Erkki

Hmm... I get what you are saying about Tale of Tales, but it worked for me, mostly. Today saw Slow West. I had really high hopes for this, and it didn't disappoint. It was also my last (25th) movie of the festival, so it was nice to end on a high note. I think it might be the most interesting American take on the (kinda-?)western genre since Dead Man (that I know of), but on the other hand it's not quite as great as Aferim!, which might unexpectedly be my actual favourite movie from the festival. I already want to see it again! And when I went to see it, the cinema was almost empty -- I guess most people are still put off by black and white?

I think we should really drop the Recently Discussed Games thread. It makes it seem like very little discussion about games is going on because game-specific threads are often really empty, unless it's a game with a lot of hype behind it.

Tale of Tales is a fantastic fairy tale movie! Aferim is a western-like film set in Romania of 1800s. Isla Bonita is a Spanish-speaking Woody Allen-like film. I liked them all, perhaps Aferim the most.

I have 7 more movies to see in PÖFF, and I've seen 18. The only one I walked out of in the middle of the movie was The Find, and that movie was chosen as the audience's favourite (!?). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4176964/ If anyone else will see this, I am really curious to hear your opinion. It pissed me off for mainly two reasons: 1) When the main character had to walk around a huge lake near the beginning of the film, the camera showed him sometimes walking left, sometimes walking right, in relation to the body of water. The shore line would have to be REALLY complex for this to make sense. Admittedly it was a little bit complex, but I saw no justification for such foolishness. 2) The main character's determination to call a certain person bitch all the time and his developing obsessions relating to that person. And his relationship with his family... It just made no sense to me whatsoever. Maybe the end of the movie gave a reason to tolerate this character, but I couldn't wait that long. Maybe this is actually a brilliant movie and I don't like it for similar reasons I didn't like Taxi Driver that much.

I've seen some more great movies at PÖFF during the past few days: Truman is about dying and friendship. Really great actors who make a really emotional movie. A friend I saw it with cried 8 times, I cried only 3 times but was declared also human. It's more of a typical movie compared to most festival movies, as my friend put it. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3754940/ La novia (The Bride) is a really poetic movie that grabs your attention. The characters are intentionally unreal, as if out of a fairy tale. I'm not sure how well it will work outside of a cinema, though. I think this might be my favourite from PÖFF so far, besides Tangerine. I really liked how it had lots of details while doing a great job emphasizing the important elements in every scene. I wish I hadn't been too tired to ask some questions from the director - I think this was the first time the movie was shown outside of Spain. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2734566/ Epitafio (Epitaph) was another really poetic movie, of some conquistadors who decide to climb a volcano, for reasons. It is visually and aurally impressive, but I think I need a second viewing to get the most of it. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4991756/ Sado (The Throne) is an impressive historical drama set in the royal family and court of 18th century Korea. I held back the tears as I didn't want to cry for fools, but in the end I had to let them come. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4010918/ The End of the Tour showed that even a famous writer is a normal person like anyone else http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3416744/

I have been here since the start almost, probably 2004 or something. Over time the community has changed somewhat, some people have left, then come back, then left again. Lots of new people started coming when the podcasts started. I don't actually remember when the mega-threads started (maybe with the new user welcoming thread); I kind of like them, but sometimes I miss a year's worth of posts in them. And at other times I catch up with a year's posts in an evening or two. I really hate the "Recently completed video games" thread though, and I think I locked it at one point, but then everyone started complaining.

Having a slight movie overdose -- saw 5 movies in the cinema and 3 or so at home during the weekend. One was Fellini's 8 1/2, which I had never seen before. That was pure awesome! In the cine (still PÖFF) the ones I liked most were Guaraní, a road(river) movie about a girl and her granddad making a way to her mother, from somewhere in Paraguay to Buenos Aires. Stranger, a Kazahstan movie about the soviet collectivization, and mainly about a boy who decides to go live in a cave near his village when his father dies. Desde Allá was also good.

