Halgwet

I came over here from the adventuregamers forums a bit more than ten years ago, though as my post count shows I haven't really been participating much. Even so, I do come by about once a day, mostly to check out the megathreads. I try to learn as little as possible about games, films and books before playing/watching/reading them myself, meaning that I mostly rely on the recommendations of people I trust for what media I consume. This community has been very much in sync with what I enjoy over the years, so I've used it as a place to pick up interesting tips I wouldn't find elsewhere. The short discussions in the movie/TV and "recently completed video games" megathreads are perfect for this, and I also like to keep up with the social justice related threads for a quick update on what's been going on. Oh, and of course those sweet, sweet baby animal gifs. So, I'm all for the megathreads, though I guess that I may not be the typical user of the forum.

I saw Tale of Tales at the Stockholm film festival last week and I wasn't at all impressed. It's strange though, because I can't quite put my finger on what it was that made me dislike it. To some degree it was the arbitrary nature of the stories, with things just sort of happening without much reason or logic. The story with the flea was particularly guilty of this. However, this sort of storytelling is very true to the fairy tales that the film is based on and would probably have made me even more intrerested in seeing it if I had heard it described as such. In the same way I was put off by the amount of rape, murder and misery found in the stories, particularly since most of it was inflicted on the few undeserving characters that could be found, but this is again true to the old style of fairy tales. Basically, the components make it sound like a film that I would be very interested in seeing, but put together it didn't work at all. It did look very nice though. I saw a few more films at the festival, so I might as well give my opinion of them too. The Lobster: I loved this film. The writing, the acting, the cinematography, the weirdly hilarious sadness of it all. The director, Yorgos Lanthimos, was there for a discussion after the film. I didn't have a chance to ask him a question, but if I did I would have asked him what it is about mustaches that so perfectly conveys loneliness. Son of Saul: Really, really impressive film. In a lot of ways. It follows a Hungarian jew in a concentration camp as he tries to hold on to his humanity. I would not be at all surprised if this breaks out of the foreign language category at the oscars and picks up nominations for cinematography and sound editing/mixing. It's shot almost entirely with Saul in focus while the rest of the frame is slightly blurry. This means that the sound does most of the work, letting you fill in the horrifying blanks with your own imagination. It is extremely effective. Carol: Well made and well acted but overall I just didn't feel it. I enjoyed it while I was sitting there watching but it didn't stay with me at all. Green Room: A tense thriller/horror film by Jeremy Saulnier who also made Blue Ruin. The overall plot isn't much to speak of but the directing and acting more than make up for it. It's very well paced, going back and forth between quiet scenes and frantic action, and it uses some carefully deployed gore to good effect. It's also a lot of fun to see Patrick Stewart play a neo-nazi.

Using cameras is actually a pretty bad example and would probably be better used as an argument against the people saying that 60 fps is inherently better. There are many things that determine the quality of a camera, but megapixels is the only one that people in general are aware of since it is a simple number that can easily be understood. Larger is better, or at least that seems to be the logical conclusion. Camera manufacturers noticed this and started focusing on just the amount of megapixels so that they could have a large number on the box. This was done to the detriment of other features that determine picture quality like lenses and sensors. So you got pictures with crappy colours and a ton of noise, but there sure were a lot of pixels.

I've got a whole bunch of European Club Nintendo cards that I can't use and which will start expiring in a month or two, so I figured I would check to see if anyone wants them. If my math is correct, there are 4750 stars worth of unexpired cards, which is enough to get the Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack cd for example. It is also enough to get you pretty close to the reproduction of the first Nintendo Game & Watch game, which seems pretty cool. I also have a few really old cards that don't have a written expiration date on them. I'm guessing they won't work, but who knows. Is anyone interested?

Hold on to you butts.

This sounds like Endorfun: http://www.mobygames.com/game/endorfun While I haven't played it, the one screenshot I remember of Orion Burger had the main character shrunk down and put in a hamster cage: http://www.mobygames.com/game/orion-burger

I believe the proper position is to have your knee at something close to a 90 degree angle and your thigh parallel to the floor. You'll probably need a chair with adjustable height to achieve that position. For me, the point when I realized just how much fun rock band drums were was when the pedal clicked and my foot just started doing its own thing.

I just started watching Homicide. It's great. It's almost like having The Wire back again. I was expecting a more traditional police procedural, but it's a lot closer to modern HBO-shows than it is to it's contemporaries (it started in 93). The focus is on the characters, brought to life by some awesome dialogue. If you like The Wire you really should check it out. Be careful though, the DVDs are in the order they were broadcast, which is very much out of order. Imagine watching The Wire with a few episodes with "too little action" moved to the end of the season by the tv network. Ok, maybe not that bad, but there is a whole lot of continuity that becomes completely fucked up by this. Use wikipedia and go by the production order.

Gah! That damn harbour in Acre. I think I died maybe 20 times throughout the game and at least 15 of those must have been in that place. The free running totally breaks down and your reward for failure is insta-death. Nice. It may seem like I'm very negative towards the game, but that's not really fair to it. I mean, I played it to completetion, so I didn't hate it or anything. I just thought it had so much potential that it wasted and that's the thing I'm going to remember about it. If they announced a sequel I would be pretty excited for it, at least if they say they're going to focus on gameplay and story and that they aren't going to rush it out in time for christmas.

I played through Assassin's Creed a little while ago and I was pretty disappointed. For a game that must have taken enormous amounts of time and manpower to create it sure feels lazy. It's like they created this gorgeous world and some fun controls for free running and then just phoned in the rest. One thing that really stood out for me was the lack of variety in the voice acting. At the end of the game I must have heard that damn beggar woman say "No, you don't understand, I have nothing!" hundreds of times. It just seems so lazy. There's something like a hundred citizens around the world that need to be saved from soldiers and it felt like there was maybe six replies they could give for you saving them. How hard is it to record a hundred different replies? This is a game with a massive budget we're talking about. For me, this made it feel very transparent as a game. While the world is beatiful graphically, the repetetiveness of the sound, not to mention the missions and gameplay, really brought me out of any immersion it tried to create.

I'm not one for absolutes when it comes to favourites of anything. Saying whether something is in the top ten or not is as far as I'm willing to go. And even then, there's more than likely quite a bit more than ten spots on this top ten list. Despite this, I'm pretty comfortable with saying that The Wire is the best damn show I've ever seen. But on topic, Carnivàle had a great intro: Also, Six Feet Under:

From what I've heard the whole resetting of downloadable song scores happens if you download from (or maybe even access?) the download menu within the game. To be on the safe side, if you're going to download something for GH3, do it from the dashboard. I bought the game on release a week ago and I guess I'm having fun with it, but it's just not the same. As you guys have already said, no soul at all.

I really like the Conflict Freespace intro, mostly because of the voice acting. You can hear the desperation in the pilot's voice. It gets me evey time how well done it is. Great game too. The Freedom Force intro and all of the character origins were also pretty damn sweet. They set the mood perfectly for the game.