pyide

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by pyide


  1. I thought that was just the sunlight reflecting off the windows, but on second look.. wtf? 


    Could still be reflections, the camera is moving while the plane is turning and banking, there are a lot of factors which could explain the bizarre pattern it appears to have. I don't know. Brain expects reflections to be more uniform, and not hitting both sides of something but not the middle, like some of the windows on the plane here. Can't make sense of it.


  2. Great episode. Lots of detail. Things are in motion, plenty confirmed, and a few more mysteries. Plus another gross Renault, and some Lynchian audio creeping into Sleepwalk over the credits. That was unsettling.


    One question: There's this guy who busts into the RR diner near the end of the episode asking if anyone had seen Bing, and Riley Lynch is credited as Bing, but who was Bing? Was he the guy Andy was talking to who asked him to meet later and never showed? Or someone obvious I missed? Was Bing the guy at the diner asking about Bing as a joke? I'm confused here.


  3. 7 hours ago, suzyisbored said:

    i'm confused about the location of the trailer park... i thought it was in deer meadow, oregon but apparently it's close enough to be driving to twin peaks every day? am i missing something?

     

    2 hours ago, Gregalor said:

     

    I'm finishing up The Secret History and I seem to remember it mentioning that Deer Meadow is just one county over. How Twin Peaks is near both the Oregon and Canadian border, beats me.

     

    There's an addition to the sign that reads "NEW" so it's called the New Fat Trout Trailer Park in the series where it was just the Fat Trout Trailer Park in the movie. I'm not sure if this means he moved the location or started a whole new one or simply updated the name. The numbers on the pole were the same as the ones in the trailer park from FWWM so it's probably meant to be the same place, but they couldn't actually film in that same exact location as before for whatever reason. The sign itself is also in a completely different spot. Whatever the reason, I'm assuming it's supposed to be in the same general area around or between Deer Meadow and Twin Peaks because it is still within driving distance.


  4. 57 minutes ago, fellintooblivion said:

     

    Did you watch the rest of the episode?

     

    The Air Force said they have had people entering his prints into a search 16 times in the past 25 years.

     

    I don't understand how you can take that as confirmation the body was Briggs' without some real willful ignoring of facts.

     

    Well the prints that were blocked were from the headless body, so I guess it was more confirmation that the military block was related to Briggs, than the body actually being Briggs.
    And I must have been distracted during that scene inititally because I thought they said it was the second hit on the prints in years, definitely not the case on a rewatch. Woops! Not even close!

     

    The Colonel also said it's possibly another wild goose chase, but if it is real this time, they have to alert the FBI. Seems like obvious foreshadowing to me but nothing is that simple in this show.


  5. So the corpse with the missing head and the military classification on the prints was Major Briggs, as most assumed. But he had Dougie's wedding band in his stomach? That's odd, has to be a deliberate plant. But was he possibly used to help create Dougie as well?

    Cooper's scenes continue to be hilarious, and Bad Coop seems to be in much better shape this episode than I assumed he'd be after the state he was in last time. There's so much to unpack in this one despite not a lot moving forward on the whole. Need to watch it again.


    Also, nice little nod to Don Davis by naming Ernie Hudson's character Colonel Davis.


  6. "Now one of you must die"

     

    Since Blank Coop appeared, Bad Coop has begun to deteriorate, very obvious in the interrogation scene.

    I feel like he's going to slip even further as Blank Coop recovers a bit more to his former Normal Cooper self, but I'd wager both are only going to be operating at half capacity from then on until one of them is gone.

    Who knows how long that will be? Could be many episodes for all we know. Mike seemed to indicate they cannot co-exist properly in the real world.


  7. 17 hours ago, Urthman said:

    Well, given that one side of the match-up consists mostly of long, drawn-out, time-shifting shots of Cooper falling or looking at weird stuff, it seems like it wouldn't require much precision to get everything to match.  A few extra seconds of Cooper in space, a few extra bits cut out (or sped-up, or rewound) of the glitchy scene with the eyeless woman, and it all lines up.  All Lynch would have to say is, "This bit with Cooper in the box happens when the guy was out of the room, and that bit with the woman making slashing noises coincides with those two getting killed" and the editor could pretty easily make it happen.  It wouldn't really need to have been planned out at all before they did the filming.  And I can definitely imagine Lynch enjoying the serendipity of making the bit where Cooper is dangling in space go on even more uncomfortably-too-long than he originally intended just so the timing lines up right.

