Erkki

I completed Human: Fall Flat (just bought it a couple of days ago thanks to a mention in this same thread here) and it's indeed quite good. It's very impressive that they managed to create a huge number of activities with one simple mechanic of grabbing stuff like in GIRP (or now Grow Home/Up) - you're climbing things, breaking things, bending things and using machinery like (for best experience maybe it's best to be surprised about the range of things to do) I think the game slightly errs on the side of not respecting the player's time occasionally, since the drunken GIRP-like feel to it means you will mess up a lot. Maybe you'll mess up with a controller more than a mouse and keyboard, at least I did. You could also be stuck attempting some amazing feats of GIRPness, but the solution is something else. Thankfully this didn't happen to me a lot, but it did a few times. Anyway, most of the time it's not bad - the entire game took me 7 hours to complete and I missed some optional stuff. I think generally each level is about an hour, with the earlier levels taking less than that and the later ones more.

I think I was overstating it when I said I found it not funny - I did actually like some of the jokes. But yes, there were some really dumb references that it could have done without. I don't remember if I had turned on some kind of in-jokes switch. And I also should say that yep, the hint line was good, and in general, Thimbleweed Park has one of the best uses of in-game telephones ever.

I'm actually still pondering seeing it a second time at IMAX. Hell, it even brought Mr. Hoatzin back to post in the forums, so must be something good in it!

Oh, I got The Long Dark a while ago, but it seemed too brutal or I didn't have enough time to invest into getting to know how it works. Should give it another go soon, especially since they've added a story mode.

I liked it too. I still strongly prefer watching English movies with subtitles, even though it's been my work language for 7 years and I probably watch more than two English movies in a week on average. Has anyone here who isn't a native English speaker switched English subs off at some point? I think the main thing for me is that I don't want to miss any words and the thought of having to rewind to hear something again that I missed is much worse than reading subs.

I beat most of Grow Up, except for the challenges and achievements. Might go for 100% if I get bored of other games and want to play something else. It's pretty much the same thing as Grow Home, just more. The plant scanning simplification is definitely good - dragging them to the teleporter was one of the choriest things. I only used the new ability to plant scanned plants twice or so, so I think that wasn't a very useful addition to the game - especially since it isn't required. I don't remember any more which of the powers were present in Grow Home, but it feels like they were better tuned this time and it's really fun to fly around and look for crystals - kind of like Far Cry 2 diamonds, just more fun. The challenges seem more doable also. Although I haven't looked at the achievement descritpions yet - last time I had a lot of trouble with some, I think I did Grow Home 100%.

My go-to solutions at the moment involve using lots of short arms. My alcohol separation is much less efficient than you guys, though. I think I will play through a large chunk of the story before starting to optimize, otherwise I'll feel like I bought another game which I won't complete.

I bought it and started playing, but I'm getting the feeling that it's going to end up very similar to SpaceChem and TIS-100 where the latter challenges just become more and more involved until it became almost work. I think the competition aspect of these games can be pretty cool and something motivating to keep working on improving the solutions in the easier end where it's not yet so much work. I only saw Toblix there, maybe I need to refresh thumbs people on Steam. I'm villane if anyone wants to add me. [edit] Also, I kind of like the looks of the game, but I'm not sure if this alchemist story around it is necessary. Some of it is pretty badly implemented e.g. the ones where you see portraits in the middle of screen and then their dialogue appears one-by-one in the same box no matter who is speaking, just the portrait border gets a highlight. Pretty dumb solution as there are many better ways to show who is speaking. I also am not sure if I prefer the gameplay to SpaceChem for example - the programming there felt more pure and complete. At least the Magnum Opus way of programming is much easier to handle than TIS-100, but I'm not a 100% sold on the programming interface.

Damn, I think all movies that Hitchcock made after Psycho are underrated (at least if I go by Letterboxd - too lazy to analyse ratings on other services). I've now seen them all, and the only ones I'd say are safe to skip are Torn Curtain and maybe Topaz. And even these are good movies, just maybe nothing that special. And actually I'm even taking a liking to Topaz in retrospect, there's just a problem that it looks a bit too artificial at times. But The Birds, Marnie, Frenzy and Family Plot are all great. I just saw Family Plot - his last movie - and I really liked it. I like the subtle humor in it, never laugh out loud, but you are often just about to laugh, made me think of Blood Simple. And there are at least a couple genius cinematographic moves there, one of which I suspect other directors later got from this movie, but it may have been an older trick as well.

