Jake

Idle Thumbs 183: The Anonymouses

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Yeah, a lot of the makeup doesn't hold up all that well with the added detail. The funniest thing to me is how much more obvious the stunt doubles are. None of that pulls me out of the experience, but I can see how it could bother people.

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Rebirth on PC has a smoothing filter that you can toggle, but nothing that I've found reverts it to the old art style. The filter isn't in the Vita version, and I haven't played PS4 yet, so I don't know about that one.

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I don't think the fuzziness is ENTIRELY the fault of SD video itself as a standard -- it's guaranteed to partly be the fault of very old film to video telecine transfer technology. A lot of film used to be transferred to tape basically by projecting it into a small screen that a video camera was pointed at (unideal!), and then copied from tape to tape after that (which is a very lossy process).

Now film is transferred to video by being scanned in, the way you would scan a photo developed to a slide to run in National Geographic (aka an incredibly high quality-retaining process designed to preserve as much detail as possible).

For instance before Twin Peaks was on Blu Ray it was re scanned and cleaned up on DVD and it already looked a million times better than it had in years but was still SD. The quality then went over the top with the HD release a few years later. So I think it's a few aspects at work.

 

Interesting! Yeah, SD was a lazy shorthand on my part, I was thinking of the crappy kind of transfer you describe..

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Oh, I forgot to ask whichever Thumb(s) it is that loves Batman '66 whether they've read any of the recent comics based on it?

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Yeah, a lot of the makeup doesn't hold up all that well with the added detail. The funniest thing to me is how much more obvious the stunt doubles are. None of that pulls me out of the experience, but I can see how it could bother people.

 

A little while ago I heard somebody advance an argument about Dr. Who that I think is relevant (I forget the source). Basically, he said that complaining that Daleks, as presented (big stupid trash cans) aren't actually scary is kind of missing the point. You have to just buy into the fact that the Dalek represents the idea of something scary. A dragon in a stage play obviously isn't a real dragon. It's a representation of a dragon, you accept the artifice due to budget / scope limitations and move on.

 

The problem is that in the modern era, where effects and CG can make things that are actually scary, this gets lost a little bit. Especially with modern Dr. Who where you mix actual scary looking things (CG monsters) with these theatrical representations.

 

Japanese Bunraku theater has a convention where the stagehands dress all in black and so you pretend they don't exist. Ignoring them is actually a sort of acquired skill, but eventually, they just melt away and all you see are the puppets. It's kind of neat.

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The best thing about those two covers is that they both adhere to a contractual obligation that any poster/cover art for the movie must represent Lancaster and Curtis' faces at the same scale, so as not to imply a greater "starring" role for either one of them. The Criterion cover obviously does it in a much subtler and more meaningful way, by putting a photo of Lancaster in the background so we understand that in the actual world his face would be at 3x scale looming over Curtis, while still keeping the literal depiction in line with the requirement.

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There was some misinformation regarding Evolve

 

1.  The human players don't immediately see the monster at the beginning of the match.  The monster has around a 15-20 second head start to run away from the hunters.  Odds are the players won't see the monster for several minutes.

 

2.  The monster plays entirely in 3rd person, it would be much harder to play as the monster in first person since he has to keep track of 4 humans swarming all around him.

 

I played mainly as the monster during the alpha and had a lot of fun.  Lots of target switching and prioritization as the monster as you try to take out the medic and support classes first.  You also have to be quick to respond to the individual tactics of good hunters.

 

Also the part where Nick stated that the monster runs at the same speed as the hunters and they were just going around the mountain forever, the medic has a Tranq gun that severely slows the monster down for several seconds + outlines him through obstacles.  A good medic will keep the monster tranq'd long enough for the trapper to put the dome up thus forcing the fight.

 

I played mostly medic and it didn't seem like the tranq gun was doing much, and it didn't really last long enough. If I wanted to tranq the monster, it basically was a full time job, no time for healing, let alone snipping. My biggest complaint is that none of the matches I played ever seemed close. Either the monster creamed us right off the bat, it got to level 3 and destroyed us, or we caught and shredded it. 

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Japanese Bunraku theater has a convention where the stagehands dress all in black and so you pretend they don't exist. Ignoring them is actually a sort of acquired skill, but eventually, they just melt away and all you see are the puppets. It's kind of neat.

 

There's an anime from a decade or so back called Princess Tutu that draws a ton of inspiration from stage performance, including having stagehands dressed in black assist with some of the action sequences. They're never really acknowledged or spoken to by any of the characters, so it's not clear if they're really there or not. It's a weird decision for an animated series to make, but it does a really good job of contributing to the series' ongoing theme of reality being corrupted by fantasy.

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That one dude in the Criterion cover looks a lot like Roger Moore. Way more than the actual guy looked like Roger Moore, judging from the other cover.

 

So, I guess my point is, if I bought the Criterion one, I'd be super pissed that James Bond wasn't in it. Worst movie ever, one star.

