MrHoatzin

'Lo fellow 'Peans, I just had Alfred J. Kwak pop into my head. I recall really digging the show when I was a wee one, but there is no way in hell I will be able to find it anywhere in the States. Was the show any good, or was I a dumb kid for liking it?

That's what I am hoping for.

I found the first Penny Arcade game to be dull and one-dimensional, even though I was a fan of Paper Mario and The Thousand-Year Door (a game it takes after a fair bit, I thought). Was the second one an improvement over the first one? I hope Deathspank doesn't suck. The screenshots are a bit tired-looking.

haha @ alcohol delivery service

This is the Monkey Island grog recipe, right? I don't know if this is necessarily bad journalism, it is just extremely sloppy and incompetent journalism. I tend to think of bad journalism as the kind that willfully riles up the audience against something that is in their direct interest (say, the shit that the right wingers are saying about the public option and death panels and such to freak out the stupid in the US right now).

Where you see poor craft, I see a conceptually sound decision. Sall I'm sayin! I linked to Richter's Baader-Meinhof series because it is the first example that popped into my mind of extremely low contrast used to an extremely good end! As an example of why I think invoking contrast as a must have is a flawed truism. At no point did I say that you're not allowed to critique it. I was just trying to say that rather than automatically seeing it as the Fallout team dropping the ball on palette selection, it would be valid to see it as a conscious decision on their part—on par with Valve's decision to go for a far more nuanced, almost impressionistic handling of color in their post-apocalyptic world; on par with Kubrick consciously making the movie extremely slow. Common sense of the craft stipulates that if you want someone to be entertained, you do not consciously bore them, just as you don't consciously make them stare at asbestos green landscapes for sixty hours. And yet they did that. But not really. I thought it was unfair to be "turned off" by drabness. The drabness is an integral part of the experience, without which it would not be the same dreary game.

Car manufacturers that make vehicles for the most oil-consuming market (US) have been rather indifferent to improve the gas efficiency of their cars for the past thirty years. When oil is cheap, why bother? The weird spike in the price of oil that bankrupted the US car industry as of late was entirely due to speculation. The oil production kept increasing as the price of oil kept increasing and there was no real tangible increase in demand in the third world. Besides, oil doesn't really behave according to free market behaviors. OPEC is a conventional cartel. What I am saying is far from tinfoil helmet territory, dude. I pick which conspiracies to theorize about carefully. That said, in retrospect, saying that electric car was getting killed was a dumb way of putting it and a kind of a fuzzy example all around. For all I know, it wasn't killed actively, there was just no research into it because it was not profitable. It was not profitable because oil was cheap and no one cared to invest into the environment. Still. It is easy to sabotage from a position of power. It doesn't take great, visible, concentrated effort to not encourage certain kinds of R&D. And if your business gets into a serious pickle and becomes afraid for its own existence, all it takes is a bit of FUD disseminated through the populace to kill all kinds of things. Look at the health care debacle happening now in the US.

Oh, no, not in the least. I am not saying any kind of laissez faire thing would be preferable. I am just saying that markets don't even really work the way people claim they do. There is too much bullying of the small and the emerging by the big and the established, stuff that is never really mentioned as an aspect of the invisible hand of the rational market in the standard doctrine of Capitalism, but that very much plays a role. If they did really work the way people claim they do, then all kinds of desired technology would be ubiquitous in no time at all. There would be a lot more innovation and fewer artificial barriers to entry, more smaller-scale entrepreneurship, etc. There would also be failed radical tech ventures and a lot of technological dead ends. As it is, the only venue where this kind of entrepreneurship is happening is the internet where barriers to entry are practically nonexistent. And all really interesting development of radical things takes place in universities, which are public institutions subsidized by business just enough so that they can harvest the patents that these universities come up with. It is not a stretch of imagination, really. It happens all the time. Governments are not powerful enough to penalize big international companies that control certain technologies in uncompetitive ways. The oil industry kept destroying the electrical car. My grandfather in the seventies sat down and calculated that a hybrid car with a gas generator running on some optimal speed, and powering an electric motor would make for a far more efficient machine. Other more with-it engineers probably thought of this before him. But there is large momentum to any system. And when they're already making mad money with the status quo there is little impetus to change things drastically. If tomorrow someone came about and figured out a way to make processors out of potatoes at a fraction of cost and immensely superior performance, do you think Intel will just roll over and die? They will likely buy the technology and sit on it until they've milked everything they can from their current infrastructure. We would've probably had ubiquitous flat TV technology fifteen years ago if there wasn't as much institutional investment into glass tube-based tech that industry wanted to milk for all it was worth, for as long as they could. Battery makers are small fish. I suspect they may go the way camera companies that died when film died—if they can't come up with better chargeable cells and gracefully shift production, that is.

