apsham

I never really realized that people had all that much of a problem with Last Jedi - I wasn't quite blown away or anything but I never really thought anything bad of it to be honest. I will say that I am overly hyped for Solo right now and I almost need to see that movie.

Yeah I realized that just after I posted this. Picked up a console version of The Sims 4 because it was on sale this week.

God help me I just got back into this. My apartment is a historical landmark but also has a ghost.

The first time I heard of Sage Francis was no shit, a mashup that Legion Of Doom made between 'Slow Down Ghandi' and Dashboard Confessional. Still a fan.

The second game was under another publisher as far as I could tell, but the developing studio was still HB.

That is great for the devs - they're relatively local and the work they did on Golf Club was really cool. I almost had a job there too!

Super Megabaseball 2 isn't something to sleep on either for anyone on the fence about grabbing that one.

It's the only game for... well since I can remember, where I was sad that I finished it. And it's bittersweet too, because the game director made it clear that DLC wasn't on the cards - he wanted to make a game that was a single experience where it felt like nothing was held back, and boy did they succeed at that. I can't get past how awesome the 2 weeks that I would come home anxious to play that game were.

I'm having a terribly hard time finding motivation to finish Ni No Kuni 2 and I'm not even really that far, having just made it to the second kingdom to recruit.

God Of War is legit. That game is going to be seriously hard to top this year - I've never seen something get the open world, but still narrative driven thing just perfectly right but they went ahead and did it.

Nick is in John's region and yeah, he provides air support. I never actually flew with him - that would've been neat.

All Stars is an amazing game - you could boot that up and be in the middle of an awesome match before you made it through the opening loading screens for 2K18.

It certainly looks like a fine movie.

The puts the DLC at the same price of the game in Canada then.

It's listed in Canada as a $64 pre-sell - shit. That's just 15 dollars off a full priced game here.

Man - I just found and popped in my copy of WWE 2K14 and it's actually mildly depressing to play that game and see what the series evolved to in only four short years. I really miss the arcadey gameplay and actual game modes that didn't take a dogs age to load into and I doubt we'll ever see it this way again until 2K either realizes that there's still a market and they put out an alternative, use it as a gimmick some year or lose the license entirely.

With modern/smaller shows, I think the writing is smart enough most of the time to not even create a character like Apu in the first place. That goes back to it being more of a writing issue than anything.

The cost based issue was more relating to the world outside of The Simpsons, which is an old juggernaut that doesn't have many peers in terms of how they do things - their last-ability throws another wrench in there as well.

Take a look at pretty much any program out there that requires a lot of VO work. If you're looking at a movie and you have to get 20 characters cast, you cast 20 individual people and there's not really any getting around that. 20 roles in an animated series can be split between any number of people and it becomes cost efficient (and there are huge costs associated with that line of work) and then things such as time constraints (also a huge thing) are also taken care of by booking more multiple into a single session. But this is kind of beside the point that I was trying to make. The issue surrounding Apu makes sense to criticize one hundred percent - but a lot of that has to do with the writing around the character in tandem with the choice of accent. The suggestion that a character like Carl needs to be changed is where I'd stop and say 'well maybe we don't paint everything with the same brushed because black and white doesn't match up on the other side of the microphone'. Take a look at any prolific voice actor regardless of their race and they've all done voices that run the spectrum. If there are individual issues they should be addressed, but Carl Carlson and Lenny Leonard could have their skin colours swap and very little would need to change, well... other than this: But it works just the same way regardless - this isn't jumping to the defence of Hank Azaria for any reason other than he is a voice actor. VAs like Cree Summer and Kevin Michael Richardson shouldn't be limited to just playing black characters either, they - like everyone else in their field - deserve to have well written characters that fit their voice range, nothing more and nothing less. And the best thing to support in terms of getting more roles into the hands of diverse voice over artists is echoed from something that I've heard Rahul Kohli speak about - where he exclaimed that he didn't want to see more character who were written to be Indian just to get him a role on the show, rather more characters that he could play were well written who just so happened to be Indian. Voice acting is the world where none of what you look like has to influence the end product. Unless it involves something as specific as Apu, then do it right.

Recasting voices in animated works because they don't fit the race/nationality of the on screen character isn't feasible and it never will be. I just don't see it being a 1 to 1 analogy with traditional acting roles, it just isn't.

No I think you're pretty much on point - voice acting is an entirely different beast alone. I feel like painting it with the same brush as other instances is looking at it way too simply. If anything voice acting is where these things are the most equal - in many cases the race of the actor has little to nothing to do with the character that they are portraying and not being in front of the camera is the great equalizer. The actor is judged based off their skill to pull off what needs to be done with the character and not about what is or isn't marketable... unless you're talking about big budget animated pictures that tend to shit all over that for big names to get people into the theatre.

Old Man Simpson being tone deaf is disappointing, if not unsurprising when it all boils down to it. I think there's a very fair middle ground for just about anything like this - and it doesn't even have to mean taking the full blame which is pretty much what none of these people want to do - and that just straight up boils down to 'this wasn't something we thought about before, we should think about it now and we're going to do something about it'. Casting a part like Apu and the wide variety of different ethnic characters back when The Simpsons started was down to hiring as few people as possible to do as many voices as possible, and it isn't quite something that people in general would've blinked twice at. But the show has lasted decades and they're in a new world.... 'young people always be whining' probably isn't the best route to take.

I picked up Mercenaries due to my great memories of playing it back when it first came out in 2005. Holy crap have games changed. Still fun as heck though due to the Deck of 52 system.