For anyone passing through with nostalgia for CnC Renegade’ multiplayer mode (which was a first-person take on the parent series’ base building) give the fan made remake Renegade X a look. I played several games with full servers when 1.0 launched and it scratched my nostalgia itch like no one’s business. They have the link to the download in the description of the video.
Good eye sniper! I was wracking my brain trying to think if there was some obscure predecessor to Blood Wake that I wasn’t aware of or something.
Thank God for SPT. Modding away so many frustration points, no cheaters, improving AI… Makes it a lot more enjoyable, at the cost of running even more like ass than usual.
…thank you.
I agree. As you mentioned, the quality of Statham’s filmography varies wildly, but I don’t think his performances are ever the determining factor in what the final result is. Idk, if someone wanted to call the 6th consecutive movie where he plays a gruff guy with a checkered past mixed up eith some baddies on someone else’s behalf a ‘slop movie’, I guess I couldn’t fight them on that. However, given that genre is a perennial favorite of mine, I’m not looking for a wide emotive range from that experience. I want cool fight choreography, inventive cinematography, and badass stunts. If I get that, but Statham gives a wooden performance, I’m still going to think well of the movie (not least of all because it’s largely the same performance as what he gives in his ‘good’ movies too lol).
I guess when I think of the prompt, the actor that comes to mind is like a Ben Kingsley type. Someone who won awards for their acting prowess, but who wound up shoveling out direct to video crap in the twilight of their career.
I don’t know. Blaming Statham for Ghosts of Mars feels like blaming a waiter for the Titanic: he was just along fir the ride.
Only if he’s from Britain, anywhere else and he’s just “sparkling self-satisfied”
I mean, I can’t speak for everyone, but I do.
Eating a mint to deal with bad breath seems like the equivalent of a 15 year old boy dousing himself with Axe body spray to deal with their BO. It doesn’t solve the problem, it just temporarily masks it, and usually to a lesser degree than you think or hope.
In OP’s defense, I checked out both movies’ Letterboxd ratings, and Blade 1 is rated at 3.5 out of 5, and Blade 2 is sitting at 3.3, so maybe it is just an echo chamber thing. That being said, I really believe this was not the case 10, 15 years ago.
Having sat with it for awhile now, I’m kind of coming around on the notion. I’d have to do a back to back viewing to confirm, but my current hypothesis is that Blade 1 is an excellent urban action-horror picture. It does everything you’d expect it to do pretty well. Blade 2, being a product of Guillermo’s interests, has this weird, quasi-Shakespearian family drama between Nomac, lady vampire, and the patriarch serving as the emotional spine of the picture. It’s fine, but I remember a lot more about their dynamics than I remember about Blade’s arc, which is maybe not what you want from a Blade movie. Plus, all the extra vampire lore and whatnot makes the picture feel less like urban action-horror and more like a fantasy film, which just so happens to have guns and the occasional unwitting human. Not bad, but it does feel like a dry run for ideas Guillermo would do better in other movies.
I was gonna say, how is this entire thread skipping over the take that Blade 2 is a step down from the first? It’s not the craziest movie take I’ve read on here, but it definitely flies in the face of what I understood to be popular opinion.
I tend to agree with you about the art style. While I know HoMM3 is the fan-favorite, HoMM2 was my jam growing up, and it’s distinctive “80s-fantasy-paperback-cover” style is firmly embedded in my mind as the essence of HoMM. While that definitely speaks more to my nostalgia than any rational critique, I do find the current direction to be lacking in character. It’s all fine, but it could belong to any modern fantasy IP.
My hangups about the art notwithstanding, the game seems to be rock solid. I spent 6+ hours in the demo in a single sitting. When I came to my senses, it was well into the wee hours of the morning. If that’s not the hallmark of a good HoMM experience, idk what else would be. Additionally, the actual game map tends to look pretty good, and there are graphical touches that I quite enjoy (like different troop variants having entirely different models, rather than simple pallete swaps). Finally, as a HoMM3 fan, you might even enjoy certain aspects more. When I wrote about this a few months back, someone in the comments mentioned that they felt like there was a fair amount of HoMM3 DNA in the art (which, as a HoMM2 head, I wouldn’t have clocked).
