#he left the legion to do variety shows in vegas | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

retphienix · 7 years ago

Photo

I'm going to let out some of my feelings on New Vegas under the cut, but let's start with some more optimistic talk based on what's about to happen.

We're going to play through New Vegas (again for me) in an attempt to re-evaluate it since I harbor such strong negativity towards it despite recognizing all it's accomplishments and improvements over F3.

To start, I adore the intro cutscene. I just do.

I wish it didn't jump to the slideshow mid-way through, but I can understand it non-the-less.

It's fun to see the factions doing interesting things, or even just actions that add character to a faceless organization.

We get the NCR partying it up and drunk, giving off vibes of "modern" military personnel on leave or taking a moment of reprieve. We also get to see the Legion acting like a small raid force and clearly using some stealth tactics as they attack quietly in the night.

To end it off we get to see Benny and the Khans, and aside from showing how strange Fallout engine models look scaled up for a cutscene (because the Khans look like crap), this was good stuff. I especially love the Courier's view swinging towards the weapon as they acknowledge the danger they are in.

Okay, let me get some things out in the air on this one.

I'm starting this playthrough with some baggage.

I really don't like New Vegas. Like at all.

Fallout 3 is one of my favorite games, Fallout 1 was so fantastic a playthrough that it got me excited about Fallout again (I've yet to play Fallout 2 but you better believe that's coming up at some point) and Fallout 4 is unbearably disappointing but offered me plenty of fun for my trouble.

I'm in the minority on this and I completely understand why.

I see all the gameplay mechanics that add depth and I LOVE them.

I see all the differences in the writing and I LOVE them.

I see the improvements to the factions to add depth and I LOVE that.(mostly, I love the attempt)

I see Hardcore mode and, while some have switched to complaining that it's far too simplistic, I had a total BLAST playing through this game on the hardest difficulty with Hardcore turned on.

I see the companions and how they are objectively the best to the point where I'd do anything to reunite Veronica with her girlfriend from the DLC or to steal Arcade away to a new land altogether.

But I just get so hung up on this game.

I've completed it every which way, I've grinded the achievements that forced me to play the game differently than I usually do, I found out unarmed is the most broken weapon-type in the game because Ballistic fists are unbalanced as heck and I loved it.

But I get so hung up on the things I don't like, despite how few they are, they are important things to me.

For one, the factions. I like that they are more complex but I just hate every single one of them.

I get that that 'can' be realistic, and I love “shades of gray” morality options that let me choose who I agree with despite the drawbacks, BUT EVERY FACTION IS UNLIKABLE, EVIL WITH FALSE “Good” IDEALS, OR THEIR DRAWBACKS ARE UNBEARABLY LAZY AND DULL.

I really, really don't like how Fallout 4 handled factions and yet I can still go "Yeah, I'll side with the Minutemen despite their synth problems because they are the moral ideology I agree most with" or "-with the Railroad because despite their human life devaluation issues I most agree blah blah".

Fallout 4 had two "too problematic for me" factions in the form of the Neo Nazi Brotherhood that goes entirely against what Fallout 3's brotherhood were (yes F3 had a simplistic "too good" brotherhood, but they were limited to that chapter and THIS racist chapter IS that chapter so that's just inexcusable), and the Institute who fail due to poor writing and lack of explanation (oh you're the GOOD guys who will SAVE us with technology? You have hidden synths wandering around all over for intel? THEN WHY DO YOU BLATANTLY POISON AND KILL PEOPLE TO STEAL THEIR IDENTITY WHEN YOU LIVE IN AN AGE WHERE YOU CAN JUST THROW A SYNTH SOMEWHERE WITH A BS BACKSTORY AND YOU KNOW THAT WILL WORK OUT JUST FINE??? You're murderers, not the good guys, screw off.)

The thing is, I was able to find factions I agreed with despite their flaws in 4, and 3 made it easy by not doing a good job at all and just giving you a good and bad choice (fair enough).

NV? It tries so hard to have diverse and interesting factions but I honestly think they got too distracted with adding flaws that they forgot to make any of them likable.

NCR are bureaucratic idiots who overexert (Bureaucracy as a flaw, in itself, is utterly lame and dull), follow the flaws of the US government (at least that's interesting) and can best be "agreed" with based on the fact that they support farms. But they even abuse that from what I remember.

The Legion have an entire in-universe explanation for why they look like a bunch of stupid cosplayers and I remember it being summed up as "I read a book, I like military tactics from the Roman empire so here we are!".

If Legion's entire goal is unifying the world under one flag then they could have been literally ANYTHING, but no, they are cosplayers with no deeper meaning beyond "I want slaves, don't respect culture if it isn't my own, and read a military book about rome".

