SpectreCollie

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Posts posted by SpectreCollie

  1. Posted

    2 minutes ago, Marius said:

    Before Cooper woke up, didn't Bushnell hear a humming sound somewhere in the room, like Ben Horne did some episodes ago?

    Yes, it was the same sound!

     

    Unrelated: I’ve been a fan of Laura Dern (in Lynch projects anyway) ever since Wild at Heart, but her performance in Twin Peaks has been astounding. After such a drawn-out, intense, scene, Diane’s reaction to being told she was a tulpa was one of the best moments of the series. I can’t get over how good she and Grace Zabriskie are.

  2. Posted

    1 hour ago, Argobot said:

    - The reveal that Audrey was in a fake Roadhouse means that we know have to question the reality of every Roadhouse scene, right? That would explain why the website run by Matthew Lillard's character had an audio track of all the Roadhouse bands up to that point. It's all been in the Black Lodge (?) or some other place.

    - All the extras swaying to Audrey's Dance was great.

    - Will Richard Horne reappear??


    I suppose it's not necessarily the case, since the Roadhouse we've been seeing and the Roadhouse where Audrey's Dance happened could be two different places. If she is in a coma or something, then she could be dreaming about the Roadhouse in this episode. Especially since almost all of the characters who've appeared there and in what I assume is the "real world" have been Richard Horne, Shelly, and James, all of whom are people Audrey would know. (I'm assuming she knows Freddie as a Universal Archetype of the Cockney Iron Fist, even if she'd never met him in person). (Oh yeah, and Chad, too. Never mind).

    I don't believe that, since most of the scenes in the Roadhouse have seemed weird and other-worldly, while Twin Peaks "proper" has been surprisingly normal this season. Apart from the bizarre scene that Bobby saw in the stopped car with the sick girl, it's been fairly light on the weirdness and super-elevated melodrama.

    And Audrey's Dance just filled me with dread like nothing I've seen in a long while. Whatever is going on with her story, I can't imagine any version that isn't my worst nightmare. Even with monsters chewing faces and strange women suddenly appearing in dark motel doorways and faces getting pulled off to reveal blackness, the most horrifying thing for me has been the scenes with Audrey and the sense that something is very wrong and it's possible that she's been going through this for decades.


    Also: good call to Jake and Chris for pointing out Dougie's reaction to spending time with Sonny Jim. Y'all noticed that it read like he was reacting to a family life that he'd missed out, but to be honest I'd thought that was a reach. This ep all but confirms it, and it's a pretty sad story when you realize that he's lost 25 years of his life in the Black Lodge.

  3. Posted

    Robert Forster's reactions to Wally Brando were the redeeming part of that scene -- I thought it was hilarious, but it felt more like a comedy bit than like a part of the show.

     

    The funniest bit of the entire episode to me was Cooper/Dougie's little gasp of surprise when the limo driver came to open the door for him.

     

    Is Showtime selling mugs yet that say "I AM DOUGIE'S COFFEE!" in Helvetica Italic?

  4. Posted

    On 5/25/2017 at 8:21 PM, Jake said:

     

    I agree with this for whatever it's worth. I think some of the mid season 2 visual effects choices were over reaching and not actually good, but the Lynch stuff usually feels deliberate even if it's aesthetically "bad" by normal tastes. I think season 3 showcases the intentional nature of the effects really well because there are traditionally "nice" effects next to the more weird pure-idea/pure-2D-composition Lynch stuff. 

    I only saw afterwards that y'all talk about this on the first episode of the podcast, and FWIW I agree completely with your conclusions there. I was happy you mentioned that establishing shot of Manhattan because I was struck by how eerily unreal it looked but couldn't think of how to describe it.

    And probably a better example than my failed attempt at over-explaining David Lynch lighting is the way "comedy" succeeds or lands, since it can be super-tough to figure out the show's sense of humor. For me, nothing's landed as well as Nadine excitedly opening and closing the silent curtain runners; everything else is just an uncomfortable uncertainty.