The Deponia games don't have a thread of their own somewhy... I remember liking the first three Deponia games, except that the main character became more and more annoying throughout the series, and the jokes can be quite dumb occasionally, plus there are way too many references and even some fourth wall breaking. So it's not without flaws IMHO, but it's still one of the most enjoyable current point and click adventure game series that I know of. So has anyone tried the fourth game (I believe), Deponia Doomsday? How is it?

I may be pedantic from that perspective, but as someone who was never a big Star Wars fan (even though I liked some of the movies well enough to watch them multiple times), I mostly view these as stand-alone movies, and am not giving them any kind of pass that I wouldn't give another movie. Actually for some other movies like Blade Runner I was more willing to give a pass to some flaws, as I was just thrilled to have another great movie in that particular style again.

I think Frenzy is another underrated Hitchcock film, probably because it didn’t have big stars and was too violent? Anyway, I found it to be brilliant in how the tricks of cinematography were effectively used for storytelling.

Can I use this thread to ask for recommendations? I think yes. I've decided to catch up with Hitchcock a bit - I had recently only seen 9 of his 50 or so movies and now I'm at 14. Just watched Dial M for Murder and man, this is the stuff for me. This is actually how I mostly remember good old movies from my childhoold - that they involved mainly a man and a woman and took place in a room. I'm not sure why I remember it mostly like that, maybe I just happened to see such movies at an influential time. I think Dial M for Murder might have been one of those movies that left a permanent mark in my brain when I saw it as a kid because watching it now felt very familiar, but I didn't remember that I've seen this exactly. Actually I felt like there were some differences... was there a remake which changed some facts around? Was there a similar plot in a Columbo episode, or something else? So my question is, can you recommend any other old movies* or TV show episodes where the film mostly takes place in an apartment and preferably** involves a (possible) murder? I will mention a few which I already know (not all with murders): Rear Window, Rope, The Apartment, The Tenant, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby. * not necessarily Hitchcock films, and I will not put an exact limit to 'old' ** I'm also open to watching old movies that take place in an apartment where there is no murder involved

I think I must admit that I wasn't presenting very good reasoning for my dislike of the movie. To be honest while watching I was really torn between liking it and not liking it. But at the end I just felt I couldn't accept all the flaws, which I think are numerous, and still say that I like it. I can only say I liked the visual side of it a lot, for the most part. To be honest I'm not at the moment very interested in going deeper and really exploring my dislike of it. To summarize, maybe I'd say it just had too much stuff, too many characters to care about, and that stopped it from focusing on particular things or characters better (except Rey and Ren perhaps) and then it just had several situations which I found ridiculous or dumb, but which may have come mostly from again having too much stuff in it and not being able to spend more time to show why the situation would NOT be ridiculous. The motivation of the characters didn't feel right to me, and I think some of the setup for the story was just a bit lazy for not establishing better motivations for certain things.

I get a feeling that now you're just making fun of me. On the first point, a sci-fi or fantasy story should still aim for suspension of disbelief and plausibility within a certain framework. In this case I found for example these things to be rather dumb and not believable: As for the second point, we can tell who are the main characters by the screen time they are given. It is about there being a lack of a big story arc, instead there's a big cast of characters with multiple dramatic arcs all going on almost at the same time. Every character needs at least one EPIC HEROIC moment, so those are abundant. There are no personalities here, epicness is the main quality the persons have. Another issue: just for us to be sure who the villains are, they are the ones with the most scarred and disfigured faces. Ugly people are evil, simple.

Ok, I don't automatically hate unsuspensful movies, and I do think it had *some*, but it was more like Jake said - felt like a season of a TV series done as 2+ hour movie. Any tension and dramatic arcs just felt to be at a very wrong pace to me. And I guess the twists could be fine, and are somewhat needed in an action movie, so maybe I put the focus of my criticism on the wrong thing - mainly I felt that it was just not a very believable story told with bad pacing and it was trying to give every main character a chance to shine, which is not what film storytelling should be about, IMHO.

