vimes

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by vimes

  1. Plug your shit

    It's funny how this kind of 1930's Cole Porter-ish song that always end up being played with that sort of static and this muffled quality is now completely linked to Bioshock in my head: while listening, I'm constantly anticipating the ambient sounds of flying turrets, the FX for turrets detection or splicers' barks to cue in. Weird.
  2. BioShock Infinite

    In the end, you swap body with Elizabeth, go back in time, loose your memory and replay the game while both personalities are swapped - you are now Elizabeth attempting to save what's-is-name, in a never-ending loop of hope and despair. Take that gender complaining people!
  3. BioShock Infinite

    I should probably replay the HL² games because, in my mind's eye, Alyx never really showed any romantic feelings toward Gordon. Sure, she's written and directed so that I find her attractive, witty and charming - so that I care for her - but I remember the emotional focus of to be on her relationship with her father. As far as Gordon is concerned, her initial curiosity develops into camaraderie and friendship through 'adventures' that make them owe each other a lot; but I never felt like it went beyond that. All the romantic hints, came from her father teasing her which again put the focus on that relationship rather than the other. So yeah, she probably isn't a complex, layered character, but I wouldn't say she's nerd bait either
  4. BioShock Infinite

    I don't think Alyx Vance AI was particularly impressive - it was nearly entirely scripted. The real breakthroughs came in the voice acting, the majority of the writing (what I remember most is how her reactions were particularly underplayed) and, more importantly, the work on her facial expressions which was incredible and remains so to this day. Anyway, I want more Video game characters that could be played by Kathy Bates. Though that also holds true for movies
  5. BioShock Infinite

    Yeah, my lack of knowledge about the Ivy League and Silicon Valley of the early 00s probably betrays me: I really bought into the idea that those institutions were still hugely discriminating against intelligent / entrepreunarial women. Hence the lack thereof. Damn you Sorkin, for making sweeping baseless statements believable! If the movie wasn't using real world stories, this probably should be more acceptable; but yeah, since it invokes real names and places, I can see it being disturbing.
  6. BioShock Infinite

    That's a cool rundown of the movie, thanks. You're probably right; but I don't think that I would have been particularly impressed if Sorkin had had a single woman stand up to the mysoginy of the character just for correctness sake. I still think that it is a stronger statement to have those horrible people succeed in their endeavour and being admired by stranger despite their lack of empathy to other people. Call it artistic licence. I think that Mark is an asshole (in the movie at least) and I think that, beside fleeting feelings of loneliness displayed at the end, he is happy. Once he's back at his facebook office, he'll be OK, which is pathetic and horrible. The last statement from Marylin really sounded to me like an explanation of how society can still humor that sort of behavior; she, after all, doesn't really know anything about him at that point but his ready to give him some salvation. Given our previous conversation on Allen, I expect that you would rather have the movie inspire to standup to mysoginy. I understand that but I'm personally more in line with the cynical arc of event that Sorking chose to describe. At least for this one movie.
  7. BioShock Infinite

    OK. Thor, Dante, Vamp (probably Raiden too) and to a certain extent The Prince are valid examples because they are the male transcriptions of the sort of one dimensional representation of women we were talking about. So I was wrong about that; there are indeed male incarnations of that sort of view. Still, the other characters you mention - Kratos, Monkey, Kain - give of a different vibe because they are 'generally' more fleshed out that their female counterparts; their dynamics and appeal as characters rarely hinge on their 'shirtlessness' alone. That's rich: if you were so convinced that sharing an opinion for the sake of it is worthless, you probably wouldn't have posted a 10 line answer about how it's your opinion that this discussion shouldn't even exist. You're entitled to regard this discussion as futile, but you've got no basis to label me (and I figure others) as conceited wankers with too much times on their hands because we're talking about a topic you can't relate to; yet still somehow post about. And by the way, maybe you don't, but I get offended by the fact that creators and/or marketing people think that Video game and mainstream entertainment should only be so base as to only appeal to our reptilian brain or whatever stereotypes have been arbitrarily maintained for the last millenia, and I get pissed of by people who throw their arms in the air and go "It sells; mystery solved!" and get snarky when people still want to continue digging in the topic. I know this paragraph is useless rage, but fuck it, I and others had the honesty to listen to contradictory opinions and have an actual dialog, so I'm not going to be told by somebody who drops in nonchalantly that this discussion is irrelevant Yep, you're right, sorry about that - the tone of Frenetic Pony's post, just ticked me off. So. Bioshock Infinite: will it allow us to not kill everybody everywhere this time around?
  8. BioShock Infinite

    Please, do give some examples of white male Video game characters taking their shirt off or flexing their muscles.
  9. BioShock Infinite

