singlespace

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Posts posted by singlespace

  3. Posted

     

    I read over on reddit a comment from Chris to the extent that the game is partially meant to echo a kind of adolescent experience where you have a brief experience that while it's going on seems super important and central to everything, but in the context of the rest of your life ends up just being a blip, ships passing in the night.

     

    Part of that makes me rather frustrated because, while Firewatch presents itself so brilliantly from moment to moment, it never delivers that notion with any force. Rather it presents several disparate themes without giving its full weight to any of them. It's certainly quite true to reality, but the ability to focus and filter out all the noise and present a single coherent vision is one of the greatest strengths of art.

     

    My biggest issue with Firewatch isn't the pacing, or the deus ex machina, or the divergence between the narrative presentation and player perspective, but rather that if you consider any one argument of what Firewatch means, there will be large swaths of the narrative rendered irrelevant. You never have that singular moment when all that has happened comes to bear in an epiphany. You never have that moment when you feel, for the briefest of moments, what it is to be someone else.

     

    Or at least it never happened for me. Intellectually I can understand the various thematic elements, and how they could fit together, but what empathy that I have for Henry and Delilah are things that I brought with me in the first place.

     

    EDIT: used the wrong quotation somehow

  5. Posted

    --In my playthrough I kept thinking that the twine-ish intro went way more different places than I guess it does; that my dementia backstory was just one of many possible.  It seems like it's always that though I guess.

     

    I've been slowly cataloging various things in Firewatch, here's a Twine of the intro sequence:

    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26101/Firewatch%20Intro.html

    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26101/Firewatch%20Intro%20Source.html

  9. Posted

    Yeah, I really liked that small vignette, but I doubt they had the budget to really lean into that kind of content.

     

    I think maybe I had a slightly atypical experience with the rappels: they didn't really seem that bad, just some scree slopes as opposed to verticals. If pressed, you can sprint and slide down those kinds of things, though it's really not advised since it erodes the scree and is a bit treacherous. Most of the time people will switchback up and down those kinds of slopes, it's a bit rare to bother with fixed lines.

  10. Posted

    I don't think the design of the game is inherently flawed. The game suggests that you will be rewarded with specific content if you go exploring, and that's good (i never found the raccoon). But with the day-skipping structure, the game doesn't say to you "this stuff is important enough to detour from the imminent plot".

     

    There's actually one point where they explicitly telegraph that you can explore, I think maybe on Day 2? It's when Delilah asks if you're ready for work and then the conversation has an unnatural beat added where you can say either you're ready or that you'll hike around a bit.

  11. Posted

    Oh, that research stuff - I got the impression it was being used by the Parks Department or whatever to track bears or take soil samples, and then while they were away Ned was using it to eavesdrop on Henry and Delilah.

     

    In Ned's notes there's something to the effect of "the real scientists come back to work in August, leave no trace."

     

    The entire camp also seems pretty run of the mill. When Henry says something to the effect that there's 20ft tall radio towers, they're just short weather monitoring towers: both feature prominent anemometers and various other weather packages with a distinct lack of any antenna. The items in the tent are similar innocuous: tracking collars, notes about weather, etc. -- the only things out of place are the items that Ned added.

  12. Posted

    so which ending did you guys choose? I said she'd be a shrink. And then was unsure when D told me to go back to my wife. Did anyone tell D to come with her? I wanted to, but that didn't rest easy on how i envisioned him.

     

    I think those dialogue choices are actually dependent on what you tell Delilah during the course of the game. I played through twice and when being open it gave the Shrink option, but when being cagey it gave a Crossword option. Nothing you say changes what happens, but it's a nice touch.

  18. Posted

    Looks like fnatic and other pro CS players might not be so magical afterall:

    http://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/2npzoc/dreamhack_on_ldlc_vs_fnatic_controversy_ldlc_vs/cmfvt7j

    https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/2nowkw/discuss_the_fnatic_boost_on_overpass/

     

    TL;DR: Teams, one that the featured in the video that this episode was talking about, were caught using texture transparency, immortal bugs, and pixel walking at Dreamhack. There is also some talk of aimbots, though not substantiated at this point.

  22. Posted

    Animation is pretty incestuous. For western animation, there are pretty much only three successful feature length animation studios today: Pixar, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky. Of those three, two are based out of California, which is true of a lot of VFX and animation studios who work on other shorter length and mixed media projects projects like Blur. A good portion of the best animation schools are also based out of California like CalArts, USC, and CMU, while top tier animation schools which aren't from California, like Sheridan, are heavily staffed by former animators from the big three.

     

    A lot of this intermingling dates back to the golden age of animation and Disney's Nine Old Men which are still some of the strongest influences in animation today. Studios like Warner Bros. Cartoons and MGM were started by former Disney animators and when those studios started closing through the 50s and 60s, Disney remained as one of the last places that trained in full animation. A decade later, when animators like Brad Bird and John Lasseter were educated, there were only a handful of young animators being trained and educated in the art worldwide.

     

    Famously, many of today's most prominent animators are from a group of friends who all learned animation together in room A113 at CalArts in the 1970s. John Lasseter, Tim Burton, Brad Bird, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Glen Keane, Henry Selick, Genndy Tartakovsky, Rob Minkoff, John Musker, Brenda Chapman, and Kirk Wise all learned animation together. Even today, when you look at all english animated features made in the past two decades, the overwhelming majority were directed by CalArts graduates – many from that same 1970s group.

     

    So when you look at Blizzard, which is yet another studio based out of California, it's not particularly surprising that their work shows a great deal of commonality with other animated works.