syntheticgerbil

Nice! Clear and simplistic. Thanks. I don't know how to describe animation stuff because a lot of it is just internalized since while I went to an animation school, Art Institute, I didn't actually learn how to animate from any teacher, since they had no idea what they were doing. It's all just books from various sources and flipping frame by frame through DVDs to me and everyone tends to use slightly different terms. Also I hope one day I just have $1000 to burn on the Richard Williams big DVD set. Hopefully if he dies anytime soon, they still sell it. It'd suck to miss out.

Haha, at the cost of me own family, fuck 'em. Yuck. The weakness part is such a cliche people shouldn't even ask anymore. EDIT: Kept watching. Oh my god, I'm in love with this. As someone who just lies on every application and interview now saying whatever BS they think they want to hear, I remember that part of me as a teen that died when I was honest in interviews and realized I fucked 'em all up that way.

Well in Ghost Babel it's the fogger! ;rimshot; Looks like soft reset is still in the HD version. Press left and right buttons and triggers plus back and start all at the same time. It boots you to the title screen and you have to reload, so it's not a modern restart checkpoint but it should only take about 30 seconds or so to get back if you saved in the room you failed on. I remember I did a lot of soft resets in Twin Snakes and MGS2, something about those interiors and lack of camo just made MGS3 much easier to get away in comparison while the basic MGS2 engine is just kind of an out of control spiral to your doom. MGS4 stealth feels broken in most of the early parts of the game because it has more to do with you having made sure you didn't forget to grab the right rebel disguise and later to do the same thing with a face mask in London. Besides early in the game and late in the games, MGS4 makes very little use of octocamo and instead the incredibly easy costumes. Not even sure why it wasn't octocamo only, but MGS4 is a big fucking mess anyway so I'm sure it was just another thing they felt they needed to add in without actually designing a game around it.

I think this may have been replaced with a newer thread but does anyone want 3DS download codes for Mighty Switch Force and/or Woah Dave?

Haha, that's probably my favorite part in the whole movie. Other than being very pretty in many parts, it's not very endearing and doesn't make a lot of sense. I could not care about Scarlet after she hit her dog. I am unsure if that was a hilarious joke only funny to Japanese sensibilities or what, but it was played off as a slapstick scene ender.

Super Star is the best, especially with two players. Are either of the Lost Vikings games on VC?

It was released in Europe. I also have a set with both versions. Looks better in black and white.

Can't you soft reset in MGS2 in the HD collection? Or is that what you meant by exiting the game? That was my goto pre MG3 when it was really hard to get yourself hidden again.

Oh yeah, that's a bummer. Like I was going through Moth episodes and I noticed a handful of them, especially the good ones, I had heard on This American Life before. Maybe they just have a hard time getting the research and recordings done for an original episode? I can't imagine the amount of interviews they tackle is easy, but it seems like they have a lot of staff to create a lot of stories.

I think the only reason most people pay attention to Ted Cruz is to laugh at the idiocy. Similar with Rick Perry.

Haha, funny you say that, because that episode was on in the car earlier today and while I like that episode too, it took me a little bit to realize I had already heard it. Which is why I just went here to whine. Actually looking at the website, they have stopped putting reruns inside the radio archive section, so I think I missed the boat there.

Haha, poor Tom Bodett. Since someone brought it up, why the hell does This American Life do so many reruns? It seems like in recent years they have made less content than ever. I would be happy if they didn't post reruns on their main site under the recent episodes because that's disingenuous. It makes sense to rerun when it has radio timeslots for broadcast, but why on the website? So then I have to check the date to make sure I haven't heard it before. Although that's now no longer a good indicator because they will rerun episodes with current timestamps just because they added a sentence somewhere in the podcast to upload it, so it becomes a new episode.

