Codicier

damn your right! good job i held off a bit

http://www.gog.com/luckoftheirish seems like there are a few decent deals here, might take advantage of it to finally grab Spelunky, plus Fez, The Swapper & Reus. Not sure what 5th game to go for though, perhaps Conquistador.

finished Bioshock Infinite last night, went in with fairly average expectations and came out the other end having enjoyed myself. Anyone have any recommendations of any good articles written about it I should give a look at now I'm done?

As far as titles go I've always loved the sound of (and the imagery invoked by) "Now and Then, Here and There"

I decided to ask a friend who actually makes his living doing stop motion animation to see if I was being silly. Turns out there is considered to be subcategory of short films, that encompasses most works under a few mins of length(complete with its own awards ,festivals etc). The name used for this sub category it is.....Very Short Films . Grrrr Gonna cheer myself up by adding a link most people have probably seen but I love anyway

The eponymous "Shorts" as a catch all term with no sub categories does not quite work for me Shammack, but Bravo all the same Or well if it should (& perhaps it should), a lot of things which label themselves that are really bloating the core concept. and it doesn't feel like it's just a difference of narrative ambition. idk >_< it just feels there's something very different going on with for example "The Order to Stop Construction" & "Moses" that makes me feel uncomfortable with calling both "shorts" and just leaving it at that.

That's a great little animation, huge amounts of energy and a great focus just rendering it's characters movement and emotions in the most effective possible way. In some ways It's so simple I almost hesitate to think of it as a traditional story. Sometimes short animations try and throw a overcomplicated narrative arc into the few mins they have, but this didn't and felt all the better for it. I feel like I need another word to describe something with this sort of economy of narrative, perhaps "a sketch" is the closest thing that comes to mind but more in the way that term is used in comedy rather than in art.

The one thing missing from a lot of day-z stories is any real sense of consequence. Everyone knows in the end they are just a server reset from a fresh start. So when the guys talk about 3:10 to Yuma it makes me think your spot on with what would make a interesting stream. All the great cops and robber stories and how one of the most notable things about them is that often the cops are constrained by having to bring someone in alive. Honestly I don't think you need anything more than the idea of a attempted rescue to make this interesting. Perhaps the one thing I would suggest its that the captive is basically the judge of how the rewards are distributed to his 'gang'. If you wanted to make it more complicated however you could possibly do something with having the captive stash some objects around the map before anyone including the thumbs spawn which act as representations of the prizes and make it so him & his gang have to physically collect each prize.

Just watched Parks and Recreation for the first time after a low level crappy day, so far it's proving to be the baby animal gifs thread of sitcoms for me.

Ennis is a great example of what i like to think of as "the pub storytelling style" . He writes very naturalistic dialogue, and gives his character a wonderful awareness of how farcical the situation they find themselves in often are. It feels like he's also a writer who has a talent for picking collaborators on the same wavelength, with Steve Dillon probably being the most famous example. Check out their run together on Hellblazer, it's one of my favourite takes on a very British character.

Which is weird because the premise "kids with psychic powers, in a post apocalyptic society" is the sort of thing you'd expect to be shouhen. What I think separated from most shows is that it didn't just lift 20th centurary morals and tropes and drop them in "the future" it built a timeline about how a society would evolve and tried to keep it's characters true to the sort of person who would live in that world. Redline has really grown on me over time. Think I over analysed it at first before just accepting it for the high paced, excellently animated fun that it is. I haven't hit those episodes yet, but I think I can guess who might be involved. Noticed something on crunchyroll today though, as i understand it on thier popular anime section stuff is ranked, which means Log horrizon with its low budget animation and plot based around negotiation has overtook sword art online which has a much bigger budget behind it. This is encouraging!

Minor non plot Spoiler for Ep21 of kill La Kill

Hey Osmosisch any chance you could perhaps give some tips/feedback about what makes your particular group work (in your opinion), I like in a pretty small town and so don't really have the luxury of having other designers around to critique my work. Perhaps we could even build some of that into this thread in a way.

haha that reminds me of my favourite ever X-Com squad wipe. On a terror mission during my original classic ironman run I took aim at 2 chrysalids with my heavy's rocket launcher, unfortunately he missed. The errant rocket blowing a hole in the building behind them and revealing 3 more bugs, a cyberdisk and a couple of floaters. Who promptly took opportunity of their free move to rush my squad, but oh well at least their end was quick.

Just finished Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2692798-strange-and-stranger Before reading this I had no idea that Ditko was a such a devoted and hardcore Ayn Rand follower, let alone the self destructive nature that devotion had on his life and career. Its such a shame to see the path he took from someone who's early ink work and composition are so intricate, dynamic, and show such commitment and passion, to someone who so slavishly follows Rand's creed that he would end his working life producing pages who's pencilling looked like something a bad highschool art student would have been ashamed of just because he was determined to give as little effort as possible to the publishers he saw as looters.. Recommend, if depressing reading. Adding this to avoid double positing although it's a slightly different subject. Watched a episode of What Do Artists Do All Day? on Frank Quietly today during my break. A solid look at both Quietly's production methodology and his influences (which include talking about the way he feels the city backgrounds are drawn with the same attention to detail as foregrounds in Akira) . http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03v2vcb

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26418358 The fight back begins! human exoskeletons are kinda cool, until you consider what it would be like to be strapped into something like that and carried around against you will..... Also who in their right mind calls their robotics company CYBERDYNE SYSTEMS!!!

