one-armed dwarf

There's some kickstarters I wouldn't mind being able to contribute to after the funding window has closed, like a tip jar. I wish I could do that with Pathologic 2 but when the KS started at the time I was broke.

Buying gifts for others is an option but I feel weird about doing it, cause I feel I'm putting pressure on someone to play a game they might have no interest in. 

I thought Kirsten Stewart was in it but it was Kirsten Dunst, doh.

Well that's unfortunate cause I was hoping someone would go see Alex Garland's Civil War and report back on the fuss about it.

fwiw, looking up that film the other actress Juliette Binoche was in a film called Blue, which I watched ages back and found pretty good. 

I watched High and Low (1963) the other night. This is one of Kurosawa's films that aren't about samurai, with Mifune playing a high ranking executive at a shoe company on the brink of making some aggressive moves until his chaffeur's kid is kidnapped and he's got to decide whether or not to put his overly leveraged position on the line

It's a good film, but I have this issue with Kurosawa where I find his films a bit too straightforward or something so I often don't feel I'm getting as much with his films as others do. I mainly watched it cause Spike Lee is remaking it with Denzel, and so I figured it was a good time to check it out. I'll say at least that the theatrical framing it uses for the first part of the film, where it feels like a stageplay, and then later on it goes into more of a police procedural with a more active camera following a character down through the streets, it drifts between these two modes very effectively. It feels like you spend an enormous amount of time in the movie completely separated from the reality of the world it's set in, ensconced within this shoe guy's house, to then being thrown out and immersed completely within the city when it follows the police investigation (which I guess, there's the theme of the film for you in a way). Particularly in the scenes in the nightclub

There's a certain section in Cyberpunk which feels like a direct callout to John Wick. Nag might know the bit I'm mentioning

I watched 2 episodes of Fallout. I think it's really good, but maybe faithful to a fault. It understands and adapts its material really well, but to the point it does feel a bit like watching a video game at times.

Dunno if you would call that a negative as such, but it gives me kinda LARP vibes a bit. The video-gaming 'coding' of its world is a little bit too obvious to get immersed in its storytelling in these early chapters. It is violent and humourous in ways that you will recognise from the video game. 

As such maybe it's better to look at it is a fun addition to the already existing video games rather than try to pin it down to this other medium. Like an 8 hour live action FMV to watch alongside your New Vegas playthrough.

Not the topic for it I know but you really should play FFVIII

edit to include a bit of context I mean cause it's a game where powering up beyond reasonable levels has never been half as interactive and interesting as in VIII. It's the best game for this specific thing (XII is also good at it though)

I don't know what min max means in this context but these older FFs don't really require you to grind I think (at least not the 16/32 bit ones). You can generally speed through and the speedbumps you hit along the way are by design

I feel the opposite on the runtime, it felt more like it was a 3hr30 film crammed into 3hrs and had a few snips here and there. But Nolan's films often have that hurried feel to them where they don't really allow you to linger in one moment too long. 

There's also the fact imo that Nolan seems less interested in people (except one person) than he is in narrative techniques and tricks, which gives a sense of emotional coldness to a lot of his stuff (except maybe Interstellar). I have issues with the film but I think its narrative structure made up of criss-crossed fragments is what makes it interesting. Feels like the story is built around these tiny narrative particles colliding across time and memory, mirroring the turn of history itself as the invention of atom bombs triggers chain reactions into the future, changing the world fundamentally and mostly for the worse.

I just thought that worked really well and made it interesting

The stuff you're saying is why I put my playthrough on pause, read similar on reddit that its a bit undercooked in the back half and it had me wondering why i needed to level and get new gear

I'll be happy enough to just start over in a few months with a more complete endgame to look forward to, and maybe with some difficulty mods (we already have a couple), or something to reduce XP gain a bit

Shame that its not that game right now, though

I dont really think characters like Roche have anything to do with that

I think its more that the games are overly marketed to and tailored to players of the original, which are a shrinking and aging demograph

(This discuss came up on the previous page I know but half as much as remake is new info at least)

Sales not looking so good for Rebirth

https://www.eurogamer.net/final-fantasy-7-rebirth-is-underperforming-says-industry-analyst

Wonder how they'll work that one out for the final game, seems to have no real momentum yet a whole lotta baggage

On 11/04/2024 at 19:49, Jimboxy said:

It's all been released in one go, so no need to wait

Good thing I waited though, now I know that the first 11 minutes suck!

I'm a bit confused by the thing you mention about hidden skill checks. It tells you things like if a roll is +2 or whatever and due to the physical rolling of the dice it sort of makes more sense to represent it like that than the percent chance

Well, 15 frames per minute is 1 frame per 4 seconds, so it would be very challenging to input the button sequence needed to get Sabin to suplex the train. 