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The best thing about those two covers is that they both adhere to a contractual obligation that any poster/cover art for the movie must represent Lancaster and Curtis' faces at the same scale, so as not to imply a greater "starring" role for either one of them. The Criterion cover obviously does it in a much subtler and more meaningful way, by putting a photo of Lancaster in the background so we understand that in the actual world his face would be at 3x scale looming over Curtis, while still keeping the literal depiction in line with the requirement.

 

Probably a lobby card:

 

sweet+smell+of+success7.jpg

 

Re Image restoration: Pauline Stakelon, who restored The Goldbergs for a DVD set, wrote A Case for Imperfection: Confessions of a Digital Restoration Artist. She specifically means the imperfections of kinescopes: Of the 71 extant episodes of The Goldbergs only the complete last season is available as 35mm film, the remaining episodes exist only as kinescopes.

 

Somewhat related: Nick Pinkerton's argument for the imperfections of film versus the perfect digital image.

 

Related: The Minnesotan Muller Family Theatres prepare a 70mm copy of Interstellar for projection:

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I disagree with the idea that better visual quality will make older movies more appealing to people. If you look at people's listening habits, they've basically spent the last couple of decades moving to formats with decidedly worse audio quality for the sake of convenience/cheapness. While there is a market for people that would rather listen to vinyl than mp3s, or people that are interested in a properly remastered album, those people (and full disclosure: this includes me) are a distinct minority of music listeners. I suspect the same is true with restored older films. This is tremendously exciting for connoisseurs, but most people aren't going to give a shit. They're just going to watch whatever is new on Netflix.

 

On a completely different topic, I agree with tberton about L4D2. Thematically it was less interesting than the first game, but the gameplay was way better, and the multiplayer was way better as the infected compared to the first game.

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I disagree with the idea that better visual quality will make older movies more appealing to people. If you look at people's listening habits, they've basically spent the last couple of decades moving to formats with decidedly worse audio quality for the sake of convenience/cheapness. While there is a market for people that would rather listen to vinyl than mp3s, or people that are interested in a properly remastered album, those people (and full disclosure: this includes me) are a distinct minority of music listeners. I suspect the same is true with restored older films. This is tremendously exciting for connoisseurs, but most people aren't going to give a shit. They're just going to watch whatever is new on Netflix.

 

On a completely different topic, I agree with tberton about L4D2. Thematically it was less interesting than the first game, but the gameplay was way better, and the multiplayer was way better as the infected compared to the first game.

I don't know if I'd compare vinyl vs mp3 to this thing about remastering TV/movies. mp3s are wholly acceptable quality and most people don't even notice the difference. Not to mention the sheer convenience. A digitally-available TV/movie remaster is an entirely different thing! In my opinion. (That said, I agree with your overall argument, so I guess I'm just being a pedantic ass.)

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Oh no oh no oh no, I just heard Sean say something about re-scoping FIREWATCH after playing 80 Days, and I ran here because one must never, never, never make design decisions after having just been impressed by another game.

 

Which I'm sure Sean knows, or maybe I misunderstand the extent of the changes. Whatever, either way I have faith in you, but a chill ran down my spine after hearing that scenario described. Bad memories of a project that never got off the ground, that's all.

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I feel like there's a couple of different topics being conflated here. An HD video remaster from film is just taking advantage of the portable format's ability to store more information, but that information already exists in the original film. 

 

With a situation like the the kinescopes, there's a situation where you're trying to artificially improve the image quality by, basically, removing information (reducing film grain) or artificially introducing new information (sharpening lines, etc). This kind of process is always going to be an aesthetic call on the part of the restorer.

 

I think the former is a lot more acceptable than the latter, because from a archival perspective, removing information isn't doing any good at all.

 

(The former case probably has some measure of cleanup for the film transfer, but I assume the scope is pretty different).

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I found the whole discussion on remasters interesting because the two genres of visual media about which I have the most knowledge (television and anime) both have this unfortunate period between 1998/1999 and 2005/2006 where film masters were switched to digital, but everything everything was still saved at standard definition, so there's literally no information there to move to high definition. Farscape and FLCL are two of the most unfortunate examples of this, especially because companies want to release Blu-ray content anyway and therefore just do really aggressive DNR and edge enhancement in order to make fundamentally SD content look HD. It's gross.

 

Also, and unrelatedly, Sean's Bane voice makes me realize that he must like the "oh no" at least in part just for how it sounds, as do I. I would happily have an entire podcast where Sean just repeats pieces of things that the other Thumbs have said in the Bane voice.

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Also, and unrelatedly, Sean's Bane voice makes me realize that he must like the "oh no" at least in part just for how it sounds, as do I. I would happily have an entire podcast where Sean just repeats pieces of things that the other Thumbs have said in the Bane voice.

 

"I'm Sean Vanaman, and this is the Bane Respeak Podcast."

 

Bespoke.

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Oh no oh no oh no, I just heard Sean say something about re-scoping FIREWATCH after playing 80 Days, and I ran here because one must never, never, never make design decisions after having just been impressed by another game.

 

Which I'm sure Sean knows, or maybe I misunderstand the extent of the changes. Whatever, either way I have faith in you, but a chill ran down my spine after hearing that scenario described. Bad memories of a project that never got off the ground, that's all.

