-
Content count
2416 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Calendar
Everything posted by James
-
Official Giant Bomb Thread Mostly for Complaining About Dan
James replied to tegan's topic in Idle Banter
That approach is probably less fair for something like RB6 Siege, because it seems like quite a departure for the series. In fact, that's a series that has reinvented itself at least a couple of times, to varying degrees. It made a tantalizing promise, but the problem with that kind of promise is that it requires a lot of the players as a group. It takes work to arrange a group of people to play a team multiplayer game competently, and it seems like most players just won't do that (myself included). EDIT: I was about to make fun of Dan Ryckert for pronouncing "lousy" like "louse-y", but I looked it up and that is the actual origin of the word, so I guess he actually taught me something. Weird.- 1367 replies
-
- Drew Scanlon
- Brad Shoemaker
- (and 9 more)
-
Official Giant Bomb Thread Mostly for Complaining About Dan
James replied to tegan's topic in Idle Banter
While it might not be great as pure art criticism (for which Giant Bomb is probably never going to be your best source), the question of pricing models is very relevant at the moment, it being a thing in flux and seemingly poised to enter a phase of even more drastic change. Discussion of money may seem crass, but the reality is that game-making is a largely commercial art form, and very few of us are wealthy enough to exclude cost concerns from our consideration when assessing games. As production gets ever more expensive and games hit up against consumers' comfort boundaries with traditional pricing models, one can foresee more and more developers experimenting with non-traditional pricing models in an attempt to circumvent these psychological barriers, particularly given their success in mobile gaming. These techniques will potentially intrude far more into the actual stuff of the game than a simple price tag on a single boxed product ever did, at the risk of harming the integrity and quality of the thing as a whole. A criticism you could perhaps level at Giant Bomb – particularly its podcasts – is the expectation that the audience has been listening along for some time. I think that's part and parcel of the community atmosphere they maintain on the site, but what it does mean is that when they spend time discussing the price of Rainbow Six Siege and not much else about it, there's the assumption that you've watched the Quick Look, and listened to the first impressions when the game was first revealed at whichever E3 it was. The impression I get is that the "something" that the game has is the same thing that appealed back when it was first announced, and the problem was that there just wasn't much else to it. That's the implicit message I get from price quibbles. There's a nice core idea, but it wasn't expanded enough or wasn't given enough supporting content for it to breathe and thrive as a satisfying experience.- 1367 replies
-
- Drew Scanlon
- Brad Shoemaker
- (and 9 more)
-
All I've done is had a couple of things printed on Photobox. They seemed OK to me, but I don't think I have a very good eye for that sort of thing, and I only picked them because they were much cheaper than the other online options I was looking at. Regarding split toning etc., I do sometimes fiddle with RGB curves, which are obviously more flexible, but I find in my pursuit of the intended effect I often end up with something very unnatural and unpleasant looking, which I try to correct for by adding ever more points. For me, the more limited possibility space of split toning helps me keep things under control.
-
Tell me about it. Like, I get (broadly) the technical reason why it happens, but I'm not really sure how you're meant to account for it. It'd be nice if there were some sort of colourspace conversion tool with a live preview, for example. But I would have thought it should be a solved problem, anyway. Like, in almost all contexts isn't it better to preserve the colour balance of the image than it is to make maximal use of the available colour gamut? Surely there should be an algorithmic way of getting a good match. Then again, perhaps I'm misattributing blame. Precisely none of my display devices are calibrated in any regard other than "looks fine to me", and other than Lightroom I do most of my image browsing in stuff like Web browsers, which I suspect might not always properly respect colour accuracy and the associated metadata and so on. Not an expert, though. Nice dog picture, anyway. Is there some split toning business going on in there? Or am I now imagining I'm seeing it everywhere?
-
Oh I know. It's a like a tragic play. We were cursed by our own inaction. I haven't found the guy anything yet, but I did buy a ring binder for myself. I'm a lot of fun.
-
There's nothing like Secret Santa to remind you of how little you know your coworkers. I recently referred to it as a £5 - £10 Christmas tax. I was mistaken. It costs more than that. It costs time. And everyone just throws away the tat they receive from each other. We might as well just ceremonially flush £5 down the toilet in the name of an anonymous colleague. It'd require less aimless searching and strained reactions. Seriously, all I know about this guys is that he's a middle-aged warehouse temp whose son is trying to buy a house near where I used to live. I've spoken to him literally once. My current plan is a generically humorous mug. I'd like to make it clear, though, that I'm not this bitter about the whole season. I love Christmas. I just hate this Secret Santa bullshit. There's only one person at work with any enthusiasm for it, but nobody had the heart to tell her no. Moan moan moan.