Ok I'm going to go back on a earlier statement. Although many of the golden age shows and films could get made today I've just finished rewatching one I think fundamentally could not, which is a shame since all the talk about fan service in anime means it's probably needed now more than ever. What I'm trying to say is I guess, goddamn Perfect Blue is good. Btw does anyone know if the Blue Ray version is worth investing in? In terms of image quality and/or extras?

Have any of you given impossible a shot yet? coming to the end of classic i find myself wondering if its worth giving a shot. I feel i know the system pretty well, and have a have a good idea of the danger points on most types of maps so it doesn't seem inconceivable i could make my way through. But does it really add much to the game? Can you beat it through good play and careful management or is it something which is only beatable through a set playbook built to deal with a deck that is stacked against you?

Oh man Time Commanders! I remember watching that back in the day, looking back it was kinda interesting to have a show where a game was played with a verbal chain of command even if it was a little bit naff in the end. I do think there is something to saying that the whole magic hill thing is basically as shorthand for introducing a outside context to a smaller scale battle without modelling every single thing.

I destroyed their base last night I will admit it was noticeable when they switched to laser & gene mods, however i managed to hit plasma weapons ahead of the curve which meant by that time my squads damage output on overwatch was so high that often reinforcement waves would be dead before my turn would start. I still don't feel like they were a patch on the aliens, chrysalids and cyber disks still always felt like a threat in a way the agents never did. I suppose what it comes down to is that it felt the exalt operatives play it too safe to really be a threat compared to the regular aliens, a 6 man squad running into a pocket of exalt could always pick off their strongest threats and soak the rest with a assault or mec before finishing off the survivors, where as aliens utter disregard for their own safety and comparative lethality sometimes seemed to just overwhelm a squad to a extent that someone it always felt like i was one missed shot from a dead troop. Loved the base defence mission though, having the concentrated lethality of a full squad taken away from you and being forced to fight in really close quarters was nerve wrecking.

Started playing the expansion this week, and surprised I'm finding classic a lot easier than i had in the base game. For the most part the exalt missions are a joke, they almost feel like a xp farm in comparison to any mission involving the aliens. That said I'm used to playing on classic now & I play very very cautiously. Plus my risk of starting with officers training and the 25% xp perk as soon as i could really seems to have paid off. Still love the randomly generated missions names too. Just completed: Operation Brutal Whisper

Just noticed today that there's a iOS adaptation of that game out, is it worth playing?

That's a fairly solid way of implementing it, reminds me a lot of the genestealer blips in space hulk. I do feel like I need a little more info on the theme to understand how the trap should exactly feel, is the player embodied at all? What is he risking? His life? His resources?

Sometimes there's a expectation that as adults we shouldn't be upset when our pet dies, that we should somehow be old enough to brush it off with a stoic shrug. That expectation is BS. Sad to hear this is the way things have turned out Subbes, you have my sympathies.

Although I love Paranoia Agent (my favourite of Kon's work is however Tokyo Godfathers) I'm not sure I can go along with the idea that there was a "Golden Age" where somehow artistic and storytelling styles were both more mature. I think partially at least some of this feeling comes simply from the fading of bad shows from memory, i'm sure there were hundreds of bad shows made for every "great" anime we can remember. But you do have a point, I think most mediums go through stages where people are either working at pushing the form's boundaries or exploring what they can do within them, and anime has been stuck in inward looking cycle for a while now and it only been rarely that directors like Kon break out from that, because of how tough it is to get something that doesn't appeal to a core demographic greenlit in any art form. I suppose in some ways that's why I've been so disappointed with Space Dandy, it feels like Watanabe could have had pretty much carte blanche to produce whatever sort of script he wanted, and someone would have agreed just to have his name on a dvd box, and yet what he picked was a very underwhelming show i keep watching in hope of the one great episode. I think one of the big things that has been missing since Kon passed away is anyone really willing to risk producing a show that actually had a mixed an varied cast of adult characters. There has (as deleric pointed out) been a period of deep nostalgia for youth and escapism, which is not entirely surprising in a post recession world where many people have found their expectations of adulthood completely out of step with reality. So we get show after show of self aware young protagonists, all drawn in a nice smooth non-threatening styles. But we do increasingly get people doing very smart thing within these constraints or just on the margins of the mainstream. I mean The Eccentric Family was out last year and possibley my favourite show since the days of Mushishi, and Planetes, and it was relatively unheralded show, with a rambling (even occasional non linear) story, based on exploring what it means to be part of a family. The art style was not flashy but it was hugely impressive in the way it captured movement and the little gestures that make a character believable. I'm not sure about the example of Excel Saga as something that couldn't get produced today, i think it's just simply a case that genuinely funny shows are very very tough to do. Since Excel, the only two show's which have made me laugh in quite the same hysterical way have been Cromartie High School, and Detroit Metal City. (& there was a 4 year gap between each of those). Anyway later this year however we are getting a new Mushishi series and a Masaaki Yuasa directed version of Ping Pong so this year looks interesting in terms of big non moe shows.