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The Bard
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Posts posted by The Bard
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Just finished reading This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald's first novel and it's crazy how much of a contrast it is to his later work. The authorial voice is so much stronger, and the ideas aren't as implicit, but he flat out uses the protagonists as tools for direct commentary on pretty much everything he wants to talk about. Which was great, it gave it a sort of oratory and rhetorical feel in parts whereas I didn't feel that for example, Gatsby, or Tender is the Night had that about them.
Also started reading an anthology of Lovecraft stories. Got through Mountains of Madness and Call of Cthulhu. Cthulhu was great, short, engaging investigative horror fiction. I didn't expect the beauty of expression that it has in parts. Mountains of Madness is probably the most frustrating thing I've ever read in my life though. Full to the brim with unnecessary background technical information about Pleistocene rock formations, geology, evolutionary biology etc. There one section that's literally an exposition about how drill bits work. It took some patience to get through, because instead of being explanatory either contextually or explicitly, it just threw out these terms and expected you to have an encyclopaedia at hand. I suspect it was there more to make the reader think "gee isn't he a clever fucker," than anything else. Except in reality she's thinking "why do I need to know about drill bits in a story about tentacled space monsters?"
Either way, the ideas are incredible. The horror doesn't come from the unknown, but from the unknowable; the idea that there are things lurking in the universe that our senses can't...well, make sense of, or understand, whether that's because they're dimensionally composed in a way that's alien to us, or have an evolutionary history that's completely separate from our own. Need to read more, but I'm going to have to be wise about what I select since Cthulhu was great, but Mountains of Madness was only tolerable for the last third (which is where it got pretty good).
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They're all variations on competitive gaping. Except for the Lebanese midgets, obviously.
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Fuck that, the lean look suits you. I've let gym work slide for so long that I don't even know where to start anymore.
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Zechs read about enumerative induction in a logic 101 textbook and spends his days tragically applying it to all aspects of human existence.
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Have you seen No Man's Sky dude?
Oh yeah, that has a similar vibe, seems like a crazy ambitious project as well. A team of four extrapolating entire ecosystems from a series of algorithms? Seems like something an evolutionary biologist would be into rather than a videogame developer.
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This is probably like the best looking game on next gen consoles.
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This game is just so joyless, charmless and humourless. I feel like I've been staring into space after playing it for any length of time. There isn't a single character that I don't hugely despise.
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The problem is that when a machine's vehicle, indication or sign recognition software (as well as everything else in the car that's digitised) malfunctions, nobody is going to know unless there are detectors in place for every possible contingency. A slight error in a high risk situation will be enough to cause a major disaster.
In contrast, when a human has dementia, it's both obvious to the person in question, and everyone she interacts with. So until Google programs an all encompassing artificial intelligence that has tendrils in every aspect of the hardware it's operating, I don't think I'd trust this thing to perform all the functions a human being can perform so intuitively.
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I've played it for a good ten hours and I can't figure out why it's an open world game.
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Tomorrow I've got to give a 45 minute - 1 hour end of year talk about the progress of my PhD research so far and anxiety/panic levels have jumped up massively in the last day or two.
It's really important as it forms part of the basis of me getting passed on into the second year of my PhD so yeah a bit nervous. Even more so because obvious the department/university is funding me and my research and no one in the department does this kind of work so it almost feels like I'm doing this talk to justify not only the validity of my own work but broadening the spectrum of research in the department and the field in general.
My saving grace is that my talk is at 4pm and none of the lecturers are really aware of it as it hasn't been included on the events calendar of our website so hoping that there won't be a huge turn out as it just means more stress and more questions as some of the stubborn old hands try to poke holes in my work/theory.
So not going to sleep well tonight
You'll be fine in the moment, it's the anxiety leading up to the deed that's the killer. Maybe take some inderol. You've got some serious stones doing an hour lecture though, I had one ungraded ten minute presentation to give this year for my Masters and I fucked off abroad
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With Assassin's Creed Black Flag AND Rayman Legends still sitting unopened I cannot justify getting this may as well wait till it's bargain bucket!
Spoiler: Black Flag is a much, much better game.
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Apart from the specious problems people have brought up about dynamic lighting and other marginal shit, how are people finding the experience of playing the game?