Nothing happened that is as major as you seem to be imagining. Sean doing any amount of major re-scope would have to pass through a bunch of other people who that re-scope would hit before it becomes real. (But it doesn't matter because he was just referring to some stuff he specifically is writing for the game.)

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Yeah, it was me just wanting to up my game because I was impressed -- and that just means "be better."

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Something that I've read about Evolve that doesn't seem to have come up: there's going to be three different characters in each hunter class, with different personalities and abilities, and at least three or four different monsters. I assume they probably only had one of each in for testing this time around, but I'd imagine that ups the variety and strategic choice potential dramatically.

 

RE: Left 4 Dead 1 versus Left 4 Dead 2. I gotta say, I never really understood why people were so excited about Left 4 Dead. I did get and play it, but I found it a pretty monotonous experience because there was so little enemy and weapon variety, and so few gameplay mechanics, that even different maps felt like essentially the same experience, just with different hallways and quips. I have to assume that the people that liked it are the sort of people who get really excited over really subtle variations and nuances on a strong (but essentially singular) mechanical design, and that's just not me. It felt more like a proof of concept than a full game. Left 4 Dead 2 felt to me like the game people were talking about Left 4 Dead 1 being. Every map had genuinely different twists instead of being slight reconfigurings of the same formula, there was a significantly larger range of weapons with much more rewarding feel to them (pretty sure all the dismemberment effects and such were new in 2, no?), the new enemy types mixed up encounters a lot more, etc. It ended up still not really being entirely up my alley - there's just not enough narrative there and I've never had a full group to play with (the bots are nigh useless) - but I could finally understand the appeal. I suspect the Payday games would be more to my taste but I still have the "reliable coop partners" issue.

 

I would not expect Sorcery or Sorcery 2 to offer 80 Days' depth or quality of writing. 80 Days is an original inkle creation. The Sorcery games are conversions of a series of gamebooks released back in the mid-80s, that were a spinoff of the Fighting Fantasy series. They're some of the better gamebooks of that era and it looks like inkle did a bang up job of doing them up as apps, but still...adjust expectations accordingly.

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I went out and instantly purchased 80 Days after the first discussion about it on IT. Now that I have done so, I realize I should have purchased Desert Golfing. It is the unfortunate reality that the times when I am using A Device (almost always a phone) to play a game it is usually to kill time, or I'm doing something else, or I only have a minute. I have played some 80 Days, and I really liked what I've played so far. I just can't seem to be able to give it my full attention. The apps that have used the most battery in the last week for me are Instacast (driving! Working out!) and Threes. Threes is an amazing but mindless game that I have played so, so much this year. I just don't go to the phone for an artfully crafted story experience, and now that I can do so I'm not sure I can break my pattern to get myself into the habit. When I have the opportunity, in general chances are I'll be using another device to do so.

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Rebirth on PC has a smoothing filter that you can toggle, but nothing that I've found reverts it to the old art style.

I think this was included mostly as a joke, because of how many people asked for the original art style.

 

Re: L4D vs L4D2, something that always bothered me is that the lack of melee weapons in L4D always felt like a deliberate decision, since all the weapons had a melee push thing anyway. But then L4D2 brought in swords and crowbars and whatnot seemingly just because that was something they could add.

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Here are some reasons that The Binding of Isaac Rebirth exists, and why I am over the moon :D

 

The original game ran in Flash, so it would always run like crap on a lot of people's machines, including mine. Any time there were a lot of things on screen the game would slow down a lot. From the moment I started moving Isaac around in Rebirth with my controller I was in love. I cannot overstate how much better this game feels, it's like comparing Bubsy on Genesis to Super Meat Boy. Okay, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement ;).

 

Another problem with Flash: they could not compile the game past the last version of Wrath of the Lamb (the original game's last expansion). I mean, they literally could not fit anymore code into the game without breaking everything. That meant no more updates and a lot of unfixed bugs. Now they can add as much as they want, for example, all those synergies that you imagined in your head but were never brought to fruition. And I don't have to exit the game and load it back up every time I start a new run, one example of a thousand things that grated on me about the original game. 

 

Levels are generated differently, the item pools have changed, there are more floors and more bosses, etc. As someone who played the original for 100 hours, got all the achievements, unlocked everything, and watched another hundred hours of people playing the game on Twitch, and was still learning new things about the game up until Rebirth was released, I can tell you that the game was figured out. To take a phrase from the RTS world, the meta got boring. Rebirth is like Brood War, it's like those Civ expansions that make you realize how crappy Civ IV and V were on release. It's like Tony Hawk 2.

 

Binding of Isaac has a huge community. On the Wednesday night after Rebirth's release, more people were watching Rebirth on Twitch than they were watching the new Call of Duty game. BoI was this little Flash project made in a few months that somehow turned into a really big deal to a lot of people, and since Wrath of the Lamb this army of people have been screaming for someway for this game to reach its full potential. So that's why it exists :).

 

One more thing: if you think the old game looks better than Rebirth then you are fucking crazy :)

 

Chris, I feel like you previously said that you never played Wrath of the Lamb, is that right? 

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