Mr. Tact wrote on Mar 21, 2021, 21:10:
As I understand the supposed reason was 4:3 looks better on iMAX sized screens. I don't understand if or why that would be true, but I'm fairly certain I read that somewhere (possibly here?).

IMAX theater screens are always in 4:3, 24m x 18m. A projected image can have any dimensions however, and in a dark screening room, unused screen space is invisible. But the premise of IMAX is to be presented with a gigantic image that towers above you, and leveraging the 65mm 1.43:1 classic IMAX format is one way to do so.

I learned recently that in 1974 the US attempted to do Daylight Savings Time year round. It was unsuccessful because what was once a uniform schedule change to accommodate changing daylight hours, became an ad hoc schedule change as some institutions had to move start and end times (because they really did need to operate in daylight hours) but others did not. For example, schools and construction sites would have later starts but indoor offices would not. This caused a lot of scheduling problems and everyone hated it, ending the experiment after 9 months. It turns out that having a uniform schedule change, rather than an ad hoc one, makes society run smoother. But the grass is always greener, it's pleasant to pretend that trade-offs don't exist, and people love to complain.

Super R-Type was a very early SNES port that was poorly optimized for the hardware and was absolutely inferior to the TG16 version. R-Type III: The Third Lightning was outstanding however, and was easily a top 3 shmup on the SNES (where admittedly there was less competition among shmups than on the TG16 or Genesis/MD).

David Simon describes the problems and trade-offs of adapting SD 4:3 television to HD 16:9 with The Wire remaster of a few years ago: https://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/

At the last, I’m satisfied what while this new version of The Wire is not, in some specific ways, the film we first made, it has sufficient merit to exist as an alternate version. There are scenes that clearly improve in HD and in the widescreen format. But there are things that are not improved. And even with our best resizing, touchups and maneuver, there are some things that are simply not as good. That’s the inevitability: This new version, after all, exists in an aspect ratio that simply wasn’t intended or serviced by the filmmakers when the camera was rolling and the shot was framed.

Still, being equally honest here, there can be no denying that an ever-greater portion of the television audience has HD widescreen televisions staring at them from across the living room, and that they feel notably oppressed if all of their entertainments do not advantage themselves of the new hardware. It vexes them in the same way that many with color television sets were long ago bothered by the anachronism of black-and-white films, even carefully conceived black-and-white films. For them, The Wire seems frustrating or inaccessible – even more so than we intended it. And, hey, we are always in it to tell people a story, first and foremost. If a new format brings a few more thirsty critters to the water’s edge, then so be it.

Mr. Tact wrote on Feb 25, 2021, 16:08:
It is possible they were being forward looking. Wanting to do widescreen, even though they knew it wouldn't broadcast that way. *shrug* Is there a reason your assumption on their intentions are more informed than anyone else's?

Because that's not how composing a photograph or shot of film/video works?

This is a 2d artform. The aspect ratio is your canvas. if your canvas is a different size, you don't put things in the same place. Imagine a 4:3 frame with two characters in profile, facing each other, with the edges of the frame roughly in line with their ears: the framing implies intense confrontation, that they're opposed to one another, and their opposition is so intense that there is no room for the rest of the world. Expand to 16:9 and the edges of the frame now exist in negative space beyond the back of the character's heads; suddenly, the characters have room to breathe, their confrontation isn't so intense, and is merely one part of the larger world. Change the aspect ratio and you've completely changed the emotion and story telling effect of the shot. You cannot shoot for both; you have to pick one and make your creative decisions accordingly.

Furthermore, there are technical and artistic reasons to shoot with, e.g., an anamorphic lens even if you have no desire for widescreen. A different lens creates a different image, separate from any concerns about aspect ratio. Same with film stock. An anamorphic lens will have softer focus in the background that bleeds into the foreground at the edges. Lens flare will take on a horizontal quality in anamorphic that is not the case in spherical lenses. Different film stocks will have different qualities in their grain that will look different on screen. Etc.

