Patrick R

Wow. I was really not expecting to be back in this thread so soon on some ridiculous adventure game bullshit, but about 75 minutes into Dear Esther I fell off the pathway and in between a bunch of rocks that left me completely immobile, no way to move in any way. If there was a jump button I would have been able to continue no problem but Dear Esther is a #seriousgame and what kind of #seriousgame allows it's player character to escape a prison of 9 inch tall rocks? The protagonist of Dear Esther is too morose to climb out of such a fiendish obstacle. I guess he figured just starving to death by the shore would be preferable than finally making his way to the blinking red light. But whatever, mistakes happen. "No problem!" I say to myself, "I'll just restart the game and load from the most recent auto-save!" Except apparently there are no saves in Dear Esther? And not only that but, though the game gives you the option of starting from one of four chapters, my game apparently doesn't believe me that I've already seen the caves and such, because it's only lets me start from the very beginning, with the other three chapters all darkened out. I wanted to play Dear Esther because I'm about 2/3's through Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs and was curious about Chinese Room's previous game, which I understood was short enough to do in one sitting. And while I really appreciated the beautiful natural setting (even as a total nature hater) and gorgeous music, I will be damned if I slog through another 75 minutes of that terrible garbage nonsensical writing again just so I can see the final 15 and discover that it's all post-apocalyptic or the narrator murdered his wife or invented the atomic bomb or whatever bullshit twist awaits me. JUMP BUTTONS. IN REAL LIVES, EVEN #SERIOUS ONES, THERE IS SOMETIMES A CALL TO JUMP. JUST A THOUGHT.

That you can still control Dot Gobbler after the game over always looks like he's trying to angle for the best selfie as he's on fire. Pretty good!

Wow! In that case I guess it's just a Me problem. I always assumed VNs were designed to be played through in just a couple sittings. I can't think of the last actual book I read that took me 70 hours to read.

The only Telltale game I've played (besides Puzzle Agent) is The Walking Dead S.1, and I always felt more expressive in that game than I do Read Only Memories. Even if R.O.M. technically has more endings, by the time I was 90 minutes into The Walking Dead I felt like I was playing more and making more decisions than I have my 90 minutes into R.O.M. Even if it isn't actually true, all my dialogue options feel arbitrary, and the minimalist presentation keeps me at a distance from the story. Maybe voice acting would help that. HowLongToBeat.com places it at 8 - 10 hours depending on how much extra stuff you do. I don't have a lot of experience with visual novels, but that seems like an awfully long playtime for one.

Maybe one day I'll finally grab that premium membership. Do they play them all the way to the end? Back in this thread because I am the king of quitting adventure games, as I am done with Read Only Memories. Though in this case my problem is that it really isn't an adventure game at all but a visual novel. And I'd be down with that, because I dig the world and tone, but apparently it's a 10+ hour game? I don't have the patience to click through nearly a dozen hours of story that I don't feel like I have meaningful control over.

I'm not participating in this one, but I just wanna say everyone's shit looks amazing this year and I can't wait to play it. If any of you need a playtester who doesn't have a controller, I'll gladly try your stuff out.

That's a good idea! Given how linear it is (each disc is it's own chapter, and all progression is equal), a save file at the start of disc 3 or 4 would get me right back to where I needed to be! EDIT: But the only save file I can find says "100% Complete". Good thought, though.

I was kinda enjoying Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, the sequel to Phantasmagoria. In many ways it's much worse than the original. It ditches the captivating green screen aesthetic for more traditional FMV antics, it's much more linear and limited in scope. A lot of the time it feels less like an adventure game than a low-budget DTV horror film that you just happen to click through. There aren't really the Myst-like puzzles of Phantasmagoria; most progression is achieved through merely exhausting all your dialogue options with the other characters. BUT it's queerer than the original. It's probably the first bisexual male protagonist I've ever played in a video game (though I'd love to hear of more?!?), and while his gay best friend is mostly there for comic relief, it was unbelievably refreshing that he was more "office computer dork" funny than "flamboyant ridiculous f**" funny. And in general it's approach to alternative sexuality (S&M, bisexuality, polyamory, etc.) was refreshingly level-headed for a 20-year old video game, even if it felt it was trying a little too hard to prove how "adult" and "mature" it was with all that stuff. But then my game crashed and it deleted my save file. And while I will gladly be strung along hours of bad acting and cheesy horror once, I cannot let myself go through those motions twice. I'll probably return to it in a couple years.