(also I think VI actually ran at 60, or maybe 30. Depends on the video signal maybe)

Love lies Bleeding is on the list of things I want to watch but as I no longer have a cinema near me I'll be waiting for digital/physical release.

It is interesting that both Twilight stars worked so hard to shed the kinda reputation that franchise would leave them with by diving into doing lots of independent type films. It's also ironically worked rather well in allowing people accept that Edward Cullen can make a good Batman as he returns to more popular things

edit watched Paths of Glory (1957) on 4k UHD last night and what a treat for the senses on the OLED. Sometimes you don't get the best bang for buck when it comes to restoring old films but this one looked wonderful. Deep black levels, HDR great at preserving detail at the high and low end of brightness spectrum, the dingy trenches and the brightly lit chateaus all looking great as possible, no weird AI restoring nonsense on the film grain. It's about 3 soldiers being tried for 'cowardice' during the First World War as a career ambitious general sends them off on a doomed assault. I was left wanting that the court martial segment of the film would be longer. I guess that's not the point though, it's about the inherent unfairness of it all

The pixel remaster looks cool but that font is terrible. 

I think I heard they patched it, but wonder what they were thinking in the first place

Way I see it, based on these posts the stars are aligning here to dispose of this dumb plan to play FFVI and go for the cooler option of playing Triple Triad VIII. 

There's even a thread for it right here

https://www.mfgamers.net/index.php?/topic/40766-final-fantasy-viii/#comment-171792

edit wait I'm reading my own posts in that thread and that VIII port is dogshit. Abort, back to VI, abort

There's a lot of he said she said going on about it but the TL;DR now seems to be that DS2 remake was never on the cards in the first place

Click through to read more I guess cause there's lots of tweets, but an interesting detail is that the team themselves don't sound like they were even that interested in doing DSII themselves and wanted to do something different and new

It wasn't that long ago I loaded up DSII on PC, it was fine. They should just remaster it for Playstation players, I think Xbox get an 'automatic' remaster with their BC but I don't know.

To be completely honest, remaking Dead Space never made much sense to me. Always felt redundant. It's not like how there's been entire industry paradigm shifts since the classic REs, or how RE4 in particular was its own paradigm shifter, so revisiting those makes more sense than DS imo

For some reason they decided to remake Speak no Evil, and its trailer kinda spoils a lot. Probably shouldn't watch it if you're not already familiar with the original one. But here you go. James McAvoy and Mackenzie Davis

Original film only came out 2 years ago. Weird decision to remake cause it's not like they even have the 'ew it had subtitles' excuse either.

My last run took 5 hours, knowing where I was going but no grinding. 'Casual' but without getting lost and stuff so somewhere between that number and HD's is prob right for most. I dunno about averages but you have to take into account PAL->NTSC speed differences as well

Also I did fuck up the 'stealth' section in the shinra tower constantly, where you sneak past guards. Fucking dogshit section, that added some time anyway

and I got proof of that time, it's timestamped on a vid I posted in the thread. An hour for Midgar is nuts, would be some interesting tech to see tho

I didn't do most of the open world stuff until after beating the game. Did maybe 30-40 percent of it first.

Cosmo Canyon you can just sort of speed through and come back later to that stuff. The postgame has a chapter select and it saves all your progress

Does not seem like DSII Remake will happen

Wonder if we are past the peak of remake projects being a sure thing. 

I didn't like the trailers for this, the effects weren't doing much for me, looked kinda shit. But Walton Goggins is excellent whenever he's in something (the ghoul 'mayor' in this), great as Bowd Crowder in Justified. 

In any event I'm tired of tuning in week by week for stuff so happy to just wait for the whole thing to release and more complete opinions come out as well. Got fooled once already signing up on Paramount (I think) for Nathan Fielder's new show

Watched Punch Drunk Love (2002), heard this movie was good but damn I loved it. Adam Sandler plays a guy who's, in my view anyway, clearly neuro-atypical and it's about his struggles navigating life and love. But it's much more affectionate about its subject than the shit comedies he does, nowhere near as mean spirited and cynical (it leaves that to his sisters, to whom he might as well be invisible as a person). Great film, might be my second favorite PT Anderson film after There Will be Blood.

Expect a divisive response cause a lot of people aren't super into how these films ignore the mythologies of these characters, but it looks like a fun and playful genre deconstruction. 

Wasn't a huge fan of the first one, mind. But it's hard to get a guy like this to sign up to sequels so they must have some cool ideas at least