Venture

Sam beat me to it -- an arc that used EVERY SINGLE "asset" would be like those early 90s web pages that used flashing text and italics and bold and ALL CAPS and blaring music and dancing hamster wallpaper...the ones you couldn't click out of fast enough.

Less is more.

Actually it doesn't.

As I keep saying, gluing feathers on a rat doesn't make it a swan. This stuff:

...is feathers. The player having command of an organization would change the game completely. Instead of running missions he'd be assigning them. He wouldn't be out farming mobs to get invention salvage; he's got people to do that for him. And so on. It would change the game from an RPG to some kind of RTS. A tabletop GM can accommodate a change like this; a MMO doesn't have a chance. This is the kind of thing you have to design for from the start.

Wishful thinking at best. Your ever-so-helpful "assistant's" Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal is all but written on her forehead. The game's structure does not even remotely support the player having an organization at his disposal, never mind having any real political power in the world. Failure Is The Only Option.

I don't care.

All that matters is the quality of the work. There are no excuses. If they've bitten off more than they can chew they need to scale back accordingly. I'm sure they're all great people off the clock but that's not what I or anyone else here is paying for.

He'd already been there and done that.

He sunk a lot of the company's resources into the fusion reactor...and then killed the project when he learned it could be weaponized. We came in during the aftermath of that.

Or the person who wrote her dialog in i6 really, really like The Lexx. *sings Brunnen-G Battle Hymn* (*)

* very badly

Yeah, but look at which villains. When I was sent out to get Castillo (and please, let's stop pretending that you're not working for the Contact still) my first though was "what, Operative Jenkins wasn't available?"

a) Inception is a case of people missing the point and reading too much into things. There are people who pull the same stunt with Minority Report, claiming everything after Anderton gets haloed is a dream. Spielberg has said, point-blank, "we wouldn't do that to the audience, that would be stupid" but it doesn't stop anyone. Don't even get me started on Total Recall, which also drags in the "director re-interpreting his work" angle, since Verhooven's explanation of the ending varied according to whether or not he thought he was going to get to make a sequel at the time he was asked. Ironically that sequel would have been Minority Report. Of course both movies as well as Blade Runner (no, Ridley, Deckard is not a replicant) were based on the works of Phillip K. Dick, so maybe these issues aren't surprising since at any given moment he probably wasn't sure if he was hallucinating or not.

b) The Dark Knight Rises is not Inception. It is its own movie and has to be evaluated on its own terms. Arguing that the ending is ambiguous because the same director made Inception is like expecting characters to walk off of movie screens in every Woody Allen movie because he made The Purple Rose of Cairo or expecting every Terry Gilliam movie to end with "it was a dream" because he made Brazil.

Not hard. In fact, having a solid story makes the rest of the process easier.

It's not worse because there's nowhere to go from rock bottom.

The whole Well/Fountain/Box/Whatever thing is just silly. Doesn't jive with how superhuman powers are acquired and developed as shown in the game. Doesn't fit with technological advancement seen in the game. If it was "planned all long" then the plan failed catastrophically; more likely it's a retconned-in attempt at a meta-explanation and it shows.

And sometimes directors creatively reinterpret their work after the fact, and sometimes people read way too much into things. There is no reason to believe the end of TDKR is anything but what it appears to be.

<treknobabble>Different harmonic frequencies, obviously.</treknobabble>

Fixed.

We do?

I've heard this theory but I didn't see anything in the film to even suggest the ending wasn't what it appeared to be.

But then people keep borking up the end of Inception, too. (No, it was not a dream, and the point wasn't whether or not the top fell, it was that he stopped looking to see if it did.)

Actually I don't remember it being said at any point that Talia has League of Shadows combat training. As for her accomplishments in the film, "It is not supreme excellence to fight one hundred battles and win one hundred victories. Supreme excellence is to win a victory while fighting no battles at all." -- some dead Asian guy.

Or, you can just use the word the way the vast majority of English-speakers do.

If it falls short of TDK it is only because Ledger hit it out of the park.

No. Other way around. Fission reactions are used to ignite fusion.

Decades ago one of Jerry Pournelle's friends asked him how to make a nuclear reactor explode like an atomic bomb (for a book the friend was writing). Pournelle said "put an atomic bomb in it and set it off". The friend, FWIW, didn't like that answer and ignored him. (I don't think the book ever achieved liftoff; can't imagine why.) Reactors don't explode like nuclear weapons (except, perhaps, a breeder reactor but AFAIK even that is real long odds). They can misbehave in a number of ways but they don't go kaboom. Fusion reactors, as previously noted, are even more fragile that fission ones. If the proper conditions aren't maintained the reaction will just stop. We've been working on maintaining those conditions since the 70s and from what I've heard we're actually farther away now than when we started. That's how difficult the reaction is to establish and maintain.

Of course, this is the kind of thing you have to overlook in a superhero movie. The dubious physics involved in the fusion reactor wasn't exactly the most improbable element of TDKR.

So, basically, they're the Rampart division?