I also think the problem with that writer is that she condenses like 3-4 decades worth of animation to make one point. What inspired entertainment and racial connotations is not the same every decade, times changed, attitudes changed, and sensibilities changed. Putting Coal Black up there doesn't really make any sense with the context of Cuphead, which is pulling directly from a time where characters were designed in very black and white styles because of the simplicity due to lack of color and cels plus blackface being popular at the time. Sometimes it's hard to say with some of those early characters, since they are all so homogenous, what might actually be inspired by blackface and what is actually just due to black and white design like all Felix, Disney, and Warner Bros. characters pre color. I haven't even been alive for a full thirty years yet and in my time media and sensibility has changed so much as it is, so to mash up every gross thing in three to four decades as a big problematic reference seems reaching to me. Just because it borrows elements from a time period doesn't mean you have to take away the disgusting parts of those times with it. You can "sanitize" it so to say. I feel like Cuphead does a good job of that. I mean, should I not enjoy Monkey Island (or really any pirate fantasy) because it is a fun filled reflection on a brutal time in history where raping and pillaging was a normal thing? I don't feel like I should take away that any character is a rapist in Monkey Island or it's necessarily romanticizing it just because they are pirates. This is also my argument with putting too many gruesome elements within Metal Gear, like that fiasco in Ground Zeroes, because while everyone says, "war is gruesome and that's reaalllll, man" it is also a wacky game series that I expect a lot of that stuff to be held back so you know, I can enjoy myself.

It's basically Metal Slug though, which moves like butter and is extremely snappy. On that article though, I don't think it's fair to say Cuphead is referencing the racist stuff of the old cartoons. While blackface was often a basic character design because it required two colors, was popular, and could be easily done as a line drawing. If you use that logic you could say Mickey Mouse and Felix also bear the weight of the same reference because of their visual basis, which they don't exactly. Bosco however...

Oh shit, new Studio 4C film upcoming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=47&v=WngjMUpBalQ I know nothing about the original comic it's based on, the art for that is often ugly, but the redesigns for the movie look great. Hope it's good. Hope it gets a U.S. release.

While I am not a fan of simple rounded characters of early animation, I am not equating that with how they move. A visual style is separate from an animation style. That's what I mean, they picked the "jank" or primitive animation style to make an action game with. It looks weird, floaty, and slow. I don't see how the game conveys fun rather than just going for a gimmick. You don't have to animate like you are in the 1920s to use the aesthetic and like I said I don't think anyone would notice if you didn't. Which again is why I brought up Shovel Knight which clearly stayed within the constraints until it serviced the game, like tons of extra frames of animation, an extra color for the background not in the NES palette, an five color sprite set up, the amount of original music, etc.

I guess I didn't know until now (clicking on the first link in that article) that Mark Kern was "that guy" I had read about years ago who wasted a bunch of money on useless stuff that doesn't belong at a game development company. Now that I made the connection, I'm not understanding why anyone is even listening to says at all.

I guess that $1750 thrown out earlier is kind of nuts to me. It's nearly double my rent on a two bedroom with backyard duplex. I suppose what is daunting about moving to another city with a higher cost of living is in order to rent you security deposit is going to be expensive, most likely pet fees, plus first month in advance. A lot of times leasing offices want to see you make four times the rent from four weeks of paystubs. I guess I should one day get to saving.

Well while I like that movie, I don't feel like it is aping any kind of early style of film, which is more analogous to what I'm saying. It is steeped within fitting an established noir style developed much more solidly after the 20s were through. The flying saucer in the movie is definitely a mid century callback in film instead of an early century one. Cuphead apes a more primitive era of animation. For The Man Who Wasn't There to equivacolly ape short film styles from the 1910s and 20s you'd have to have the camera continuously under or overcranked, bad edits, picture off track, and just general technical difficulties which I equate to the stilted animation of the 20s. While maybe that would make a neat short to mimic all of that stuff, if The Man Who Wasn't There were like that the whole time I'd hate it.The Man Who Wasn't There plays like a smooth moody 1940s film as that era, the technical aspect and cinematography was already well established. You could also juxtapose any Chaplin short from around 1918 to his later 1936 film Modern Times and see what progress from continuous attention to timing and speed can do. Almost everything Chaplin pre Mutual is hard to watch nowadays, especially if you caught one of his later works first. I guess that's where you and I differ. I feel like these days tons of games come out with unique styles and new aesthetics, it's sort of a gold mine, and instead Cuphead feels very basic to me. The thing I'm impressed with is how 1:1 they got the look of a Fleischer style short but I suppose that's about it. Kind of wish if game studios are to attempt the rigorous deman of traditional animation that they might try instead try something a little bit more fresh.