That reason is utterly ridiculous and uninteresting. Anyone who tried to organize something like this would have success in their area (remember something about uniting some tribes and tackling opposition weakest to strongest to divide and conquer) but then they'd just fall apart because you're trying to run a racist little slave army while killing farmers, a revolt or dude in power armor is going to stomp you out realistically.

House is fine. Like, yeah. He's fine. He's gray morality, isolation is his goal, I don't "agree" with him but he's someone I COULD agree with if I was playing that kind of character.

So NV leaves me with either playing NCR because "Well, they suck completely, but hey, maybe they can do some good?", House, or take control on my own and use my own imagination to decide what happens to the area once the credits are finished (since you can’t experience any of those changes you would have instated, afterall. Though that itself isn’t a complaint because I understand the actual cost that would entail to add to the game, but the fact that my best option is this means I would have liked the option to make my lack of “good” choices felt “acceptable” because I could at least instate change etc)

So there's one major complaint out of the way, the factions all being either completely incompetent, stupid, or unlikably bad morally.

The next major complaint I had was the world itself.

I HATE IT. I HATE THIS DESERT WASTELAND OF BOREDOM.

I know some of you have probably heard a variant of that complaint! Something along the lines of "It's just empty desert and there is nothing to see" and you scoffed and you said "This idiot isn't looking in the right places" but you know what!

THERE IS A REASON THIS COMES UP IN PEOPLE WHO DON'T LIKE NEW VEGAS.

It's because, yes, there is stuff to see! But the LAND and WORLD look so barren by design (despite the things that are there) and it all looks so boringly dead and bland that even once we find interesting places it's all desaturated in our heads to the point where we go "ah. cool. is there anything to do in this boring hellscape."

Everything looks the same and it is a huge drain on the eyes.

This world is the most boring thing to look at. I hate sandscapes, I loathe exploring literal desert land. You have to shove more variation in there.

Fallout 3 worked with its separation between "empty" wasteland, "colonized" wasteland, "empty" cityscape, and "populated" cityscape.

You could go to these different types of places and feel a different environment around you.

New Vegas has two places. Empty desert that you sometimes find a shanty town in, or Vegas which is just casinos so who cares beyond gamblers.

It's so monotonous and boring.

The most exciting areas are your starting area (at first, because it hints that you'll find tons of strange working towns to spice up the desert instead of the reality of emptiness), Vegas if you're into that sort of thing, the NCR outpost with the Ranger monument, and Artillery tribe.

Fallout 3 had a green filter over everything and some people complained, I didn't care in the slightest. But with this brown filter over a brown sandscape I felt like it emphasized the color palate too much and made what was already boring to look at even worse.

Off topic, but throwing that in.

All said, maybe I'm exaggerating. But my time with New Vegas left me feeling like the overall politics were either utterly stupid or painfully unlikable, and knowing that made every other questline or story point feel meaningless because I wasn't invested in any character or organization involved.

When every major player is unlikable, I stop caring. So I ended New Vegas feeling like, for all it's writing and smaller stories, they messed up the factions so badly that I couldn't care about any of it.

So when I stop caring I decide to explore the world, and while it DOES have things in it, they painted over that fact by making every area look the same with their brown desert crap. It needed more cities or towns, more "outer" Vegas, and just more variety in general.

And if they couldn't justify a reason that would lend variety to New Vegas, then guess what? Maybe VEGAS is a boring as heck place to put your post apocalyptic game.

*sigh*

Since that rambling, lacking substance as I'm typing from emotion and not diving far enough in for details, rant is done-

(I really did go off and cut some of this because of that. Sad when you consider I got this fired up and I only listed two reasons, poor factions [in terms of morality and not being annoyed with their designs/lore] and the world looking terrible to me because I hate deserts)

-I am going back in to try it all again.

#Fallout #Fallout New Vegas #RetPlays

6 notes · View notes

kansascityhappenings · 7 years ago

Text

Comedy icon Jerry Lewis dies at 91

Watch Video

LOS ANGELES — Jerry Lewis, the manic, rubber-faced showman who jumped and hollered to fame in a lucrative partnership with Dean Martin, settled down to become a self-conscious screen auteur and found an even greater following as the tireless, teary host of the annual muscular dystrophy telethons, has died. He was 91.

Publicist Candi Cazau says Lewis died Sunday morning of natural causes at age 91 in Las Vegas with his family by his side.

Lewis’ career spanned the history of show business in the 20th century, beginning in his parents’ vaudeville act at the age of 5. He was just 20 when his pairing with Martin made them international stars. He went on to make such favorites as “The Bellboy” and “The Nutty Professor,” was featured in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” and appeared as himself in Billy Crystal’s “Mr. Saturday Night.”

