Primal

If you're looking for some thrash, along with the others might I suggest a little band that sadly never made it all that big, Testament. One of the big stars in Bay Area thrash. Here is one of their newer songs, and The Formation of Damnation is a fine album, but they've been around since the 80s and have quite a few choices. Personally my favorite song by them is Low. There are several compilation albums from them too.

Otherwise I'd also suggest some of Soundgarden's older stuff too, specifically Badmotorfinger. I really really like Slaves and Bulldozers off of it. They have a compilation too, called A-Sides I think, that would be well worth a purchase if you're into them and don't have the originals. Only thing it's really missing is their cover of Into the Void, easily my favorite Black Sabbath song, Soundgarden REALLY does it justice.

Gonna have to disagree slightly with the Maden there, Death Magnetic is thoroughly kickass. The Judas Kiss is just awesome, as is All Nightmare Long. Though I do agree that the Black Album...lacked something, to be nice. And nobody likes St Anger, lol. Of course my favorite Metallica song ever is Phantom Lord.

Hell, video games are flourishing. They're getting better and better and better. There are stinkers here and there, but compare them to movies, where it seems like there are way more stinkers than keepers. Of course, I could be just biased.

Yeah, some people are old fogeys, saying "[NES/SNES/Sega/Atari game] was better than any of this crap, and cheaper to make too!" To which I have to say "And guess what, those that weren't alive then, who grew up poor, or who just plain didn't have access to them, can play them now too." Re-releases, plus the modern stuff too? Win and win for everyone!

It's a great time to be a gamer.

Jerky, definitely, but I honestly don't know if that'd be called griefing. It's more a sin of omission than commission.

I have not run into such individuals, no. The worst I've run across is people just sending me random SG invites, which I always turn down, and I've never heard from them again. I'll join SGs only if I've been on a team with people in one, and only if I liked them.

I don't see such anecdotes as the OP's as indicative of players as a whole, so frankly to say "This is why I don't team" seems quite extreme to me. I've met many, MANY more folks that range from average to great than I've met bad ones, and I'm 95% PuG to 5% soloing. This game is very friendly, actually if you've only played this game online I daresay you're spoiled. Don't get me wrong, team if you want to or don't, but to not team because you have a 1% chance of running into a jackhole isn't exactly playing the odds.

Sequels to video games don't bother me at all. On the contrary, a lot of times games sequels just get better and better, unlike movie sequels. Games tend to improve on previous titles, whereas movies tend to milk or rehash, the old The Same But More trope done poorly. It's just a trend I've noticed.

There are of course exceptions. Crappy games are crappy no matter whether they're in a series or not, same as movies.

And I too look forward to MK9...unless he's being sarcastic again, it's so hard to tell. If he is, I'm looking forward to it anyway. The videos I've seen appeal to my secret love of sickening violence and brutal beatings. Plus, Mileena, Jade, Sindel...what can I say.

Well, I checked four of my favorite sodas.

Mello Yello Afterglow (melon-flavored soda, so smooth). No results.

RC Edge (basically RC with Taurine and Ginseng). No results.

Crystal Pepsi. It said results were found, but showed nothing, no pics or links.

Pepsi Twist (lemon flavored). They have one case, which is out of date, ew. And it's cans, which weren't good in the first place. Bottled was infinitely superior. Edit: Well, they do have something called NFL Kickoff, supposedly the rerelease, but it's still cans, and hella expensive. Yikes. Might have better luck with writing a letter to Pepsi.

Will keep looking. The only other soda I can think of immediately that I miss is Stacker 2's YJ Stinger, the cola flavor was really good. Used to you could buy cases from the manufacturer, but now it's out of stock. And I get no results on a search at that website.

Oh by the way, slightly related. While in Sam's the other day I was intrigued by a case of imported Mexican Coca-Cola. It was only a few dollars more than the regular stuff, but sadly I'm between paychecks and only had enough for what I actually went in there for. Gonna give it a try next week.

Nothing wrong with simply not feeling the love, for anything. Personally, I don't like Spider-Man, neither the character, nor the movies, nor any of the games where you could play as him.

I'm pretty indifferent to the Hulk mostly, though he gave me a huge laugh in one of the Capcom Vs. games. At the end of a match that he won, he said something like, "Hulk SMASH! ...Sorry, I couldn't resist."

I like that idea of making some Temp powers permanent, some of them are really interesting or just provide some flavor. The Holy Shotgun Shells for instance, or the Bow you get in Croatoa. It seems odd for a Power Pool to provide this service, but what the heck, I'm down with it.

The idea of a Ranged/Support pool for meleers (or anyone really) sounds good, but not at the expense of locking out Fighting to ranged types.

