thl

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Posts posted by thl

  3. Posted

    There's actually a documentary about Troll 2 called Best Worst Movie ( http://bestworstmovie.com/ ) all about how awesomely bad it is. It's so bad that RiffTrax is not even needed. The Italian director didn't know any english and they filmed in Utah with a bunch of mormon non-actors so every genre convention gets pushed through a complicated series of gauzy filters resulting in a truly bizarre cinematic experience.

    I heart Nilbog!

    Dangerous Men is also a classic although much much harder to find a copy of... This one is basically a rich Iranian who apparently grew up on Cinemax thrillers poured his fortune into an umbelievably horrible take on the tough guy genre. There's weird articulate bikers, musical montages where song lyrics are written in the sand on the beach, an albino antagonist named Black Pepper, and the female lead of the movie was fired halfway through, creating a pretty interesting plot twist out of necessity.

    Troll 1 on the other hand, was pretty decent I thought. Actually having a troll in it helped a lot.

  4. Posted

    In Lasseter's defense:

    -Although he's taken director credit on only a handful of Pixar's films, everything I've ever read, heard, or seen about the company is that it's very team-oriented, very group-think, everything's run and re-run through all the creative minds there to hone each film down to what we see in theaters. I doubt all of Pixar's other releases got through with none of Lasseter's input.

    -Pixar is also very very story-oriented, which, from reading the links posted above, seemed to be one of his criticisms of American Dog

    -Hawaiian shirts or not, Lasseter is now a businessman running a company. Furthermore, he was "brought in" to change the direction of Disney's animation. No doubt there's bias there and Sanders' firing was not fair or any of that, but hey... that's what happens when you're the boss. Your personal taste and vision are what drive the company forward. If the public agrees with your choices, you stay the boss. The second they don't, there's a new boss. I don't fault Lasseter for exerting his power when that's exactly what his position calls for. true, it sucks for Sanders, but he's not the first director to have his pet project unceremoniously killed by new management, nor will he be the last.

    -i think any studio boss, if he had the situation presented where two projects were becoming too similar to successfully market separately, would make a tough choice on holding one back or changing one significantly as to not step on each other's toes. In that situation, if I was that studio boss and I had to choose which to scuttle: the next movie from the Lilo & Stitch guy or the next Pixar movie, I'd make the same choice.

    -Meet the Robinsons and Bolt both made a lot of money. Whether or not Lasseter's choice as an artist was crap, his choice as a head of development was a success.

    -Pre-Lasseter Disney was notorious for buying Miyazaki's American rights and sitting on them. I believe the weinsteins had to buy the rights from Disney just to put them out (may be wrong on that, don't know the details), so Ponyo's wide release can only be seen as a positive note for Lasseter.

  6. Posted

    I'm already annoyed with myself for buying this when it comes out, as it'll inevitably end up failing to deliver on all these grand promises.

    I think it's interesting that he says "I think there's something fundamentally wrong with RPGs like Fable. It's a mechanic that's been there since the eighties. I'm going to take that foundation stone and throw it away." while still marketing future Fable 2 DLC and announcing Fable 2 in episodic format.

    Maybe next year he'll tell us that there's something fundamentally wrong with video games and that he hates them so his next video game will be nothing like any other video game (except that you play it by looking at video and using a controller and there's a doofy british dude with a comedic sidekick and the last level is timed and there will always be better swords out in dungeons that you can find). that will be awesome.

  8. Posted

    I guess I wouldn't buy an adventure game or RPG written by [Orson Scott Card]. It's sort of like buying a racing game by Hitler. Sure, he's crazy, but how much can he screw up racing?

    oops! From what I understand, he helped write the insults in Secret of Monkey Island and he wrote the dialogue in The Dig as well.

    Not to mention writing Ender's Game and Speaker for the Death which are both excellent books. He's just a super-mormon (which makes his views on homosexuality the least of his problems)... no reason to discount the quality of his work just because he's a weirdo. Michael Jackson and Woody Allen fans concur.

    or do they!?