Jerry Lewis attends the ‘Max Rose’ photocall during The 66th Annual Cannes Film Festival at the Palais des Festivals on May 23, 2013 in Cannes, France. Photo by Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images

In the 1990s, he scored a stage comeback as the devil in the Broadway revival of “Damn Yankees.” And after a 20-year break from making movies, Lewis returned as the star of the independent drama “Max Rose,” released in 2016.

In his 80s, he was still traveling the world, working on a stage version of “The Nutty Professor.” He was so active he would sometimes forget the basics, like eating, his associates would recall. In 2012, Lewis missed an awards ceremony thrown by his beloved Friars Club because his blood sugar dropped from lack of food and he had to spend the night in the hospital.

In his 90s, he was still performing standup shows.

A major influence on Jim Carrey and other slapstick performers, Lewis also was known as the ringmaster of the Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Association, joking and reminiscing and introducing guests, sharing stories about ailing kids and concluding with his personal anthem, the ballad “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” From the 1960s onward, the telethons raised some $1.5 billion, including more than $60 million in 2009. He announced in 2011 that he would step down as host, but would remain chairman of the association he joined some 60 years ago.

His fundraising efforts won him the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 2009 Oscar telecast, an honor he said “touches my heart and the very depth of my soul.” But the telethon was also criticized for being mawkish and exploitative of children, known as “Jerry’s Kids.” A 1960s muscular dystrophy poster boy, Mike Ervin, later made a documentary called “The Kids Are All Alright,” in which he alleged that Lewis and the Muscular Dystrophy Association had treated him and others as objects of pity rather than real people.

“He and his telethon symbolize an antiquated and destructive 1950s charity mentality,” Ervin wrote in 2009.

Responded Lewis: “You don’t want to be pitied because you’re a cripple in a wheelchair, stay in your house!”

He was the classic funnyman who longed to play “Hamlet,” crying as hard as he laughed. He sassed and snarled at critics and interviewers who displeased him. He pontificated on talk shows, lectured to college students and compiled his thoughts in the 1971 book “The Total Film-Maker.”

“I believe, in my own way, that I say something on film. I’m getting to those who probably don’t have the mentality to understand what … ‘A Man for All Seasons’ is all about, plus many who did understand it,” he wrote. “I am not ashamed or embarrassed at how seemingly trite or saccharine something in my films will sound. I really do make films for my great-great-grandchildren and not for my fellows at the Screen Directors Guild or for the critics.”

In his early movies, he played the kind of fellows who would have had no idea what the elder Lewis was talking about: loose-limbed, buck-toothed, overgrown adolescents, trouble-prone and inclined to wail when beset by enemies. American critics recognized the comedian’s popular appeal but not his aspirations to higher art; the French did. Writing in Paris’ Le Monde newspaper, Jacques Siclier praised Lewis’ “apish allure, his conduct of a child, his grimaces, his contortions, his maladjustment to the world, his morbid fear of women, his way of disturbing order everywhere he appeared.”

The French government awarded Lewis the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1983 and Commander of Arts and Letters the following year. Film critic Andrew Sarris observed: “The fact that Lewis lacks verbal wit on the screen doesn’t particularly bother the French.”

Lewis had teamed up with Martin after World War II, and their radio and stage antics delighted audiences, although not immediately. Their debut, in 1946 at Atlantic City’s 500 Club, was a bust. Warned by owner “Skinny” D’Amato that they might be fired, Martin and Lewis tossed the script and improvised their way into history. New York columnists Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan came to the club and raved over the sexy singer and the berserk clown.

Lewis described their fledgling act in his 1982 autobiography, “Jerry Lewis in Person”: “We juggle and drop a few dishes and try a few handstands. I conduct the three-piece band with one of my shoes, burn their music, jump offstage, run around the tables, sit down with the customers and spill things while Dean keeps singing.”

Hollywood producer Hal Wallis saw them at New York’s Copacabana and signed them to a film contract. Martin and Lewis first appeared in supporting roles in “My Friend Irma” and “My Friend Irma Goes West.” Then they began a hit series of starring vehicles, including “At War With the Army,” ”That’s My Boy” and “Artists and Models.”

But in the mid-1950s, their partnership began to wear. Lewis longed for more than laughs. Martin had tired of playing straight man and of Lewis’ attempts to add Chaplinesque pathos. He also wearied of the pace of films, television, nightclub and theater appearances, benefits and publicity junkets on which Lewis thrived. The rift became increasingly public as the two camps sparred verbally.

“I knew we were in trouble the day someone gave Jerry a book about Charlie Chaplin,” Martin cracked.