This isn't a case where "future proofing" applies. Widescreen isn't "better" from a story telling stand point, no more than a rectangular canvas is better than a square canvas in a painting. Instead, it's a tool that is an option for bringing about a desired artistic purpose. In the context of 90s television, your aspect ratio was chosen for you BUT THEN ALL OF YOUR CREATIVE DECISIONS ACCOUNT FOR IT. Technical decisions too like "is the boom mic operator in frame or not?" The creative and technical decisions will change with the aspect ratio often in contradictory ways. That's why I'm very confident that they weren't secretly planning for a day when yet to be invented widescreen TVs would let them show the cut off part of the footage where you can see the lighting rig.

Why would anyone want to watch television or film in an aspect ratio other than what was intended?

Yes, some older television was shot on widescreen film stock and lenses, but when the DP was looking through the viewfinder composing the shot, it was for 4:3. If you expand to widescreen, you ruin the shot composition. You also ruin all the creative decisions that were made on the assumption that "only stuff that fits in the 4:3 frame will be seen". For example, the set dressing outside the 4:3 frame may not be consistent with the stuff inside (or even finished) because the assumption was that it wasn't really being filmed!

I thought we all had come to realize the pan & scan era was garbage and why. But clearly people don't get the "why": they don't care about cinematography or whether the image on screen works as a composition; they just don't want to see any black bars on their screen.

Quinn wrote on Feb 23, 2021, 19:21:
Personally it looks like a great cinematic experience with very barebone game mechanics to connect cinematic cutscenes A with B. To me, that's fairly typical for a console game.

Sounds like you need to play Dark Souls.

Mr. Tact wrote on Feb 16, 2021, 21:36:
Only 20? I would have guessed it was older than that.

Yeah I could have sworn this was released in 2000: I first encountered it when a Team Fortress Classic clanmate -- best wishes, [MFR]Killer, wherever you are -- posted a link on our clan forums. Our clan was most active in 1999 - 2000; the clan ostensibly still existed by 2001, but it was definitely on its way out by that point and our forum was pretty dead.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Feb 10, 2021, 17:03:
New York is basically a soggy paper plate.

Have you had it while in New York? And not pulled a Michael Scott?

Bleecker St. Pizza is my fav for ordering a pie; Joe's on Carmine for grabbing a slice.

Jonjonz wrote on Feb 6, 2021, 06:54:
I see our knuckle dragging mouth breathers are still around bleating their favorite code words for anything anti-Nazi/white supremist.

One glance at my post history would make it clear which side of this debate I'm on, i.e. not the one you think I'm on. I'm just mocking Cutter for his standard, knee-jerk, read-the-headline-but-not-the-article quick take where the story is literally the opposite of what he thinks it is. That said, I am very much against knee-jerk reactions and tribal groupthink honor displays, so in that sense, maybe we aren't on the same side after all.

Cutter wrote on Feb 5, 2021, 15:37:
Jesus, Google is literally on the verge of cartoon supervillainy.

So are you deeply concerned about diversity and inclusion research seeing publication regardless of its merits now? Did you go woke or just not read the article?

WaltC wrote on Feb 2, 2021, 11:14:
It was never going to happen for a variety of reasons, of course, not the least of which is that the majority of people actually like having their own local hardware, local software, and upgrading their hardware as they see fit, etc.

Have you heard of this thing called the Internet and Cloud Computing?

Genesys wrote on Feb 1, 2021, 20:05:
Well, that didn't take long, did it? Yow. 150 developers.

If they want to keep working for Google, they'll have the opportunity to find and transfer to a new team.

Orogogus wrote on Jan 28, 2021, 23:11:
I thought it was kind of overblown, personally. When I played Rise of the Tomb Raider I was expecting something like Dead Space because of all the hullabaloo, but the vast majority of my deaths ended up being shot by guns or falling to my death, and she wasn't being blown into bloody chunks or gorily impaled on rocks. I think there were a handful of excessive death scenes, but they were few and far between for me.