  9. Posted

    His weirdness about how Dexter was made into a success sounded like he was trying to say that you can take an insanely crazy idea (hero serial killer) and still manage to prove to the money-men that it's a viable option... His point being that they've found a system that allows creatively risky ideas to get past the money-men. I don't believe he was trying to say: "By designing everything through customer research you can get great commercial ideas".

    This is what's confusing to me. Iit's right what syntheticgerbil says about Molyneux not really knowing the TV industry and therefore not knowing what he's talking about because the shows he brings up as being successes of the TV machine are all completely atypical examples of how most TV works. HBO and Showtime are famous for their lack of studio interference and willingness to take risks and almost all of their shows are written by one crazy guy up in the woods. None of the stuff he mentions would make it to network airwaves precisely because of all the babble he spouts about market research and writing by committe.

    I think if he was going to make that statement, he should've used Big Bang Theory or Lost or any of the more traditional TV-industry shows that are successfull. Of course, that's a harder job because that process is terrible.

  10. Posted · Edited by thl

    Pilots seem like a good de-risking strategy, by the way (though not without its flaws). I guess prototyping is the game industry equivalent.

    Good point. I think there's a larger investment with a pilot but who knows -> not me.

    I guess as a general practice, making a researched well-informed pitch is not a bad idea in any industry. The question is the validity of that research and whether or not it means anything.

    To money people, Transformers 2 is the safest bet of the year. To critics, it's a chore. of course, people still go and see Transformers 2 so the money people are right in their assessment. All of this assumes that the overall goal is to prioritize art over commerce. Since it may or may not be proven that the best and most artistic achievements come with the ignorance or lack of market research, the value of it is suspect.

    so i guess:

    research supporting existing unique awesome idea = good

    research driving creation and direction of ideas = bad

    P.S. posting on here has made my boring work day go much faster! Inane babbling sure can be fun

  11. Posted

    i would guess that Mad Men got greenlit more on the credits of the Sopranos-vet executive creative team behind it. Ask any Arrested Development, Firefly, Family Guy, or even Deadwood fan about the current state in TV demographic modeling and you will get a pretty angsty answer. Premium channels have better shows (for the most part) not because they do more numbers-crunching but because their shows are a larger investment so they can't help but to run a show for an entire season and nurture each show and promote it properly to try and garner an audience, rather than the week-by-week reactive nature of networks. I seriously doubt most TV executives do any kind of homework before making a decision on a show. If there's talent attached and it fits their budget, they buy it. If it doesn't test well after it's created they cancel or shelf it. That's what pilot season is all about.

    Seems incredibly helpful to me. Not sure there's anything in the current TV industry worth cribbing, whether its well-intentioned or not. Just take your risk, strive to do something individual and unique, and hope for the best. Let publishers put out sequels and licensed properties to pay their bills and nurture a Molyneaux project or a Warren Spector project as a prestige game racking up metacritic scores and "awards." Much more similar to the movie industry than TV.

  12. Posted

    My problem with Meat Circus was always really more about the escort stuff with young Ollie. (I also hated the rotating firy fences and still don't understand why the long slide ladder has to go DOWN before going up but whatever). I guess it's really my problem with EVERY escort mission: the person I'm protecting is an IDIOT! So I spent the entire game loving every character in the game (except I only "liked" Coach. I think a huge reason why this game didn't sell well initially was because the weakest levels were the first and last. They should've released Sasha's level as the demo) then all of a sudden hating everything. I hated the mutant rabbits, i hated the knife throwers, and most of all i hated that kid.

    Oh yeah, Brutal Legend looks great.

  14. Posted

    Is it just me or does the character modeling still look way too... eh, plastic? I'm not sure how to put it, but Doom 3 looked the same way. Like, I don't have a problem with the mutants I guess but the guys talking to me all look like papier mache and foam rubber like something I'd see at a GWAR show.

    The detail in environments however has me completely jazzed. I don't really see any of the cold gray rubble of Fallout 3's capital wasteland. Maybe it's because I didn't really put much time into the first two fallouts (which were more desert-set).