The eulogy Tesla wrote for Edison is one of the greatest epic burns ever.

Haha, that is basically the opening line. Also, the same thing I was tempted to post before watching the movie, so you're in good company there.But yeah, damn, impressive shiznit. However, because we don't really live in a world in which true capitalism exists or is respected, the existing power structures will fight tooth and nail to keep this shit from taking root. I am thinking of people who make AA batteries, Energizer and the like. They've invested too much in infrastructures for making shit throwaway batteries. On the other hand, these peeps are not powerful enough to fight technology this damn useful, and they can probably adjust to making rechargeable cells quickly enough. A lot quicker than camera makers adjusted (or didn't) to the new filmlessness, I would imagine.

All of this advice sounds kindof false, or true with caveats and under certain circumstances, negotiable under others. I feel like I can't offer any really pertinent advice here because I've been in an awesome, utterly drama-less relationship for years now. I just want to pitch in that those are indeed possible! :eek: Compatibility of personality is very important. It is also important not to project traits that are just not there or misinterpret one trait for another. Then come aligned long-term goals. If that is met, everything else boils down to good communication and conflict resolution skills and agreed-upon procedures for resolving conflicts.

Not really. I am talking about the whole work. I am defending a seemingly ludicrous decisions that were made (visuals omg so fucking drab, retardedly slow and boring piece of entertainment), on the grounds that they benefit the whole (sense of utter desolation in a nihilist landscape, space flight is not supposed to feel exciting and instantaneous). Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Sorry. Truisms are retarded. Contrast is just a tool, like any other, not some sort of fundamental pillar without copious amounts of which art automatically crumbles into irrelevance.Again, the visuals are just a part of the whole. Making them too uniform and contrastless (and really, I don't think they were all that uniform and without contrast; it is just that the contrast between areas was never like walking across a sharp line between a happy tropical island into a dark purple den of the necromancer) may not have been the right decision, it may not be the right decision for a shooter like Rage, but it is a decision that they did make and it is a decision that without a doubt affected the experience in a positive way. They have provided plenty of meat in other aspects: little bits of history that pepper the world, varied locations (architectural aspects and varied landscape forms—whatever you want to say about the game, exploration was never boring and no two villages were ever the same, which is what it would be if they really did completely go overboard on the desolation, drabness and lack of contrast), and so on. So much effort went into the game that I refuse to recognize that the relatively monochromatic palette was anything other than choice on their part, made in the service of the dreariness that they wanted the player to experience—right on par with Valve's choice to delicately blue-tint and up the saturation of shadows in Source games (among other subtle things their engine does to colors). I would argue that the flat stares and absence of body language of all the NPCs is a more important shortcoming of Fallout 3, but all Bethesda games are slightly broken. You just gotta love what they do awesomely and ignore the stuff they will more often than not fix in the next game. I found the monochromatic wasteland of Fallout 3 far, FAR less jarring than the inexplicably uniform phthalo-green foliage of Oblivion. Although, now, that said, I guess I would concede that subtle color variation is not their art director's strongest suit, but I would insist that it is an asset for Fallout and a shortcoming for Oblivion; in the former it makes more conceptual sense than in the latter.

You know, that almost demands to be its own games website, unrelated to the thumb.

