User comment history
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| News Comments > Evening Metaverse |
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| 8. |
Re: Evening Metaverse |
Jul 13, 2019, 10:26 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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El Pit wrote on Jul 13, 2019, 02:43:
Mindhunters (the movie) was shot in 2004 and is not 80s at all. Mindhunter (the series) was shot in 2013 and takes place in the 70s and also features no 80s nostalgia. MANhunter was shot in 1986 and has some of the greatest cinematography ever - but definitely looks and feels like a movie from the 80s in a good way. But the color composition of this movie is wayyyyyyy better than anything ever done in the last 30 years with few exceptions (like e.g. Nightcrawler from 2014).
Oops: I said Mindhunter but meant Manhunter. And I completely agree about Manhunter's visuals. The film oozes cool to the point that it feels more contemporary than the present, and is entirely in keeping with the stylishness of Michael Mann's other films. You've probably seen it, but if you haven't, I highly recommend Thief, another 80s set Michael Mann film. That said, given that prominent members of this forum have argued in favor of enabling frame interpolation on modern televisions and for HD remasters of television programs that were never shot for anything but NTSC resolution, I figured I should give fair warning about the essential 80s-ness of the film. |
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| News Comments > Evening Metaverse |
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| 6. |
Re: Evening Metaverse |
Jul 12, 2019, 22:27 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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RedEye9 wrote on Jul 12, 2019, 21:49:
jdreyer wrote on Jul 12, 2019, 20:37:
Manhunter was really good. Manhunter (1986) the movie or the Mindhunter series.
inquiring man/minds want to know
Both are excellent imo. Be warned that Mindhunter Manhunter is pretty dated at this point, but given how enduringly popular 80s nostalgia is, the film's 80s-ness might be a plus.
This comment was edited on Jul 13, 2019, 10:35. |
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| News Comments > Ys Net Promises Shenmue 3 Steam Keys in a Year and Refunds |
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| 27. |
Re: Ys Net Promises Shenmue 3 Steam Keys in a Year and Refunds |
Jul 2, 2019, 22:31 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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Tipsy McStagger wrote on Jul 2, 2019, 12:23:
Don't even know what Shenmue is actually..
It was a wildly ambitious open world adventure/RPG/simulation game by Yu Suzuki (a legendary Sega arcade game designer) for the Dreamcast that largely failed in its ambitions, but nevertheless was an interesting failure. A second game was released for the OG Xbox and a third was planned but was cancelled after the commercial failure of the first two, leaving the story dangling without a conclusion. |
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| News Comments > Evening Interviews |
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| 3. |
Re: Evening Interviews |
Jul 2, 2019, 22:04 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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eRe4s3r wrote on Jul 2, 2019, 21:39:
Remember, this is the company that coined the terms
minimum viable product (games as a service) aka, releasing unfinished garbage
Minimum viable product has been standard business jargon for at least the past decade, if not longer. It's very commonly seen alongside startup-centric terms like burn rate and runway. |
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| News Comments > Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Dawns |
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| 5. |
Re: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Dawns |
Jun 18, 2019, 22:16 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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Darks wrote on Jun 18, 2019, 19:30:
I know right! I cant understand how shit like this gets funded. its like kids from the 80's have invaded our timeline.
For the same reason any crowd-funded game project by a legendary game director gets funded: people want a spiritual follow up to something they love.
I haven't played this yet -- and admittedly the trailer does make it seem ridiculous -- but it is uncontroversial to say that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is one of the best games ever made, and that SOTN's Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS follow-ups were generally very good, so on the strength of that pedigree this is probably at least worth a look. Likewise, the stand alone prologue to this game, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, was an outstanding homage to Castlevania III and 8-bit NES action platformers in general.
Again, I haven't yet played this, but trailer not withstanding there's every reason to think this will be very good and worth picking up. |
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| News Comments > Morning Metaverse |
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| 6. |
Re: Morning Metaverse |
May 21, 2019, 22:23 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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Dacote wrote on May 21, 2019, 20:15:
Exactly, I thought the second season was way better than the first.
Alas metacritic ranks season 1 at 76 and only gives season 2 a 78.
Hmm, I would argue that the execution and storytelling took a significant turn for the worse in the second season.
