MrHoatzin

I have a penchant for idol worship on par with any tween girl's, so I somewhat envy you in a really silly, pointless way.

Ack, the LEC Monkey Island remake looks exactly how I feared one would look. Goddamn. Too faithful in an uninspired kind of way, too little risk taken. But on the side, I preordered my Tales of Monkey Island.

Start a journal. Grab a book by an author you admire and just start copying the thing word for word. Do some extensive research to some writing end. I really suck at getting off my ass too, tho. Since graduating I have been in a weird consumption of culture mode; hopefully I will snap out of it and add something to said culture sooner than later. I have a shitload of really neat projects that I should be working on, but I am being lazy.

The series maybe not, but the mechanic and the premise (you a thief, you steal neat shit, you hide in shadows) are worthy of a more Hitmany treatment. Combine the shadow lurking and thievery of Thief, with the rad varied locales and the disguise mechanic of Hitman, and if you wanna make it open world GTA-style, set the game in occupied Paris of 1942 and I am sold.

Ok, so I am playing through Thief 3 and I am somewhere just past the Shalebridge Cradle level (which was pretty terrifying and all around , but felt like a completely different game) and I am getting bored of lurking in shadows and having to go all the way across town to the next level (last couple of levels I've been running through town throwing flash grenades rather than properly hiding in shadows), etc. Should I persevere and finish this thing or just abort? In all honesty, the game hasn't been mixing it up for me. By and large every level I get to do the same thing in damn near identical environments. I had just come off Hitman: Blood Money and was expecting a similar sort of romp through crazy-varied scenarios and am somewhat disappointed by the large droning expanse of Thief 3. Should I bother getting Thief 2 to run perhaps? Is there a Blood-Money-with-stealing-things-rather-than-killing-people game for me out there somewhere?

Win.

Almost as lovely as Kenneth Branagh trying to speak with an extreme Mississippi accent.

Maybe it should be Goblns 4?

Didn't I say in the very bit that you were replying to: The onus for badly conceived characters doesn't fall on the actors. I didn't mean to imply that, and I don't think I did. :shifty:Still, any badly conceived characters in The Wire are far above the well-conceived characters in the rest of TV programming.

Almost all of the people who first showed up in season two had no bearing on the rest of the series, they never appear again. The exceptions are Beadie Russell ( ), Brother Mouzone ( ), Sergey Malatov ( ), Nick Sabotka ( ), Spiros Vondas ( ), the Greek ( ), and Clarence Royce ( ). In their wishy-washiness, these exceptions highlight the non-interference of second season in the rest of the story, more than they celebrate its contributions to the rest of the story. No doubt, second season fills some important parts of the picture (and you bring them up yourself), but that is because The Wire doesn't waste its critique on meaningless institutions. That is true for the entirety of its run. That is why it is a great show. What is interesting to me about the season is the striving of the stevedores to remain petty and therefore keep their virtue intact while they have such obvious access to far more impressive avenues of crime. Nick and Ziggy and Frank flirt with heavier crime, but fail at it because they don't come from inherently broken communities, because they believe in an alternative, honest life. The black kids in the ghetto fail to see options altogether. All I am saying is that the petty thievery of white blue collar mopes is not an important section of the grand structure of The Wire, it is just an ornamental side tower that shares a flying buttress or two with the main fortification.

The tone of the inFamous post, the Trico post, etc. I am ASSUMING you were being , rather than earnest.

Are you feeling ok? You've been saying rather bizarre things as of late.

Details! Details! But yeah I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they happen to forget that these are mouse games.

I thought Landsman was perfect fit for who he was. The only time I ever really noticed shoddy acting was in season two, and that was really because the new characters were relatively badly conceived. E.g. Brother Mouzone smugly winking at the camera, reveling in his own awesomeness ("You know what is themost dangerous thing in the world? A nigga with a library card."), Ziggy, the mysterious Greek who is so damn mysterious he is transparent, etc. But whatever, it is a rad show.

Sherlock Holmes: Steampunk Hero...

I have the impression they won't do anything more than make it run on XBLArgh. It would be, a) stupid to do more than that because it messes with the original experience of the game in ungood ways, too risky and therefore not really in the spirit of the risk-averse, shit-peddling bunch of yesmen (and women) that LEC has become. The fact that it took this long for the SCUMM games to reappear makes me think getting them released was a sisyphean struggle of one dude in programming who had to persuade the entire hierarchy (probably all promoted from marketing*) that this old crap they were just sitting on could be worth a lot with only a few months time needed to get it to run on modern hardware. *I am pulling this out of my ass. It is an educated guess somewhat; what with them not making ANYTHING worthwhile in YEARS. Doubt there are any cool creatives left in the company TO promote.

This shit is not even choose your own adventure, it is mash keys along to a cutscene. Why don't they just shoot everything with real people and then edit it together in realtime based on or or player input? That would be a more interesting thing to be subject to, might even be more conducive to less linear storytelling than a very asset-intensive video game. I want to pronounce QTE's as "cuties".

Hrmnm. Wait a moment, if the second one was tentatively labeled "Nico", shouldn't the third one be "Sico"?

The little lady sat on a train and left Wednesday morning for a week and a half in DC. She is still on the train, in the last leg of the journey. She thought that traveling by train would be awesome and exciting, or something, but now she just wants a shower. I've been alone in a very empty house for two days now.

I looked it up in the dictionary before I asked.

Stuff was just written less subtly in the second season, plus blue collar white people are not all that interesting to begin with. It is a good thing that second season doesn't come back to pollute the rest of the series at all. Whereas all the other seasons seem to build more overtly one on the other, the second one is a weird little tangent. I am not sure what you mean by "no less compelling and 'moreish'". If you're saying it is slightly more compelling than the rest, I would like to know why you'd say that.

The horse (Aggro was it?) in the Shadow of the Colossus was the best sidekick in a video game ever, well animated and semi-intelligently controlled to boot. The player really felt connection with the horse, and I am sure we all The pupffin is a lot more conspicuous than Aggro was. Connecting with the horse took me unawares, whereas this monster is obviously engineered a little more consciously (fluffy, cute) to get the player to care. :tup:

Season two of the Wire is kindof blah compared to the rest of the series but three, four and five are rad—with four being a kind of high water mark that the fifth couldn't possibly live up to. Still, they are all rad. Best thing on TV.

This somehow falls into a murky place between this thread and the Obligatory comical YouTube thread*, as it can freely be found on Hulu (sorry folks outside of the US, maybe thee are working proxies out there?), I have been watching Art:21 - Art in the 21st Century. It is a well-curated, beautifully shot PBS series on contemporary art and artists now living. I would suggest it to the pretentious ivory tower smartypants and the salt of the earth, meat and taters, real folk alike. __________________ * While it is not inherently comical, it is interesting and on the internet and therefore may fit there

3 is the easiest to get to run, it and 1 are pretty great, but I never played 2.