-
Robot automatically punches weeds/other lifeforms with unparalleled speed and precision: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/bosch-deepfield-robotics-weed-control
-
A lot of their rhetoric seems pretty libertarian to me. "Who are you to deny me my breast simulator game?" sort of thing. Not that anyone other than the producer of the breast simulator is actually doing so, but like I said, rhetoric.
-
Yeah, Merus seems to be on the same page as me. These kinds of little social interaction nuggets might not seem logical in isolation, but they're often a logical response to social expectations that exist. I would even go so far to say that I don't think the phrase is inaccurate as such. Very rarely does language work in pure absolutes. Saying you'll get "right to" something is a relative term. It means "without significant delay". What constituted significant delay is not universally defined, and will vary from context to context and person to person. I imagine the kind of people who say "I'll get right to the point" consider the time it takes to do so a significant delay. There's all sorts of implicit meaning in language that leads to a lot of flexibility in how it's used. I get a bit annoyed when people act like it's more correct to ignore that, given that it's essential to how pretty much all human communication works. Not that I ever use the phrase myself. I hope that doesn't come across as too aggressive.
-
Probably because in the given context their audience would expect some amount of beating about the bush, and to launch straight into the main matter without some sort of introductory phrase would seem awkwardly direct. Like, if you just go up to people and say, without introduction, what you want, that's a bit weird. Possibly even rude. At least by introducing it with an acknowledgement of the directness, the person saying it demonstrates that it's not that they just don't care. Or maybe it's just to draw attention to how direct they're being, because they're really pleased with themselves.
-
Official Giant Bomb Thread Mostly for Complaining About Dan
James replied to tegan's topic in Idle Banter
Dan Ryckert did a pair of Periscope streams this weekend wherein he a) ordered everything from the Taco Bell menu, and took a bite out of them each, reviewing them as they went. I didn't pay a lot of attention, as I was busy continuing to have my life consumed by Fallout 4, but it seemed like even though he was using a hundred point scale, nothing deviated more than 3 points from 85. All that time reviewing games has apparently made an indelible mark.- 1367 replies
-
- Drew Scanlon
- Brad Shoemaker
- (and 9 more)
-
Official Giant Bomb Thread Mostly for Complaining About Dan
James replied to tegan's topic in Idle Banter
Then in all likelihood I will never live.- 1367 replies
-
- Drew Scanlon
- Brad Shoemaker
- (and 9 more)
-
Wow, I kind of remember making this post six years ago. Seriously, if you break that game down into its constituent elements and were to relay them to a person sufficiently far back in history, they would think you were describing some sort of Hell dragon. On hearing about Girl reaching Pluto, I did consider plugging my PS3 back in to check it out. Reading a bit about it, it looks like each planet did have unique content. It's weird and kind of cool to think that only a minority of a minority of that game's presumably already pretty niche audience has ever even seen a large portion of the game's assets.
-
I haven't confirmed this for myself, but on today's Beastcast they seemed to be saying the Koei-Tecmo statement was from a community manager who had been pressed on the issue. I'm not sure an official statement would even have brought the sexism thing up. I've been wondering whether to delete my Play-Asia account (in response to the GG courting rather than the DoA-importing), or whether that's an entirely empty gesture. There doesn't seem to be any facility on the site itself to do so, so I'd have to email customer support. But I've only ever ordered two things from there, so it's hardly a significant material loss to them. It's probably not worth the fuss.
-
I find it kind of endearing. It has pluck.
-
Isn't another facet to cultural appropriation that it's quite patronising? It's something that's harder to pin down than more concrete forms of harm, but it can be emblematic of a lack of respect for the richness of another culture.
-
Well I was thinking more along one of those one-post locked pinned threads, but sure, megathreads are fun. It was a silly idea, anyway.
-
"Murder aside, what's wrong with me putting this bullet into your brain?"
-
They've done panels at game conventions before. I don't think they've arranged any live in-person events of their own (i.e. not part of a larger thing) yet, though.