For example, the entire first episode was a tiresome and pointless series of "Hey, guys remember the EIGHTIES? With ARCADES? And DEVO?" nostalgia service in place of an actual first act: the audience is literally made to sit through 80s callbacks for an hour before anything dramatic, i.e. interesting, happens. Compare this with the first five minutes of the first season, where we're effortlessly situated in a time and place through the use of costume and set dressing -- rather than being hit over the head repeatedly with overt references to whichever 80s licenses the producers were able to secure -- introduced to and shown the endearing qualities of the most important characters, and then thrown headlong into pure terror as Will is pursued, and eventually kidnapped, by a mysterious and menacing threat. By the end of those five minutes we are immersed in a world, interested in the people who inhabit it, and desperately want to know what that shadowy figure was and what will happen to Will.
The second season followed up on such an effective series opener by feeding us 80s nostalgia red meat for an hour in the hopes we'd be so excited to reminisce about the Reagan era that we wouldn't notice that there was no longer any mystery -- and its attendant fear of the unknown -- or that the characters we so love were going to spend much of their screen time away from one another and doing mostly uninteresting things. Season 1 told its story well and with economy; Season 2 got lazy and coasted off the goodwill generated by its predecessor. And don't get me started on episode 7, Eleven Goes Punk in Chicago, which is arguably the single biggest quality drop in a TV episode in recent memory.
As far as review aggregators go, it's helpful to remember that the score tends to reflect the number of reviewers who recommended the film or series and not how strong that endorsement was. That's why, for example, The Last Jedi had such a high aggregate score, even though if you actually read the critic reviews, they tended to have mixed feelings about the film's overall quality but felt it had enough going for it that you'd get your money's worth if you went to see it. I suspect something similar is going on here: using myself as anecdata, I still enjoyed season 2, and wouldn't tell a fan to skip it, but I definitely think it saw a steep drop in storytelling quality relative to season 1. |
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| News Comments > Out of the Blue |
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| 27. |
Re: Out of the Blue |
May 16, 2019, 21:46 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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WaltC wrote on May 16, 2019, 10:45:
As with any "based on true events" television or movie, I think it pays to remember that a certain amount of dramatic license is taken with the facts, timelines, persons involved, etc...;) Probably wouldn't be so riveting otherwise!
Sure, but they aren't really changing the underlying history, so much as omitting, combining, and/or eliding so as to better tell the story. For example, Legasov and Scherbina are shown meeting at the Kremlin and then boarding a helicopter to go to Chernobyl, when A) they met on site, and B) Chernobyl is well outside helicopter range from Moscow. Similarly, in order for the three engineers to go into the reactor sub basements to open the sluice gates, an Army captain and some of his men had to pump out much of the water so that it would be possible to send in engineers at all, something which the show doesn't depict. The history really is as dramatic as the show makes it out to be; they've just adapted the history to fit the constraints of the television mini-series format. |
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| News Comments > Out of the Blue |
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| 24. |
Re: Interview: Ira Steven Behr Looks Back on Trek Deep Space Nine |
May 4, 2019, 21:27 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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Mr. Tact wrote on May 4, 2019, 11:05:
I was sorely disappointed ST:DS9 didn't get a remaster, that would have been incredibly awesome.
My understanding is that all of the edited, effects shots, i.e. the ships and space battles and such, in DS9 only ever existed as NTSC (480p) video. In other words, there's no 35mm film to rescan at a higher resolution for a huge chunk of the show's runtime. Any HD remaster would require that all of the effects shots be redone from scratch, otherwise there'd be a jarring drop in resolution and screen format anytime we saw a ship exterior or something similar. Given how effects driven DS9 was, especially as compared to TNG, the economics of redoing all of the effects for a remaster just don't pan out. It's unfortunate since DS9, more than any other Trek, could really benefit from an HD facelift: the special effects have aged quite poorly, yet the latter seasons of DS9 are pure space opera and thus depend very heavily on no-longer-impressive CGI. |
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| News Comments > STAR WARS Battlefront (Classic, 2004) on GOG.com and Steam |
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| 7. |
Re: STAR WARS Battlefront (Classic, 2004) on GOG.com and Steam |
May 2, 2019, 22:00 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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panbient wrote on May 2, 2019, 18:38:
So in addition to Battlefront all Star Wars games seem to be on sale this weekend. On that note did anyone play Rebellion back in the day? I don't ever remember even hearing about it but it's apparently a 4x / grand strategy. Kinda curious.