My MA/Regen Scrapper had little problem with the War Walker. Who, by the way, has not been respeced since I made 50 with her back around I5. It was actually an interesting fight, I had to pop off heals and generally watch my hp, but I took it down. As far as the rest of the IDF, I really only ran into trouble if I let those -regen blasts stack up, or if I didn't immediately hop on the Seers throwing buffs and Psi around.

Of course, lest you think I'm bragging, Marauder simply murdered me over and over, even as a "mere" EB. Rage + Unstoppable meant I was taking 500-800 damage shots in the face repeatedly through 4 purples, and doing pinprick damage in return.

Al 'Aqran is my Crab Spider. Pretty standard hired killer/mercenary type really, nothing hugely original, but I'm a sucker for those types of characters. She stays hidden in her armor, unless she plans to kill any witnesses anyway (i.e. in a solo defeat-all). Works for Arachnos since the pay is very good, the targets plentiful, and only the future victims ask questions. The name means "Scorpion" in Arabic, I use variations of it for a lot of games, usually it goes on archers but I thought it highly appropriate for all the backpack-based attacks.

My Night Widow is named Katili, Swahili for bloodthirsty or cruel. Assassin by trade, she comes from a long line of them. She has a sister who's rejected the murder for hire trade as well as her family, a Claws/Willpower Scrapper named Majasusi (Swahili again, traitor or secret agent), and who's responsible for Katili's lost arm and badly-scarred face. Katili of course vows revenge, and in the meantime works for Arachnos.

Bane Spider Minchew has a rather pedestrian name, but it's on purpose. See, inside that nice, anonymous armor is a former accountant named Anna Rodriguez-DeMarco, who along with her husband found some files that put her employer Arachnos in a rather bad light. They didn't do the best job of covering their tracks either, but one thing they DID do was get the drop on the two SoAs sent to "question" them. They sent their three kids off (i.e. to Paragon), and borrowed the names and uniforms of their would-be killers to cover for them until they themselves could get out.

Obviously Fortunata Epps would be Anna's husband, David DeMarco.

(Yeah, I'm aware that both the above majorly fly in the face of canon, since there's supposed to be a hive mind at work and such, but I got stuck on the idea of taking over the assassins' identities to carry through on their escape. Anna has already made it to Paragon, but David's only level 9 or so, I need to work on him, I hear tell Fortunatas rock hard later. The Bane's fun in a Mace Stalker way, though she feels squishy.)

Yeah, that's the big issue I have with the blue caves too, the crampedness of them. Dead ends I don't mind at all, twisty passages all alike don't bother me as long as I have a map, but low ceilings and narrow corridors just make me feel confined. Especially on MMs, good grief it's aggravating. The challenge should be the fighting, not in vainly attempting to see what's happening on the other side of a mob of pets and teammates.

Been three months or so since I've gotten a character to that level, but yeah, it was consistent enough for me to have a strategy for dealing with it if I was on a character that couldn't handle big spawns. Basically I'd get to a height where only the Ancestor Spirits could show (and if there were a bunch of them I'd head for the drones), then deal with the remainder afterwards.

Could've been just lucky me, and fixed in the interim, will run my newly-Heroic Bots/Traps through it and see.

Nice. It doesn't quite replace Butterball as my source of awws on a bad day, but it's nice, and does have a catchier song.

Ambush size in this game sometimes gets really wacked, regardless of difficulty settings. Sometimes I believe they're intended to be simply death squads, and the characters that can handle them are actually the exception. There's another one which is much lower level, early teens, involving Skulls. The game never throws less than 10 at you at once for that particular mission, part of an arc. (I actually sent in a bug report on it once long ago, and got the reply that it was WAI. Death squad I guess.)

Then you have the costume missions Hero-side, where at 20 you're likely to get 10 Tsoo thrown at you...and at 30 you get like *two* Crey. I still haven't decided if it's bugged or if someone was having a laugh and did it on purpose.

Blue caves suck. The rest of them aren't so bad, or at least not so numerous, but blue caves just blow chunks. You can always count on hearing "Ugh, caves" when entering one on a team, and if there are a couple of MMs in there too, it's just compounded. I've been on several teams that all decided "Yeah, let's do another mission instead of futzing around in this cave".

I agree, make them rare maps. Then it'll be more like "Hey, a blue cave! Cool!"

Qulon Chi - Peacebringer whose powers are all written off as water powers, and she can take the forms of water predators from her home planet (which is completely ocean). She's also been a FF/Rad Defender in the past, with the FFs said to be water, and me changing the subject when asked about the Radiation. Since I don't like Kheldians, I'm thinking of remaking her as a Kinetic/Energy Stalker, again with powers "colored" like water.

Quirian Kai - Warshade, from the same planet as the above. I still don't like Kheldians, so I'm thinking of rolling her as something Energy (Water) too, probably a Brute.

Sangrenacht - Elec/Shield Scrapper. Blood-red Elec attacks, blood-red shield (the one called Energy). She's a vampire.