All of which is to say, give the demo a shot if you haven’t. While my bugaboos with the art style never entirely went away, they were easily relegated to the background by the rest of the game’s strengths.
They’ve got a demo available! Worth checking out if you want to whet your appetite.
I’m not saying it’s a brilliant name. Im arguing it is an inconsequential detail that does not matter in the context of the story, and it should be treated as such. You called it “possibly the stupidest artistic choice in cinematic history”. I guess I just find that to be at least as ridiculous as “unobtanium”, if not moreso.
I agree with you in all of the particulars of your argument, but am ultimately unphased by the use of the term. Cameron stopped one step short of calling it MacGuffinite, and I can understand why that would annoy some people. However, within the context of Avatar, it just doesn’t bother me.
If I wanted to conjure an in-universe reason for it, I can do so without straining my credulity too much. Aerospace engineers in the 50s develop a term for a hypothetical wonder material that they can’t get their hands on: unobtanium. Fast forward hundreds of years, and a material is discovered on Pandora which possesses qualities which were previously only thought of as theoretically possible. Perhaps jokingly, perhaps sincerely, the new wonder material is called unobtanium, referencing the fact it is no longer hypothetical, but it’s still damn hard to get a hold of.
Now, I recognize that 1) none of that is explained in the movie, so it’s just head canon, and 2) as you say, calling a material you are actively mining ‘unobtanium’ is stupid. However, I don’t think it’s any more or less stupid than your suggested alternative courses of action given the context of the plot.
If unobtanium had ANY relevance to the story beyond “this is the source of conflict”, I’d wish for more juice there. But Cameron is nothing if not a functional screenwriter. No matter how much lipstick you put on the pig, the sole purpose of the scene is to telegraph the third act conflict (and allegorize the Iraq War, to some extent, but he does more with that elsewhere). The screenplay spends only bare minimum amount of time covering that detail before speeding along to more relevant thematic matters.
So, I agree that it’s a dumb contrivance that is clunky. However, it’s just so irrelevant that I don’t care. Call it whatever you want to, the name, like the material itself, is completely inconsequential. Frankly, I’m actually warming to the idea of calling it MacGuffinite. Put a line in that it was named after the first marine to die on Pandora or some such bs. Have your cake and eat it too, a plausible in-universe name, and a tell to not think about it so much.
Well, I’ll start by disagreeing with the premise that an “objectively poor” artistic choice exists, at least in this context. There are choices that work for you and choices that don’t, but neither are objective. The name unobtanium was chosen because it represents a hypothetical substance that is everything that Cameron needed it to be to tell his story in a single word. He’s practically telling the audience, “look, guys, don’t think about it that hard, I’m speeding through the set-up because I know everyone is here to look at pretty shit in 3d”.
In another story, one where the specific properties of unobtanium were in any way relevant (beyond being valuable), that sort of handwavey shorthand might perturb me. However, as it stands within the context of the film, it’s fine. It’s functional screenwriting, and that, to me, is a hallmark of Cameron’s style.
Also, I’m not suggesting unobtanium was a placeholder for Cameron. I’m saying that it doesn’t necessarily strain my credulity to believe that, if scientists are pre-conditioned to refer to a hypothetical wonder material as unobtanium, and then they actually discover a wonder material, they might continue referring to it as such. Or, if not scientists, at least corporate ghouls like Ribisi who probably can’t pronounce the “official” name, if one exists.
