Moderator: Edi
THANK YOU!Zablorg wrote:I don't get E.T. Not only do I not get it, I fucking despise the thing. I hate Elliot, I hate his sister, and I fucking hate E.T.
They tried that and it bombed horribly.andrewgpaul wrote:If you've got a story to tell, write a fucking novel. Or make a movie.
That reminds me of Half Life 2. Why bother making a game if it is an interactive movie ? I think people once joked about paper thin plots in FPS games. Now it's the opposite. The player is forced go along a scripted rail road ride so he "appreciates the story". Many people praised Half Life's lack of cutscenes as a step forward. I think it was a step in the wrong direction. Plot should stay in cutscenes and not affect the gunfights in form of scripted bullshit.If you've got a story to tell, write a fucking novel. Or make a movie.
There's a good and a bad way of doing these things, and I think that's why I never got into the original Half-Life. They gave you only one path of progression, with the illusion of interactivity. All too often, you found, for instance, a scientists hanging on for dear life, waiting for your help, but as soon as you got close, a script would trigger and he'd fall to his death. Scripts are all well and good to give the illusion of freedom, but it is a chimera. And if it's obvious I don't have a say in what happens, whyever should I bother playing?Sarevok wrote:That reminds me of Half Life 2. Why bother making a game if it is an interactive movie ? I think people once joked about paper thin plots in FPS games. Now it's the opposite. The player is forced go along a scripted rail road ride so he "appreciates the story". Many people praised Half Life's lack of cutscenes as a step forward. I think it was a step in the wrong direction. Plot should stay in cutscenes and not affect the gunfights in form of scripted bullshit.If you've got a story to tell, write a fucking novel. Or make a movie.
That's because The Spirits Within was shite. From what I've heard, the FF7 plot is interesting, but I don't want to wade through the god-awful game around it (things that bug me: random encounters, especially when I'm trying to chase an NPC; needlessly complicated levelling up procedure; well-rendered (for the time) backgrounds, ruined by the bobble-headed character sprites - at least make them match).Uraniun235 wrote:They tried that and it bombed horribly.andrewgpaul wrote:If you've got a story to tell, write a fucking novel. Or make a movie.
Halflife1 is still much better in this regard than Halflife2, where not only are you railroaded down a plot, but the plot is STUPID. Being chased by the army? Quick, run into the secret resistance base! OH GOD HOW DID THEY FIND US?Eleas wrote:There's a good and a bad way of doing these things, and I think that's why I never got into the original Half-Life. They gave you only one path of progression, with the illusion of interactivity. All too often, you found, for instance, a scientists hanging on for dear life, waiting for your help, but as soon as you got close, a script would trigger and he'd fall to his death. Scripts are all well and good to give the illusion of freedom, but it is a chimera. And if it's obvious I don't have a say in what happens, whyever should I bother playing?
Contrast that with Thief: The Dark Project, whose overarching story was equally linear, but which in essence let you do whatever you wanted within the context of a given mission. In terms of character, of which the game's protagonist had a lot, the actions he took always made perfect sense. Someone tries to kill you? Follow the bastards home and rob them blind. You got shafted by your employer? Get even.
According to one of those "Hard water " tables you get around the place, the majority of the UK has perfectly decent water. Its only the likes of London and the Midlands that have particularly rubbish supplies.andrewgpaul wrote:Oh, and from another thread; bottled water. Why?
OK, I'll grant you, perhaps in countries with shitty drinking water, like parts of England, but in Scotland? Eh?
Oh hell yes. I could talk for ages about how the average gamer seems to want everything spelled out for them, but I'll shut up for the sake of the thread.Stark wrote: Games like Thief that required timing and paying attention to take advantage of convesations/distractions/etc were often criticised at the time. People want to 'watch the funny conversation', not 'use distraction to penetrate security'. If you have to take advantage of a limited opportunity, most people will miss it.
It's long been my theory that grunge is an outgrowth of the Pampered Generation. A generation which has been so hopelessly coddled, pampered, cushioned, and gingerly protected that they need to create a miserable mood with the music they play on their iPods, in order to feel like they possess something resembling emotional depth.RedImperator wrote:I don't get grunge. It's the most listless and grating genre of rock that ever went mainstream, and whatever limited charm it once had was long ago beaten out of it by endless radio airplay of the same boring shit over and over (and over and over and over) again.
That's how I felt about the Dark Tower series. I felt my suspension-of-disbelief-meter drop a few points every time a character from this world was introduced. Sure, the self-referential stuff was great, but it didn't make up for the hokiness of having Roland play therapist for a junkie. I kind of stopped trying to suspend my disbelief when Susannah joined the party.His Divine Shadow wrote:Take his magnus opus for that, around the middle he fucks up the whole story and it just gets progressively worse until the end, and it was such a fucking good story at first.Gullible Jones wrote:Stephen King.
