Yeah the difficulty of the dam is way overblown. Try the caves in stage 5 or the Technodrome itself for the real challenge.

Categorizing words in order to do statistical analysis on their use is always going to mean miscategorizing them sometimes. But that’s not copyright infringement, nor unethical, it’s just a reality of linguistic analysis.

Man I spent a good chunk of yesterday trying to explain this to folks and there is extremely vehement resistance to being educated on this topic. I get it, people are scared of generative AI, and companies have and will continue to use it for terrible ends (including G/O Media. Fuck y’all btw). But this is a classic…

While I have a certain amount of nostalgia for the first NES game, despite its difficulty, I think the third NES game, The Manhattan Project was better.  It expanded on the TMNT 2: The Arcade Game’s formula and was a solid original title rather than being a port.  

When NES TMNT was run at a GDQ like 6 or 7 years ago, I prepared myself for like 3 minutes of absolutely precise play when the runner got to the dam stage. My mind was blown when it turned out the runner’s strategy was to just...take damage. Swim through the electricity, touch the seaweed! It doesn’t actually do that…

Regarding that first NES game: I personally never found the dam level that hard (though I admit the swimming controls are really finicky).

I feel like its just one of the first really tense levels many millennial kids played. I was a huge TMNT fan as a kid, so I loved the game, but I had a terrible time getting past that level because it felt so much harder than it was. I was also only like 6 or so, and hadn’t done a lot of other gaming. Once I played a…

Yes. The real terrible level part is that corridor with the astronaut laser guys right before the final boss.

Agreed, once you know the best path it’s pretty easy - if still nerve-wracking. I will add though if you’re trying to complete the game without the use of cheats/save states, your success on the dam level pretty much determines if you need to burn a continue at the beginning of stage 3 as there's not a lot of easy…

Yeah, it’s just rote memory once you get the hang of it.  No different than running a kinda hard level of Mario.

Are you saying WE are the shareholders? Do I have a cache of movie industry money that I don’t know about? Fuck.

“I’ve just discovered that MANHUNT has been uploaded to a content mining site so that it can be indifferently plagiarized by anyone who wants to feed it into their so-called “AI”.”

So, linguistic analysis, which is fine - perfectly fine - if done by underpaid (or unpaid) interns entering data manually while being bored and miserable is somehow wrong if the process is automated?

This probably has something to do with it being the best game in the series. Aside from maybe Resident Evil 7, which let’s be honest, was a big tone shift.

“There are hundreds of simple apps and functions you can’t do”

What does that even mean?

This movie is so charming and disarming throughout. I love how the introduction of Superfly is kind of this homage to the Joker introduction in The Dark Knight — as well as an homage to Heat, which is what Nolan is always using as his heist template.

Hey, I’m with you. Some of the best memories of my life are trash talking on the couch with 3 friends. And I still have a group of friends that get together every once in a while for Smash, Kart, Halo, Soul Calibur etc. But I would imagine the best play for the developer to get the game in front of the most people…

I honestly don’t see the point of this. First, there is no chance in hell that a Hollywood studio-helmed project can portray even a fragment of the things you see in Speak no Evil- when they say they were deliberately trying to do Denmark’s most disturbing movie ever, they are not being hyperbolic, and I would like to…

I love McAvoy. But that movie is such a fucking bummer.