     

    Also: I've gotten so annoyed hearing people go all-in on auteur theory with Twin Peaks and attribute every single thing to David Lynch and David Lynch only, so I was happy to hear y'all not only acknowledge Frost, but succinctly describe what is probably Frost's main contribution. I'm a huge fan of Frost's novels (at least the Sherlock Holmes ones) but have never been able to identify exactly what he does for Twin Peaks apart from a vague guess of "balance."

  5. Posted

    Apologies for commenting before listening to the new podcasts, but the point where I most consistently disagreed with Jake and Chris in the podcasts for the original run was re: how much was intentional and how much was just poorly done. Obviously it'd be impossible to get a definitive answer even from somebody who wasn't as notoriously "the art speaks for itself" as Lynch, but I tend to side with "intentional" almost always.

     

    For instance: one thing I'm really happy to see in the new series, and which I always associate with Twin Peaks*, is the way traveling in the woods at night is depicted. It seems to always be headlights or a flashlight against the trees, with a circle of stark, artificial clarity in the center of the frame and a huge completely black expanse everywhere else.

     

    Technically speaking, it's poorly lit. And the "standard" technique for movies and series inspired by Twin Peaks seems to go the X-Files route and have enough ambient light to fill the whole frame -- X-Files often had flashlights diffused by fog, or a preternaturally bright light just over the horizon, to make everything seem creepy, but it was still well lit. Shots in the woods in Twin Peaks are just unsettling, though. Especially when they're going to the Black Lodge. It feels like darkness is closing in on everything, and your feeble attempts to fend off the darkness can barely make a dent. To me it does the same thing as that recurring shot of a traffic light in the original series, which is that idea of civilization feebly trying to hold off darkness everywhere.

     

    So I tend to think the same for the VFX. Even when it's not intentional to convey an idea, it's still part of a unique look. The artifice draws attention to itself and is part of what makes it uniquely unsettling. I'd agree that there's some element of "good enough for what we're doing," but I don't see it as a limitation in any way -- I can imagine that "more professional" effects would just blend in with everything else and become forgettable.

     

    *(It's in Wild at Heart and long stretches of Lost Highway I guess, but it's not used exactly the same way)
     

  6. Posted

    1 hour ago, Jake said:

    Seeing the Log Lady again and the casual familiarity she and Hawk have on the phone was the most emotionally impactful though. Knowing Catherine Coulson passed away between filming her scenes and the premiere made it so sad to watch. (Thst she seemed to be playing the Log Lady as emotionally overwhelmed didn't make it easier!)

    Same here. I'm assuming they all knew that she was ill, since she was on oxygen during the scene? It played as if the show was so huge in her life and she was having to say good-bye to it.

     

     

    I only saw the first episode tonight and hope to space them out one per night (and avoid spoilers). I really enjoyed it. I was surprised how tonally different it was from the original series, but I'd compare it to Lost Highway more than anything else. (I haven't seen Inland Empire). Scenes were awkwardly paced, the look of everything was somehow between film and video, and it was so matter-of-fact in its creepiness. The effect in the monitoring room (which I'm going to have nightmares about tonight) looked almost like an X-Files-era effect. And the music was so understated that I don't remember any playing in the entire episode, diegetic or otherwise.

     

    The original series was so overwhelming with the music and melodrama that its soap opera influences were apparent. This one seems more like a subversion of Law and Order than a subversion of Peyton Place, and I'm not sure how I feel about that yet. I feel like with the original series, that layer of artifice helped distance everything that was being shown, so it was scary but never felt ghoulish. I know all those affectations annoyed some people, but to me that tone is what made the first season and a half near-perfect, and what Fire Walk With me lacked.

  8. Posted

    Also! There was the comment on the podcast that Radiator Springs rock formations in Cars Land would be analogous to if Mount Rushmore were naturally occurring.

     

    Since the peaks in the Radiator Springs mountain range are modeled and named after subsequent years of Cadillac tail fins (citation: tourist info plaque on the path from Bugs Land), it would be as if Mount Rushmore were naturally occurring and featured the Presidents' butts. 

