I never read the book, but after seeing the movie, I probably won't. Would you mind please SST-ing the change between the two? Thank you!

Sure:

Winona's character is a federal agent, whereas the movie indicates she was working at the same place as Arctor the book suggests she was at a totally different tier. It pushes the conspiracy farther up the chain of command, and makes Arctor (IMO) a more tragic character, selected by the feds to infiltrate New Start. His whole department just unwittingly forced him into that position, and he lost his mind as a result.

Also, it's mentioned that the federal drug agents have technology beyond that of the local cops, so.. I dunno.. Winnona's character is in a way untouchable, and Arctor was chasing after that untouchable entity. Makes his character more tragic, again.

The book also had more of the humurous dialogue between Arctor's roomates. The microdot conversation was pretty solid, might wanna google for that.

The book wasn't perfect, by any means. Dick is, as an author, fairly incapable of making things realistic, believable. But if you accept his stories as pulp-books, comicbook-esque.. things become more acceptable.

The movie compresses things a lot (out of necessity) but in the book Arctor's insanity develops more realistically, more interestingly. Keanu killed that aspect of the movie further..

Oh well, still enjoyed it

Kinda rambled there, busyish.

edit: here is a site with the microdot convo, A Scanner Darkly book spoilers follow: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:FXKnGs3n6kMJ:www.american-buddha.com/scandark.12.htm+microdot+%22a+scanner+darkly%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&client=opera]


This comment was edited on Jul 16, 10:05.

Eh, I liked the ending.. The *slight* change from the book bugged me a little, but other than that no gripes about the plot. Very true to the book.

Keanu was as crappy as ever, but the others pulled their weight. Even Winona was fine, I thought.

Unfortunately, that isn't true. Quality is a subjective measure and as time passes, so does your notion of quality. What might have entertained you as a child will not likely entertain you today. Just look at Doom. Great at the time, but not so great when compared to modern shooters.

Nice, cut the rest of the quote out. TF is a great game, I played it recently and still loved it, much as I still love the Myth series of games. The graphics may suxor, but the level of thought in those games is still far above the shit that's released these days (I'm looking at you, BF 2)...

i bet they dont even have a grappling hook either

Was the grappling hook even in the original TF? I thought it wasn't added in Mega TF... maybe I'm thinking about the rocket pack...

The concept of Team Fortress was amazing back then even if it was just recycled from Quake II

Quake II?? TF originated on Quakeworld...

And great gameplay is great gameplay, now or in 96. People still play the original, and with good reason: it's one of the few team FPS's where people actually play as a team, even in pubs.


This comment was edited on Jul 13, 21:09.

Most hardware-knowledgeable folks have realized there is no need for separate graphics capabilities from what a modern cpu should be able to render.

You are a crazyfool, even Half-life 1 quality graphics are ridiculously difficult to render in software. Without a graphics card you'll end up with little better than PS 1 graphics capability, worse yet you'll waste weeks of man hours programming and testing that shit...

A smart business man would try to make his software fit as many hardware platforms as possible including people with fast new computers but with limited video options.

You're totally right, they totally should have spent more time working on the software renderer for Doom 3, Half-life 2, WoW, and [insert successful 3d computer game here]. Those games all totally bombed, and their requirement of a $50 graphics card was the reason!

As fast as modern processors are, they simply aren't designed for realtime 3d rendering (shaders and all) like GPU's are, the processing structure is totally different. I can't emphasize this enough.

Furthmore, the idea of creating a modern 3d engine in any reasonable amount of time without using direct 3D or openGL (and all the hardware that goes into support those API's) would be.. unreasonable...

This is what worries me most about the online distribution/authentication trend, Steam, Prey's system, etc. What if the company goes bankrupt? I still play Thief and System Shock even though LG is long gone.

All those games have already been cracked, even the Steam'd ones. If the company goes belly up, and doesn't drop whatever DRM is lockign down their game, the comunities will step in and make sure they can keep playing.

Look what happened with the Myth series. Shortly after being bought out by MS, Bungie pulled the plug on the online servers. With little help from Bungie the Myth community reverse engineered the bungie.net servers and had replacements up and running in under a month.

Where there's a will, there's a way...

Blue never sleeps, cause sleep is the cousin of death.

Nice post, Murdr. Think I'll wait awhile before wading in myself

Blue broached the topic of baseball so I feel I'm justified in mentioning that Joe Mauer is the second coming of Ted Williams and that the Twins will win the wild card this year

Technology Bits... Not Technical...

Eh, it's one dude.. how much do you expect? He's competing with the 3DSmax and Maya folks, this isn't easy shit to program.

It ran well on my 9800 pro and 2500+, hopefully your system isn't any worse than that (I'd feel bad for ya, at least..)

I want what Woody is on. Will pay top dollar...

...not worthy of my time.

You just spent hours posting in a thread on the internet about a video game you don't even play. I'm pretty sure your time is worth jack shit, and being "worthy" of it seems like a fairly trivial standard...

Well, you guys had a nice little flamewar, then came through with the rare internet reconciliation! Pretty solid!

That's also how I'd describe this demo (except just the second sentence, the first one didn't really apply very well (trust me I tried)) (uhoh, double parenthesis.. you can always tell when someone's been doin too much maths)!

I agree about the AI, those aliens were all about the run into the room and stop and shoot. I didn't really mind it though, the environments and stuff kept it interesting enough.

The puzzles especially were pretty fun. Puzzles in FPS's always come off as kinda forced, but these weren't as bad in that department as, say, HL 2 (episode one was somewhat better in this respect, but I digress). I had no trouble figuring out what I had to do throughout the demo, but at the same time, I still had to engage the ol' grey/pink matter.

Performance was solid, though I kept the resolution pretty low (still rockin' my 9800 pro). Seemed about on par with Doom 3, maybe a little better.

The girl model wasn't done all that well, especially in the bar scene she deformed rather awkwardly (as was mentioned earlier, the shoulders were especially sketchy). The ol' grandfather guy was pretty solid, though. Woulda liked it if they'd left his dialogue in a little more cryptic voice (like his first couple lines), but I think I'm probably in the minority there (and I admit, it would have been hard to do without coming of as ridiculously cliched).

Good demo, though. The wall shit was blowin my mind in spots, can't wait to see what happens in later levels. Hope the SDK's released soon...


This comment was edited on Jun 23, 01:42.

just as good as the movie

secret text (better safe than sorry):
I'll only be satisified if I can lift the entire golden gate bridge, fly it out to Alcatraz, and then, for mysterious reason, be totally incapable of killing a small child.

I don't see how you have time to play any videogames when you spend so much time here on Blue's ranting about the perils of player accounts... Seriously, you have more posts in this thread than I have in the last two months!

Your edit is spot on, bike, that's what he meant and that's what I thought the first time they brought up one of their early/alternative takes.

As for comments and god mode: any time one of the comment nodes is active you're invincible so you can focus on the listening.

WH: MoC looks great, but I can't help but think it would be even cooler looking with some Myth style blood splattered across the ground. Body parts wouldn't hurt either...