vimes

The issue with Project Zero's kind of character is that, because they are extreme, they do not leave a lot of room for development or characterization. We've seen subject zero before : she's the steel thong wearing female villain in Warrior Within, Carrie Ann Moss' character in Red Planet who showers naked with her all male platoon because 'they are first and foremost soldiers, and then men and women, so no shame to have' or Dushku's character in ... well, any of her works. And none of them had particularly interesting development : they're just a fantasma of 'strong women = male in disguise with unapologetic sexual appetite and boobs" and expecting them to deepen from this sort of premise is like expecting the Hamburglar's backstory to be compelling.

Jesus Christ, this thing is eating me up : last Saturday, I've poured hours into the thing and finally completed all the Medium levels with Gold and torn from the clench of Fate my first victory in the Extreme category. For a second, I had a nice endorphin rush and I thought " Mmm, Trials HD is fun" while in fact, that statement was true hours ago! Now, I don't really know what the game can offer me except kicks to the balls but, at night, my controller seems to find the game by itself in the library and launch it. I don't know what's got into me - but since I'm still playing the putrid Burnout Paradise to get the last license - I'm beginning to fear I've got a bad case of completionism, something I swore never to fall to. Help me!

Chris Remo : PC Fan (maybe ?)

I don't expect this to be news for anybody here, but I just discovered the Ice Cream Man song by Tom Waits (hadn't listen to his earliest stuff, like the Closing Time album before) and it might have the best first 30 seconds in a song ever.

Since I'm a cheap bastard and the Paris-London ticket is more accessible on Sunday 11, then that day would be awesome. Man, that'd be my first visit in proper England! (I don't think Exeter counts) Edit : I'd be up for Eurogamer expo. And that would allow all the continental EU Thumbeteers to be there!

I saw a bunch of movies on the plan to and from New Zealand. State of Play was meh, but it'd been a while since I had seen Robin Wright Penn act, and she remains gorgeous across the years, so that kept the movie interesting enough. The International's ending and opening were neat but, god, Naomi Watts sure can't act and the rest of the scenario is a bit shallow for a political thriller. Also, we need Armin Mueller-Stahl in a lead role: he's been awesome in too many mediocre movies (Eastern Promises, the later X-Files and this one) to not get a shot at being center stage in a good one. Terminator Salvation : pretty bad but extra point for the Plane Edition which makes the action sequences completely indecipherable and kind of hilarious. I watched about 30 movies during my accumulated 55 hours of flight (including Night at the Museum 2 and Hannah Montana - got to keep in touch with the youth) but can't remember them really well. I also stumbled upon a documentary about fear and suspens in Hitchcock's movies and it was awesome since it consisted mostly of him commenting on his own work directly. Made me want to watch movies from him I have yet to watch. I think I'll start with Frenzy. On Wednesday, I watched District 9, which is one hell of a frustrating movie for letting go a brilliant first half to mundane hollywood cliches in the last 20 minutes. Then there was Redacted : which shows how horribly wrong fake documentaries can go. If you though bad writing, bad acting and bad music could plagued a movie, you need to witness those 'qualities' in a fake documentary; it makes everything look preposterous and make the filmmaker look like a dick not only for allowing bad acting but also for promoting it to complete authenticity without having his brain kill itself. Plus, the movie is beating a dead horse. On the plus side, I've watched the first season of Mad Men which turned out to be completely different from what I imagined both in terms of content and aesthetics. The most amazing thing is the absence of referential nudge-nudge and how little nostalgia the writers have put in there. It's basically a ratpack movie except it's a period piece like I've seen about -the Victorian; so it's quite fresh. The storylines are quite decent even tough, the brush is sometimes a little too heavy on the characters flaws, but otherwise, the sobriety is one to applaud. It was particularly awesome when they approached the Kennedy-Nixon campaign. The only thing that seems weird to me is how futile most of the secondary female cast seem to be, sometimes corroborating the machismo comments from the male characters. Were all female secretaries that giggly, stupid and ready to get laid for promotion ?

Maybe... because it's not appearing anywhere for me.

Mmm, apparently EU Gold Members still need to wait till Rocktober 1st to get their hands on the demo. I wanted not to get hyped, but this minor drawback do sting a little bit. The rest of you spoiled rotten bastards can queue it from here.

Well it's a nicely rounded sentence, but he doesn't really build on it sooooo, well, it doesn't mean a thing in my opinion.

Awesome news and congrats! Amusement Magazine looks more and more to be the true heir of Brazil, but covering more than just movies.

F for Fake is an excellent movie, it simply oozes of old bearded Welles' charisma; and the subject is actually completely awesome - I don't remember the movie being obviously self conscious; the editing, mise en scène and scenaristic tricks, serve the movie theme very well, and are not just for show. So, yeah, agreed. God, I must unwrap that copy of Orson Welles Mac Beth DVD and check it out!

From Christchurch, NZ : The shot would have been better if I had been quicker : a few second before, a guy with a messy gray/white beard was having coffee under the sign; he walked away before I had my camera out :/

The best would be to have several savegames (don't remember if the game have those) so you can play the first 2 scenes and the most interesting bits of the detectives' storyline.