It's not that he's a bad writer, exactly; but four out of five times it seems he just can't get his shit together. He creates great characters and great scenarios, and then pulls some random crap that breaks SoD. He takes an interesting idea, and turns it into an artifically hopeless situation that he resolves with a literal deus ex machina. Some of his stuff is good all the way through; but more often than not I find it tremendously frustrating, in some ways more so than that of authors who are pure hacks.
In HL2's defense, the whole deal with Xen in HL1 looks pretty stupid to me. (OMG look, our portal opened into a dimension full of monsters controlled by the big fetus-shaped boss! Wheee!) The Combine at least strike me as fairly creepy,Stark wrote: Halflife1 is still much better in this regard than Halflife2, where not only are you railroaded down a plot, but the plot is STUPID. Being chased by the army? Quick, run into the secret resistance base! OH GOD HOW DID THEY FIND US?
Yes he does insert himself in the books, he is called the "wordslinger" by Roland, the bad guys are trying to kill him because doing that will prevent him from finishing the Dark Tower. Yes Stephen King is writing about writing a book and being visited by the guys he's writing about. It was a pretty fucking weird.Gullible Jones wrote:I've heard that King actually inserts himself into one of the later books as a major character. I'm glad I didn't get that far; at this point, I prefer to think of The Gunslinger as a standalone work and the rest of the series as semi-crappy fanfic.
The grunge kids have since had children of their own, thus giving birth to Emo.Darth Wong wrote:It's long been my theory that grunge is an outgrowth of the Pampered Generation. A generation which has been so hopelessly coddled, pampered, cushioned, and gingerly protected that they need to create a miserable mood with the music they play on their iPods, in order to feel like they possess something resembling emotional depth.RedImperator wrote:I don't get grunge. It's the most listless and grating genre of rock that ever went mainstream, and whatever limited charm it once had was long ago beaten out of it by endless radio airplay of the same boring shit over and over (and over and over and over) again.
Oh yeah, that reminds me. I don't get Lovecraft. Oh boy, a bunch of ancient gods that feed on terror, that sure does fill me with amusement.The Yosemite Bear wrote:so in HL three do we get to see HPL's pals, you know Mr. N., Mr. C., Mr. H, Ms. Y.-S.
Well, you can buy the whole album, often for a bit less than the cost of a physical CD. That said, sometimes people just want the single song.Mrs Kendall wrote:I don't get ITunes, why pay for songs one by one like that?
Maybe it's cause I don't use our I-Pod shuffle (which we got for free) since I don't go anywhere without the car for any length of time. I just don't get why people pay so much for just one song.
This is a nice neat segue into my own personal 'I just don't get", which is 80's glam-metal. I'm not a fan of grunge, but thank god somebody killed this shit. I have records from all these bands (except for KISS, they never did anything good), and I can enjoy them on their own terms (and AC/DC is a Top 10 band) but they're creatively bankrupt and most of it is terrible. Just like we needed punk rock to kill off progrock in the mainstream, we needed grunge to get rid of the power ballad. Thankfully grunge died and now we have good music again.I've always agreed with Red's statement that grunge killed rock. Everyone was having fun with the likes of AC/DC, KISS, Bon Jovi, Poison and the like. Everyone was getting paid and laid, there was nothing to bitch about.
80s glam metal was mostly considered shit by music fans even in its time. Even when Poison was a brand-new band, almost everyone I knew thought that their presentation was a fucking embarrassment to popular music. And a lot of bands back then sold records on the basis of the "one radio hit sells the other 9 piece of shit songs on the album" technique. The music business was different back then: customers put up with a lot of shit, like not being able to preview albums before they bought them. Why do you think the RIAA is so nostalgic for that era?HemlockGrey wrote:This is a nice neat segue into my own personal 'I just don't get", which is 80's glam-metal. I'm not a fan of grunge, but thank god somebody killed this shit. I have records from all these bands (except for KISS, they never did anything good), and I can enjoy them on their own terms (and AC/DC is a Top 10 band) but they're creatively bankrupt and most of it is terrible. Just like we needed punk rock to kill off progrock in the mainstream, we needed grunge to get rid of the power ballad. Thankfully grunge died and now we have good music again.I've always agreed with Red's statement that grunge killed rock. Everyone was having fun with the likes of AC/DC, KISS, Bon Jovi, Poison and the like. Everyone was getting paid and laid, there was nothing to bitch about.
Anywhere else, I'll take your word for it 