It's extremely rough around the edges but is at least playable and sporadically enjoyable. The real-time space battles are god awful, but the strategic mode lets you do fun things with hero characters like sending Han Solo on smuggling runs or assassinating enemy agents with Mara Jade, etc. Some people seem to have genuinely liked it but I would have a hard time recommending it today. I was pretty let down by it when it came out back in '98 and I have a hard time imagining that it has aged well in the intervening 20+ years. |
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| News Comments > Saturday Consolidation |
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| 5. |
Re: Saturday Consolidation |
Mar 30, 2019, 19:00 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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jacobvandy wrote on Mar 30, 2019, 13:43:
I suppose this is nice if you really want an official collectible for your shelf, but they've had other SEGA plug-and-play consoles with the same games rotting on retail shelves for years because they farmed it out to third parties.
The software component is being developed by M2, which is enough to perk the interest of anyone in to retro console gaming. M2's previous work in the retro space has pretty consistently produced reference quality emulation with thoughtful bonuses, features, and options that are very well attuned to what someone interested in retro gaming would want. While I probably won't get one -- I fell down the retro gaming rabbit hole last year and now have a Genesis, and Sega CD, and 32X, hooked up to a Sony PVM with RGB SCART cables -- this will almost certainly be the best legitimate way to play Genesis games for those who don't want to go to the effort and expense implicit in tracking down original hardware, cartridges and CRTs. |
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| News Comments > Morning Tech Bits |
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| 2. |
Re: Morning Tech Bits |
Mar 22, 2019, 14:32 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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HoSpanky wrote on Mar 22, 2019, 11:10:
So they CLAIM they can’t find anyone (when they mean “we can’t find anyone to do this work for $50,000 a year”), and apply for H1B so they can get someone from India who thinks they won the lottery at that sort of income...right up until they discover the cost of living. By then, they’re stuck.
How widespread is that outside of the firms engaged in outright H1B fraud?
Anecdotally, my employer employs tons of H1Bs but they're all compensated the same as US citizens and green card holders. Meanwhile, most software engineer applicants, regardless of country of origin, end up being rejected as insufficiently qualified. I interview 2-4 job applicants per month, and while the software engineering interview is not a great measure of candidate quality, i'm only averaging one "Lean-Hire" or above per quarter. Meanwhile, of the two H1B holders -- one Chinese and one Israeli -- on my 6 person team, the Israeli is in danger of not being able to renew his visa because the State Department can't understand how someone with a Mechanical Engineering bachelor's could possibly be qualified to work in software. |
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| News Comments > Diablo on GOG.com, More Blizzard Classics to Follow |
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| 20. |
Re: Diablo on GOG.com, More Blizzard Classics to Follow |
Mar 7, 2019, 19:41 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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El Pit wrote on Mar 7, 2019, 10:56:
CJ_Parker wrote on Mar 7, 2019, 10:52:
You MUST grab fan patches to get some of the classic C&C games to run on modern systems.
This is why I'd prefer to buy them on GOG: they would be released to run on Win7/8/10 out of the box.
I own the Origin C&C collection - but I neither have the time nor the patience for patching and experimenting with the older games. This is why I would rather pay GOG some money to do it.
No need for experimenting and patches, just download, install, and play (to include multiplayer): https://cncnet.org/red-alert#download |
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| News Comments > Ubisoft Apologizes for Assassin's Creed Odyssey DLC Misstep |
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| 18. |
Re: Morning Mobilization |
Jan 16, 2019, 21:47 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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A few comments for those who are interested in the Ancient Greek historical and cultural context regarding sexuality:
- The Greeks did not think in terms of heterosexual/homosexual. They thought in terms of penetrator and penetrated.
- A sexual penetrator was in the dominant role and the sexually penetrated was in the submissive role.
- The propriety of a sexual act or relationship depended less on the gender of the participants, and more on the social status/role of the participants.
- It was appropriate for a high status person to be in the dominant/penetrator role, and for the low status person to be in the submissive/penetrated role.
