plasticflesh

Members
  • Content count

    336
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by plasticflesh

  1. Recently completed video games

    I've been enjoying A Hat in Time. Pros: Super cute platformer. Lots of fun unique stuff in each level so far, I'm about 25% in. Cons: The environment design has a rough edges feeling, rolling through texture planes and weird camera stuff.
  2. GOTY of the Year

    I have you to thank for cluing me into this great gem. I resisted to look too closely to your solutions to the maps you posted elsewhere, but from what I saw I was very impressed with your efficient use of round about. Being from New Jersey USA my instinct is towards overpass and jug handle gore.
  3. Music Of The Year 2017

    https://productlust.bandcamp.com/releases Cassette EP by Product Lust. This is actually a 2016 but I saw them play earlier this year and it was a great show. Surf rock meets doom metal screaming. https://unusualsquirrel.bandcamp.com/album/fuck-sandwich Fuck Sandwich by King Missile front man's new act, Unusual Squirrel. Meditative and tongue in cheek monologues ranging subjects from fucking, sublime music, slow buses, financial predators. https://parisonic.bandcamp.com/album/anatol Anatolé by Paris Treantafeles. Mellow space funk melodies on 80s hardware.
  4. Thank you so much for endorsing In Our Time. This seems like a fantastic wealth of knowledge. I've come to really appreciate the various podcast and audiobooks available online. I use them when doing house chores or doing work that allows me to multitask. I've enjoyed the volunteer based Libravox recordings of various books from Tibetan Book of Living and Dying or Walden Pond, Audible editions of many books from Thomas Sowell to Earnest Becker to Alice Miller, the School of Life youtube series, and other youtube lectures from Jordan Peterson, Bessel Van Der Kolk, Slavoj Zizek. I absorb knowledge this way really well so I am very grateful and very excited to have a new fountain of knowledge to drink from. Thanks!
  5. Movie/TV recommendations

    I unfortunately did not come off with an awesome feeling from seeing Three Billboards Outside of Ebbings, Missouri. It's a strange and bumpy and ambiguous movie, so here's a strange and bumpy and ambiguous and spoiler laden review...
  6. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

    I'm compelled to comment on the new Death Stranding trailer somewhere and this seems as good a place as any. Kojima's cinematic cinematography is so strange. It's probably been commented on a million times in regards to MGS5 but it's still such a jarring and stylized experience to me. It's mostly with out camera cuts, with camera work that can only exist in a CGI reality, in carefully blocked and completely surreal sequences. The single cut makes it seem like it is set in reality, but the completely random sequence of surreal events is in stark contrast to that. The only point of reference I have to compare this specific style of CG cinema is Xavier: Renegade Angel.
  7. Very cool. Love the tactile inventory exchanges. A lot of literal and figurative gravity on that camera satchel. Great character animation and environments. Can't wait to see how Far Cry 2 systems apply to documentary film making. Looking forward to viewing footage from a camera that rolled down a hill and started a fire.
  8. Episode 414: Classic Year in Review: 1997

    "Little Big Adventure 2: Twinsen's Odyssey" came in 1997. Amazing game.
  9. GOTY of the Year

    Freeways by Captain Games is my indie GOTY. Making traffic optimizing into a small puzzle is captivating for me. Hollow Knight I really enjoyed my time with. I only got maybe half way through and then felt totally lost and over whelmed, it's hard to pick up again after a hiatus. I like this debate about open world games becoming empty as the mission content is mined. To me it opens the doors to something I always wished open world games had instead of bespoke missions, which is to have dynamic world content systems. That would be an interesting challenge to design, to put all the focus into world systems instead of designed story missions. Obviously that's an unspeakable sell because systems content is impossible to QA. Amorphously obtuse Dwarf Fortress comes to mind.
  10. Veggie Panino Tactics [Release]

    This looks like an excellent meditation on Ahimsa. The tactics of non-violent tactics?
  11. Episode 414: Classic Year in Review: 1997

    I played Dungeon Keeper a few years ago. I really enjoyed it for a few levels. I'm a total outsider to most RTS and Strategy War games. I enjoyed Dungeon Keeper for balancing the relationships established between the monsters, and fell off from the game when the levels became serious strategy challenges. I still enjoy other management style games and pursue ones that have a civilian or light hearted tone. Dwarf Fortress, Theme Park, Kingdoms and Castles, Kingdom, Dragon Quest Builder. Some how I never explored The Sims seriously. I've dabbled in Rim World and Prison Architect and they are indeed compelling, but depressing and draconian. So perhaps this is the confusing appeal of the non-war niche games. They are strategy management games that appeal to people outside of the war game tone.
  12. [Released] Awkwardness and Harmony