Per the internet, so grain of salt and all, unobtanium predates Avatar by some time, typically used as a brainstorming device. You know how a physics problem might say “assume a frictionless environment” or something of that nature, in order to focus on a specific point or phenomena? Unobtanium is sort of like that. Picture a bunch of aerospace engineers in the mid-50s, talking about how they’re gonna put a person in space. They’re throwing all their spaghetti against the wall, hoping some of it will stick. One guy stands up and says, according to his calculations, if they can get the mass of the launch vehicle down to X, he’s confident they can do the thing. Unfortunately, material science being what it is at the time, there is nothing that would be light, strong, cheap, and workable enough to fashion such a vehicle, but the math all checks out. These engineers jokingly start referring to the hypothetical material that would satisfy all their needs as “unobtanium”, while they search for practical solutions.
Fast forward 60 years, and Cameron is writing his Pocahontas in Space movie. He needs a name for his MacGuffin, but, being a MacGuffin, it’s entirely irrelevant to the plot outside of the fact that the characters are destined to fight over it. So, he decides to call it unobtanium, since that’s pre-existing shorthand for “rare material that does everything you need it to”, and that’s literally all this material needs to be for the plot.
It’s still silly, sure, but no more or less silly than mechs fighting giant blue people that fuck via ponytail sounding.
A shame to see a AA publisher go down in today’s market. I know indie dev is touted as the panacea for modern gaming, but the projects that come from that space are often a little more slight or niche than I’m interested in. I’ve enjoyed games from all three of the named dev studios.
You guys are lugging around some hefty coins. Granted, I don’t think there’s any sort of back of napkins maths that can be done to make the DnD economy make sense, but it’s a fun exercise anyhow.
Showing my work here, because I’m bad at math so someone should check me.
1lb = 453.59 grams
1 oz = 28.35 grams
1 troy oz = 31.1 grams
1 coin ≈ 9.26 grams (per the 2014 PHB: “A standard coin weighs about 1/3 of an ounce, so 50 coins weighs a pound.” Those figures return a coin weight between 9.45 and 9.07 grams, which I averaged out to 9.26 grams)
Cost of pure gold per troy ounce IN JUNE 2014 (roughly corresponding to when 5e was released) ≈$1300. Therefore cost of pure gold per gram ≈ $41.80.
One pure gold coin then ≈ $387.07.
Of course, assuming coins in circulation are gold bullion is a big stretch. As part of The Great Debasement (which sounds like a helluva a party until you learn it’s about monetary policy), King Henry VIII reduced the standard fineness of English currency from 23 karat (95.83% pure) to 22 karat (91.667% pure). This standard was further reduced when the United States Mint struck their gold dollar coin in 1849, when they dropped the fineness to 21.6 karat (90% pure).
Tangent regarding the size of gold coins mostly unrelated to DnD economics, but maybe interesting if you’ve already read this much. The Type 1 American Gold Dollar was only 12.7 mm in diameter, or half an inch. That’s TINY, and one of the chief reasons people opposed the striking of a gold dollar at the time. For folks familiar with American currency, the dime is 17.91 mm in diameter, so you’d be hunting for a coin 2/3 the size of what is already an inconveniently small coin (imo). I didn’t find a direct causal link cited between these points, but I assume part of the reason for lowering the fineness from 22 karat was to eke out a slightly bigger coin for the same monetary value. Here is a visual aid showing how tiny the Gold Dollar was in comparison: 
Which brings us, finally, to DnD coinage. Let’s assume 90% purity, with the remainder having a negligible monetary value. Decimating the value of my hypothetical pure gold coin, we arrive at a value of 1 GP ≈ $348.36.
Given one gold coin is what a skilled (but not exceptional) craftsman could expect to earn from a day’s work, that seems relatively in line with expectations.
This took forever to write on my phone, so someone may have already hit these points, but it kept me amused during a slow day at work. Edit quickly to add that inflation from 2014 -> 2026 increases all values by roughly 1/3. In today’s dollars then, 1 GP is about $463. Ish.
Well, ain’t this board game a temporal oddity? A week away for years now!