Oh my, I've had a completely different game experience that you guys had. Be ready for a whole lot of complaining. So, I've been picked up the game on the 360 because I kinda liked the demo and after for 2 two hours session the only thing I can find to say is that I am deeply and utterly bored. And it's a bloody Burnout game! To start with, there's a huge number of usability issues that break the game flow and make it a sloooooooww experience: I can't find how to bail out or restart a race/event the commentator freezes the screen every 2 minutes to give me unuseful advice (and I couldn't find an option menu to deactivate her) the end race screen - and even more, the winning screen - can't be skipped (again, to my knowledge) and takes ages to go away with the 1.9 update, it takes something like 3 minutes from starting the game from HD to being on the road the take-downs sequences your car actually slow down but still make it go forward during the replay On the gameplay side, it's simply challengeless : the AI is totally useless - if you stop during a race , you can actually see the whole pack coming to a crawl and they just crash for nothing. Boost is being awarded for nothing which makes it less exciting and rewarding the races are just pedestrian : all I had to do for the first 15 was to play third place while accumulating an insane amount of boost by going on the wrong side of the road -woohoo talk about risk -, take down the car in second when the end flag came into view on the map and just boost my way to victory. The only other Burnout I played was Takedown on the PS2 and it was a shining masterpiece. Despite having nailed the open world-ness and integrated successfully with the racing part, it's actually the racing part that seems completely broken to me. What happen to Criterion and their awesome risk/reward balancing and their masterful management of stress ?

Mmm, what does that mean ?

Finished it and enjoyed it; but, I don't know ... even though the characters and the dialogs are more than fine (loved the dialogs between Winslow and Guybrush, and the awkward Elaine/Le Chuck predicament), as far as gameplay goes, it's pretty standard and unimaginative : too many of the puzzles summed up to and, this time around, there were only Fedex, 'use this on that' puzzles; and not really well disguised with that. No dialog puzzle, no un-traditionnal puzzle, no surprises. Also being a swashbuckling adventure and having several swashbuckling moments, I was surprised that they didn't manage to get the same spot-on rhythm that the W&G climax had. Anyway, I hope that the next episode will give us the chance to spend a bit more time with the characters (friends or foe) ... I know it's already done, but if we get any time please, do use as a reference for the atmosphere. Oh, and the Island-to-map transitions were gorgeous. And the final short was genius. So, here, no one can say I'm pissing all over the game.

Every time I see this video, I think about this ... though it might make more sense for French people.

I quite like Brink character design - not only because I find it original but because it actually provides me with a good example when I want to describe to someone what I mean by "detailed cartoon". Plus, you're right, even though there's a good amount of grey/whites, there's also a bunch of colors; go fuck yourselves so called 'Colors of War'!

Well, I try to get to the mast via the cable but it's apparently out of reach and using items on it hasn't yield anything .. I tried to climb the mast but all Guybrush does is angrying Morgan by repeating "This is the Mast!"

Goddamit, I'm stuck on the very first puzzle : Gimme a hint, just a hint.

Most of Pixar and Ghibli's movies are great , but it's a bit of a wrong statement to summarize those companies to Miyazaki's and Lasseter's works, since I feel these studio's best pieces came respectively from Takahata and Stanton/Unkrich ... and anyway, there's a bunch of talented people that make these movies happened. I hated Cars and I loved Bug's life and Toy story 2 (the best feature film they did so far, IMO), but when I look at the record of the co-directors of these movies vs. Lasseter's own, I can't help but credit them to these guys rather than him. Plus, there's this weird visual homogeneity - mainly in character design - that came to be since Monster Inc. which I find strange when compared to the variety of styles you'd find in the artbooks. But, then again, this discrepancy is trye for most animated movies. Anyway, for them to have let Sanders go to Dreamworks is really a big loss in my opinion.

Well, I would agree a bit with synthetic Gerbil since he fucked up American Dog/Bolt and did a very crappy job on Cars. I don't mind his point of view - even though I don't think he's the best creative mind at Pixar - but he seems to have gone from allowing lots of different ideas to emerge in Pixar's feature films to enforcing he's own vision of what a good story is.

Man, we need Steve Purcell to move from giving poor story advice on Cars (I'm saying poor because the end result is shite, not because I've been told stories) to being the art and story director on a Pixar short. Can't we start some sort of futile petition to that goal?

Well you do end up with different endings, only one of which will - thanks to the sequel - be the True one, hence, the others being bad, hence you being Evil for breaking narrative contingency. But other than that, Chris is right : the dilemnas at the core of the side quests and relations with other characters never smells of the writer's moral stance : your party will comment on your choice, but it's not like the game scolds you for taking a decision rather than another. Bioware's writers can still get better at the way they present those dilemma though, since in Mass Effect, they are quite apparent and more times than not are bit salomon-esque.

Can't believe they also stole, I mean, adapted this one from our french repertoire. DrU-4H_FXhM Sinastra did this with Claude François, but that one is weiiiird.