    For me, the most surprising and freaky bit was how the terrifying knocking/banging starts exactly when they start having sex.  Cliché perhaps, or maybe even an eye-rolling pun, but that part was really creepy the first time I watched this mash-up.

     

    The banging noise is part of what makes me think it's all just a coincidence, because when he comes back into the room with the "American Girl" it starts up again and she urges him to leave. And this is some time after no-eyes is zapped off into space and the two are dead. But then that whole scene could be a reset of sorts, I don't know.


  8. 1 hour ago, UnpopularTrousers said:

    I too hated Lucy's dumb cellphone reaction. There was a scene in original Twin Peaks where she keeps talking to someone over the sheriff's department intercom after they have left the room and then when they run up front, she is scared and baffled by how they could be in two places at once. The updated scene really doesn't work though and is made all the more dumb by the fact that the twin peaks sheriff's department has always had mobile radios.

     

    While watching I immediately thought of their mobile radios when Andy was trying to comfort her and again explain how people can talk on phones while walking around and driving now. Wasn't she the sole dispatcher in that place back then? Absolutely ridiculous that wireless communication would now be confusing to her 25+ years later.


  9. 23 hours ago, Maple Syrup and Ham said:

    I also found it interesting how Mike knew to cover his eyes just before Dougie turned into the gold ball, has Mike seen this before? He certainly looked perturbed, he was maybe expecting DoppleCoop to be the one who was there.

     

    Definitely something that stood out to me, although Mike doesn't shield his eyes until that odd grey (electric tree-like) head thing appears after the clothes propped up by the black smoke fall away. He definitely sees some of the gold ball floating around before that.

     

    Someone mentioned it could be related to whatever killed those two getting it on in front of the glass box in Part 1, as that thing didn't attack them until they were looking at it. Hard to discern with it shaking around so much, but the head on that thing did appear to be slightly different than the post-Dougie apparition, and more than just a floating head blob of course. As Mike is shielding his eyes, the head blob thing in the red room sort of deflates and flies around with the gold ball until it disappears in some flashes of light and a small gold ball is all that's left. The head could just be a glimpse of whatever evil Bob used to construct Dougie. IDK. It did look similar in shape to the evolved Arm / electric tree head, but no electric branches attached which makes it seem like something else entirely.

     

    Speaking of that, were there two different electric trees in Part 2? One was purported to be to be the evolution of the Man From Another Place aka The Arm, but it seemed like another one appeared later (its own doppelganger?) which freaked out then said "non-exist-ent!" and sent Cooper on that ride. The first tree head was a fleshy pink color and the one that freaked out was a gross sickly yellow. And whatever that was that appeared after Dougie vanished was grey.

     

    6 hours ago, purps said:

    Regarding the room with the outlet and the woman with no eyes, a user on the Twin Peaks subreddit has a theory that I think makes total sense

     

    https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/6dz7ad/s3e3_electricity_and_what_went_wrong/

     

    I agree that I think the reason Cooper is so out of it is due to the fact that his re-entrance to the real world has gone wrong, and not just because he's been gone 25 years. I say this because Cooper does seem to be capable of comprehending and participating in a conversation when he talks to Laura and the Giant in previous episodes.

     

    That guy could be right on the money, but it all seems a bit too specific and elaborate to be accurate. And I personally don't buy the correlation with the gold ball to the real Cooper he's trying to make.

     

    I took Cooper's behavior in part as a result of the transference itself seriously messing him up, in addition to the long amount of time spent there (didn't Major Briggs show some problems after vanishing for just 2 days? Crossing over and coming back seems to have some effect on otherwise normal humans).

     

    Anyway, when he first gets close to the outlet before getting completely sucked in, he's zapped loudly and in a puff of smoke backs off with a wide-eyed and confused and then part empty look on his face, as if he's already getting a taste of what's to come. It's a huge expression for someone who has been nearly expressionless the entire time we've seen him in this limbo, which also seems to do him no physical harm otherwise - like falling forever into nothing only to land on a concrete slab and getting up like a cartoon character without a scratch. But simply getting near the outlet definitely had a substantial effect on him. And that was just a brief encounter with this phenomena, when he fully commits to going through the shock his body & mind is subjected to could be exponentially worse and take a while to recover from. That's the most basic explanation I could give to what's happening, but also likely to be completely wrong.

     

    There is a brief moment of recollection in Cooper's face to what Laura said to him during a previous episode in the red room when Jade says "Yes. You can go out now" when dropping him off at the casino. Cooper visibly reacts to this more than anything else up to that point in the real world, showing he might be able to come back from whatever is wrong with him. Plus Lynch also beats the viewer over the the head with this info by overlaying the footage of Laura herself saying "You can go out now" after Cooper shows some recognition. It's also an odd phrase for someone to use when telling someone else to get out of their car, seemed very deliberate on the author's part.