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It has begun. My electric drum kit fund has now become the PS4 fun. 200 quid already. Hoping for some sweet deals after E3/Summer-time/Christmas. I'm ready to believe.
(unless Sony have a dreadful E3...)
Dude, fuck that, get the drum kit let's start an N-E post rock, shoegaze band.
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Bought this off cdkeys.com for £25.99 last night and it's installing now. Soups excited.
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Anyone watched Frank ? Caught it at the Cornerhouse in Manchester the other day and really enjoyed it. Utterly unpredictable, genre-defying stuff with awesome musicianship and offbeat characters.
Haven't seen it but I love the Cornerhouse. Although I had the world's worst date there when I was 18. Took a girl to see Control and her brother was in the row in front giving me the hound eye through his stinky dreads.
Anyway, just watched Starter For 10. Would be a fairly generic university/ coming of age film in the John Hughes mould if it wasn't set in 1980s Bristol and centred around a nerdy kid whose lifelong ambition is to make it to the university challenge team. I have a soft spot for understated character films like this, and I like the way it's a recontextualised genre film, and quite amicable while still reminding you of all of the absolutely humiliating times you had being an utter callow goon at uni, and that one girl that was always so much of a dick that it kept you pining while completely missing the other one who had a crush on you and wouldn't inadvertently decimate your psyche.
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Blink's portal power is probably my favourite power I've seen in the X-Men films, and I think I could easily watch a whole film based on her using her powers.
Quicksilver's scenes were also great, especially the big slow-motion one. It will certainly be interesting how Avengers will compare, as well as the Flash TV show (as that will be on a much lower budget - I'd imagine the money for that one scene would be more than one episode of the show).
The portals were my favourite thing in the movie, it made me really nostalgic for Portal, specifically the part where Blink opens a portal at the bottom of the cliff face, and another one in front of a sentinel, letting Colossus build up momentum. Wish they'd done more with it
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You are genuinely the most unintelligent person I've ever had the displeasure of having a conversation with. At this point, I'm convinced that you can't actually hold another person's argument in your head long enough to come up with a coherent response.
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I have lots to say about this, but mostly that I enjoyed it greatly. I'll wait until I've completed it a second time, playing through the second timeline before I say anything, but yes; it's one of the most satisfying shooters I've played for a while, and it's totally upfront about the fact that its combination of outlandish brutality and genuinely emotive story would seem a jarring juxtaposition if it didn't present itself as completely bizarre in every element of its design as it is. It also has the best Scotsman I've ever come across in a videogame. That dialogue puts Malcolm from The Thick of It to shame.
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Mario Kart reminds me of nothing as much as progressive taxation. It's reminiscent of a Bolshevik era system that not only enforces equality of opportunity, but also equality of outcome.
In other words; fuck blue shells and rubber banding.
Someone tell me that this is different from every game since MK64, please.
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Have you ever played GT5 or 6? There are no real microtransactions. You can buy money at a grossly horrible price on PSN(which had its controversy) but the game is not designed around it. You could earn the money faster in game than it takes for you to buy it and then boot back into the game(hence controversy died down fast). GT5 actually introduced real time damage modelling and real time physics based deformation for premium cars. The DLC system is quite good in GT games. Right now all the new DLC cars are free in GT6. Unfortunately I cant say the same for the makers of Project Cars/Shift. Shift series was terrible for microtransactions. Those car packs are stupidly priced.
The point, as you so cleverly managed not to understand, was that people complained across the board for both series, and there were also people who loved both series. Judging the developers' current games completely on past products that came out of two completely different development situations, instead of using them as a point of departure to think about how the situation differs, once again, misrepresents the facts. The car deformation in Gran Turismo 5 was almost non existent, and where it was even visible, it had no effect on play. You present all these things in the way a PR firm would put bullet points on the back of the game box, when in reality they're completely meaningless. As for the microtransaction model in Shift; look to the salient difference between Shift and Project Cars. Maybe the fact that the former was published by EA which infamously mandates introducing ridiculous monetising attempts into all of it's published games, compared to the latter which is a fully funded, publisher free PC release?
In fact, this this is one of the points I raised in multiple foregoing posts, so please, try and up your reading comprehension before you try to engage people with your witless pablum.