Boy, The Love Witch is something else. If you aren't interested in pastiche or witchcraft you'll likely get bored by it, but it's one of the most remarkable acts of mimicry in film history.

I really like Phantasmagoria's whole thing, it's cheap-looking Clive Barker meets The Shining meets bad green-screens aesthetic. But the pace is incredibly slow and progression feels completely arbitrary. My husband started to go a little Jack Torrence and yell at me to buy him drain cleaner, so I go to town, buy it, and return home. I hear him in his room but the door's locked. I wander around the house and can't get to him. The "hint skull" just tells me to find him and give him what he wants. There are no puzzles blocking my progress into rooms, no inventory items to pick up. Turns out I didn't have ENOUGH conversations in town to get all the backstory, so the game refuses to trigger the events needed for me to move on. I'm bad enough at adventure games without all this hassle.

I went to a screening of Meet Me in St. Louis last night and it's such an amazing movie, my favorite ever made, and it was the first really beautiful experience I've had since the election. I wrote a long rambling thing about the movie and what the experience meant to me.

I had all the items so I don't know about it's variations, and even once I figured out what to do (which was always pretty clear) it took forever to do it right because he keeps spamming new enemies and blocks. There was no great "ah ha!" moment for me with any of the bosses the way there was for the game's best puzzles.

I was enjoying Ittle Dew's puzzles and general thing, but it's boss fights are just lame and tedious, and the final one was the final straw. So many forms, all tedious. The final boss is constantly spawning enemies and objects and if you don't beat the wave quick they just keep piling up until the whole screen's a mess. For a game that's 80% about puzzles, it's a bad way to end it.

I would definitely prioritize figuring out a clear and concise way to tutorialize the premise, which is awesome but a bit complicated.

I like this twist.

Starting playing Thief for the first time. I'm walking down an alley and see a guard approaching. I think "Ah ha! I'll hide in this dark corner of the alley and just let him walk right past me." I wait an excruciatingly tense 10 seconds and when he finally passes me he stops his whistling just long enough to say "Hey, how's it going." and keeps walking. Oh right. They're guarding the manor. I'm allowed to just be in the actual town. What an amazing and humiliating way to learn the systems. Then the first guard I blackjacked, I hid his body in a shallow pool of water and he drowned and died. GOTY 2016

If you still need a female voice actor, my partner is an actor and would be down to do it.

Yo, that trailer is doooooope.

Was this episode recorded before or after the election results? I'm assuming after.

Shocker: Sausage Party is exactly as lazy and unfunny as all those shitty Dreamworks movies it tries to parody. First Rogen/Goldberg movie I've out and out hated.

I think The Wire is one of the best pieces of art ever but I think, as far as what TV actually is most of the time, Breaking Bad is the best example. Which is to say I think most serialized television isn't actually interested in telling stories or exploring characters. I think most serialized television is only interested in spinning plates in as interesting a way as they can. Most modern TV feels all about that final moment of the episode, where you're on the edge of your seat and say "Whhhaaaa, but but, what's gonna happen next then???". It's all about stringing you along so you desire that next fix. You just gotta know what this mystery is, you just gotta know what happens to so-and-so, you just gotta know how they get themselves out of this seemingly impossible situation. I think, as far as most serialized tv goes, every episode is only about getting the audience to watch the next episode. In that way, Breaking Bad is King. For 4 seasons, they had a set-up where at the end of basically every episode the characters were worse off than they were before, their situation was tighter than it was before, and death/jail/total meltdown always felt imminent. For 4 seasons. Very impressive. 5th season was pretty bad. But as an actual story, as an actual character study, it's kind of meaningless. Vince Gilligan likes to say the premise is "what would it take for a normal guy to become Scarface?" but Walter is clearly not a normal guy from the start. The show would try to shock the viewer by showing Walter getting more and more immoral and wicked, but the first episode has him murdering some dudes. He's pretty much there from the start. But as far as old film-serial style cliffhangers go (which is what I think most modern TV resembles, more than anything), I don't know a show that's ever been as exciting as Breaking Bad.

