vimes

Sorry, he's what my short sentence meant : Tekkon Kinkreet starts with a interesting visual edge and a chase that features hugely detailed backgrounds, gritty character design and animation that stands to 4°C tradition : it's like the ending escape of MindGame had been put upfront. The problem is that it doesn't go any further than where it starts : visually, the movie ends up being static and boring, the animation being a huge letdown after the first five minutes. The story which covers the oh-so-fresh 'good vs evil feat. schyzophrenia' theme manages to be, at the same time, a pretty big mess and underwhelming. It's an action movie, a mafia movie, a character centered movie, a sci-fi movie, a shonen anime, a comedy, a slice of life anime .... but none of these genre are explored fully or in an interesting way. The worst being that while surreal sci-fi elements and a bunch of characters are thrown at you, Black and White's character development stagnate at a nearly embarrassing level... ok, they're like twins, they are complementary, they are wild but no so much .... then what ? The conclusion of the movie follows the same trend : it closes on the exploration of the theme in a naive, manichean way that recycles the most boring cliches anime has ever created when it comes to self exploration, inside solliloque included In the end, it felt like the director was trying to emulate the emotional depth of animes such as Windy Tales or FLCL while using the craft of 4°C studio... but in the end, he only used the most superficial elements of these influences (the pace from windy tale, the surreal elements of FLCL) and never seem to find ideas of his own that would propel the movie to a higher level.

Then, please thank me too for writing this message because without it this internet meme would have been left unused. What was so weird about what I stated by the way? Or was it how I wrote it ?

I hope I'm not too late : Tekkon Kinkreet is shit after the first 5 minutes, don't even bother tracking it down.

It doesn't involve any booze or Dexter, but I'm going to Atlanta, and I doubt that any of you can stop me. or as the desire to. Anyway,tomorrow, I'll see Paris in winter, which is to some a certain kind of Paradise. The next day, I was told I will be experiencing Hell first hand as I need to transfer from Heathrow to Gatwick at 9.00 am to catch a flight to Atlanta at 11.50am. Then Atlanta, 9 hours later on the same day... This is going to be a tad difficult, I'm still in the family-needy mood that Christmas seems to bring.

OK, my bad, I didn't know.

Apparently, they had "22 to 31" people working on the project since 2002... I'm not sure it can be considered as a small team. And even without that they still spent money to : purchase UE2 develop a proprietary engine around its script and network component purchase a license for the karma engine purchase a Meqon license

Haven't read the book but loved the half hour following the cheesy first 3 minutes. The beginning of the movie has an interesting cold, nearly sadistic tone and I could sense the fairytale going wrong... but then the gypsies come to the rescue and it all goes to hell. The rest of the movie suffers from the same problems plaguing other book adaptations : it's a fucking mess on a narrative level. There are tons of characters, events and reference which are obviously included so that further sequels can be made but in the scope of the movie don't make any sense (why the fuck is Eva Green's character supposed to be important). And there are sequence like the bear duel that are emphasized only because they are cult to a part of the audience thus felt weird to people like me, because it seems like it's been directed and edited for another film altogether. And because the material is so rushed and we don't spend enough time with the important characters, most of the dialogs sound wrong... so there's a high deal of greatness that is lost because of the need to make this piece the beginning of a saga.

This is even weirder looking back at Far Cry awesome AI... How could they get worse from one game to another ?

May I borrow these awesome sentences and make them my new sig ?

This guy is a genius at HCI.Period.

Well, Prey seems to be their most recent source of money, but it's not like it was hit ... 3 months after its release in Europe it was already in Budget format and for a few months you can find it for 5€... so doesn't really solve anything.

Isn't that the same kind of declaration Broussard made each time DNF media was released since the 2001 trailer? It seems like they don't have any plan for development AND marketing ... it's kind of nice they can do whatever they want, but who's pouring money in this bottomless hole? I know at least one game director who could make 100 decent games with the budget they seem to have.

What happened to your blog, Ben ? Did you just move to another location, or just stopped blogging ?

Arg, I knew there was a time at which some idol of mine would appear as mortal, but not this one. I hope he's still planning on writing the non-Discworld stories he mentioned a few times in the past few years.

