inmostlight

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Posts posted by inmostlight


  1. * batteries not included was also an Amblin movie so very Spielbergian.  Plus it was similar to Cocoon in that it was an 80s sci-fi movie with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.  I mostly remember it being a light-hearted comedy more than anything.

     

    ...whoa, and I just looked it up, it was also one of the first screenplays by Brad Bird.

     

    Short Circuit, of course, is these days also known as the movie series where Fisher Stevens is in brownface playing an Indian character.  There's a good rant about it in Aziz Ansari's Netflix series.


  2. I remember playing Majestic!  I really can't remember much about it, but I know that I definitely "played" it.  There really wasn't too much game there, just typing to some chat bots and occasionally getting phone calls/instant messages.

     

    I think the disclaimer at the beginning of phone calls was an option that you could turn on or off; I seem to recall a bit of media panic because early on someone not playing the game answered a threatening phone call from Majestic that didn't have the disclaimer and freaked out.


  3. If you liked Review and want to jump down the Andy Daly wormhole, I highly recommend the Andy Daly Podcast Pilot Project.  There's only 8 episodes but they're so wonderfully insane.  (And then if you want to keep digging, you can find many of the same characters on old Comedy Bang Bang episodes, usually with Jason Mantzoukas.)  Just like Review, they get kind of dark -- a lot of Satan worshipping, murder, and suicide played for laughs.


  4. I totally agree, I think one of Sicario's points was how Blunt's character was just a pawn, and one of the reasons they picked her was because they thought she could be easily manipulated.  

     

    And a pedantic aside: "Asha" was renamed to Yara in Game of Thrones tv because it was too close to "Osha" in pronunciation.  I kind of agree with that change, especially for viewers who never read the books.


  5. The talk about the Russian games reminded me of all the weird electromechanical games that existed in the 70s, and could still be found in out-of-the-way vacation spots in the 80s.  You can see some examples in the boardwalk scenes of the movie Jaws, for instance.  There were a whole bunch of types:

    • Shooting galleries with little figures that moved and you'd shoot pellets or BBs at them.
    • Racing games sort of like described in this episode, but the car you'd be controlling would be driving over a zoetrope rear projection or a vinyl track on spools
    • Lunar Landers where the space ship is on wires or rods.

    There's a cool gallery here: http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2010/03/14/retro_arcade_museum_an_electro/

    And apparently Sega made a TON of them:  http://segaretro.org/Category:Electro-mechanical_arcade_games

    In some ways they were more impressive than early video games, because they have that weird tangible quality similar to pinball.  I'd find myself more mystified by how these machines work than the more complex programming behind a Space Invaders or Asteroids.


  6. I also hate the change. The discovery queue is ridiculous. I recently bought Final Fantasy Type 0 which is some weird off-brand Final Fantasy game that was originally released for the PSP or Vita (I've never followed the handheld gaming scene so I don't know the difference) and ended up as a PC Port. It has incredibly mixed reviews on Steam because people don't like the PC Port (I think it looks fine and don't really care about that), and it is much smaller and tighter in scope than a traditional FF game (a major selling point in my book, but obviously not what a lot of fans of the genre are looking for). Anyway, I'm enjoying this game for kind of idiosyncratic reasons because I typically hate JRPGs, just find them dull and super uninteresting. But now Steam looks at me playing this weird JRPG with kind of mediocre reviews, and decides that my discovery queue should now be filled with bad JRPGs, no matter how many times I click the "not interested" button.

     

    The discovery queue also has the problem in that it never learns what I'm *NOT* interested in.  During the last Steam sale where they encouraged you to keep going through it, I must have hit "not interested" on every possible Final Fantasy game, as well as several other series...yet it never learned to not show me any more of them.

     

    So yeah, it's been a long time since the Steam front page introduced me to a new, cool game....but instead, the Activity page has done that.  Maybe it's just having a few certain people on my friends list who I consider "taste makers", but if I see someone buying something, posting screenshots, or getting a bunch of weird looking achievements I will check a game out.  That's the sort of thing Steam should be highlighting more than weird queues that will never stop trying to make me like anime. 


  7. The discussion about the videos that played during the long Fallout 4 install reminded me of the original PC Crimson Skies game.  It had a pretty long install for the time, but while it was going it also streamed CD audio.  It was like an old 1940s radio serial, setting up the adventures of Nathan Zachary.  Very well done and a lot of fun.

     

    Some years later I got nostalgic and wanted to play again, but also wanted to hear that installation adventure.  CD-ROM drive technology had advanced so much, though, that the install took seconds and I only got a line or two of dialog.