  10. Posted

    So I've got to be That Guy and point out that the theory of "This is a post-Zynga SimCity" is way off-base. The only reason I bring it up is because I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but it's actually a slam on Maxis to suggest that the exchange of ideas between SimCity and Cityville or Farmville or whatever was anything other than one-way.

    Just about everything in the new SimCity (except for the cool data layers as in-world infographics) is a direct descendent of SimCity 4 and the "Rush Hour" expansion. It feels to me like they took the concept art and prototypes from SC4, combined them with the amazing scripted effects system that Andrew Willmott & Ocean Quigley did towards the end of the project, and then waited ten years until they could actually make an entire real-time city simulation out of it. (And made Spore in the meantime).

    That's actually a big part of what's got me excited about the game -- the effects system started out as a side project to add some visual flourishes, and over time it became more and more powerful, until they could go from idea to having it in game in a very short amount of time. It ended up being as powerful as the system I'd spent almost a year making, and it was a lot more extensible. To see that basic idea driving the entire simulation is awesome.

    It means that exchange of stuff between regions can be simulated and doesn't have to be as faked. The bit in

    where he starts a fire in his city and the fire trucks come in from the neighboring city is the best thing.

    Plus it means the behavior of the simulation is modular, not just the buildings. That's what makes the Sims series so expandable. People all over the place are complaining (predictably) about greedy old EA forcing expansion packs on innocent victims, but I think that the prospect of being able to add entire new industries or new types of services to SimCity -- instead of just cosmetic changes like new building sets -- is amazing.

  12. Posted

    I doubt it's a technical limitation of the Unreal Engine as much as a marketing one. They made a big push to position themselves as the official middleware engine for Microsoft around the same time that Microsoft was trying to hard sell consoles based on processing and graphics power. At least back in the early days of the first Xbox, there was an explicit certification requirement to include no less than n items from a list of features to show off the GPU -- particle systems, bump maps, etc. I'm sure that's changed in the >10 years since, but it seemed to set a standard for what people expected to see in a game. (And of course, NVidia is still always trying to sell video cards and looking for games to show off).

    It seems like it started a push towards screenshots with over-the-top texture density, bump maps, specular highlights, etc that gradually became accepted as "the way games look."

    I remember when World of Warcraft first came out, I was stunned by how painterly everything looked -- it's pretty standard now, but at the time it was unlike what anybody else was doing. And I remember reading tons of complaints that the art was too simple or cartoonish, I assume because people had been taught that that Gears of War screenshot above is what "realistic" was supposed to look like.

  13. Posted

    with a traditional Steam arrangement, you can potentially know a couple weeks or months in advance of your public launch if you are on Steam or not, and then you have the opportunity to plan how you close your game, and how you build your marketing campaign and assets, around that fact. If the way to go for Greenlight is "finish your game, you have to build the Steam marketing assets anyway," that seems like it's placing even more burden of unknown on developers who are trying to close and market.

    I had no idea Steam worked like this pre-Greenlight; I'd assumed it was strictly an "after-market" type deal, only listing games that had already been available elsewhere. What you're describing sounds more like XBLA and (I assume) PSN, where developers target Steam as their "main" market. (But, I'm presuming, with almost zero chance that Valve would ever act as a publisher for a 3rd-party title, unlike Sony & Microsoft).

    As for the question of "bias," I still think (like I said to Greg Brown) that it'd be welcome for Valve to have a curated section of Steam -- not even for the developers so much as because I think those guys generally have good taste in games, and I'd be even more enthusiastic about a game if Valve recommended it than if a majority of fans recommended it. I still think it'd have to be kept completely separate from Greenlight, though -- the only way Greenlight works at all is if they keep up the idea that it's the customers voting and Valve is keep completely hands-off.

  14. Posted

    I think the difference here is that, regardless of how you use Steam as a store, Valve seems to be setting up Steam Greenlight for a loop of browsing, appraising, and voting. [...] If true, that means that some amount of putting on a show (screenshots, videos, demos, vertical slices) has to happen -- in public -- a stage or two before that is usually the case. The pitch process isn't the same thing as marketing the game, but it feels like the presence of Greenlight makes those two things intermingle in a way that they didn't have to before.