    I think I've written about that before, but I feel like Sorkin did an interesting job on TSN because he portrayed the world through the eyes of male characters whose rise took place in environments that were - in real life - incredibly misogynistic; and thus the portrayal of women is committed to that vantage point. What worked for me and apparently didn't for all spectators is that I definitely felt the director judgmental gaze on his main cast throughout the movie, an incredibly negative gaze which thus condemns the way they see and treat women. The Newsroom, on the other hand, commits to the antithetical point of views of multiple characters and yet, the depiction of female characters - beside Jane Fonda's - felt incredibly archetypal across the board. Most of them are either cold hearted individuals or emotional wrecks who are managed, 'treated' or empowered by men. Because of the multiple PoV, it feels like Sorkin is convinced that this depiction of women is truthful and the series, despite some moments of brilliance between Jane Fonda and Sam Waterson, made me deeply uncomfortable. This was a bad surprise considering how The West Wing - arguably Sorkin magnus opus - has an impressive range of interesting and detailed female characters. Sometimes, they are 'used' as vehicles for exploring feminity in governments and male oriented environment, but even when the series "schools" the audience it does so to convey viewpoints that do not reinforce archetypes. is, I feel, a decent example of this given that the character of National Security Advisor Nancy McNally - the black woman - is portrayed in a very positive light in surrounding episodes:
  10. Double Fine Amnesia Fortnight 2012

    So, the prototypes are out and so is my wall of text . Black Lake: the great surprise. I had two runs on the prototype and both were excellent on their own term. During the first one, I missed the 2nd clue and ended up wandering in the woods for a good 20 minutes, completely lost and anxiously trying to build a mental map of the place from the clues scattered around. I failed, felt lost and confused but that, in itself, was a great experience; even though it didn't build up to anything. During my second play-through I followed the clues and damn, what a cool game: it only brushes on a few gameplay ideas but they were very well executed (ala Mark of the Ninja) and it's all wrapped in a great atmosphere of real tension and wonder. If only they could mesh the linear and the 'being lost' aspects, it would be a blast. There's only 2 small downsides. One is that some of the art (the FX, the texture, the main character), made it look a lot like Psychonauts... it's not bad, but I feel something more unique would serve the game even better. The other is that I'm not sure if a full-game could sustain the balance between gameplay ingredients that can provide depth and the genuine of the atmosphere that the Russian voice over and music bring. Autonomous: there's a bunch of improvements to be done on the usability of the robot creator (consistency in what right click and E do would be nice) and readability of the automatons state, but this is one prototype that managed to create a very complex experience with very little elements. And it feels like the horizon of the game is huge. If the game remains that structureless though, I don't think I'll pour myself in it - I'm afraid of structureless game - but it's something I want to hear stories about. Sean Vanaman style. Spacebase DF-9: This is an interesting one: I think it could have used a few more days to refocus the experience on the story aspect. As is, it feels like an ant farm: I can tell the ingredients to realize JP's vision are there, but the UI put so much emphasis on managing that there's very little space, time and incentive to focus on what's happening to your people. To that purpose, the info panel should probably be its own mouse-over thing and having a Flotilla-like up to date summary of event would be great. Detecting failure state would be nice too: I ended up with one male doctor and one male bartender, both lazy yet serving each other in a huge, cadaver ridden space station... I felt like I needed closure but none of them would die :/. There's also a few systems that remain a mystery to me - how do I get more matter? how can my population grow? why is my scientist ignoring the lab? - but that's OK! , it's a rad little toy that feels polished despite some clunkiness in the UI.I played one full hour of it without realizing it and that's a good sign. Also, the music is fantastic and the art worked surprisingly well. Hack 'n Slash: This one is doing a split: on one hand, the reference and nostalgia made me cringe; but on the other, the prototype proved that hacking is a fun core mechanics and that puzzles shouldering it can be diverse and scale well in terms complexity. I'm not a fan of putting the save/restore paradigm as an in-universe concept; but the actual hacking of object properties is super gratifying. The bit that fell flat though is the art direction: Raz great style shows in the tree and rocks, but the base tiles and characters were really weak - the whole thing felt inconsistent and amateurish which is a shame. I also wonder if that kind of gameplay can host a story that is compelling and not exclusively self-referential. Also, the music is infuriatingly repetitive and distracting. The White Birch: I was rooting for this one so hard but it came out as the only strong disappointment of the lot. It seemed to have been completely cannibalized by the animation direction: in contrast to the environment art and music, the animations are super showy and have a slapstick quality that lend the game into a half-assed tone that makes little sense to me. And since the animation drive most of the interaction, the game feels closer to Dragon's Lair than ICO, with hard arbitrary failure at many turns. It doesn't help that the controls, camera and animations systems are pretty clunky and that the overall experience is laden with bugs (savegames issues, inconsistency between visual and gameplay states of the puzzle, camera fuck up). Somehow, it feels like the project was derailed and forgot the atmosphere was important and not the gameplay bits. It's sad because I'm sure that if they had focused on the sense of being in a place that makes you feel, like the project lead says, as if everything is at the brink of the girl's abilities then it would have been success.
  11. BioShock Infinite