  10. I don't know what to make of this series so far. Seems like in just 4 hours there's been more weird and bizarre than all of the previous Twin Peaks. Or close to it. I don't think that's a bad thing, but all these meandering vignettes with no payoff (yet) seem to be taking priority, although the story is starting to take shape.

     

    If nothing else, it is all quite interesting and mysterious, really want to see where it all goes and how it all fits together, if it even fits together. Also a bit strange that for a show called Twin Peaks, very little of it actually takes place in Twin Peaks, but that doesn't mean all of this other stuff isn't related or connected somehow.


    Only real negative for me so far is the lack of music. I enjoy Lynch's sound design but I feel the more unsettling stuff in the original show stood out and was far more effective when contrasted to the cheeseball music in all the other scenes. I don't think I'd want music all the time like the classic Twin Peaks, but all the absence of score and soundtrack has become trying, especially in the funnier bits. I was really pumped to hear Take Five of all things come in during that breakfast scene just to have something else finally going on. When it first began I thought it was just that classic drum riff coming back and got real excited, haha.


  11. On 5/19/2017 at 0:42 PM, Argobot said:

    I don't think we'll get Windom Earle, which is a shame. That character had potential and in some cases was used really well. In some other cases...not so much.

     

    I didn't follow the Thumbs' rewatch podcast a few years back because I wanted to save it all for right before the new Showtime series finally aired.

     

    I seriously forgot that character was even in the show until doing my own rewatch recently (first viewing since the Gold Box DVD era). The imagery of BOB taking his "soul" at the end has always stayed with me, but in my head the character was someone else completely, I had replaced him with MIKE in that moment.


    You're right he was used well in a few instances but I can't say I'll miss him. Plus he sort of met his end as it were in Lynch's finale of the original series. Of course nothing really seems definite or final in this world. I don't think I'd mind if he came back because was still a sizable part of the latter end of the series and could probably be better utilized by Lynch himself, but I also can't imagine how or why his character would return. And with the way his story ended so abruptly, to me it seemed like Lynch didn't care that whole storyline and where it went and so he basically washed his hands of it.

     

    I haven't read any of the ancillary stuff surrounding the production of the old and new Twin Peaks so I really have no idea. I will say it was nice to see Kenneth Welsh pop up recently in the indie horror flick The Void, he delivers a decent and creepy performance. The movie is not that good, but still worth a watch if you dig well realized practical effects, rare these days.


  12. Thanks for reminding me about the brief season 3 of Review! Really enjoyed the first two series but forget they were going to put some more episodes out. 

     

    Andy Daly is a hilarious character comedian and improviser who never seemed to find real mainstream success, he pops up now and then in a few movies and shows but usually just bit parts. 

    Before Review, I mostly knew him from his many character appearances on podcasts like Comedy Bang Bang (previously Comedy Death Ray Radio) over the years.

    He also did a short podcast series of his own with multiple characters dubbed the Andy Daly Podcast Pilot Project that's worth checking out. He also has an older comedy album release called 9 Sweaters that's full of his various characters.


  13. The Titanfall 2 time

     

    switching stuff reminded me a lot of worlds of the living and dead switching for platforming in Guacamelee! (great game btw), but in first person 3D. Was really well done yet brief in that it lasted for a couple of levels. I was really impressed with how responsive it was in switching between what seemed like 2 different levels on the fly, complete with different geometry and textures and enemies. No hiccups or delay. I never considered that sort of thing could be possible outside of lighter 2D stuff like Guacamelee! or Outland. Even the combat in that section made a lasting impression. You can flash to the other time to avoid enemies, and it shows a blue cloud where the enemies in the other time you just left were for a short period. So you can blink, run behind them in the other time period, then blink back in to get the drop on them. It gets hectic too, when there's enemies attacking you in both time periods and you're blinking back and forth trying to both avoid and take them down. That was probably the best time I had with the combat scenarios in that game, although it's still fun to wall run around and drop kick guys from above when you get tired of shooting them. The slide maneuver is enjoyable, too. And you can use it to keep some momentum going if you prep the slide by crouching in the air before you land.

     

    I normally don't care about collectables in games, but the helmets scattered about these levels give you additional excuse to do some more platforming. Some are hidden but many of them are visible and require you to just figure out how to get to them. Nice little bonus / side distraction from all the shooting in between.

