Patrick R

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  1. This is a very good thread worth reading if you want to be even more mad about the news. I knew they'd never be able to continue Important If True while working at Valve and was afraid that In the Valley of the Gods would be the last game they ever made, which just goes to show how little imagination I have for how things could go wrong. There is zero chance I will ever be able to play a VR Half-Life game, nor do I know anyone who ever would, so this is such a bummer.
  2. Movie/TV recommendations

    There aren't really many jump scares, none that I recall, but there is a fair amount of very realistic grisly violence, so fair warning for that.
  3. Full Throttle Remastered

    I just played this for the first time and it was really disappointing. It feels very empty compared to most Lucasarts adventure games with few characters, repetitive settings, less objects and hot-spots to interact with, less lines of dialogue. I get that Ben is very taciturn and can't be a quip machine like Guybrush Threepwood but it feels like most attempts to interact with the world are met with the same 4 dismissive lines, which makes me not want to try anything. Even in situations where it makes no sense he'll fall back on the same lines, like when I was trying to use my bike chain on the semi-truck during the climax and he replied "I'm saving that chain for my friends on Mine Road." And Peter Chan's art is beautiful but scene layouts are often at the expense of clarity, like the magnet tower Thyroid mentioned or trying to figure out where the gas cap on the security force hovercar is supposed to be. Between the lack of humorous bespoke dialogue and hard to parse scenes (oh, that tiny little square in the trailer is a cabinet?) it feels like the game wants to make it hard for me to play. Same with some of the puzzle design: I get a steak and instantly know I'm going to use it to distract the junkyard dog but when I try to use it on a nearby car Ben informs me that the dog would eat the steak and then eat him. Ok, so throwing the steak into a car isn't the answer, so I bash my head against the scene for 15 minutes (luckily the remaster lets me skip the animation of Ben getting chased by the dog, no way I could watch that 15 times in a row without turning the game off) until I give up and look up a FAQ. Turns out I was supposed to throw the steak into a DIFFERENT car. That sort of thing happened half a dozen times, where I figured out what I was supposed to do (bunny minefield was another big one) and then spent a while trying to figure out the exact specific way the game wanted me to do it. It's clear the focus is story and I had heard great things about it, especially Mo and Ben's relationship, but even that was a little underwhelming: there's barely any meat there. They have a brief conversation when Mo finds him, don't really interact again until he finds the Vultures hangout, and then they pull off their motorcycle heist and there's a finale. I like that the sexual tension is ambiguous and that the game doesn't spell anything but they're both too unemotive for that ending to really mean much. There's a lot I liked (art, music, the more cinematic approach) but overall I found it missing most of what made me fall in love with Lucasarts adventure games.
  4. Filmmaking

    It took me two levels of UHS to figure out how to watch this, I am foolish. Congratulations, Erikki, this looks beautiful. All your time and effort (and money!) are onscreen. Now armed with this experience your next step is a massive feature length Mario Bava homage.
  5. Broken Age - Double Fine Adventure!

    Ah. Thanks for the thorough explanation!
  6. Filmmaking

    I feel dumb but I cannot crack this riddle. By vocal do you mean syllable?
  7. Broken Age - Double Fine Adventure!

    I've been rewatching this and it's got me incredibly nostalgic for 2012/13, when I moved to Chicago and discovered Idle Thumbs which got me back into games, etc. I really miss Idle Thumbs, for sure. I still agree with the first bolded statement, no longer with the second. I think I was just looking at the creative process through a limited scope of "individual artistic decisions people make" (which are in fact part of the documentary as well) when what this series is actually is an incredible macro look at the creative process of massive collaborative projects, how all the parts fit together and, more importantly, create bottlenecks for each other. You really walk away with a thorough understanding of how bizarre and unintuitive the game development process can be. It is wild to me that Two Player Productions would go on to make nothing else like this. Are they even still a thing? Their Twitter is active but the link to their official site is broken and this is the last project of theirs listed on Wikipedia. When they refer to "sprints" they're talking about crunch, right?
  8. Filmmaking

    It's been a bit since I've posted here but I figure I'd wrap this up. I didn't get this into any festivals so I can finally make this public. Figure at the very least the first two minutes are of interest because the Thumbs were nice enough to let me use clips of Important If True. Making movies is hard and I am proud that I finished this.
  9. Filmmaking

    Most festivals want submissions via Vimeo links and if that link isn't password protected they will be way less interested. But they won't scour the internet to make sure you haven't posted the link accompanied by the password elsewhere.
  10. South Park

    I wrote a long thing but I can't really respond without getting personal and angry and that's really not worth it here, but I think your line of reasoning is very wrong-headed.
  11. South Park

    I believe the ideas that bigot's feelings are worth protecting or that people pushing against bigotry are the cause of it are capital B Bad Ideas.
  12. South Park

    How aggressive should one's opposition to bigotry be? This is a strange sentence to me.
  13. Filmmaking

    I'll check it out when I get home from work in about 4 hours. PM me.
  14. Filmmaking

    I don't think I'd know how to answer that. It depends on your intention. As a sort of travelogue of your area it worked fine, if there was some other goal I may have missed it.
  15. I had a random thought about movies

    What is it with late Orson Welles films and sound? Mr. Arkadin is an ADR nightmare. The answer of course is money/foreign film practices.