    I'm late to the party, but the discussion about Elizabeth's design reminds me of two things. First, a discussion on the Reappropriation Blog about Depp's portrayal of Tonto in the upcoming Lone Ranger movie. Chris evoked a similar sentiment in another thread and I think the difference of portrayal between women and men in Video games suffers from a similar problem. The second thing is a paraphrase of a quote, either from Steve about Cooper during Minerva's Den Livestream or from Sean about Lee during a conversation on The Walking Dead: 'the only responsibility I feel is toward the character I'm writing; not toward whatever social strata or group he's part of'. I think that's a completely defensible point of view if the writers have, like these two, a great deal of empathy toward characters that are very foreign to them. But that philosophy, in the hand of a less 'mindful' writer can be disastrous and in that case it is very tempting to call for social responsibility instead. And I'm not sure if that's entirely right: what's the difference between bad writing and irresponsible writing? Anyway, like ArgoBot said, it's a difficult discussion because the saturation makes it hard to differentiate between educated, deliberate choices and default behaviors heavily influenced by societal factors. In any case, the visual design of Elizabeth disappoints me because it feels out of synch with both the topics the game seems to explore and the maturity with which it seems to do so. Maybe Bioshock Infintie does talk about the schizophrenic tendencies of religious societies to cast women in a predefined mold and subsequently despising them for doing so, but what we've seen from the game doesn't hint at that at all.
  12. Unnecessary Comical Picture Thread

    Yeah, Kate Beaton is awesome and she's involved in To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure; a Kickstarter for a 'Choose your own adventure' remake of Hamlet. It's already way over the original funding aim, but the stretch goals add more branching by new illustrators; which is a good reason to keep on backing it.
  13. A rainy Saturday provided an opportunity to read Gatsby a second time and so I did. It reinforced what I felt during my first reading: beside the strong societal commentary, this book reads like the meticulous destruction of the notion that conscious desires can ever be the honest expression of what fullfills an individual. In the context of the book, this pretty much spells a death sentence on the concept of genuine Love at first sight, or at least the concept of a mutually shared affections that would both express and provide meaning to someone's life. During the course of the book, most characters feel attracted to each-others for the wrong reasons and bind themselves together for even worse ones: they rarely truly know each other (or care enough to find out) and they never share world views or aspirations. They either surrender to each other on pathetically superficial motives (Daisy's falls for Gatsby because of shirts) or because they succumb to the fear that the opportunity presented to them might be the ticket to the perfect coupling and existence they've been waiting for. It doesn't mean that they are superficial characters, but they are trapped in social and personal interactions that only exists because of superficial details. Ironically, one of the most honest feeling displayed is Tom's attraction for Myrtle: it doesn't feel utilitarian and even if Nick mostly highlights the crudeness and vulgarity of the relationship, it came out like a true expression of who Tom and Myrtle are; which is a rare occurence in a book where characters act like they think they should. What felt even more striking to me is that characters who are enlightened enough to notice that Gatsby, Daisy and nearly everybody are mislead have their own sense of drive and desire poisoned by that knowledge: Nick and Jordan's romance - the only one that felt like it could be genuine - seemed rotten in the egg by the doubt that their mutual feelings just might be as fake and as shallow as the one they witness around them. To see their will crumble and their potentiality unexplored was heartwrenching. That particular angle was what felt most valuable to me. An interesting companion piece to that book might be the movie adaptation by Stephen Fry of Vile Bodies: also set between the two wars albeit in England, Bright Young Things explores similar character and ideas. The key difference is that it features a fiercer protagonist and that the author shows way more empathy for the characters engulfed in the lifestyle it condemns. It is less efficient and analytical as well as more formulaic than Gastby, but that may be revealing of each countries way of looking at its past. Or not, I'm not literate or knowledgable enough to tell.
  14. BioShock Infinite

    Jesus, that has to be the most disenchanted definition of "woman" I've ever laid my eyes upon. It sounds so sad and hints at terrible personal experience.
  15. Can anybody explain to me why Opal kept in touch with Flash after what he had done and why she told Foster he should go and see him? It's the only character's action of the book that I couldn't rationalize.
  16. Sportsfriends!