     

    As for guns, there is a lot of standard fare, though there is a quake style rocket launcher in there, the EPG? It's in a few sections of the campaign and fires a blue ball of energy instead of a rocket, but it's real fun to use in the multiplayer. It's exactly what the type of weapon I found to be missing in the first game, which had all these awesome movement and traversal abilities and speed hampered by standard Call of Duty type guns, most of which were more effective if you stopped moving to aim and shoot. It's a skill based projectile weapon like the spin fuser / disc launcher of Tribes or rocket launcher of the arena shooters like Quake & UT. It's easy to avoid at range and doesn't have much splash damage, but direct hits are real satisfying and I believe one hit kills. I feel like I'm playing a different game when I'm flying around the level and trying to land a perfect shot with a projectile that I have to lead on another player that's moving fast through the skies, when everyone else seems to be sticking with the standard weapons that dump bullets. I played a lot of the first game but the multiplayer in the sequel didn't start clicking until I began using that. If it's not available from the start it has got to be a real early unlock (within the first 1-3 levels), try it out if you ever give the multiplayer a chance.


  14. Journey was actually referenced when they were originally talking about the multiplayer aspects, so is Dark Souls. They mention preferring multiplayer to be restricted to a lobby of sorts around the player (I suppose like an instanced bubble), and limited to only a few others at the most who could enter this area at a time. And that there would be no nameplates or anything so you wouldn't be sure if they were AI or human (like Journey). They mention most of this and more in a lot of ifs and maybes and theoreticals as you can read in the interview. So it seems they wanted to do something with genuine multiplayer from the jump, and people seeing bits like this and the Colbert thing and more assumed it would have something like that, but it ended up not making the cut along the way for whatever reasons. Possibly because of the difficulty of implementing it and making it work along with the continual insistence that 2 players would never meet regardless. Yet that did not stop Sean Murray from being real cagey and vague about these multiplayer elements and so much more right up to the release.

     

    I don't think the game needs multiplayer, but some of that stuff they talked about in the past could have been neat.


  15. Each level in Doom has a hidden 

    room of a classic map, and when you open and find that room it unlocks the full level to play with the new doom guns and enemies from the campaign menu where you resume. "Classic Maps" is the section I believe. It's pretty spiffy, and also shows you that while the movement speed in the main game seems fast compared to modern shooters, it's still fairly slow compared to the original Doom run speed.


  16. When I hear someone say "explore more" in a Souls game, I take that more as try to look and poke around everywhere you can and less internalize everything. There is a lot of stuff tucked away in these levels. Hidden weapons and armors and items, rare enemies, optional bosses, unique NPCs and quest givers and vendors, shortcuts and sometimes entire swaths of levels. All of this and more you can miss out on if you don't explore, which is a large part of why I love these games. I like digging around for stuff and trying every possible path at least once. Even as a stubborn explorer type who is still not close to done with the game, I've missed a lot of stuff in Dark Soul 3 the first time through this world. A few days ago I went back to some of the initial larger areas and explored some more (with less fear of being killed as I had leveled up my guy and weapons some) and ended up finding hours of content I had straight up missed. And I was fucking thrilled. This game is amazing.

     

    I haven't done a lot of coop in DS3, but I did a ton of it in DS2. There's nothing to worry about there. It's a great way to become embered as well if you are short on ember consumables and want that extra health or the ability to summon folks. If you put your sign down and are summoned to someone else's game and beat the boss, you are sent back to your world embered and with some extra souls. And if you die and fail, you're just put back to where you were summoned with no penalty. It's not like dying in your own world. There is literally no downside to joining coop. Hosting coop is a bit different when you die - it's the same as normal, but know that the people you summon have no penalty on failure as mentioned. If anything, getting them in your game will help them learn the fight for their own world in a stress free scenario, possibly get them some extra souls, or if successful, embered status. The only downside to coop is the bosses are given more HP, but with 2-3 people hitting them instead it evens out. There are also some NPCs you can summon for various boss fights when you are embered. You can even re-do bosses you have already beaten by putting your sign down and helping others, again a great way to get free ember or earn some extra souls. You'll know the fight so it will be easier, and if you die it doesn't matter at all.


  17. On the comparisons to fighting games, the timing of the super dash (not sure what it's actually called!) unlock in Hyper Light Drifter reminded me a lot of combo systems in some fighting games like the SF series. You can't just mash it out, if you press the next button for the follow up dash too slowly or two fast, you'll drop it. It has a unique ramp up, though. Slow, medium, then steady. Very difficult to time in the heat of battle, even by the end of the game I was still missing the timing a fair amount.

