vimes

To me, the only thing interesting about this game is how they'll make the transition between range and melee in terms of camera, controls and AI : my brain keeps telling me this foreshadows a Relic RTS that allows you to 'jump' into one of you soldier to give the final push.

Kung-Fu Panda 2 could be a great movie, if they had remove some of the fat (they overplayed Po's gooffery way too much for my taste and the theme of the storyline were hammered repeatedly at the end), but there are a few moments and scenes that show the Dreamworks story team is maturing in terms what they want to say and how they say it. In fact, there are 3 scenes between Tigress and Po that are really nice nuggets of defining a character emotional backstory with little to no dialog. How to Train your Dragon had an ending that are similar qualities so I hope that they go in this way ... I pretty much dislike the rest of their CGI movies. Beside that, the choreographies are gorgeous and the fighting style animation are nothing short of perfect.

Well, that's not what I meant either. Literally, The Selfish Giant finishes likes this : . I have troubles accepting that the same author also pen the Birthday of the Infanta.

Mmmm, bigot is apparently a false friend in French. I meant to describe fables whose moral call to strong religious motifs; motifs which seem to be there because the author is expected to end on a religious note, rather than because the story requires it. (i.e. The Selfish Giant or The Young King)

I'm going to balance those negative comments and say Crysis is a very good shooter - at least in Delta mode and disregarding some of the spaceship sections- with very peculiar gameplay mechanics : I don't think I ever had so much fun with AI in an FPS and its open world aspect (you can pretty much access a target from wherever) gives it a definite flavor compared to modern linear FPS like Half-Life or CoD and RPG flavored ones like STALKER. It's really a shame that stability is an issue for you guys. Also, I think you should give a game an hour to convince you, 15 minutes seems way too short for me.

Finally picked up news book after clinging to Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 for about 2 months - I'm not sure I actually finished it, since I read it non-linearly, picking up chapters randomly while on the john or on my way to work. It's a great, great book and it bolstered my appreciation for Thompson's journalism : the presentation of hard facts weaved with strong personal opinions - that are advertised as so - really appeals to me because it's the most honest approach I've encountered so far. This embraced subjectivity provides the rare opportunity to understand where the author comes from while taking some distance from the material. Anyway, after reading Chris' tweet about The Witch of Portobello and accepting the fact that the build times of my current project aren't going to get shorter, I picked Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. Maybe I didn't get it, but to me it looked like it was either a very, very naive story or a pretty unimaginative exercise in the fable genre. A few episodes and peripeties are very well put together ( ) and Coelho's has a real talent for creating strong settings in a few sentences; but overall, it felt very shallow and empty. Recently, I read an anthology of Oscar Wilde's Short Stories which features very smart and fresh explorations of the genre (like The Devoted Friend, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime or The Birthday of the Infanta); so maybe The Alchemist simply suffers from the comparison and is actually OK. Actually, I'd recommend heavily this anthology : aside a few bigot stories (mainly from A House of Pomegranates), it's very interesting and original! I'm not giving up on it yet, but I'd like suggestion on which of Coehlo's book to read next. I'm currently halfway through George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, and I am happily rediscovering his tremendous style. He really nails down human and landscape portraits ( ), and so far, his depiction of derelict Paris is anti-sensational and yet truly compelling. It doesn't hurt that his use of French vocabulary and expressions is spot-on. The only thing that bugs me is that I don't know how much of it is romanced or time-compressed since things falls into place in a very nice way (I'll get to that once I'm done reading); but that's a minor point : I haven't had such a nice time reading description of low jobs since Zola's Le Ventre de Paris.

Just watched the 4th one, not terrible - except the clergyman storyline - but incredibly boring and soulless; they even got Jack Sparrow wrong:erm: But I love Dead Man's Chest and I'm always surprised that most people don't : I think it has the best swashbuckling tone of the three movies, and I love how it manages to build a pirate mythology that is heterogeneous , detailed some places, laconic in others, but still makes sense and feel 'alive'. I also think the three storylines really do a good job of confronting this fantastic universe to the "real" world of the time while keeping the details of this pretty sparse. I also think it's aesthetically the most successful of the three. Frankly, I never thought it was mess - or even more so an obscure one - and I think the abundance of detail and parallels are truly necessary to give the movie its sense of breadth. As for the other : I didn't like the first one, and the third one had a collection of very nice moments, but the storyline, despite the very promissingpremise of pirates vs a charted world, was really uninteresting and added up to nothing.

I just discovered this really smart-but-not-too-pretentious series from The Escapist and I think it's worth sharing ... despite the high pitched voice over. It's not always ground breaking, but it's thought provoking, offering articulated and sophisticated (but not complicated) point of views on rarely discussed topics. Also, it doesn't hurt that they often defends thesis on storytelling and gameplay, rarely voiced and very similar to what I've tried to champion in the past 4 years. I've yet to catch up on most episodes, but I'd recommend : Storytelling with which I whole-hearty agree. How to play like a Designer, which features interesting analysis methods. Amnesia and Story Structure, with a very nice set of examples in the second part.