I think I would probably hate The Neverhood if it were animated like a Gumby cartoon.

God I've been playing so much Peacewalker for the last year, I nearly completely forgot how stupidly streamlined they made the hold up process. It's pretty much completely unrealistic in that game because they automatically get on the ground every time within seconds of holding them up. They also never get back up again, so you can just run through levels aiming a gun at someone's back and moving on while they slowly get on the ground, never getting caught. There is absolutely no reason to ever continue pointing your gun at an enemy in Peacewalker after the initial hold up. Check out that part with the tank. It's incredibly silly and game breaking. But you've pretty much gotta do that maneuver if you want S Ranks. Also the games before had variation on how daring certain guards might be when holding them up, some only pausing for a brief moment or so if you did not knock them out or kill them quickly enough.

Hmm. I suppose it would maybe be easiest to illustrate between an older Fleischer cartoon and a 40s Merrie Melodies. Cuphead is very much imitating the movement of the Flesicher short, and quite well. But the problem with the movement there is there's no anticipation or follow through in anyone's movements and no acceleration or deceleration for the most part. Characters often just stop in the middle of movements for a few frames, probably because they were being drawn exclusively from pose to pose without much overlapping action, like the ears of the dog character in the short always stopping at the exact time he stops moving. I would guess it was just finicky to keep drawing and testing all of that stuff as equipment sounded like the biggest hassle in the 20s. This one lands right on 1930 which for the rest of the decade, the whole industry was transitioning to smoother more natural movement through lots of experimentation such as getting appropriate speeds right, like slow and flowing for more beautiful cartoons and quick and violent for gag cartoons. 1920s stuff just kind of floated around for the most part. The second I guess would be easiest to see the difference with the dog popping out of the bush at 2:48. He quickly jumps out and then when he hits the top of his movement he slowly deflates to a less extreme pose. In a cartoon produced a decade or more earlier, the dog would probably slowly move to the jumping out pose and just stop for a few frames until moving to whatever happens next. There's also a lot of paint smearing to nicely convey movement through motion blur without meticulously drawing every pose inbetween. A lot of these techniques would have meant less drawing for the Cuphead team. The Merrie Melodies short works well on conveying a bunch of action and I think it would fit much better to take that movement for a video game and then just use the general rounded character, rubber hose limbs, and big eyed Fleischer aesthetic. Also apologies if any of that came off condescending or overexplaining or something, I don't mean it to be. I also watched a lot of the assets in the newer Cuphead trailer and the characters move much more in line with modern animation principles than the complete throwback that was shown in the trailer from last year.

I'm glad they are paying the property royalty fees. That's a lot more than a lot of fan projects do these days.

Am I the only one mostly disinterested in Cuphead? It accurately captures the uninspired character designs and stilted animation of animation in the late 1910s and 1920s while eschewing the progress made in the, but why? There's a reason everyone abandoned that ugly movement. I suppose they could have had nicer characters like the cuteness of Felix but they didn't. I guess Sonic the Hedgehog stole his design already. I don't know, never enjoyed a Fleischer cartoon I guess. Like even if they wanted to use the bland rounded 1920s aesthetic, they could have used the current principles developed in 1930s and 1940s and it would have looked so much better, since almost no one in the audience is going to tell the difference anyway. Just looking at that animation feels bad even though it's nearly 100% accurate, except it probably shouldn't be in color. I wish they had gone the Shovel Knight route while keeping the general aesthetic accurate, it's built upon to be more palatable past the inherent limitations. Oh well, I guess there's some pointless negativity to this thread.

I want to move to this city one day, but it looks like the cost of living is a major jump. Christ, I feel like I'm stuck in Texas forever. Well, unless I get rich.