Just another voice saying Moonlight is very beautiful. I was mostly struck by how literary and low-key it is. The main character is the classic quiet, reserved introspective protagonist who, in a novel, would be given a running interior monologue throughout the book. But luckily there's no distracting voice-over here and yet you still never feel like you leave Chiron's head. It's really a remarkable feat and even makes me reconsider the kinds of stories I always assumed were "uncinematic". Quiet observers make for great book protagonists but often dull film protagonists, but because Moonlight is so much more of a character study and the camerawork is so intensely subjective, you always feel like you can get a good idea of what he's thinking.

Apparently they were trying to get a Maniac Cop remake off the ground for a while and even tried to get Nicholas Winding Refn (who, a long time ago, was Maniac Cop director William Lustig's roommate?!?) attached. That was two years ago, maybe they're still trying. I highly recommend Maniac Cop 2. Way less dull, with some really amazing action scenes and an even weirder plot. And has this hot Maniac Cop rap song over the end credits.

Good to know! EDIT: This article "How The West Was Lost - How Hollywood Whitewashed The Old West" in the Atlantic a week ago is worth a quick read although, like most people, author Leah Williams has a read of Django Unchained that I disagree with and find far too simplistic.

Actually, thinking a little more about it, I also want to concede a few things to Erikki, especially in light of what's been happening in the world of online film criticism: 1. I think "canon" (which doesn't really exist as any one list of films, but as lots of lists of lots of films that all intersect at different places based on one's specific interests and peer groups) is determined by critical consensus at least partially (but not, I think, predominantly). And I think that critical consensus has been historically white, straight, male and not personally invested in condemning racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. etc. etc. works. Giving a side eye to consensus that elevates problematic works over works by marginalized artists, or works that address issues of marginalized people, is very healthy. 2. In a world where voices of film criticism were equally likely to be Native American* as white, The Searchers, and westerns in general, would probably stop ranking so high. Of course, in this hypothetical world where there is equality, would any of these works be made in the first place? #SpeculativeFiction 3. A lot of old films that are most beloved by contemporary cinephiles (particularly old Hollywood films) are so because they are outliers where artists were able to smuggle subversive and anti-authoritarian messages into mainstream culture. So, as someone who picks movies he watches based on lists on Letterboxd (a social media site largely designed for cinephiles) it does not surprise me that a lot of older films Erikki sees are not offensive in the way he feels The Searchers and It Happened One Night are. These films were outliers in their day, but are now more commonly recommended than films that had more traditional values. 4. The Searchers was designed to be seen in theaters. Part of this is that it's landscapes are completely breathtaking, probably some of the most beautiful natural settings in the history of film. But another part of that is that a lot of the dramatic scenes play out in medium shots, where there are a lot of characters in the frame. A lot of very subtle and important character work, particularly in the first 20 or so minutes, in The Searchers is done through the body language and faces of characters who are in the background as characters in the foreground speak unrelated dialogue. I don't know how Erikki saw The Searchers, but as someone who didn't quite grasp who Ethan was on the first viewing and probably felt similar about the heroism of his character as Erikki, seeing it on the big screen is a great experience that really opens up not just the world of the film but the people too. *I think I remember someone telling me this term is offensive now for reasons I don't remember and that there's a better word more commonly used today, but I don't remember it, so I am genuinely sorry and if someone knows what I should be saying I'll go back and edit my posts.