I agree it feels like Design 101 most of the times, but since there are quite a few big budget games that seem to be ignoring or failing at these points; to me, it still feels important. Plus, I think it's cool to have so ideas out there without being completely dumbed down or mystified (not sure it's the proper adjective).

French so-so Video game website Gamekult just uploaded a 20 minute documentary/interview with Eric Chahi. I wanted to make subtitles for a few of my friends who were curious about it, but the only tool I have for that is notepad++ and so, the process is a bitch. Is there any software that can ease the process? The best case scenario I'm hoping for is an automated first pass on subtitling the original audio track, but just being able to generate a bunch of timecodes when speech starts and ends would also be of great help.

Thanks for the advice but I think i'll use Subtitle Workshop since it has a brilliant feature which Aegisub lacks : you can play a video and create with a single keystroke a new subtitle at the time of the video. I'll post a file when the job's done.

Ahah:clap:, if it's true, then the only thing Kaz Hirai could do to raise confidence is to put his own personal and credit card details on the 'newly' protected server... and leave them there for people to try and get it.

Emphasis mine; because for me that's what it will boil down to : if the writing and the structure are great, then I'm definitely in. The issue is that I really can't tell from the trailer... but I don't feel like spoiling myself any further either I guess I'll buy it, then. But I hope it's good since I could spend 6 hours watching genre movies (e.g still have to watch the Maltese Falcon and re-watch Double Indemnity) instead of a string pastiche, homage or bad mimic of the genre.

I have to read those again; I remember some funny stuff ( ) but very little about the story themselves Slightly interesting anecdote, I actually bought those two books because of the cover in the French edition - at that time I didn't know who Adams was and what he had done. Also, apparently, there was a pilot of a BBC series lead by Stephen Mangan?

A million times yes to this.

I support the motion to vote:oldman: then let people settle the rest of their personal grief using PM. I can't see the content of the code bit in the following page, but option 1. seems easily implementable and would work for existing tags.

This has been my general reaction to all RPGs I attempted to play since I went back to the genre with Oblivion. The only exceptions to this is KOTOR. Even Mass Effect seemed terrifyingly huge as soon as they asked me to visit randomly generated planet. What happened to me since Planescape Torment? I don't know

Watched a lot of movies recently, first the one in theater : Thor : I really didn't like the tacky visual of Asgard, but I quite enjoyed the first half but everything went downhill a few minutes after . The writing and structure completely crumble after that; and the movie feels like its bored with what remains to be said/done. Overall it's less tight and exigent than what Branagh usually delivers - I know his track record is of up and down, but given Peter's Friends and Hamlet I had hope for a more liberal and demanding adaptation of Thor. Fast Five : clearly not a 'good' movie, but it was pretty fit for a Friday night of brainless entertainment : it's loud, ridiculous and somewhat funny. I must admit I was expecting more from Rock and Diesel performances (I think both of them can be really good actors) but the movie's take on Ocean 11 narrative structure turned out OK. Also, Rock's punches make more noise than rifles and crashing cars,and it surprisingly makes sense

You should check out Robot Carnivale and Memories, both of them are omnibus (collection of shorts) like Neo Tokyo and have a similar vibe. Crimes and Misdemeanors is one of Allen's greatest movies - such a neatly constructed, well written movie with something interesting to say - and Martin Landau's and Woody Allen's character scene is brilliant.

I really wished I could get my hand on a facility like that : 48 hours of garage-days game dev must be pretty sweet.

For me it's Audition from Takashi Miike. Good movie, but dammit I won't sit through the second half ever again.

I agree that killing Ben Laden is a minor issue in the clusterfuck of the war against terror and I can understand why they would want to kill Ben Laden for practicality sake. But I'd argue that going for practicality and efficiency during that very symbolic event only served to prove the point of the terrorists; that lethal violence is the only justified and practical way to settle problems when there is no common ground with your enemy. Would it be challenging and dangerous to trial Ben Laden ? Completely, but I feel like if we really wanted to disprove terrorism as an idea and present our society's choices as valid then we need to support and take the decisions which because they are moral are also harder to make and more difficult to sustain. Also, doing the 'humane' thing of putting Ben Laden on trial, could also have been a very good starting point to analyzing if the way the international community reacted was humane and efficient. That's what was missing after WWII and with Ben Laden's case closed, I'm afraid people are going to erase the knowledge that, in the process of neutralizing 5 leaders of a terrorist organisation, at least few dozens of thousands of innocent bystanders were killed.

This makes complete sense. If you're keen on promoting/helping game prototyping, I'm pretty sure people would find it awesome if you'd host Global Game Jam 2012.

Apart from a few tangential exaggerations, this voices perfectly my feelings toward the whole thing.