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We've all looked back at things we used to love and realised that we actually had really bad taste in the past and were utterly wrong to ever like them. The usual reaction is to dismiss it and move on, but I thought it might be interesting to think about why we liked things that are so obviously bad. So tell us what you liked, why it's terrible, and what made you so blind to its obvious flaws. I'll start. The thing: The Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever. Why it's terrible: Lone Wolf is a series of game books, or basically single-player Dungeons & Dragons in book form. The stories are really straight-forward, the hero travels around killing a bunch of bad guys and monsters until he reaches whatever the goal was for that book and that's about it. The gameplay mechanics are wildly unbalanced, there are choices you can make that will just outright kill you, and others that will make it practically impossible to win later on. The biggest problem there is that you get advantages from having completed earlier books in the series, but he also tried to make it so that you could pick up any book and just play that one by itself, which meant that it ended up being really difficult to do each book as a stand-alone, but ridiculously easy if you did them all in order. Except for a few times when having played previous books would make it drastically harder. I'm pretty sure the only way to actually beat the entire series is to memorise the ideal path through each book, and even then you probably still have to cheat. Why I loved it: Firstly, I'd heard of Dungeons & Dragons and really wanted to play it, but no one I knew was at all interested in it. Since I didn't have a computer that could run whatever D&D style games were around at the time, gamebooks were as close as I could get. Besides, my parents wouldn't let me play video games all day, but reading books all day was fine. Secondly, I'm a sucker for world building. The fact that each Lone Wolf book told you more about the world and built up the mythology was a major selling point. I could probably still go into detail about the backstory and various creatures and people of Lone Wolf. Thirdly, despite the obvious balance problems it caused (which I was aware of even then), I loved the fact that I could take the same character with the same stats and powers and equipment from one book to the next, getting stronger and better as I went on. It felt like actually achieving something. This was the main reason that I didn't like the far superior Fighting Fantasy series by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone because each book in that series stands alone and has a completely different setting and characters.
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Feb 2, 2014 04:17
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Rollersnake posted:You're going to call the Lone Wolf series terrible and not bring up the racism? Karate Bastard posted:The racism, oh sweet mother Mary the racism! Every cocksucker and his mom is either a swarthy ratty-eyed towelhead or a straight-backed aryan. If you choose to stab the friend of the family go to page "GOOD JOB", otherwise turn to page "DEATH". I guess it's been a while since I read any of them, because I remember it mostly being monsters as bad guys. Giaks (orcs, basically), zombies, skeletons, giant snakes, etc. Although there were also the drakkarim, which I was never sure if they were meant to be evil humans or just something that looked kind of human or what.  A CRUNK BIRD posted:They Might Be Giants What's wrong with They Might Be Giants?
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Feb 3, 2014 10:03
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Karate Bastard posted:I am like soooooo torn between going to projectaon and digging up some right juicy examples of swarthshaming to post here, and actually just not, because goddamn. Knowing me I probably will. Oh, I definitely believe you that it's there, I just don't remember it. Marathanes posted:Somehow, the distinction between good fantasy / Sci-Fi stories (Tolkien, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, Stephen King's Dark Tower Series, Heinlein, Haldeman, etc) and bad ones never really became clear to me until I passed the age of 25 or so. Ha.
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Feb 4, 2014 03:17
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Gen. Ripper posted:The thing: NationStates.net I played that for a bit, but never even looked at the forums. Seeing what happens to your nation as you make different choices is fun for a while. Also, the whole thing is an ad for the book Jennifer Government, which somehow gained a life of its own and is probably far better known than the book it was created to promote.
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Feb 4, 2014 08:35
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Promoted Pawn posted:I think the worst example was probably the poo poo Monster scene in Dogma. I really loved Dogma when I first saw it, but thinking back now it seems like a really bad movie. I haven't rewatched it to find out, but everything I remember about it just makes me think "Wait, I liked this?" cyberia posted:I discovered that if I went to the local Goodwill I could buy a bag of books for pocket change which lead to a few years of reading the sort of books that people in the late 1990s thought were worthy of donating to Goodwill. Nothing but terrible Cold War thrillers, bloated coke-fuelled epics from authors like Harold Robbins, ancient sci-fi pulp novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and twee British stuff like PG Wodehouse. None of these books by themselves were that terrible (most were just dull and uninspired) but I can't imagine it did my already goony self any favours to grow up reading trash like that every day for years. Are you calling PG Wodehouse trash?  you may die posted:I went through this period where I read lovely webcomics a lot. Yeah, your usual lovely gamer ones like Penny Arcade, PvP, Ctrl+Alt+Del, some semi-popular lovely manga style ones like Megatokyo and a buttload of terrible sprite comics. I used to read a ton of awful webcomics, including CAD. I even used to think Chef Brian was funny.
