at WalMart is perfectly normal.
I've found on the whole that people are actually nicer than average in Utah. While coffee shops exist I have noticed in offices there is often a lack of a central coffee machine.
Louisiana everyone I deal with from there has a tendency to be much more relaxed than average about showing up exactly on time for things. Louisiana itself also has a cultural divide between the northern part which is more generic US south, and the southern part which has the more creole and tourist heavy atmosphere.
I honestly don't mind Ohio. I know it's an internet meme to hate it, but aside from their obsession with dumping chili on unrelated foods it's decent. Has a strong blue collar streak kind of like Pennsylvania culture.
Texas has a big cowboy influence and they don't let you not know it. The roads tend to big big and wide which is great, except the freeways especially in Dallas can become confusing multilevel nightmares.
California has lots of Spanish signs, lots of first generation Mexicans who bring culture with them. Lots of for example Mexican super markets. Californians have a culture of going FAST on freeways if there isn't gridlock traffic, in some cases going 100mph just barely keeps you up with traffic.
The red dots used on almost all of the Delta Force guns.
That style of red dot didn't exist until a few years later. At the time it should have been the equally distinct looking "long tube" Aimpoints.
Again, I know it is super nitpicky, but they are so prominent and visible especially with those red lenses throughout the movie. They are only a few years wrong, but it's like if a WW1 movie was full of Thompson submachineguns.
The BDH movie otherwise does a lot of great prop and costume details. Not flawless, but the other inaccuracies are much less noticeable.
I mildly enjoyed that the message of Jurassic World was "This park (movie) is a soulless project that shouldn't exist and only props itself up on increasingly mindless spectacle."
My thoughts exactly before I gave up on it. It felt like all the good writers on the team had shuffled over to write the dynasty stuff, and the difference in quality when the show bounced between the dynasty and foundation stories was something of a whiplash.
Respeccing. It shouldn't be infinitely free, but I like games that allow you to pay (usually increasing amounts) to respec.
Related to this, in older games without this it was common practice to save up your skillpoints and just sit on them until you'd gotten a little further into the game and hopefully had a better idea how to spend them. What was massively frustrating in older games were when leveling up forced you to immediately spend the points instead of sitting on them.