On July 24, 1956, Martin and Lewis closed shop, at the Copa, and remained estranged for years. Martin, who died in 1995, did make a dramatic, surprise appearance on Lewis’ telethon in 1976 (a reunion brokered by mutual pal Frank Sinatra), and director Peter Bogdonavich nearly persuaded them to appear in a film together as former colleagues who no longer speak to each other. After Martin’s death, Lewis said the two had again become friendly during his former partner’s final years and he would repeatedly express his admiration for Martin above all others.

The entertainment trade at first considered Martin the casualty of the split, since his talents, except as a singer, were unexplored. He fooled his detractors by cultivating a comic, drunken persona, becoming star of a long-running TV variety show and a respected actor in such films as “Some Came Running,” ”The Young Lions” and “Rio Bravo.”

Lewis also distinguished himself after the break, revealing a serious side as unexpected as Martin’s gift for comedy.

He brought in comedy director Frank Tashlin for “Rock-a-bye Baby,” ”Cinderfella,” ”The Disorderly Orderly,” ”The Geisha Boy” and “Who’s Minding the Store?”, in which he did a pantomime of a typist trying to keep up with Leroy Anderson’s speedy song “The Typewriter.”

With “The Bellboy,” though, Lewis assumed the posts of producer, director, writer and star, like his idol Chaplin. Among his hits under his own direction was the 1963 “The Nutty Professor,” playing a dual Jekyll and Hyde role, transforming himself from a nerdy college teacher to a sexy (and conceited) lounge singer, Buddy Love, regarded as a spoof of his old partner Martin.

He also directed “The Patsy,” ”The Errand Boy,” ”The Family Jewels” and “The Big Mouth.” Lewis’ more recent film credits included such low-budget releases as “Arizona Dream,” co-starring Johnny Depp, and “Max Rose,” which came out in 2016. He had a guest shot on television’s “Mad About You” and was seen briefly in Eddie Murphy’s remake of “The Nutty Professor.”

He was born Joseph Levitch in Newark, New Jersey, on March 16, 1926. His father, billed as Danny Lewis, was a singer on the borscht and burlesque circuits. His mother played piano for Danny’s act. Their only child was often left alone in hotel rooms, or lived in Brooklyn with his paternal grandparents, Russian Jewish immigrants, or his aunts in New Jersey.

“All my life I’ve been afraid of being alone,” Lewis once said. In his later years the solitude haunted him, and he surrounded himself with an entourage at work and at home.

Joey Levitch made his professional debut at age 5, singing the Depression tearjerker “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” to great applause. He recalled that he eventually lost all interest in school and “began to clown around to attract people’s attention.”

By 16, Jerry Lewis (as his billing read) had dropped out of school and was earning as much as $150 a week as a solo performer. He appeared in a “record act,” mouthing crazily to the records of Danny Kaye, Spike Jones and other artists. Rejected by the Army because of a heart murmur and punctured eardrum, Lewis entertained troops in World War II and continued touring with his lip-sync act. In 1944 he married Patti Palmer, a band vocalist.

The following year he met Martin, on a March day in 1945 in Manhattan, Broadway and 54th to be exact. Lewis was on his way to see an agent, walking with a friend, when his friend spotted an “incredibly handsome” man wearing a camel’s hair coat. Lewis and Martin were introduced and Lewis knew right off that this new acquaintance, nine years older than him, was “the real deal.”

“‘Harry Horses,’ I thought,” Lewis wrote in the memoir “Dean and Me,” published in 2005. “That was what we used to call a guy who thought he was smooth with the ladies. Anybody who wore a camel’s-hair overcoat, with a camel’s-hair belt and fake diamond cuff links, was automatically Harry Horses.”

Lewis couldn’t escape from small-time bookings. The same was true of Martin, who sang romantic songs in nightclubs. In 1946, Lewis was playing the 500 Club, and the seats were empty. Lewis suggested hiring Martin to bolster the bill, promising he could do comedy as well as sing.

Fame brought him women and Lewis wrote openly of his many partners. After 36 years of marriage and six sons, Patti Lewis sued her husband for divorce in 1982. She later wrote a book claiming that he was an adulterer and drug addict who abused their children. Son Gary became a pop singer whose group, Gary Lewis & the Playboys, had a string of hits in 1965-66.

In his late 50s, Lewis married Sandra Pitnick, 32, a former airline stewardess. They had a daughter, Dani, named for Jerry’s father.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports http://fox4kc.com/2017/08/20/comedy-icon-jerry-lewis-dies-at-91/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2017/08/20/comedy-icon-jerry-lewis-dies-at-91/

0 notes