    Thanks @hedgefield ! I've been mulling over this and considering the careful balance of keeping the game simple, yet still convey the empathy and also bias modification premise. I'm considering rewarding points for all player to NPC interactions, but on a scaling reward. 2 points for the least happy states, 10 points for interacting w very happy states. I'm also considering maybe adding a secondary "chores" system for the PC and NPCs to perform. The NPCs simply move back and forth flipping switches that represent chores and tick up a chore counter. Maybe happy characters move slightly faster, which means chores get completed. But chores also reduce their mood. Then the timed session round uses chores completed multiplied by PC's score to get the session score. That's already again way out of scope for me. I'll just end up cobbling together whatever the heck i can in Game Maker and see what happens. I'm so excited to start this project, I find it hard not to cheat and start production before the official start date. Patiently toiling in the brain storming pre-production world is legit and productive.
  13. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost did a skit about R2 D2 speaking english. I like it.
  14. Plug your shit

    That looks really interesting! GKIDS distributes so much amazing animation.
  15. I am so onboard with this angst towards the obligatory seasonal gifting ritual. My adult family now asks what to get each other for the day, which then involves coming up with some sort of consumer tchotchkes to give or receive. I value the sentiment, but the burden of random stuff and the guilt of eventually offloading it is tiresome. ...But finding a gift some one will really enjoy is thrilling, I admit. Dialectics of gifting
  16. True, thank you, I understand. I agree that works especially well at the end of a scene, or even as a match cut within a scene of relatively contiguous time usage. My pun about cuts being unnatural was catty and unnecessary, and I think assuming that the cuts were fringe style jumps instead of more common 2 shots and match cuts. Also I'm still hinging on experiencing the trope occurring in a static wide shot scene without cuts. Pedanticism abounds. What's fascinating with all of this is watching 1920s and 1930s films, where these film language conventions have not been established yet, and not only do people say good bye on the phone, they need further action to end the scene, such as an unnecessary fly swatting or sipping of a drink before the slow fade to the next scene.
  17. That makes sense. There is also specific instances of desiring brevity, but also having a situation where editorial cutting and implied time travel is not desired, e.g. making several phone calls in the same wide shot without having any cuts. Thus producing the trope. And to be needlessly argumentative, what's natural about lots of cuts? Real life doesn't cut. Unless I black out, maybe from loss of blood do to a cut.
  18. Assassin's Creed Origins

    Not that I've noticed. Oranges missions have linear objectives, or if there's optional or branching objectives, they don't sign post them at all, which I have not noticed. Some Oranges missions do take place in forts that have their own optional objectives like kill commander or steal loot, and that is static for that location. AC3 missions were much more like episodes, they could be replayed via a submenu. Which the replaying option opens up the ability to pursue the side objectives. I seem to recall other AC games including the replay of story missions, I can't recall which games did and didn't have a mission replay option. From what I can tell Oranges is specifically devoid of mission replay. P.S. AC3 also introduced the mission voting system so Ubisoft can collect data on the quality of their levels. Perhas it is this data that caused pursuit and eavesdropping missions to be mostly removed from Oranges.
  19. Re: never saying good bye. Recently I was working on a voice over project that involved a telephone dialog, and it originally included "good bye" lines. Eventually they were edited out for brevity. I was amazed that the trope was naturally arrived at.
  20. Cuphead!

    I see one big difference between old-school-hard games like Cuphead, and the new-school-hard games like Dark Souls and Spelunky, and that is the degree and employment of pattern recognition. New-school-hard games create what feel like non-linear patterns to memorize, and therefore feel like an experience of intuitive reaction and discovery.Spelunky does this with RNG worlds and systems interactions, and Dark Souls does it with 3D world exploration and elaborate patterns of enemy behavior. Where as old-school-hard games have a lesser degree of pattern variation, creating a linear pattern memorization scheme. Cuphead and other oldschool SHMUPs. I really enjoy the original "Aban Hawkins and the 1000 Spikes" for this version of linear pattern memorization. If anything the most pure old-school-hard games are not just SHMUPs, but also rhythm games like Thumper or Guitar Hero. In a way, old-school-hard uses declarative memory, I memorize the answers and recall them accurately during the recital. New-school-hard games use procedural memory, I learn the rules and phrases of the game, and instinctively switch in and out of them in a freestyle.
  21. Recently completed video games

    I enjoyed Steamworld Dig 2, and also have tons of secrets to find, but haven't gone back to scour for them yet. The story did feel a bit short, but I also played it pretty thoroughly. A good mix of digging exploration and designed platforming. The cogs can be removed from any upgrade they are applied to, it's not a lifetime commitment, for what that is worth.
  22. I accidentally posted the above reply in another thread, to which @jennegatron provided this helpful summary
  23. Stranger Things

    Both of those points are accurate, thank you. Sorry to interrupt the Stranger Things discussion.
  24. A ponderous article exploring the dilemma of distinguishing an artist's products form an artist's moral actions, and the accompanying reddit thread and discussion.