Ben X

This was my best joke ever and no one acknowledged it edit: WOAH, where the hell is angry tomato sadface?!

I say it has to be at least 4 years for that construction to be technically accurate...

That was me! I ruined that joke! Good list, although with some of these one might be relieved to be the wrong movie...

A game where "Mario goes missing, then he comes back and perhaps is misshapen": Le Retour de Mario Guerre. And if Cronenberg is tied to Goldblum for Luigi, perhaps he could cast Scanners villain Michael Ironside as Mario?

Honestly, what's the point in my teaching you the meaning of "scan" if you don't use it? And I said what about From Here To Eternity?

That looks really sweet! I was going to copy paste some of our Slack private conversation here but it's been deleted already, so to summarise: Very excited to play the final product! Needs lots of Hellboy-style environmental storytelling: particularly the owners' corpses sitting there staring at you You should put some filters on a load of your Cwine art and use them as battered old paintings for the walls A cheap and easy way to suggest more space without building it is to have cave-ins at the entrances to other wings of the castle (which fits with the delapidated feel) Once it's done, you should totally make a version where you replace Mr Puffin with Hellboy and tweet it at Mike Mignola

Comixology has a Batgirl sale on for the rest of the day. I'm tempted to buy volumes 1-3 of the 2014-2016 Fletcher/Stewart/Tarr/Wicks run for my girlfriend. She doesn't read comics but she does have a fondness for the character of Batgirl, as she is a librarian and a feminist. I haven't read the series but I thought it might be a good fit for her first proper comic as I understand it's modern, light and fresh. Are there any big reasons that this wouldn't be a good first comic? Does it require a high degree of familiarity with background lore or the medium in general? (I know there is a bit of crossover with that "Death Of The Family" Joker event where @Apelsin felt like the reader was expected to be reading the other lines.) Does it actually start to suck halfway through? Does it not have any kind of wrap-up or ending? Thanks to anyone who can advise me before the sale ends! EDIT: I went ahead and got this after a little discussion on Slack. Hope she enjoys it!

I knew you'd have a clear, concise and interesting answer! Thanks!

Did they do that in medieval times?

No, it's just your personal taste. If anything, it's fake pedantry.

All the Day Of The Tentacle ones are great, but this one is my favourite. I love the embarrassed facial expression!

Altwo In The Dark

The Often-Ending Story got a let's play! The dev-play vids haven't got any further in the 5 months since the previous post, partly because of life upheavals and partly because they're too indulgent and boring even for me to bear listening to.

Hmm, I don't get the Unity menu when opening it now, so I can't change the resolution...

I just didn't even realise there was a goal of landing!

@Badfinger Yes, I agree. Rogue One's (returning character spoilers) are absolutely uncanny valley, whereas Snoke (oops, corrected my mispelling in previous post), even if he were absolutely lifelike, would merely resemble a dude in prosthetics so it doesn't really apply. @Patrick R I would possibly quibble a little with elements of those definitions out of context, but I think when you're writing an entire book on a certain genre or area it's fine to play with the definition as long as you acknowledge and delineate your version.

Gosh, really? Hope the game is good enough for me to make it all the way through, then! There's already been a siege defense bit, though the gates were NPC-placed for this one. It was fine, but the low player speed combined with the distance between the two gates meant that the NPCs had won most of the fire-fights before I could reach them! Jedi Outcast had sentry-bot weapons but I don't think I ever actually got round to using one...

More pedantry! Someone just linked to an essay by Umberto Eco about Casablanca being a cult movie. The term seems to be used regularly as interchangeable with "very popular" these days, whereas I think it should really be defined as "with a small but devoted following". Eco has a definition close to that, saying "The work must be loved, obviously, but this is not enough. It must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects to the fan's private sectarian world." He elaborates, but the gist of it is that if the film lends itself to a fanatical, obsessive, detailed appreciation, it's a cult movie. I don't think the term can be applied if that only applies to a small part of the fanbase. Christianity has fanatical elements, but it's not a cult. Another quick one: uncanny valley. It's the feeling of revulsion a human has at a robot which approaches the point of looking exactly and convincingly human but has some small imperceptible differences. I see this get used a lot for CGI when the user simply means "bad" or "unconvincing". Someone here used it a fair amount in the Pixar thread, but I'm pretty sure they weren't repulsed by how Woody looks almost exactly like a real toy. I also saw it get used regarding Snoke in Force Awakens.

Well, Unreal II certainly looks nice. I was not impressed at first, as I moved through some standard spacebase stuff and a rather ugly exterior with no art design to cover up any weak spots in the textures. However, later planets look great, from a night-time scene with loads of bioluminescence and lumbering lower species to a snow planet with huge ringed planets hanging in the sky and Syd Mead buildings looming in the distance. They certainly know how to present an epic sense of scale. On the other end of the scale, your hub ship has a great lived-in feel; it reminded me of Firefly as I wandered around the small ship, opening hatches to access the vertical design, listening to crew grumbling about missing parts, and finding full ashtrays and half-eaten doughnuts. There's a nice Trek feel to the universe as well, with diplomatic relations between different species. Your pilot, a blue blob in a little mech suit, learning English from a collection on 20th century sitcoms, is especially lovable. It's a shame that the stock meathead-marine banter is generally pretty bad and the female member of your crew dresses like a cheap hooker. The combat starts off pretty frustrating, as your movement is very slow but you're pitted against acrobatic enemies and a load of your weaponry either has warm-up time or splash damage. I had to put it down to easy to get through the first level. I've picked up a few more weapons now, though, particularly the shotgun. The enemies aren't particularly inspired either - reptile guys or spiders, so far. It's adequate, though. Hopefully it'll pick up. Some other notes: the loading times are very long, far longer than Jedi Outcast. I can sit there for up to a minute waiting to reload a quicksave... It has mantling! It hasn't put it to good use like DOOM 2016 so far, though. It's just an occasional means to climb a slightly bigger box to get some ammo.

Hate NOLF 2. Such shit game. It's started bringing up a "client mfc application has stopped working" error regularly. I've tried a few things, but can't get it to stop crashing every few minutes. So I don't need to slog forward any further through this clumsy mix of first-person stealth and shooting, thankfully. Unless it completely changes up its mechanics/level design, I can't see a few mimes making it any more enjoyable. The stealth is extremely unforgiving, even on easy mode, and the layouts don't encourage any kind of experimentation. Onto Unreal II. I get the impression that this is a very pretty but rather mediocre shooter, but it might be a relief after turning off all those lightswitches. In the meantime, I couldn't find any retrospectives for this game (though there are some around for the first one), but Steve Gaynor interviews Craig Hubbard about the two games amongst others in this episode of Tone Control. And here's an article about why the two games are never going to get re-released.

It was nothing to do with it being black and white - I enjoyed plenty of those, old and new, at the time. Perhaps I had over-heightened expectations or I got too distracted by the plot, I dunno.

I always assumed there was more to this song than a woman breaking up with her partner because the relationship has crumbled and him saying "but we saw a film together once!" and her saying "I think I remember that, it was okay I guess but no you're still dumped" and then him saying "BUT WE SAW A FILM TOGETHER ONCE!" Thanks to this thread I have finally googled the lyrics and discovered that no, that is it.

I watched it once and found it pretty boring but I was only 18 or so; I still hope to watch it again at some point and appreciate it a bit more, if only for the sake of appreciating Grim Fandango even more.

That's the one. Okay, well hopefully if I get past this the game will warm up (lol) a bit. It does feel like they're burying the lede substantially here - instead of starting off in swinging London with hench-mimes, there's a Japanese stealth level then a place-the-explosives snow level.