    I'm not being argumentative, but this is what I'm still not getting. It seems like they've tried to present the Greenlight submissions exactly as if they were games for sale on Steam, with the only difference being that you can't actually buy it yet. So it seems to me that you'd have to put the exact same information on a Greenlight page that you would on the sale page; your end goal is the same -- would you be willing to spend money on this?

    That's assuming that Greenlight is for games that have already been finished and are ready to sale, which I assumed was the whole point of Greenlight from the start. It sounds like you're seeing more overlap with Kickstarter there, games that aren't complete but are looking for customer interest. Personally, I don't think that unfinished games should be submitted to Greenlight at all, or at least, they should be in late beta at worst. (But Valve's hands-off approach means there's no check for completion).

    What primarily worries me about Greenlight is the chicken-and-egg nature of it all: the games which have enough momentum to make it through Greenlight are most likely to be the games that won't benefit the most from that attention. [...] I'd much prefer it if they instead took a more active role in advocating for games that they thought would be interesting to their audience, and that push gaming forward. I can understand that Valve probably wants to be more hands-off about this and simply ensure they're efficiently picking any low-hanging fruit out there, but it could be so much more if they were willing to invest more effort.

    I can understand that, but I think that Greenlight and what you're talking about would necessarily be two completely different things. There's no room for ambiguity as with the "is this like Kickstarter or is it just like selling already completed, established games?", where the answer is "both? kind of? maybe?" If Valve got in the business of doing "Editor's Picks" (which I think could be a good idea, for what it's worth) then it'd have to be completely separate from any type of crowd-sourced thing, or else Valve's picks would get lost. And then of course you'd go back to what I mentioned with Apple's editor's picks & the like -- suddenly Valve isn't an objective third party and is opening themselves up to accusations of favoritism.

  15. Posted

    But there's another angle about Steam making indie games / developers bigger - it's the barrier of entry to have content hosted and sold. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all have these super bizarre conditions and certification processes.

    I'm not sure I completely understand your point. Is the objection to the $100 fee, or to having Greenlight be crowd-sourced instead of curated?

    Steam is still easier to deal with than the console publishers, and from what little I've heard, it's even easier to deal with than Apple. It seems to me that putting Valve people into the position of curator or gatekeeper would push things more in the direction of Nintendo, Microsoft, et. al. They're no longer representing "what the people want," but "how Valve wants to sell the image of its platform."

    Greenlight is just tailor made for certain kinds of games, and although I really look forward to playing games like Black Mesa or Routine, which are Greenlight success stories, I really really enjoy games like Thirty Flights of Loving which really ought to be just shoved into someone's hands with zero information.

    I don't think I understand that bit, either. The trailer for Thirty Flights does a fine job of saying what the game is (a "short story", sequel to Gravity Bone, etc) without spoiling any of the surprises of it. Again, I may be an oddball since I never buy stuff after browsing randomly through Steam; I only buy off of recommendations, or from a developer (like Blendo) who consistently makes good stuff. So I don't think you have to make a trailer or landing page that tells the player absolutely everything about the game.

    I don't think "zero information" is the way to go, either, though. You've got to establish what the game looks like, a rough idea of what type of game it is, and just enough to provide the hook. That was actually one of the things that I disagreed with Telltale management about, but gradually changed my mind over time: I think we actually did have a tendency to get a little too precious about withholding information from players for fear of "spoiling" it.

  16. Posted

    Yeah I'm saying I don't like when people go in this direction with stealth games. I'm not saying it's badly made or anything.

    Metal Gear had vision cones on the radar, but they could see way further than that, so it was more just to show which way the dots were facing. And that's not the same as having them stuck on the guys' faces.

    The guards would look in lockers and pathfind around hallways following footprints and generally use their intuition and be unpredictable sometimes.

    Laying all the information on the screen with like throwing-arcs and last-known-position n all that stuff I think takes out the tension and suprise n makes it way less fun.

    I THINK the real strength of stealth games is to make everything feel like a game of natural, capable humans wandering around.

    The kinda stealth game where that's all binary and you just figure out the path to get to the end? No thanks!