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Feb 5, 2014 06:49
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Manfrompoot posted:Chalk one up for Maddox, and throw in Seanbaby and pretty much anyone else writing internet pop culture humour in the aughts. Maddox better than Cracked? There must be some serious rose-tinted glasses here. Go read literally anything on Maddox's site and compare it to a random Cracked article or column not written by John Cheese and it should be pretty obvious how wrong you are.
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Feb 6, 2014 13:15
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Attestant posted:Man, this thread doesn't have poo poo on my embarassing music taste. I used to really like Spice Girls when they were a thing. And I'm a guy. And it wasn't even me ogling at pretty girls, either. I still like Wannabe.
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Feb 12, 2014 15:28
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so maybe it was like an early warning sign or something.
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Master Twig posted:Oh man, this is me to a tee. In college I was way too into Bullshit. Some of their episodes still hold up, such as them dealing with psychics and alternative medicine, but their political viewpoints just make me cringe now. Their episode on taxes is easily their low point. Even episodes where I agree with their viewpoints on I don't like a much because of how biased the presentation is. I'm kind of the opposite on this. The show is really biased and they never pretend otherwise, because that's the point. It's presenting an argument to try to convince you to agree with them, and I enjoy that even when I completely disagree with them.
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Feb 18, 2014 01:54
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Astrofig posted:The X-men cartoon---cartoons in general, really. I hate them with a passion now. What, you hate all cartoons? The Simpsons, Archer, King of the Hill, they're all bad because they're animated? Lolitas Alright! posted:Also, I thought Robert Heinlein was the poo poo, and even though "Time Enough For Love" had some cute quotes, it also included such lovely things as the main character having to explain to some of his many children that loving each other is a bad idea, and then proceeds to clone himself into nymphomaniac redheaded bisexual incestous twins. Robert Heinlein did write some really good sci-fi. In which he spent an uncomfortably long time trying to convince everyone that incest is totally OK, but still.
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Feb 19, 2014 21:46
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canyoneer posted:LAN Parties. When everyone has dialup internet, the guy with low-speed broadband is king. This is where a bunch of gross high school nerds brought their family PCs over to someone's house and swapped warez, MP3s, and poorly compressed movies over a screaming 10/100 ethernet connection. Might have to stop at Best Buy on the way over to pick up a PCI ethernet card in case you haven't been to one before (because your PC didn't have a built in one until 5 years later). Thanks to my patient parents for indulging having a bunch of loud kids in a hot room in the house with 8 PCs and CRT monitors lined up all night. It's still way more fun playing games in the same room as the people you're playing with than playing over the internet. Devil Wears Wings posted:On the contrary: Ren & Stimpy, Rocko, and Count Duckula/Danger Mouse are all series I loved as a kid and still hold up really well as an adult. Series like the original TMNT and GI Joe that were just made to sell action figures? Not so much. Yeah, that one really depends on what shows you watched. An Angry Bug posted:Anyway, content. Used to love Dilbert. Still have a few of the books. Then I grew up and started noticing the creepy sexist and libertarian undertones and how god damned insufferable the man was. He's really vindictive and creepy, and just seemed to get worse over time. Despite the fact that Scott Adams is an insufferable tool, Dilbert is actually sometimes funny, particularly the strips with Wally. The cartoon was also pretty good.
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Feb 21, 2014 02:21
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Febreeze posted:Same way with Cracked. I loved it when you had the regular office members writing things each week but when they started letting the community write guest articles and you'd get that one writer who would spend her articles bitching about mildly annoying everyday things that bugged personally it just plummeted fast You know they still have regular columnists who write every week? And it's not so much "the community writing guest articles" as them having an open submission policy and going through content really quickly. Their YouTube channel is also really good.
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Feb 23, 2014 13:10
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Fooley posted:I looked it up recently and nothing has changed. Even down to still not having a page with character bios. It's a really weird thing, but tons of comics (even professional ones people are paid for) have massively outdated descriptions and character pages. They often seem to get written once near the beginning and never updated ever. You've got time to draw a comic every day, but can't take ten minutes a year to update the character info?
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Feb 25, 2014 02:34
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Monstrous Regiment was probably his worst book, all told. I liked it a lot better than Raising Steam. I think books 12-20 are where the series peaked. It was improving before that and it's been going downhill since. I wish he'd stop writing them, really, and do something else instead. Dodger was his best book in years, and I'm enjoying the Long Earth series.
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May 22, 2014 04:03
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Devil Wears Wings posted:Webcomics in general, really. It seemed like starting around 2000-ish there were a handful of comics like Framed! and Sluggy Freelance that were doing some interesting, if flawed, experimentation with the medium, and I remember thinking that it would only get better from there. Boy, was I wrong. Croccers posted:I dunno if Skunny Kart is good or bad, or was it Wacky Wheels that was the good one?
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Jun 8, 2014 17:58
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