But of course, I know nothing escapes your keen analytic mind, so let's just chalk that one down to wilful obfuscation.
How about the fact that people verbally hate the shift series? or the fact that EA dropped it and that the rest of these games struggle to get a publisher? Their Ferrari game was rubbish too maybe? Where are the game breaking bug patches for all their games? where is the support? Something went wrong somewhere. Are you going, to place 'selected' critics on metacritic over everyone and every other factor that actually matters? If people cant enjoy their game do they go and console themselves with a metacritic score: peace:Yes, but you're also verbally engaging in dialogic excrement right now, so forgive me for culling the opinions I pay attention to with more care than some Sony fanboy who finds any mental behaviour besides confirmation bias a complete impossibility. Who are these "people"? Support for Shift was EA's prerogative, since they're the one's holding the license and contracting developers to make games in the series. Slightly Mad would have to do more than live up to their name, by supporting a game that the publisher was no longer paying them for. What I was getting at is that the base product was solid.
Compare that to Evolution studios or Polyphony who are on Sony's bankroll, and both working on first party franchises that serve as showcases for their respective platforms with development periods that span half decades. So yeah, looks like you have this shit down pretty well.
And right, I'm "selectively," looking at critic opinions. But of course, you're a paragon of intellectual honesty, and you of course, haven't spent the last few posts selectively looking at resolution, or whatever other fetishised element you can think of like "time," in isolation, instead of looking at the experience as a whole. Never mind the fact that you're completely neglecting to address the most important aspects of my argument and myopically (which is so so out of the ordinary for you) focusing on things that you can pretend to dismiss with vague, prebaked retorts.
I mean, what even is this?:
Then find out how Project Cars handles. The developer has a description. Isnt the gameplay of a game important? :awesome:No, you smug infantile shite, it's not like I've spend the last few wee posts explaining this while you putz about with all the grace of a giant, throbbing member.
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Not sure whether this is contentious in comparison to popular opinion, but I really enjoyed the film. There were elements that befuddle every time travelling story, and they were really obvious here, and maybe that's why they were so easy to ignore, in a Back to the Future kind of way. I also didn't understand some of the decisions that were made by the characters, especially the tendency to homogenise identity, as if a person is "essentially" the same throughout their life, and their decisions are somehow manipulable because of this. I liked how that played out though, since the characters' lack of understanding about their own, and each other's behavioural motivations was actually addressed in the way Magneto behaves.
The Quicksilver scenes were great.
In other words, it was totally good in all the ways you'd want from an X-Men film. Also it fixed the fucked up Last Stand continuity. Thank cuntfisting Jesus.
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I am amused you used Metacritic to defend the Shift series. Critic opinion for videogames is almost worthless nowadays, more so for racing games whether its Mario kart or Wipeout or Gran Turismo. The proof is in how users approach these games. The shift series user reviews are plagued by the fact that they are a buggy mess. They never even got round to fixing the flying bug in Shift 1. The entire game was a mess. Shift 2 was on PSPlus so plenty of people will have tried it out... Not sure how far people got with it though. I recall my friends list was not active on the game.
Right, we should dismiss critic opinion across the board, irrespective of how well it might have resonated with us in the past, and replace it with your obviously more measured perspective, which seems to favour non-sequitur over reason, because that would be convenient to your argument. What does "user approach" have to do with bugs? Surely that would be developer approach? Speaking of user reviews being plagued, GT5 reviews - both user and critic - were filled with complaints about how the game used PS2 car models, and GT6 reviewers complained about microtransactions across the board, how the pacing was broken without monetising, and the fact that sixteen years into the series, there are still no damage models or deformation, either in the cars or the tracks. If by "user approach," or how many people on your friends list are active enthusiasts for the series in question you mean we should taking the populist road, we should apply that across the board. Of course, that would have us favour Call of Duty over Battlefield or Titanfall, Jeremy Kyle over The Wire, or Britney Spears over The Dillinger Escape Plan and on until infinity. So sucks to your assmar, piggy, that argument is bullshit.
Photorealism involves accuracy. Which is something non GT games struggle at for obvious reasons(dev time, color, accuracy of modelling shapes, sizes etc.) . Driveclub is more impressive, easily. Actual scenery vs clever tricks and sky boxes. Not to mention lots of great features and effects. Project Cars has a great base hardware to work with but the game is closer to GT's content but with less realistic handling. I think thats an issue. Too many games like to tread close to GT.
