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arc_salvo

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@mcnichoj:

Disagree, as the original DB gives so much context that the rest of the series builds on. Even better yet would be to just go through the Manga (on Viz or Shounen Jump's sites) as it's a lot faster to read than to slowly watch, and has no filler.

That said, some of the filler in the TV episodes were really fun, but some were not. They do take up more time though, and the TV episodes also had the problem of recycling animation, stretching scenes out and basically stalling for time in order to stay ahead of the manga.

I also recommend sub over any dub (as there's more than one) if you don't mind reading, as it gives you more consistency throughout the media and also presents a better idea of what the original creators' intent was for the voice acting. It also helps if you're trying to learn Japanese, although that has the side effect of possibly being irritated when you realize the subtitlers didn't translate things right.

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arc_salvo

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@johno357:

I wouldn't go as far as to say skip GT and Super, but I agree that the original DB pre Piccolo-saga was the best part of it for me. When the humor and adventure was the focus, and there was more breadth and depth than ki powering up and everyone punching each other.

It was the next evolution of the gag manga with more "shounen" elements following Toriyama's breakout hit, Dr. Slump, a really underrated manga and show.

That said, I found the first Piccolo (Daimao) saga fairly compelling, despite the odd suddenly dramatic shift from the more comedic tone earlier. It's the Tenkaichi Budokai after onwards (Pre-Z to Z) that led to the new dynamic that I enjoyed, just not nearly as much as the original, early DB.

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@eggs_benedict:

Maybe if they were Microsoft. Now that's a company that would've done way better (and made things less confusing) if they'd just adopting a numbering system.

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Sounds interesting. I hope they fix the shaky combat and poor balance that plagued the original. I loved the original Bloodlines, but it sure had its flaws.

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Edited By arc_salvo

If you've ever had the internet go down at the worst possible time, or even had it be too spotty to stream even music or video, you can see why streaming-only may not be the best solution.

Sure reliable internet is something that many can take for granted, but not everyone, and throttling and/or data caps are a thing. Plus there's that situation where everyone's on the internet at the same time after work or on weekends, and the ISP gets overwhelmed and everything slows to a crawl.

That's when it's great to just have a game or video that's locally stored (on a hard drive or disc) and you can just put it in, play it, and it's all good. Singleplayer and offline couch co-op games with splitscreen are great! So is watching a video you don't have to stream or buffer all the time. Higher quality video and audio, and no waiting for the next scene to load or watching the quality suddenly drop into a blurry mess because there was a data transfer hiccup.

Not to say that I don't watch streaming video, just that I see the downsides of it. Streaming games though... I don't feel like that'll be a think anytime soon. The latency will be too bad until we see major changes to infrastructure, and ISP's (in the US at least) stop being regional monopolies and start getting some competition and/or regulations.

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arc_salvo

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@jsprunk:

Whoah dude, that's what Google's going to do! They're gonna sue you if they catch you doing that. They shut down stuff they made on a whim like all the time! In fact, 5 years is too slow for Google. They're "disruptors". They're going to shut it down without doing anything in 2-3 years.

And that's after launching a few more competing gaming and/or streaming services the overlap with Stadia, and none of those divisions will communicate with each other either, and then they'll suddenly start to merge a few of them before getting bored and shutting them all down, then changing the UI of Chrome and Gmail again for no damn reason.

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arc_salvo

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@Saltiva: Well, EA's been a thorn in the sides of developers it buys out for a while. Remember the old EA logo with the Cube, Sphere, and Pyramid? Those were put in as evil energy buildings in Ultima 7 (of ex-Origin Studios fame) as a complaint about EA, which had bought them out a while back.

There were also EA Execs (at the time) who were put in as pirates (bad guys) in Ultima 6 for similar reasons. Origin Studios (may they rest in peace) was one of the first victims of EA. I was really leery when Bioware sold out to them, and I'm beginning to see that everyone who was skeptical was right.

Westwood, Maxis, Pandemic... the list goes on and on. Plus, I hate how they killed the MMO Earth and Beyond while I was still playing it, and while it still had users and was making a profit to boot...

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Based on the demo, this pre-review sounds about right. The most fun part of that demo besides the flying was talking to NPC's and having those semi-branching conversations. The Bartender was hilarious.

That said, the fact that one NPC side conversation was the most fun thing about the play experience makes me wonder if Anthem's not playing to Bioware's strengths.

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From what I've seen from the demo, I'm not too optimistic. The single stronghold we had access too was boring, repetitive, had a lot of literal fetch-quests built right into the dungeon (no seriously, like half the dungeon was picking up stuff to drop it off at a specific location) and there were confusing sections with literally no markers to tell you where to go next, and a dark, confusing swim-tunnel that had more than one route through it, but only one which lead to the next part of the dungeon. Plus, 3 out of 4 party members had to be at the gate at the correct end of the swim tunnel, or the gate wouldn't open and you couldn't continue. If half your team just kept getting lost while trying to swim (more common than I would've liked) you were screwed until they somehow figured it out.

It's like Bioware didn't even properly playtest that Stronghold to see if a bunch of no mic randos could get through it alright (there was no keyboard chat in the PC demo for some odd reason, and there may not be in the official release either at the start) or to see if it was actually fun. The boss wasn't great either, and was just some predictable bullet sponge (much worse than the bosses in Destiny 2, which to be fair, are reasonably dynamic and don't feel as bullet spongy as the ones in Destiny 1, imo) that went away and spawned adds from time to time.

Overall, that Stronghold was a boring, drawn-out chore that combined the worst aspects of MMO's and FPS's, and what's worse is that the "collect crap and drop it off" fetch quest nonsense is all over this game, especially in the open world. This game theoretically has potential, but I can easily see it falling apart due to how shallow many aspects of it are, and how the gameplay design seems to have been cut and pasted from the worst parts of grindy mmo's. Definitely not a day 1 buy for me, and I'm willing to wait 6 months to a year to wait for them to sort out the probably inevitable issues that'll plague it for the first few months after launch.

Really feels like they released it prematurely to try and his some sales metrics for a certain quarter. Seemed like the game needed more refinement and polish, along with more thorough playtesting and revision. The only real strength that his game has that I could observe is that the storyline and characters seem interesting. They may not be good at action gameplay, but Bioware still has good writers.