Wind Monk - Dark/Shield Scrapper. The name probably explains it all. Clear/white attacks and shields, for my version of a speedster, with a side of Magitech. Siphon Life is explained by her ability to actually pull the evil from an opponent, painfully, and I always try to finish off ghosts and evil mages with that attack, since that's the only way to put them down for good.

Dread Image - Dark/Kin Corruptor. Can't actually hurt anyone on her own, aside from Brawl. However, if they have malicious intent, she can draw that out of them and return it in tangible form, essentially defeating them with their own bad vibes. I always start off with Siphon Power.

Majasusi - Claws/Willpower Scrapper. Willpower is colored dark purple, to act as a Dark Armor I actually like. (Sorry DA supporters, I've tried it and tried it, and it just clashes.)

Masrefah - Mind/Fire. Her natural "power" is to turn friends against each other and otherwise sow discord, and in this game it manifests as Confusion, just to speed up the process. The fire and holds came later.

DJ Shoopuff - Radiation/Psi Blaster. All powers are colored white, for an Energy Blaster I like better.

For several Regeneration characters, I write it off as the natural healing ability of humans. It's just sped up for the sake of convenience.

Most characters that I delete are going to get rerolled as something more fitting, or the concept stinks, or I just don't like the sets. I really can't think of any that got deleted who just went away entirely AND who I actually liked, they've all been redone as something better.

There are some characters I've deleted over the years that probably could've been salvaged, especially very early ones. Back then there were no respecs, no way to rename, no server transfers. I don't regret getting rid of them though.

Yeah I know, M Knight Shyamalan has a lot of detractors. And frankly this movie won't help much, it's not gonna win any awards. But you know, I liked it anyway, certainly $5 worth. It was miles ahead of The Happening, and LIGHT-years ahead of The Last Airbender. Then again, I also actually liked Lady in the Water too, so maybe I shouldn't be listened to.

I guessed who the bad guy was before I saw the movie, by just picking the least likely person, and I was right. Until then though it's rather nicely suspenseful, even if the big reveal is eye-roll worthy. If there was nothing supernatural here, it'd be a slick little movie. As it is, it's worth watching but I wouldn't pay much more than I did. I really like how the suicide jump scene at the beginning was shot, but otherwise it's mostly forgotten already.

The Town is a much better film, but I gotta warn you, if you're expecting something as thought-provoking or compelling as Gone Baby Gone, stop it. (Alternatively, if you didn't like that movie, this one's totally different.) This is basically the old One Last Job trope in action. It's a good movie, don't get me wrong, but there's nothing here that's new. If you've seen Heat, or a bunch of other urban-crime movies that go more for realism, you've seen this movie already. Good action scenes, the planning that went into the crimes was very interesting to me, and there's a damn fine death scene near the end. If the movie has a problem besides feeling fairly generic, it's the end, it's VERY close to Narm-land.

There were a bunch of trailers before both, but nothing new. One with Katherine Heigl really annoyed me actually, is she trying to be in every formulaic romantic comedy? Oh and hey, a baby poop joke, we haven't seen a movie with that in what, a week? I like Heigl a lot, and it bothers me to see her wasted like this. But I'm sure she's making more money than I am, so hey.

That was Sienna Guillory? Wow, I didn't recognize her either.

Actually in looking through Google Images, she can change her look radically. She's every length, color, and style.

Lusca is terrorizing Independence Port! What will you do?

Villain: Heh heh heh! While all those Heroes are at the do-it-yourself sushi bar, I can rob The Family Jewels warehouse and steal everything that isn't bolted down!

Rogue Heh heh heh! While all those Heroes are at the do-it-yourself sushi bar, I can wait til the Villain leaves The Family Jewels warehouse, then take in a socket wrench set and get all the stuff s/he left. The good stuff is always bolted down, duh.

Vigilante: Heh heh heh! While all those Heroes are at the do-it-yourself sushi bar, I can blow up The Family Jewels warehouse and take out a bunch of thievin' types no matter what alignment they call themselves!

Hero: I already have that badge. Besides, there's a MoSTF starting soon, it's more Merits too. Baby needs a new LotG 7.5!

Lusca: Yoo hoo, big scary GM here! Boo! I'm terrorizing the populace! I taste really good with spring rolls! I'm gonna hang around here and do nothing! I'm so lonely.

Jill is in 4. I'll just leave it at that.

It has gone from horror to action, which frankly I'm on board with. I didn't find any of them actually scary at all really, jump scares don't equal "fear" to me. Never have found zombies scary, for that matter. I'm all about the action in this series.

As to its appeal, that's a question only the individual can decide. Critically this movie's getting roasted, in fact all of them have been. Personally I give critics about as much credence as I'd give any random person giving me their opinion, in that sure they might make sense, have a different take, or just plain be interesting, but I'll make my own decision anyway. I like the movies, that's all that matters to me.