MrHoatzin

Famed Author David Eggers! etc.

Moos!

I played Planescape: Torment for something like fifteen hours before realizing that it was a D&D game (as in, I realized it was an RPG, but I completely failed to recognize it as D&D™). I think that is as great a testament as any to Black Isle's world-smithing skills. I need to actually finish this game at some point.

These podcast things are neato. They're like a substitute for conversation about Video Games for those of us who have no* corporeal friends who play games. ___ *Practically. I have no idea how this came to be.

I enjoyed this. I listened to it twice in a row yesterday. KomarMelamid_The-Most-UnwantedSong.mp3 Man, I missed these smilies.

But why?

That is so three years ago, man. I don't think you can use that and expect anyone to remember it...

I don't know what the hell's going on, but there is a surprisingly healthy assortment of movies coming out by people who know how to make movies with just a wee bit of time apart: David Lynch - Inland Empire Christopher Nolan - The Prestige Darren Aronofsky - The Fountain Michel Gondry - The Science of Sleep Alfonso Cuaron - Children of Men Jan Svankmajer - Lunacy (it is kinda coming out just now in the States) That is one formidable list right there... :tup:

Are you human, Jason? Are you human?

Seconded.

FTW??

That blue kimono with sumo wrestlers looks like something that could become me... hmmm... I don't think I have 60 bucks to throw at it.

Dreamfall, sadly, yes. Oh, and Redguard is one of those too... Man, that game rocked, and it was bollocks in that traditional Bethsoft vein.

Stupid Invaders.

Exciting! I'd pay $9.95 for that!

Eurogamer is the only site that can sell me a bad game--but not only sell me, but have me going out of my way, far and wide, to find that bad game.

Because it is a very tight movie. Very, very tight. Little room to breathe.

I never said, nor did I imply, that he was a designer. I just said that he was consistently brilliant. I didn't much like Doom 3, but that was one damn snappy engine.

Carmack has fairly consistently been in his element for the past ten plus years...

Of all the old iD people, John Carmack is the only consistently brilliant one. They did amazing things together, it is just that independently they're not worth much.

At that point, I think, the intent of whoever made this comes into play. If it is supposed to speak to the randomness and chaos of the Human Experience (which I don't think it does or is, since there is so much pattern to be observed), it would benefit more from an earnest and unchoreographed presentation and methods. If the experiment of having a 1000 people's trajectories be combined in Trackmania actually resulted in those weird results and those odd patterns, it would be an interesting thing to outright state and try to explain or stress in such a way to expect a reaction. It can be crap art. But I don't think it is even reaching for any kind of art. It is comfortable in being a toy, a cool thing. Is it not better for it to be a really cool toy than a bad piece of art?

Are you sure it is not just a simulation with all those cars handled by ai? If it was actually some sort of log of the paths traveled by 1000 people who played this game (or if they actually played this at the same time sans clipping) the start would not be that uniformly fan-like, I would imagine it would be a lot more randomized. It is just a silly simulation. A simulation could evoke the human experience, but I don't think this one does. It looks more like a simulation of insect behavior.

I'm having a hard time seeing what role beauty serves in the are games art dialogue. Why would you even remotely invoke it here? I'm curious about your reasoning. It intrigues me. ICO is beautiful, but its artistry has nothing to do with beauty as such, and directly. On a purely aesthetic level, that was one competent video simulation of something and it was well edited, and the tune is snappy (never much listened to Moby). It may be a lot of fun even--which it is!--but aside from that...

Andrei Rublev is such a bizarre movie, very weird structure. Not exactly David Lynch anti-linear structure, but it doesn't watch as a movie; it is more like a collection of situations, with little rhyme and reason, in which these characters are thrown. I was really bored with it half the way through and then something happened and the latter half of the movie pulled together, almost unexpectedly... it was as if the first half was the training for the proper internalizing of the second half. I had my eye on this Criterion box for a while now, but it is so damn expensive.