BigJKO

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by BigJKO

  3. Posted

    Maaaaan, Twig. I'm with you on Person of Interest! I remember watching some of the first season and liking it but just sort of quietly forgetting it.

     

    Just powered through almost four seasons now, and it's absolutely brilliant. So much good stuff.

  5. Posted

    As soon as I saw that Zelda in-game tablet I immediately assumed the same thing as the Thumbs, that this was classic Nintendo highlighting a specific hardware thing and that this meant NX had to be have a similar controller. But apparently, Aonuma said Zelda won't have any GamePad functionality at all, aside from off-TV gameplay. The E3 demo had a map on the gamepad but they said this won't be in the final version.

  13. Posted

    This is great! Only criticism of this first piece is the lighting on the bag looks directionless on the left side of the controller. Under the controller it feels correct, but on the left side you don't really get a feel for the direction of the light.. I don't know if that makes sense. The wrinkles look nice, but they're maybe too defined for the soft overhead light you're going for.

  16. Posted

    To get back to the Overwatch videos, I do agree they compare unfavorably to the TF2 promo videos. Blizzard take their lore so self-seriously whereas Valve know their game universes are ridiculous, and write stuff with an appropriately humorous touch that, from my perspective at least, is much more effective at bringing these characters to life.

     

    Totally agree with this. But, that said, I really enjoy watching the result of Blizzard's cinematic team's excellent technical skills and animation, ususally reserved for the house-style gritty, "realistic" stuff, going nuts on a more simple, stylish characters and world. They're obviously having a lot of fun animating the characters (you can tell these guys were just waiting for an opportunity to do all that smearing and squash-and-stretch) and rendering that simple style as beautifully as possible.

     

    What a weird choice to make the Soldier 76 short be the one with only one character in it, considering how boring he is.

  18. Posted

    I'm especially interested in hearing about people who have read these books in different languages. I read the last Harry Potter book in Russian and was really amused by some of the changes (for instance, the title is not Deathly Hallows but instead is The Gifts of Death).

     

    The Icelandic version is pretty boring when it comes to the names. For older books the names would always be translated into something more Icelandic. Lord of the Ring's characters almost all have different names (Bilbó Baggi, Smeygur, Fróði, Sómi, Gandálfur)*

     

    Harry Potter, however, just has all the same English names. Almost. Anything that's literally just a name isn't translated (Hermione, Harry, Dumbledore) but when characters have nicknames they're translated (Mad-eye Moody becomes Skröggur illaauga, which is Moody Evil-eye)

     

    Street names are translated, so Diagon Alley becomes Skástræti (Crooked street) thereby losing the pun.

     

    The names of the books are all pretty directly translated, but specifically Deathly Hallows is translated into Treasure of Death. Guess we don't have a word for magical object? Also, the Icelandic version of the cover looks horrible, don't know how this made it through any sort of quality check.. 127223.jpg

     

    Oh, I came across an article about how difficult it was to translate Harry Potter to Icelandic.

     

    The first problem for a translator is that Rowling's magical world is revealed to Harry and the reader at the same time. The translator has no foreknowledge of the plot, so words that seem innocuous may have hidden meaning that'll only becomes apparent in later books. For example the gender of professor Sinistra, which isn't clear until the fourth book, when you find out the professor is a woman. The game Exploding snap was in my mind some sort of game of tag, when in the fourth book it's revealed it's played with a deck of cards and we had to change the translation. .. [Rowling] has thought out every detail of her complex world but the translator has no more of an idea of where the story is going, than the reader does.

     

    *The names of all the dwarves and Gandalf come directly from old Icelandic scripts, so they're the same in the translation..

  19. Posted

    I read the first book during a sleepover at a friend's house when I was 14 year old (this was 1999, when the Icelandic translation came out). I hadn't really been into books at all, at the time. But my friend recommended it to me (or his mother did, I don't remember) and I was so hooked I stayed up all night reading it. I remember being absolutely mesmerised by the introductory stuff with Hagrid and Diagon Alley.

     

    When I finished it I was so excited to find out that the second and third book were already out in English so, feeling comfortable enough in my English at the time, I had my parents order them both and burned through them way too fast.

     

    Man, reading the Wikipedia entry, I would've already seen the first movie after reading Goblet of Fire.. That is some intense Harry Potter-ing for a period of my life.

     

    When is this podcast out?! :tup:

  21. Posted

    The positioning thing probably stems from how the game treats lag. I watched a video of two Bliz guys explaining how they handle latency and what they favour and they lean heavily on the shooter being right. So if, because of latency (to a degree, they don't favour people with huge lag) the enemy can still see you despite you having just made it around a corner, and in his own view he doesn't miss, the server will register it as a hit. There's some balancing there, of course, but they tend to favor the shooter, which is probably why you feel like you're being cheated when you made it around a corner but still get shot.

     

    It's a really interesting video, actually. They talk about how they almost always favour shooter-first, unless the target has a special quick-move ability they fire off for example Pharah's horizontal jump. The server will honor that horizontal jump over what the shooter sees. Balancing what each player sees and gets hits for due to latency is always tricky in multiplayer games and it's really interesting to hear them talk about how they tackle it.

     

     

    I just played a bunch of matches with Winston and I think I'm in love. His jump is just so amazing and versatile. Good for traversing big distances, good for jumping in to disrupt and good for jumping out of trouble. I love that big ape.