Splain

I've actually seen this one! 7/10. This movie was cleverly written, and definitely written to be discussed afterward. SPOILERS BELOW. I'm a man, so here's what stood out to me. Feel free to tear this apart, telling me I missed the point. There's not a single intelligent man in the movie. They're all stupid. But we can all name movies that feature all men with only inconsequential/token women in them. So it's a fair point. I've been testing the idea that women do not want any help from me. And it has actually improved my real-life relationships with women, not just my wife lol. Also, I already knew that nobody cares about my musical talents, I learned that in high school. The biggest weakness for me was that the whole solution to snapping all the Barbies out of their "trance" was sitting them down and telling them things that are hard about being a woman. But these Barbie dolls have never experienced any of that in Barbieland. So it's just pausing the movie and venting to the real-life women in the audience. That's fine, it's just a weird part of the movie and not actually a solution to their problem. It could have been more effective at actually changing something in real life, unless the proposed solution really is to distract all men with dance-fights while women take over the government. The other part that fell flat was the supreme court stuff. The Barbies tell the Kens that they're Kenough, basically "we as women aren't going to make any room for you, you have to be content with what you have. Find happiness in that." And then shortly thereafter, "No, you can't have any seats on the supreme court." Now, if that's supposed to mirror what men have been telling women throughout history, then that's fine, but it's subverted by the fact that there are many women on the US supreme court! Why dd they choose the supreme court to be the thing?? It's too easy for us to think "oh, but there ARE women on the supreme court, so we're doing pretty good!" The whole point of flipping the genders to make men upset is defeated by that, IMO. The portrayal of Mattel was effective, talking about how there was one, maybe two female CEOs ever. It effectively shows that no matter how much a man says he respects and appreciates women, it's not a replacement for an actual woman CEO. It's good to see that even though Barbie saw all the terrible things about being a woman, she still chose to be a real human, ending the movie with "being a woman is great" instead of "all men are garbage."

Ok, we're all on the same page then. Years ago the guy who started the thread (it was Peko) insisted that the early ending was not only valid, but that it was the best and most satisfying ending. If nobody here feels that way, then we're home free. Actually, looking at it now, you still have to play 5 levels to get an ending. I swear it used to end right away when I was a kid. They must have changed it. To someone playing this game for the first time, it's not obvious what is the "main" path through the levels. Wario 2 is actually the Game of the Month on the r/gameboy subreddit right now, and we're seeing people get different paths (unlocking different groups of picture tiles) on their first time through. So let's say any ending except that early one is valid. I'll update the requirement and count @Matt 4120's clear.

So, we can discuss this, but there's some history to the posted requirement to this game. Years ago, the guy who ran this thread before I took over on NA said that it would count as beating Wario Land 2 to get any ending at all, which includes the ending you get in the very first level if you don't ever get out of bed. So like, a total of 2 minutes of playtime, skipping every single level in the game. We ended up discussing it at length, and we landed on "complete every level" as the requirement. But since that feels like requiring 100%, we can decide if that's an appropriate requirement or not.

River City Ransom. Love this game.

Holy moley that's a nice haul.

Yep!

Nope

Good one. The final clue showed the rocket! Next one:

Ugh, even Reed is caught up in the Stanley cups craze

Rocket Ranger

Haven't had a really good run yet, but this one I at least made it the full 5 minutes lol. 340300

One of my neighbors has been collecting and selling and dealing these Stanley cups for a couple years now. I thought it was weird but I guess she was ahead of the curve this whole time. I wonder if she loves or hates this uptick.

As for people getting points for completed games, I'm ok with reducing the point values by half after each game has been beaten. Then how about it stays at half forever? If you ain't first, you're last. And I don't want to be giving out quarter-points.

Dude, maybe. Do a ctrl+f for "Fortune" on this blog entry: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/126217.Neil_S_Plakcy/blog?page=6 I'm looking for a more definite connection since he's credited for "question database" but the blog only says testing, but like, maybe!

Good grief, there's no way I'll ever beat the game if that's the case. Lol. But we need to know!

Yeah dude, playing this made me want to play Jazz Jackrabbit, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Jill of the Jungle, Rise of the Triad, Descent, Wacky Wheels, Duke Nukem etc. Next year's backlog might have a strong "90's shareware" theme.

f Finished Commander Keen Ep. 4. I'm pretty sure I used cheat codes to beat this game as a kid, but now I've beaten it for realsies. It's a funny game, most of the time it's easy peasy, but then there are levels with one little part in them that are hard as nails, and Keen has only one hit point ever. On Normal difficulty anyway. Great fun though. Time for Ep. 5 now.

Baby steps. I calculated the point values based on clear order from previous years. 2023 finally gave us some really good data, even if it was skewed slightly because of the Claim Sheet. I should probably ask @scaryice for pointers on calculating those point values since I might have done it weird, lol. Japanese games are worth 5 points across the board, we can increase those point values if we want to. We had discussed adding premium points for the especially lengthy games like Starcraft and Ogre Battle, we can do that too if we can decide which games they should be. Do we want to use the Claim Sheet again this year? We put that in place to help us coordinate our efforts and finally beat the library, but we can still do it if it's useful.

Great, I love food judgment.

I'll jump on the train. I'm in Phoenix AZ. @koifish There was a Box Train in 2020, and I was late to sign up, but I asked if I could still join. The guy running it said, and I quote: He must have been using speech-to-text or something, to get "beef or" instead of "before." So I said something dumb like "great! I love end beef" and then along the way, someone added some Slim Jims in the box. So it turned into a thing. But it definitely should not be in the box, lol. Also, I'm personally in favor of "repairable" items. I might have too many projects as it is but I love to tinker and repair stuff.

Yeah that would make sense. We can combine them if people agree. We combine the two Centipedes. The only thing is that it might help with participation? They both usually get beaten. I'm just finishing the list, I simplified the scoring a little bit to smooth over some anomalies and questionable stuff from the thread's dark past.

Ok, got the list up and the Japanese stuff is JANKY. I'll probably bump the JPN titles down to a separate post/table so it doesn't look so bad. But it's a start. I'm going to use our 2023 data to help calculate point values for each title. You know, the thing I said I'd do like 6 months ago.

That's kinda the hangup for me, some of them don't even look like games

Yeah. I'll make it clearer when I get the list finished. I'll use the list shown in the thread below. Should we do 64DD stuff too?