Right, I suppose you're speaking of the accuracy that comes with retooling PS2 architectural models, and refusing to do good by the "simulation" aspect that your series lives and dies by, because you're not putting in car deformation? Sounds totally legit. Once again, I have no idea how Project Cars handles in comparison to Gran Turismo (and neither, I suspect, do you), but from what I've read in, for example, EDGE, its degree of simulation is not only very realistic, but also a work in progress that'll benefit from the fact that the computers it runs on (ie. the min specs) are far in excess of the eight year old hardware in the PS3. I think we can infer to the best explanation, that if they manage to not totally screw it up, it'll avail that. But let's take your argument to it's logical conclusion shall we; let me spend 20+ years developing on my Atari 2600 and apparently all that time will have magically transmogrified my second generation console into a machine that can handle photorealistic imagery, and render these cars in a more accurate way than the latest hardware, even though it can't display three dimensional objects. Good going. The PS3 is simply limited by how many triangles it can display on screen at any one time, the ability of its 256mb of vRAM to hold textures, and the compute units that can process shadows, lighting and shading to a degree that we might call accurate.
All of this of course isn't mentioning Assetto Corsa which is being described as the most realistic racing sim available. Which doesn't really excite me, since it's for another audience; I don't even know why we're arguing about realism here, since the degree of simulation available in these games isn't even going to be available to anyone playing with a standard controller, in the same way that you're not going to get the full degree of simulation out of IL:Sturmovic without the trackIR and a flight stick. In honesty, I'd probably prefer to play Drive Club or Forza over any of these games, but that doesn't mean they're not interesting or worth talking about.
So pipe down sonny, and think twice before posting your ludicrous, reductive opinions on a place where they can openly embarrass you.
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I'm just going to pick at random things in your post that are redolent of a lack of basic reasoning skills and address them: Gran Turismo 6 is sitting at an 81 metacritic, NFS: Shift is sitting at 83. While I have problems with the way metacritic amalgamates scores based on different rubrics, it does so for both games. So there's my answer on lack of pedigree; the developers have shown that they can make an engaging sim, despite the restrictions that the NFS license and the EA constrained dev cycle imposed upon them. For Project Cars, they have all the time and funding they need. For speed.
"Photorealisim" is, despite your babbling, an outcome of the combination of the detail in the architectural models, texturing, lighting, shadowing, shading and all of the other things that a GPU does and that I can't be bothered to enumerate here because it would take forever. No amount of "time" spent in development is going to make GT6 a better looking game than either Forza, Drive Club or Project Cars, because abstract effort isn't as crucial to graphical quality as the power of the hardware.
I'm not keen to promote the game, I'm just interested it in the same way I'm interested in Drive Club, GRID Autosport and the rest of them. Someone asked a question, and you were embarrassingly, childishly dismissive, so I looked to rectify the representation that game got in this thread. I'm not into Driving sims enough to crowdfund one, but I have taken a look at what the community are saying about the constant alpha release updates, the car and track models that are constantly being released with developer commentary, and the rest of it. I think that allowing your main constituency to be in on every move you make is an interesting and yes, transparent, way to release a game.
Finally, "namecalling." Calling you a fanboy, isn't namecalling, it's describing your style of argument. There are two aspects to an argument that are important here; the content of the argument, and the person making it. When the person making the argument has shown a tendancy again and again, to misrepresent the situation at hand because doing so would favour whatever personal interest he has in one side over another, I think it's fair to call that person a fanboy. I'm not a fanboy in this instance, because I'm being fair to all sides and not dismissing them because it would make me feel secure about my console purchase.
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The cool thing with the gun sounds is that they seem to vary depending on the spaciousness of the room you're in, but yeah, they sound a little underpowered on their own - they sounds fucking fiendish when dual wielded.
PlayStation 4 Console Discussion
in Other Consoles
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I'm thinking about getting a PS4 this weekend. What multiplayer games do you guys tend to hit up on a regular basis?
@Daft, Watch Dogs is really crap. Could go on, but I feel like it doesn't deserve my words.