- For example, it was entirely appropriate and considered praise worthy for a free man to fuck one of his slaves, regardless of the gender of the slave, because the slave is low status, and to be attracted to the beauty of the human form, whether male or female, was noble.
- Conversely, it was entirely inappropriate for an adult, free man to enjoy being anally penetrated or to go down orally on a partner: to be high status yet sexually submissive was unseemly.
- Likewise, a man penetrating a woman was normal and natural. But for a woman to use a strap on with a man (yes, they had strap ons and dildos), would have been looked at as inappropriate and shameful.
- Women faced slightly different sexual norms in that they could become pregnant and it was vital, from a husband's perspective, that her husband know the legitimacy of any children born of his wife.
- Consequently, while it was appropriate for a woman to be penetrated, being lower status than a man, it was never appropriate for a married, free woman to have sex with a man who wasn't her husband.
- But conversely, sexual encounters with female slaves or other married women was fine. Non vaginally penetrative sex with a low status man, i.e. a slave, was also appropriate.
- All free men and women were expected to have heterosexual marriages, period. Being a bachelor/unmarried woman was unheard of. So was marrying someone of the same gender.
- Sex outside of marriage however, was okay as long as it adhered to the aforementioned guidelines.
- Pederasty, particularly between a man in his twenties (men didn't get married until their late twenties early thirties) and a boy on the cusp of puberty was considered normal, particularly among the upper middle and upper classes.
- Note that a twelve year old boy is of lower status than a 25 year old man: it would be natural, in ancient Greek eyes, for the former to be sexually submissive to the latter, hence its social acceptability.
- Pederastic relationships would lose their sexual component once the younger partner aged into manhood, and therefore high social status, but it was considered normal for the two to remain life long friends, with the older partner often serving as a mentor and patron to the younger.
That about sums up the sexual mores of the ancient Greeks, and, for the most part, the ancient Mediterranean in general. Having same sex relationships in this game is entirely historical, but then so are having forced heterosexual marriages. |
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| News Comments > Street Fighter V Free Weekend |
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| 15. |
Re: Street Fighter V Free Weekend |
Dec 15, 2018, 19:45 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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Strider83 wrote on Dec 14, 2018, 23:22:
I remember a time when this site and it's comment sections were about computers and computer games. Not a bunch of assholes pushing their political agenda or political opinions in every single thread. A bunch of politics, bitching, whining and complaining. Makes me sick. Been coming here over 15 years and no longer enjoy reading or participating in these sections because of this bullshit.
What the fuck are you talking about? 15 years ago we were yelling at each other about the Iraq War, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Bush vs Kerry. Check my comment history if you don't believe me (or don't because I was wrong about an awful lot). |
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| News Comments > Out of the Blue |
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| 22. |
Re: Out of the Blue |
Nov 13, 2018, 22:41 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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jdreyer wrote on Nov 13, 2018, 19:56:
Top 3 favorite movies?
I'm not sure I could narrow it down to a definitive three but some stuff that came to mind include: Eraserhead, Paths of Glory, Pulp Fiction, A Serious Man, Zodiac, Aliens, Taxi Driver, Blade Runner 2049, Ben-hur, and Tarkovsky's Stalker. |
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| News Comments > Out of the Blue |
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| 14. |
Re: Out of the Blue |
Nov 13, 2018, 19:01 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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Burrito of Peace wrote on Nov 13, 2018, 13:03:
I feel like the odd man out. Comics never really did it for me growing up. While my peers were sometimes enthusing about Batman or Spiderman, I was reading Howard, Heinlein, Asimov, Varley, Smith (both of them), and other books. My whole family are "readers" so that probably helped canalize my literature habits from an early age.
I was never a fan of comic books either. I vaguely recall liking the X-men cartoon that aired on weekday afternoons in the early 90s, but I certainly didn't develop any lasting bonds of childhood nostalgia for it like I did for Duck Tales, Rescue Rangers, and Animaniacs. Likewise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe does nothing for me. The films are generally watchable and inoffensive, but I could go my entire life without seeing any of them and don't think my life would be any poorer for it. Given the apparent overlap between video game and comic book fandom, I must admit that I'm left scratching my head anytime the latter intrudes upon the former. |
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3267 Comments. 164 pages. Viewing page 1.
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