    Yeah, you're right, my mistake.
  17. Far Cry 3

    Same, I think I found the optimal soundtrack for work.
  18. Sportsfriends!

    Somebody just gave 20 000 dollars and they met their goal.
  19. Nevermind, download is now working.
  20. Oh, and I also love the ellipse during dialog; when it jumps to a moment when a character either remembers or evokes the bit of dialog that came before. It's awesome. Also, the episode has been posted, but I can't download it; when i Right click Save-As. it loads forever. I tried changing the filename to match today's date, but that gives me a 404. Anybody has that issue?
  21. I finished it last week-end, and once again, it's a very interesting read. What I appreciated most about the book is its extreme sensibility, in the sense that I think it manages to capture feelings and emotional states that are very subtle, transient and ephemeral; in a very genuine way. It might sound exaggerated or nonsensical, but some passages seemed so fragile and brittle, that I felt clumsy and uneasy reading them, like I would break the text if I wasn't cautious enough. This is mostly true during Opal and Fos first encounter and every time the book explored Opal reflection of aging and her understanding of Fos' personality. The second most interesting aspect of the book is its exploration of the damage done by the inability of people to understand their own limitations - the main application of that theme being Foster as a flawed scientist. Back in my grand-parents day - and maybe still today - quite a few people became Catholics because they stumbled upon holy cards and were struck by their beauty or symbolism. They didn't really understand what religion was about but they wanted to be part of something that could produce these images, this kind of feeling, this 'grace' like a great-aunt of mine once said. It seems to me that Foster is fascinated by science for very similar reasons: his naive, full of wonder approach leads him to embrace science as a whole, without questioning it. It is endearing at first, but his blind faith ultimately prevents him from seeing the danger of his naive take on science and from 'getting' what I think is the true value of science is; i.e. its method. Other episodes in the book, like the couple's attempt at being farmers, Opal's attempt at mitigating Flash irresponsibility and Fos' ridiculously light efforts at securing Lightfoot's future, are in a similar vein and depict very tragic, interesting and sometimes pathetic trajectories. To me, the unique craft of Wiggins is to paint these trajectories from the exact distance where empathy, criticism and reader's post-hoc knowledge can coexist; and it's brilliant. The book is not perfect though. For instance, Lightfoot's part doesn't connect with the rest as naturally as it should: I like the idea of adopting the point of view of a character that knows less than us - we've been reading a lifetime of stories about his parents, we understand things that he'll probably never get because the evidence of the events that lead to this understanding have disappeared - but there's a huge amount of shoehorning and overall, it fails to live up to the most delicate part of what came before. I also do not understand why the author made Opal continue writing to Flash after what he had done and made her suggest to Foster to go and see him. That was reaaallly left field. But, yep, overall, thanks Idle Book Club: it was worth it
  22. VG Mutha Fuckin As (Holy crapping cow)

    Yeah. It would have been rad if they had been introduced... it's cool that Randy Pitchford did that for the Leads of Borderlands 1 & 2.
  23. VG Mutha Fuckin As (Holy crapping cow)

    The contrast between the show crass and the range of games awarded is making my head spin. I must confess that, looking at which games sell hugely, I thought the silent majority of gamers really looked to games to have their narrow minded adolescent fantasies full-filled. That didn't make me want to make games which reinforces those views; but it made me expect that 'higher' sorts of games would only appeal to a minority. And that status quo was fine by me; I accept it the same way that I accept the disappointing fact that Transformers movies always sell more than The Master. But this year's major VG's awards - which are 100% based on gamers vote I believe - went to Journey, The Walking Dead, X-Com and Dishonored; and none of those really tap into the fantasies that I thought were at the core of mainstream console/PC game consumption. And the fact that the whole presentation of VGA's rode on an endless parade of booth-babes in skimpy outfits (even the violin player, dammit), fake enthusiasm for military power fantasy and useless profanity, was a dramatic realization that the media and the market analysts might be completely wrong in what they think player's aspirations are. And what frightens me and pisses me off, is that I know for a fact that these views have a strong foothold in big studios because media and analysts gets strong credit there. Even I was convinced. So interestingly, despite its abysmal lack of interest, the show has renewed my faith in gamers as a whole - based on the somewhat OK hypothesis that the ones voting are a representative sample - and I hope we as an industry, takes some strong clue from it. Also, eat that hat Pachter!
  24. VG Mutha Fuckin As (Holy crapping cow)

    edit:doublepositing somehow.
  25. VG Mutha Fuckin As (Holy crapping cow)

    Well, I guess I've got my answer Congratulations Sean and Jake!