There was also an amateur game called Sonate, which was in the same trend. Not as good looking though.

I've watched three movies in theaters recently, all of them were surprises. Michael Clayton was a surprisingly good movie despite featuring 1. an evil-evil environmentalist corporation plot 2. a scenarist directing for the first time 3. what I though would be a patronizing George Clooney 4. Pollack in the same role once again. For the best,he plot quickly forgets its techno thriller roots to center around the awesome characters - including one if not THE best madman ever depicted in a mainstream movie - which it follows with a very slow pace. It is not forcefuly introspective, it is diluted and Clooney is very good. It also contains the greatest assassination scene ever, making me wish the guy was helming Hitman... the only downside is that the movie doesn't sem to have the guts to end without a bang. Youth without Youth is the kind of film which critics might describe as "the kind of movie that the audience will find either miraculous or definitely broken". For me it's the latter and not even Tim Roth can the save it from how bad it is. The movie has the cast, the cinematography, the mise-en-scène and the setup of a rigorous mainstream movie... but the way it's cut, the way the 'story' unfolds gave me the impression of watching a bad novel adaptation butchered by a thousand script doctors : at best, it's ridiculous, at worst, it doesn't make any sense. The most aggravating is that the confusion isn't the downside of a certain complexity because there doesnt seem to ven be a point to this movie. In the Valley of Elah has an encouraging first half hour during which Tommy Lee Jones fails at doing basic investigation in a very quiet atmosphere. But after that, neither the plot, nor the underlaying political discourse or the character thickens... it's not boring but it's pretty shallow. The so-called political message is a pretty simplistic one 'People aren't bad, the army is" : every army man is basically depicted as a psycho, a drug dealer, a wife beater, a liar or, if retired, socially retarded... and it's not like the movie put the blame on the war : the settings could be any of the balkan conflict of the past 40 years, it wouldn't change a thing.

Well, it seems I was partly misunderstood ... when I wrote I was sad DoubleFine was going for gore, I didn't mean that I was sad they were making violence their core gameplay(1). What disappointed me was that among all the known and unknown graphical representations of violence, gore was the one they chose. it doesn't stand out as a particularly sophisticated design choice. And, as always, I would be glad to be proven wrong by DF. I hate it to be so, but maybe this is a rhetorical argument in the end. (1) Well, seeing DF producing a very violent game was kind of a let down, actually.

Well, I'm not going to pretend that DF can't surprise me, but in my opinion, gore, as in "fountains of blood pouring out of throats or severed limbs", can't really go that far in terms of aesthetic and theme. I might be narrow minded, but I can only distinguished two flavors of gore : the comical type (Army of Darkness, Brain Dead) and the creepy, serious type (texas chainsaw massacre, Ichi the Killer) .. and if I enjoy the first one, I must admit you can't really make it deeper than the gross joke it is. And since I can't find a classic Heavy Metal cover that feature severed limbs gushing out rivers of blood, I'm not sure this will make the game any truer to its inspiration.

I am not that enthusiastic about the gore too: I feel like it's one aspect that doesn't require a peculiar talent to be achieved successfully, so it saddens me to see DoubleFine using this approach rather than doing something no other dev team can do.

I've been hearing this here and there, and I'm beginning to think that this doesn't really make sense: yes, rhetorically, it IS another argument altogether, but deep down, I guess it's always about wondering if there is a proper and safe way to deliver a game to its intended 'market' or proper viewership. If one could do this in the traditional retail chain, there would be no reason to ban it in the first place.

I didn't, but I didn't hear it speak either...

Well 1 - He did never announced anything at Leipzig 2 - He just said "There have been some rumors lately. Some stuff was true". if you ignore the following joke, this sin't a lie either. 3 - He only denied the Rock n roll heaven part and that was also correct...

You know what is nice ? Contrary to most flash games, it has an END.

Finished in one seating too and I must say it's the best game I've played in the past 6 months : it's smart, well-paced and the length is just what it should be, no more, no less. One thing though : ... or maybe I have missed something ?

What about the medic ? In the last few months I've fallen for Enemy territory (Not Quake Wars) because the medic is a 100% support class which doesn't need to be skilled at fraging but rather need to have a good analysis skills... is it the same in TF2 ?