"Finally, a game peripheral you can sleep with, only this one won't freak out in the morning and charge you with rape!" - ign.com

I am not going to argue that Fallout is not drab, because I can see how someone can see it thusly.On one hand, there are conceptual reasons for making the whole world drab and dreary, on the other, there is so much subtle difference between areas that obviously took great effort and restraint to put together. Not every post-apocalyptic game needs to look like a Mad Max Doom Carnival for it to be compelling, cohesive, interesting. Simply damning Fallout for the cardinal sin of drabness and uniformity doesn't take into account what good that relative drabness and uniformity brings to the experience. 2001: Space Odyssey is a very, very slow and boring movie. This is not an accident. Space travel is supposed to be slow and boring and Kubrick wanted the viewer to feel this. There are too many crazy extreme games out there, the subtler ones should not be penalized for subtlety.

This ain't fair.

Does the pay-shipping-and-get-the-disk version generally contain higher quality assets?

"You're going to be blown!" -IGN.com

Man, I am really sick of the 8-bit retro nostalgia fetish. It is time it goes away.

These crazy peripherals are a becoming a weekly occurrence.

I had already heard good things about it and read some interesting interviews with the creators, but now I really must start watching this.I was looking for an old thread and stumbled upon this. I hadn't realized you'd made me read the Earthsea books back in the day. Kindof amusing.So speaking of Earthsea, the Ghibli movie about it (made by Gorō Miyazaki, old man Miyazaki's son) is the worst thing yet to come out of the studio. While it was in production and I kept hearing how the old man was pissed that his son was making movies and I ascribed it to some sort of patriarchal old man bullshit. But upon seeing the film, I agreed. Gorō sucks and should have been kept away from film. It is like he took random "cool" elements from all the Earthsea books and mashed them all into one, making a horrible, banal mess of things. One thing he added of his own volition is a story of teenage angst wherein Arran (the little prince featured in The Farthest Shore) runs away from home after stabbing and killing his own father. It was so ham-fisted, transparent and dumb. I could almost hear old man Miyazaki sighing exasperatedly and hanging his head in shame over how dumb it all was. The animation was weak to boot, the pacing was sloppy, the setting changes were random, it was just an awful movie. Ponyo, on the other hand, is an awesome movie and everyone should check it out. The drawing quality is the most Hergéish Miyazaki has yet gotten, with fat outlines and color pencil, picture book backgrounds. The theater screen was a bad format for the film, I kept wanting to see it on a much smaller and more personal scale (and also in original Japanese). It contains the most unapologetic nature-conservationist porn of all Miyazaki films. The little kids make some oddly mature choices, but it never feels forced. It is probably the most epic non-epic movie I've yet seen.

Depends, is it animated by Dreamworks or Jim Henson?

Vapid entertainment is by its nature fascist.

Back when I used to have his blog on my rss feed, the only kind of older work he would post was work that inspired his sensibilities, from which you could draw a direct line to Ren & Stimpy, and the only kind of work by new kids he would link to was stuff that unabashedly ripped off his own style. I am talking in the past tense because I don't know if this is still the case. At some point he ran out of fresh stuff to post and I stopped reading. Edit: and as for the "creepy old man" bit, he had this protégé, a girl half his age, who fell squarely into the "unabashedly ripping off his style" camp. Her style was nothing more than a competent ripoff of Ren and Stimpy, and he was constantly gushing over her work, to the point where it became creepy.

Sometimes I kindof can't help it. Will Wright's politics took the shine off of my enjoyment of Spore and all the Maxis games. I don't think I'll feel free to enjoy John Lasseter's movies as care-freely as I have. I haven't been able to enjoy Ren and Stimpy since John Kricfalusi started a blog and showed himself to be an artistically incestuous creepy old man.It is nigh impossible for me to separate creative work from its makers. Having been minced through half a decade of art school and come out on the other side, I know for a fact that there is nothing inherently magical to the creative process, that who I am and what I think about day to day is inseparable from my work—ditto for others. If I find something I like, I want to know more about the maker, so that I can find more of his/her stuff and have a sort of one-way conversation. If they turn out to be a turd of a person, I am a bit saddened and I have to reevaluate the conversation we've had. In this particular case, I can't be forced to care all that much. What is appealing to me about the game is the atmosphere and gameplay, and Orson Scott Card had shit to do with that. He just provided the storymaking equivalent of middleware for the project.