I was facepalming in cinema during watching it. Not good. There is definitely some competent cinematography here for sure, except for the warp cuts (I don't think I've ever seen cuts done like that, what gives?). Visually, everything is very well done indeed. It's just that the story is complete bollocks. It's like a delivery system for heroic moments for almost all of the characters and these moments are almost all ridiculous and twisty. There strength in the way which the medium can provide suspense, as established mainly by Hitchcock and others before him, goes unused. There is not really even rising tension and climax in this. Anything cool happens - a moment later it's twisted around. He sacrificed himself! How heroic! Wait, no he didn't! Wait, actually he did! MIND BLOWN! (not)

I forgot to mention Catherine Breillat. I've only seen Fat Girl, which was pretty good, if depressing. Her Brief Crossing is on my watchlist and I just noticed that Sex is Comedy is on Filmstruck.

That links is missing a colon

On a lighter note, I watched a few of the E3 trailers now and I have mixed feelings about BG&E 2 (but still hopeful), Far Cry 5 (skipped 4, but this one seems interesting). The biker zombie game seems interesting, but on the other hand it seemed to be a mix of so many things taken from other modern games rather than something standing on it's own merits...

Man, I just saw somewhere that The Last Night made a strong showing on E3 (this is how behind I am with gaming news) and immediately remembered this whole issue that the developer was slightly associated with gamergaters and/or partially sharing similar views... I'm blocked from his Twitter for arguing back then, but I looked at it anonymously and he still seems to have pretty weird preconceptions like "Bullying doesn't really exist in Europe like in the US, right?" (as a response he got tens of people saying they were bullied in school in European countries), but seems to have taken a slightly better disposition than before. Anyway, I think I'll be willing to look past all this stuff if the game turns out to be really good, he seems to be an incredibly talented guy in the digital visual arts department, if somewhat naive politically. And now I just looked back a few posts and saw Ben link to an interview with him, and reading it it seems that he still has mostly the same confusion, wanting to be apolitical, but then making a game which sounds quite political and ending up sharing his political views in interviews probably more than most other developers do. And he still seems to believe that gamergate was about journalistic integrity. I don't know, I have my doubts that this person can make a game that explores the future in an interesting way, but it could still turn out just worth it visually. [Edit] wow I now went to the beginning of this thread and saw that this controversy around the game appeared at around E3 time also and IT forum thread about this was actually linked to.

So I played the demo again in English and with mouse & keyboard. It definitely went a lot quicker and I understood more. And with the Steam controller I didn't even figure out what buttons made the stealth kills, but now it was more or less clear. Anyway, it was definitely better now, but I still didn't get a feeling that I definitely should play this so I think I'll skip this game.

I have only played Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and the one from 2001, but I assume you mean the ones since reboot. So no, haven't played them. I think I will give the English demo another try with mouse & keyboard, there definitely were some cutscenes that looked fun but maybe not so much in Spanish. Is knowledge of the previous games required to get some of the humor? [edit] basically the demo begins with a lot of characters and on-going activities I don't know about, so maybe it's not the best introduction to the series.

I played through the demo in Spanish (my computer is in Spanish so it's the default if available) with a Steam controller. I just didn't see what the fuss was about, seems like a competent shooter, but I don't think I saw anything really special. So I'm wondering if me not enjoying as much as I expected could be because of demo not being representative of full game Spanish voices are not as good as the English ones the added processing required from me to understand Spanish does a disservice to the experience the Steam controller (or any controller besides KB & Mouse) is still not great for first person shooters

I just tried to count the games I've played this year - Steam doesn't make it easy so it may not be accurate, but seems it was only Thimbleweed Park and Kentucky Route Zero, and then some puzzle and party games. So Thimbleweed Park would kind of win by default by being the game I've played that's from this year. I don't think I would put it very high on my list if I had actually played a lot of games, though. I've also played some VR games at VR spaces, but not enough to count. I hope to play some more games over Christmas, but I think I will be just going through my backlog of games mostly from the previous 3 years or so.