     

    There's that room inside the shop you buy it where you can practice it forever by dashing in a giant circle, crossing tiles on the floor regenerate your meter that otherwise limits you on how many dashes you can string together (along with some other abilities). It's one of the most interesting upgrades in the game, changes how you can move in battle and outside quite a bit, you should really make it the next thing you buy if you don't have it already.


  18. Important PSA: concealment in XCOM 2 is for setting up a perfect first strike on the initial group of enemies, not for bypassing them completely. It's actually a bad thing to slip past too many enemies, because spotting them in concealment technically still counts as them being spotted, so they'll seek you out once you're revealed, unlike unspotted enemies. After a series of attempts to stealth entire missions, which all went down in flames with a dozen enemies closing on my squad, I've come to agree with the PC Gamer guide that staying in concealment for too many turns is probably even worse than losing concealment early to a bad move, because the latter allows you to overextend yourself without it being reported to you as such.

     

    That's a good point. I'd generally set up ambushes on one of the first groups I came upon after experiencing something similar when trying to sneak it all the way. It might be doable on the small number of missions where your goal is to grab something and manually evac, but the vast majority of them require you to eliminate all the aliens as a mandatory objective (which feels a bit at odds with the whole guerilla tactics vibe in XCOM2), and you're much better off not getting gangbanged by a dozen of them at once.


  19. The start of XCOM2 is absolutely brutal. I had a few outright wipes and restarted 6 times until I got the hang of everything on Commander/Ironman. After you start getting better weapons and gear and know what to expect form the new enemies (Stun Lancers were my bane) it really starts to even out. I was also lost with the whole Avatar Project thing, thinking I was doing everything wrong or totally missing certain details as it ticked up constantly,

    when it's really not that big of a deal. You can push it until it's full and then until the final day after the doomsday counter the starts ticking down before tackling a red base or story mission which should reduce some of the progress.

    I don't think that's a spoiler so much as information that's not really explained to you outright, thought I should tag it nonetheless.
     
    Early on I'd say flashbangs are invaluable, and mimic beacons remain overpowered until the very end. They are a serious get of out jail free card.

     

    And if you're having a lot of performance issues, I'd consider capping the game to 30fps. I had a much better time after doing so, consistency beats the occasional 60fps with constant drops and hitches, plus then I could comfortably increase all the details except MSAA.


  20. The thing you guys were saying about the puzzles in The Witness taking a turn for the difficult after first 30 minutes I somewhat understand, I was just following the breadcrumb trail of progression in the glowing cables from puzzle to puzzle until the game turned me loose. I spent a few minutes exploring the immediate area and came across a few puzzles I had no clue how to solve, but instead of beating my head against the wall on it, I wandered somewhere else, toward something that in the distance that looked intriguing
     

    What I learned from that fairly early, is that many of the distinct areas you'll explore also have their own learning stages and ramping up to introduce a specific puzzle mechanic like the opening. And then continue with their own glowing trails of progression. Some are easier than the opening section, some are more difficult, some go from 0 to 60 in 2 seconds, while some barely require any thought at all. But if you ever run into a puzzle you don't comprehend, exploring the island alone will bring you to some simpler puzzles, or the tutorials for those ones you were clueless about before. It's so open and there's so much to see, I never saw a difficult puzzle as a roadblock until I was at the very end, because there was always somewhere else to explore, and a totally different puzzle to try. There's dozens of different things you could be doing at any one time. Perhaps you simply had not played enough at the time of recording to take that all in, has your opinion on that changed any after putting more time in?

     

    Even after finishing the game, I went back and promptly found stuff I missed in the first 25 hours, despite being what I thought was incredibly thorough. The island may seem small after a while, but it's very dense, and exploring it was just as rewarding as solving a long puzzle chain for me. So my advice instead of just taking a break and coming back later when stumped would be to set off in a new direction, there's plenty of other stuff to see and do.


  21. While it's not an obvious bug, there is some sort of memory leak / performance degredation type stuff in Just Cause 3. The game plays fine for me for about 10-15 minutes and then it starts dropping from 60fps to the 40s and below and never recovers until I restart the game. I've seen a ridiculous amount of folks mention similar issues online when I went looking for solutions, some have even said the console versions have identical performance drops. Not sure if it was ever fixed.

     

    Fun game, though. Especially after someone finally put out an vertical fov fix, when you're driving or on foot & shooting the narrow, zoomed in view is pretty rough. I kept getting sick after a few minutes.