Gildermershina

@ip007: I think initially it was "oh look, cool zombie action". But actually over the long term, it's more about people pushed to the absolute limits of their humanity. I think in a way it's cathartic to experience this characters facing unimaginable hardships and horror, because it puts our everyday fears in perspective. But then, that's drama in a nutshell. The Walking Dead is just heightened to the maximum.

It's draining as hell, and sometimes it takes the cheap shots, but when it works, it works. Not for everyone, but for a lot of people apparently.

There's something to this "I'm gonna punch you through the entire Earth" thing, isn't there?

Thanks for playing We Are Young, and bringing me back to 2011/2012, where I was stuck in an late shift office job where they played hit radio over the PA system all damn day long. We Are Young, Bruno Mars thinking he wants to marry you, that Rihanna one about finding love in a place, and like, four Adele songs. Oh, and some guy who wanted to light it up like it's DY-NO-MITE. And Moves like Jagger which we turned into a fucking word game. "I've got a bad leg so now I walk with a stagger, walk with a stagger.", "I've got a job cleaning windows so I spend all day up a ladder, all day up a ladder..." "I had a curry last night and I drank a lager, I drank a lager..." "Rowan Atkinson stars as Edmund Blackadder, as Edmund Blackadder, as Edmund Blaaaa-aaa--aaaa-aaa-aa-aaa-aackadder."

And then an hour later, it would repeat it all over again. Day after fucking day.

Although actually, some nights it would be some kind of football (soccer) call-in show, where the dumbest fucking pieces of shit on Earth would call in and share their ill-informed garbage opinions and get into arguments about who's fault it is that some team or other wasn't performing this season, and who should be thrown under the bus, and oh god if there's anything in the world I hate more than hearing the same pop songs every day it's fucking football talk.

AND THEN, in the run up to Christmas, they switched off the radio, turned on the TVs, and started playing some muisc video channel showing the same 10 Christmas songs over and over in a loop. Every version of Do They Know It's Christmas. And All I Want for Christmas is Yoooooooou. And Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, and the very next day IT'S CHRISTMAS NODDY HOLDER FUCKING WOO I wish it could be Christmas every day.

Millennium fucking prayer.

@mathey: I don't know my Moorcock (except through a couple of old Hawkwind songs). My understanding of some of the fluff on Chaos was that the gods were manifestations of various sins - basically a variation on seven deadly sins. So I guess that makes some degree of sense.

But considering all of that, the Chaos daemons sure seemed to be incredibly regimented back in the day. They pretty much all had a greater daemon, a roughly humanoid foot solider, and then some kind of beast, and a steed for mounted champions. Kind of a contradiction.

How many goddamn Kirby games do we need?

INFINITE KIRBY.

As far as gods and daemons go, yeah. I believe the implication in the fluff as was that they were parallel realities. The Chaos gods and the Old Ones (who created a bunch of the races in both realities) were the main crossover between the two. Chaos is portrayed as coming from outside of reality in both realms, so it makes sense it would be the same in both. The miniatures for the classic daemons were always the same across both, they just sold them with round bases for 40K and square bases for fantasy.

It was the Chaos followers that changed. Fantasy Chaos had Chaos Warriors and Beastmen, while 40k had Chaos Space Marines and Cultists.

Of course, it gets weirder because there were other Chaos gods at various points in the lore who were destroyed or maybe just retconned out, and then there's the Elf/Eldar god Kaela Mensha Khaine. Khaine is either an aspect of Khorne or maybe a separate god, or maybe both depending on the lore at the time.

TLDR: Yes, it's the same pantheon of gods.

I'm amazed how much of this lore stuff I still have in my brain. My reaction to that intro video was like "shit, okay, Tzeentch, right? Yup, there's the Lord of Change. Glad it's not Khorne for a change." What an amazing waste of long-term memory.

Viva's existentialism was also a big deal for me at that time in my life. I guess I was about 14 at the time, and for whatever reason I was coming to grips with the idea of mortality at that age. It's one of the reasons that game stands as my favourite Final Fantasy.

Although the moment that hits me the hardest, for reasons I can't actually explain, is when you discover Quan's dwelling.

Quan was a master gourmand Qu who was all about imaginative eating. One day he fished Vivi out of the ocean, and raised him as a child. Vivi called him Grandpa. Quan died before the game begins, and when you visit the cave you learn a little about their sweet and strange relationship. It's implied that being raised by Quan was what made Vivi sentient unlike the other Black Mages. But also, Quan was actually raising Vivi to eat him.

There's something to that, but I don't actually know what it is.

I was a Games Workshop kid in the early 2000s. Like most folks, I was more into 40k. I did start collecting a WFB Orcs & Goblins army before I drifted away from the hobby. The thing I liked about the Warhammer fantasy setting was its weird sense of humour.

Over the years it kind of lost that humour and became a little more traditional fantasy, but Blood Bowl never changed. That game is still a delightful relic of the earlier goofy Games Workshop. Why would mortal these teams of mortal enemies get together and play in a kind of fantasy rugby league (aleit, a hyperviolent league where players are regularly killed). It's so dumb I love it.

The PC game is not bad.

AG Barr? Holy shit.