[edit] deleted [/edit]

Yesterday was a crappy PÖFF day for me, but today I saw two movies that I really liked. Staying Alive A comedy about a woman getting divorced from a cheating husband Paradise Suite For some reason I went in with low expectations, but this was a hell of a movie. It touches the stories of 6 people, dealing with human trafficking, forced prostitution, exploitation of illegal immigrants etc.

It's the Black Nights Film Festival and I've managed to schedule 11 movie viewings for this week. Today I had to walk out of one of those, but so far two movies have stood out: one is Tangerine and the other is Anna Also saw a Karel Zeman movie and a documentary about him. Quite interesting to see how he did special effects and how he has influenced Terry Gilliam and others.

This would arguably be a wrong forum for this post, but what the hell: IMHO, the Grand Theft Auto series is way overratedoverpopular(?). Sure, I enjoyed the shit out of the games, and there was nothing quite like it, but man, actually there's a lot about these games that is so crappy. Mainly, I mean the way they are structured and the way that some "modes" in the game work well with one type of controller while other modes work better with other types of controllers. Even in San Andreas I remember some horrible missions where I had to shoot people from (the backseat of?) a motorcycle, and how I struggled with it. The new one has similar scenes, even ones where you have to keep rotating around 360 degrees to shoot everyone quickly, while the controls are absolutely not suited for that (at least with the steam controller, maybe slightly better with dual-sticks but I doubt it's a fundamental difference). I resorted to grabbing a mouse & keyboard while doing shooty bits. WTF? Why does a modern game make me do that? Of course the mouse & keyboard are then not very awesome for driving (a controller works just as well or better, and can be way more comfortable on the couch). So what I'm saying is that GTA has stuck to some format of gameplay that is a bad compromise between all the things it makes/allows you do, and people probably love it just for the amount of stuff it provides, ignoring the gameplay problems. And Rockstar has seen that it kind of works well enough to sell and haven't really come up with a better way of doing things, and are just providing new content for the same broken format. Honestly I enjoyed Sleeping Dogs more, although I remember having similar problems there, but maybe the shoot & drive stuff was more in the extra content than the main story.

What do you mean by "the virtual keyboard"? The one that comes up when you have to type something in Steam? Steam Controller isn't limited to Steam, if you quit big picture mode (when using Link) you get control of your own desktop. I haven't tried if there's a way to still access the virtual keyboard there, though. Also, the desktop usage of Steam Link kind of sucks. Even if I have all settings turned to max, I see horrible artifacts, and any text clarity disappears, and sometimes the artifacts even flicker on and off. Watching movies is ok (or well, depends on whether the Steam Controller ends up in the right mode for Kodi, sometimes it's just fucked), but after the horrible desktop experience (which I'll still probably use somewhat), I have my doubts and now went back to Kodi running on Rasperry Pi 2 to watch movies.

Saw Tangerine yesterday, and it was awesome! At first it seemed like it might not be that great, but it kept getting better towards the end. Also, I've only been to a limited number of places in the US (the bay area), but the streets portrayed there looked much more like the america I've seen than what is mostly shown in movies. Maybe it's also because of it's filmed with iPhones -- the cameras were closer to what the human eye would see compared to normal film cameras.

Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy. Maybe Old Joy too. Maybe Zach Braff's Garden State, Taika Waititi's Boy, Eagle vs. Shark.