The 2013 game opens with a horror movie setup where she's about to be mutilated to death for a human sacrifice, and then in her escape she spends about 15 minutes getting the shit beat out of her by both crazy cultist types and the environment. The whole sequence feels quite harrowing even if the rest of the game isn't nearly so bad. I agree that Rise of the Tomb Raider didn't feel nearly as rough, just some grisly death animations as opposed to extended torture porn sequences.

Simon Says wrote on Jan 28, 2021, 21:30:
They wanted to punish the Hedge Funds, who were trying to bankrupt Gamestop ( and other companies ) using abusive shorting practices that are well known to bankrupt corporations, with a "short squeeze".

If you actually give a shit about GameSpot or think that going to the mall to buy overpriced physical media is a viable business model in 2021, then clearly this was not a rational endeavor.

To quote The Big Lebowski on nihilists: "Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, but at least it's an ethos, Dude." Meanwhile our society is marching down the road to perdition for the sake of the lulz.

Mr. Tact wrote on Jan 28, 2021, 19:19:

RedEye9 wrote on Jan 28, 2021, 19:10:
Do you really think he's getting one over on the man. {insert mouse flipping off hawk.jpg here}

I suggest you ask the hedge funds which lost millions (if not billions) if someone got over on them...

What about the institutional investors who are making bank? Do you really think retail investors are making trades in the $100M range? This is nihilism riding on nostalgia and faux-populist anger. I thought the sacking of the Capitol was enough of a national trauma to teach us that nihilism as a strategy never ends well, but apparently my dismal view of American attention spans was too optimistic. Just as delusional QAnoners are being left holding the bag of federal criminal charges for 1/6/21, it's not going to be Wall Street that gets hurt by this: it'll be the fools who think they're sticking it to the man because a meme on the Internet told them so.

If it's bad for hedge fund managers, its automatically good for everyone else right? It's not like introducing financial market chaos for the lulz could possibly end up hurting someone other than professional investors.

MattyC wrote on Jan 23, 2021, 14:31:
I still think it is the best Resident Evil game, but I also only ever played it on the GameCube.

My vote goes for the original PS1 version of RE2, although its recent remake is nearly as good. I'm also playing through RE7 for the first time right now in response to the RE8 news dump (plus it was bundled with my PS5), and it's basically everything I like about the series in a more contemporary format. I love RE4 but I think it strayed a little too far from its adventure game roots (which RE7 returns to), although as an action game it is superb and I'm sorry I missed it when it was new, when it would have been as impressive technically as it is today in terms of gameplay and design.

TB1447 wrote on Jan 22, 2021, 22:30:
Was RE4 good? I couldn't tell because the PC version was so broken you couldn't play it at all.

It's generally regarded as one of the best and most influential games of all time. I played it for the first time last year on the PS4 and thought it held up magnificently.

The controls however are pretty idiosyncratic to console controllers and although they probably could be made to function on mouse and keyboard, it would not be the same. For example, ammo supplies are usually just sufficient, but you have to be very strategic in their use, and a major risk/reward tradeoff is going for head vs body shots (with the former introducing, ahem, other risks later in the game). The risk of the head shot is that you miss and waste a round that you can't afford to lose, but that risk/reward sensation only obtains if aiming is not perfectly precise and if aiming for the head will take longer and require greater care; with a mouse, you have no reason not to go for headshots every time because its no harder to aim at. This may sound like a limitation of the game's controls, but in fact and in context, it perfectly coheres with level design, enemy design, item placement, and other core mechanics to create compelling gameplay which forces you to constantly make trade offs, beat strategic retreats, and otherwise think your way through quite elaborate combat encounters.

Slick wrote on Jan 22, 2021, 15:58:
There's a reason why Dirt 5 is one of the only games that hits 4k@120hz on PS5, it looks like it's from 2012.

Uh wut? Dirt 5 is the only Codemasters racing game I've played because it's one of the handful of PS5 launch titles and the options are slim right now. BUT Dirt 5 easily looks as good as Demon's Souls, and together they are real technical showcases for the console. The lighting and weather effects in particular are stunning, especially at night. I think you may have forgotten what games from 2012 looked like.

The problem with Dirt 5 is that it's soulless and repetitive, not that it looks like an XB360 game.