    Not sure what the gameplay is gonna be like and how the open-world racing will all of a sudden become dark tunnel scary-shooting but... Definitely looks good (except the puffy-faced dudes trying to talk to me)

  15. Posted

    I am a complete Fallout 3 nut and have dumped 160 hours into my one play-through. Having gone through all the DLC, I can say this:

    -Broken Steel and Point Lookout are the only ones that are not insulated mini-action games. You can "go back" to all 4 of the locales not in the wasteland but Anchorage, The Pitt, and Mothership Zeta are all very linear questlines that should probably be done in one go.

    -The first two are the worst. I appreciate the loot in Anchorage and Pitt but they are pretty simplistic and really only offer different scenery.

    -Each one has a dramatically different color palette. I think it's amazing how beautiful this game looks. The Pitt is all read and rusty, Anchorage is cool blue and white, Mothership is tarnished silver and grey, Lookout is gorgeous yellow and orange. It's really great how different every environment looks yet they still all fit that Fallout mold.

    As far as when to play, Anchorage and Pitt are playable before you hit level 20 but after that I wouldn't recommend it. The yokels in Point Lookout can be TOUGH, the alien weaponry shoots FAST, and Broken Steel's stuff is all about levels 20-30.

    All in all I think I put about 20 hours into the DLC, which I'd feel justified in if I bought a separate game for 50 bucks and enjoyed it as much as I did with these. If you factor the 140 I gave the original game, a hundred bucks is not a bad value for the time and enjoyment I've had with it. Granted, if you think I'm crazy for spending so much time with it, the DLC may not be different or more enough for you.

  16. Posted

    That's a bit of an exaggeration--it's one I've used, but in the context of somebody talking about actually learning how to play the drums, it's not entirely accurate. That is to say, it's possible to succeed on expert drums without actually knowing what you're doing as a drummer, simply by treating it like a video game where you just have to hit all (or enough of) the buttons at the right time. I don't think feedback is really what makes the difference either, at least rock rock drumming (which even at its most subtle is not particularly subtle). The much more important part is understanding limb independence.

    Yeah, but I'd also say there is some truth to rockband-as-realife drumming though. The continued coordination of your body in set tempos is a big part of drumming along with independent limb rhythms and the beat trainer gives you a fairly nice starting point to different meters and time signatures (although it doesn't explicitly label them or teach you how to play them per se).

    I'm a newcomer to rhythm games (bought Rock Band 2 about 4 months ago) and one of the reasons why I was hesitant to jump in was because I kind of agreed with Prince in that kids could just as easily learn to play real guitar and start awful bands that get them laid in the same time that they obsess over learning fake guitar to get 100% on expert. So when I finally broke down and bought the game (largely because I knew Beatles Rock Band was coming out but also knew I couldn't afford the Beatles instruments), I was surprised by how non-random the drum programming actually was. Yes, the blue pad is covers a range of different sounds but for the most part, red is snare, yellow is hat, and green is crash. It makes a little bit of sense that, if you just move the location of where you're hitting, you could just as well be playing drums. Being an untrained amateur drummer and knowing absolutely nothing about playing guitar, it seems to me that Rock Band drumming is closer to real life than Rock Band guitar.

    I think the much harder part of being a "real" drummer is following your own sense of rhythm and time and understand a song's structure rather than just miming what's on the highway. The newly-release Janis Joplin DLC actually does a pretty great job of the breaks and fills with that song but I'm not 100% sure the game actually teaches you why the patterns change and why they change at that moment.

    I actually originally wanted to comment on Beatles Rock Band for my first post (btw, hi! long time listener first time poster <barf>) because I'm really hoping that everything I've read about the fine-tuning of the game and the attention to detail translates to a much smoother game experience. I think Rock Band 2's actual gameplay is great but a lot of the interface design and functionality is clunky and unintuitive. I hope they throw some of Guitar Hero 5's features in there like being able to play a song without the bassist without having to back up out of the entire game just to disable one instrument or maybe even change difficulty mid-song at least in practice mode. All these little things added up to a feeling of Rock Band 2 being rushed for me and I hope the game in between songs for the Beatles game is much smoother and less frustrating.

    Oh yeah, I also REALLY hope that you can play the full albums or any setlist without a pause between songs. I guess in the context of a live show or whatever it kind of makes sense but for the studio albums it's going to be terrible to keep stopping. Or maybe not; who knows. I'm excited.