    Mark of the Ninja isn't binary, but it's most definitely puzzle-oriented. There are multiple solutions to the puzzles, sure, so it's not as this-key-fits-this-lock as an adventure game, but they're definitely going more for cleverness (and general ninja bad-assery) than immersion.

    But for me, the stuff you object to is exactly what "fixes" stealth games. The most recent ones I played were Arkham City and Arkham Asylum, and they have pretty much the same problem as every other stealth game I've played -- they're trying to deliver on the sense of immersion and seamlessness that it sounds like you're talking about, but the premise is simply too artificial to support it.

    It looks like it should have all the common-sense rules of gauging whether you're hidden or not, but a) you're not actually there, so it's impossible to tell for sure; and 2) the enemies still have arbitrary vision cones, even if they're not made explicit by the UI. I have yet to encounter one of those games that didn't have the same problem: it's about 80-90% realistic, but still impossible to completely avoid situations where the enemy AI or hearing/sight rules don't work like you'd expect.

    For me, the exceptions end up breaking the immersion and make the entire thing seem artificial. I'd much rather have the game make everything absolutely explicit -- I know it's all based on vision cones and hearing radii, and the developer knows that, so why pretend? Not only does Mark of the Ninja make all that feedback really cool-looking, it makes it explicit what the rules of the game are, so my mind fills in all the storytelling business. Left brain is pressing B button to hide behind all-too-conveniently placed urn until the guard's hearing radius no longer intersects my dart-noise radius; right brain is saying "hell yes this is awesome I'm totally a ninja."

  17. Posted

    2) When your opening is "anyone who disagrees is wrong," you relinquish your right to be surprised if an Internet argument ensues in its wake.

    When you post something on the internet, you relinquish your right to be surprised if an argument ensues in its wake.

    And anyway, what else am I going to do if not argue (with wrong people) on the internet?

  18. Posted

    I have opinions about Greenlight!

    My crotchety-old-man take on the complaints about the $100 fee is here: http://www.spectreco...2/09/greenlight

    (Short version: the question isn't whether a person without $100 is "good enough" to be on Steam; it's whether a game that can't drum up $100 worth of interest is going to be worth putting up on Steam in the first place.)

    But what jumped out at me from listening to the podcast: several of the people being vocal about it -- in particular you guys & Ben Kuchera at PA Report -- are saying, essentially, that Valve's in a unique position to create an audience for obscure indie games. But that's got it reversed, I think: the only thing unique about Valve's position is that they can turn indie games into profit. It's you guys, on podcasts, blogs, news sites attached to popular webcomics, etc, that can bring attention to a game and create an audience for it.

    I know I've never bought anything just from browsing Steam. I have bought stuff, sight unseen, after hearing about it on Idle Thumbs, Joystiq, or a message board posting.

    It's reasonable to assume that Valve could afford to get into curation & moderation with Steam. But is that the way they want to go? It hasn't worked that great for Apple -- I'll pay attention to stuff on their "what's hot" list and the "Editor's Choice" sections, but they're constantly getting bad PR from the approval and submission process. On the same day, I've seen complaints that they're ridiculously strict right alongside complaints that they'll let anything and everything into the store, sometime on the same site.

    As an outsider to the whole submission process, it's always seemed like Valve tries to stay as neutral as possible with Steam. I never get a sense of "Valve thinks this is cool" -- unless they put game-themed hats into TF2 as a cross-promotion or something -- but "Valve thinks this is popular" or "your friends recommend this" or "based on what you've already bought, here are some algorithmic suggestions." If they ever become more visible as curators, then they'll become The Man.

    Which may be unavoidable, since people are already saying "they've got enough money that they should be giving indie developers free advertising and exposure," even when they made it clear that they went to crowd-sourcing recommendations specifically to avoid taking that position, and that all the money they get in fees goes to charity.

  19. Posted

    People who don't like this game are just wrong. I'm about the worst at it, and I'm still not far past the second level, even after playing for hours, and I still think it's the best.

    What if something looked as awesome as Shank but was actually a game, and what if somebody made a stealth game where you actually had enough feedback on being stealthy?