(I copied this from a post I made elsewhere so sorry if this repeats something in this thread) So I've been trying the Steam Link and Steam Controller. The link works pretty well (wired net), but I do see some compression artifacts in GTA V. Not enough to really bother me, though. I've tried a few other games as well and on the whole the experience can feel a bit beta (but I already prefer it to having a huge tower in my living room). If there are crashes or weirdness, I sometimes have to run to the computer room. There aren't as good controller schemes for all games as has become standard practice with the console controllers. For those, developers have had time to perfect the schemes since the DualShock was introduced in 1997. Steam Controller can make that scheme work, but the haptic touch-pad isn't perfect for emulating the right thumb-stick. It definitely feels like the Steam Controller has potential to work better than two-stick controllers, though. The shape is just perfect for my hands, and the triggers with the final click are an excellent idea, as are the bottom buttons under middle/ring finger. The haptic feedback seems to work well enough in some cases, but I haven't tried any games that have special support for it. When the controller has a mixed Gamepad+kb/mouse emu, what can happen is that games switch between which scheme is active, and this can produce some weirdness (in GTA V seems to start recording video quite often after some button press combos, even if I didn't iniciate that particular function)

I can't recommend the Logitech K400 enough. Well, besides that the trackpad does't work well. I think the K400 Plus is supposed to fix that. The battery life on those things is insane - easily more than a year. [edit] I just got my screen unexpectedly quickly! Now time to try if the Steam Link can handle movies as well.

So, I bought an iPad as a birthday present for my mom, and I hope I get to use it too sometimes. I tied it to my account, in hopes that I would be able to play all my iPhone games on it. Kind of disappointed that most games have separate iPad versions that need to be purchased again I guess I should have expected that, considering how dirt cheap the iPhone games are. Still, don't want to buy Monkey Island yet again, wish I hadn't bought them for the iPhone. Ok, rant over, what games do you recommend for iPad? Also, do you know what are the best card games, which is what my mom mostly plays on the computer. FreeCell, Spider etc. (hope it's ok posting a new thread for this, I think there wasn't anything specific to games for the iPad)

Damn, no range from couch to PC with logitech dongles. But at least I discovered that changing the volume on the PC end does affect the output from Steam Link. So now I'm wondering why it doesn't forward the volume key presses to the PC -- could it be that it's a driver-specific function and won't be forwarded?

Woohoo, I received my Steam Link & Controller today and was now able to move my huge PC tower out of the living room! I have a 100MB wired network and it works almost perfectly so far (some issues with some games so far). However, I have to wait a few days before I can fully enjoy it, as my PC now has an old 19" 4:3 monitor attached and this means games will not work properly in 1080p. I ordered a new monitor (the 1080p that PC gamer recommends), was overdue anyway. Some issues I noticed so far: * Steam Link doesn't seem to have master volume control, at least the keyboard volume controls do nothing, the audio is too loud by default, I don't want to go and adjust the volume on my speakers. * if I hook up my Logitech Harmony Smart Keyboard to the Steam Link and then launch e.g. Kodi, I won't be able to use the Pause/Play/etc. buttons to control Kodi for some reason. It might work if I hookeed it up to the actual PC (should have range), but I haven't tried. * logitech's mouse acceleration seems to be non-functional (for both K400 & Smart Keyboard).

I loved Mount & Blade (Warband), it was the only game which's multiplayer I have played extensively during the last 10 years. However, M&B 2 seems rather similar and just a small step forward, I would have expected more of a jump. Has anyone tried some of the more recent games with similar combat system? I fogot the names.

Or what if it would have been Jodorowsky's Dune?

Hmm... My computer room is about 10 m2 (ca 100 feet2). It's possible for me to keep that room relatively empty and mostly available for VR-ing, at least for now, but I wonder if that would still be a bit small for Vive. But even if a little space enhances the feeling of presence that much, it might be worth it... But then maybe it will turn out to be a gimmick as I realize I don't want to play games standing up.

I love the turn this thread is taking. If anyone has a catchy title for "classics I don't like" I'm willing to change the title.

I'm pretty sure I'll get either an Oculus or Valve VR when they are available. What are the expectations for the pros/cons of each?

Birdman ASL 87.1s Fury Road 2.6s Both great movies, seems like a meaningless metric. [Edit] Sorry, I meant meaningless metric to judge enjoyability of a particular film, but maybe when applied to whole generations of movies it is useful.