-
Sorry to hear you (and I'm sure others) find it excluding, but the format is probably the reason this is one of the two forums I ever visit. I personally find it very difficult to handle the endless onslaught of threads you find in other forums. I suppose it's a matter of personal preference, or perhaps even something to do with how you think. I registered over six years ago, and still feel like a bit of an outsider sometimes. That's my stellar social skills at work, I suppose. Would it maybe be a good idea to have a pinned thread that gives an informal introduction to the format? I'm not sure precisely what it'd say, mind you.
-
What's great is that even the responses to that tweet get hijacked by some moron trying to push a "they're all justified because ignorance is what makes people scared of guns" agenda. Like, literally in reference to a person who had actually been shot at. If only they'd understood the difference between clips an magazines, they would have been able to calmly analyse the situation, safe in the knowledge that firearms are mere tools, no more dangerous than a saw or corkscrew. Jesus Christ. I felt like responding to his pedantry in kind, pointing out that the slash in the inequality symbol goes forward (he uses "=\=" a couple of times), but I don't really think getting involved for such a petty dig would be a great idea.
-
A facet of my problem is that when I run short on patience I get a bit frustrated and will sometimes just upload everything as it stands to be done with it. Then I come back later with fresh eyes and see other things I could try, but once it's online I don't normally want to take the old one down, since it's already been made punlic. I mean, my audience is basically zero, so it doesn't really matter, but it still bothers me a little. EDIT: Looking at it again in Lightroom, I think part of the problem with the colour version linked to above is a colourspace conversion issue or something. It doesn't look quite as over-red in there. Another wretched complication. EDIT 2: I took another crack at a colour version, but this time more stylised. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.
-
I haven't commented for a while, because I can't find a way to make repeatedly saying "that's great!" not seem repetitive, but this stuff is all really great. I particularly like those shots through car windows, Architecture. I've experimented with reflections on glass, but not with such success. Anyway, for someone who hates having his picture taken, my dad photographs pretty well: Dad Recently I've been starting to try out processing my photos in black and white. I'd kind of shied away from it in the past for fear of seeming pretentious, but it often comes out looking better, particularly when I struggle to get the colours looking good. For reference, here is where I ended up with the colour version of this image. He's far too red but we were sitting under a heating lamp that gave off this intense orange glow which, while it looked quite nice on the camera's preview screen, didn't hold up so well once I'd imported the pictures to Lightroom. Perhaps desaturating it a bit would help, but I still don't think I'd be as satisfied with it as I am the B&W version. Really, it's a bit of a mess. The longer I spend on a picture, the more I lose perspective. Also, a YouTube video recently reminded me of the existence of split toning, so I've been experimenting a bit with that as well (such as in the above photograph). I've yet to get a good feel for what works well in colour pictures, but it seems pretty easy to get good results (to my eye) in monochrome images. For comparison, here is how it looks in straight greyscale.
-
I don't see what everyone sees in that movie ...
James replied to Erkki's topic in Movies & Television
If you take the term at face value, it's a claim that something is generally "rated" too highly. It's making an objective claim: that the thing is less good than people espouse, rather than that you simply like it less than others. For art it would probably imply that it's flawed in a way that people are ignoring, rather than it simply not being to your taste. For example, perhaps it's not as insightful as people claim. People could still like it, but it wouldn't be as good. While it takes its name and the very broadest strokes of its plot and setting from the Fritz Lang film (i.e. it's a heavily socially stratified future and there's a machine woman/girl in a big tower), it's really a different thing. It's more "inspired by" than "remake of". I love the ending of the anime. That kind of audiovisual spectacle really hits the spot for me. -
I don't see what everyone sees in that movie ...
James replied to Erkki's topic in Movies & Television
It's not meant to be a measure of quality. It's just a tool to demonstrate trends in film-making. There's nothing inherently better about long takes; it's just that perhaps the general preference for shorter takes leaves modern audiences too impatient to appreciate slower-paced editing. I'm personally quite a fan of long takes, but obviously different films will be best served by different styles. I presume for Birdman it counts the disguised edits? Because otherwise shouldn't it be over an hour? Most of the film is presented as a single shot. Does anyone know why that site is under a Latvian domain, by the way? Does .lv correspond to something else relevant to the subject matter?