Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 31, 2006

Filed under: Movies 23 comments

 Silent Hill: Plot analysisPrevious Post

Lileks nails my #1 gripe with X-Men:

[…] never really loved the franchise, to use that horrid word. The entire mutant-as-a-metaphor was insulting, anyway â€"if you know anything about kids you know that a teen with the ability to shoot fire out of his ears would not be shunned as a weirdo freak but elected class president on general principle: dude! Awesome! I can understand parents getting upset if their kid was blue and covered with hairy nodules, but the idea that parents would consider their kid “sick” if she had the telekinetic ability to raise every car in the neighborhood nine feet in the air â€" please. We have parents who will go across the ocean to adopt a Down's Syndrome baby; are we to believe that the majority of American parents reject their kids because they can levitate or cough up gold by the quart or exude perfectly formed Neapolitan Ice Cream bricks from their hindquarters? Far from persecuting them, they'd get their own reality shows. Storm would be a TV meteorologist in New York. As for your morning commute, I'll see what I can do. Stay classy, Manhattan.

The second movie made me nuts. In a movie with people who can turn into metal and control the weather, the most unrealistic part was when Bobby went home. His parents did not act like real people. They way they rejected him way very un-parent like.

It is in the nature of parent to claim that nothing is wrong with their kid, even when there obviously is. Once in a while you’ll see one of these stories about some sicko serial killer / mass murderer who gets caught killing / raping / eating young women, and their parent(s) will end up on the news saying they still love their kid and believe he’s a “good person”.

In the real world you’d see bumper stickers:

Proud parent of a mutant honor student

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Silent Hill: Plot analysisPrevious Post

Next PostSexy Beach 

23 comments

Uwe Boll vs. The Movies

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 30, 2006

Filed under: Rants 8 comments

 The Harvard ManPrevious Post

Next PostAd Senseless 

I tossed some insults at Uwe Boll the other day, but Cineris has a better idea than boxing Use Boll: Challenge him to a movie-making competition, which would be a contest where he could not possibly win.

He hasn’t made any movies about games that I care about. I’ve never seen BloodRayne before. I played Alone in the Dark, but I was never very attached to the game itself. Far Cry was already a stupid game when it came to the story and characters, so I don’t know how much worse he’ll be able to make it. Dungeon Siege was more or less a plotless game of stats building and loot harvesting, so I don’t know how anyone could make a movie based on the game in any meaningful way. If you can make a movie from that, then Microsoft Flight Simulator: The Movie can’t be far off. Postal is stupid on purpose for comedic effect. I wonder if he realizes that.

So he hasn’t wronged any titles that I care about. My real fear is that he will. Sooner or later he’ll get his grubby mitts on the rights to some game close to my heart, and there won’t be anything I can do but watch my beloved story get turned into a single-digit scoring movie on the Tomatometer. System Shock, Myst, Dues Ex, and The Longest Journey come to mind.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 The Harvard ManPrevious Post

Next PostAd Senseless 

8 comments

DM of the Rings XXIII:
Happy Halloween

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 30, 2006

Filed under: DM of the Rings 35 comments

 DM of the Rings XXII:
Are We There Yet?Previous Post

Next PostDM of the Rings XXIV:
Loot of the Rings 

Fellowship of the Ring, Legion, Happy Halloween

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 DM of the Rings XXII:
Are We There Yet?Previous Post

Next PostDM of the Rings XXIV:
Loot of the Rings 

35 comments

Virtual Villagers

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 30, 2006

Filed under: Game Reviews 6 comments

 Dreamfall, The Bitter EndPrevious Post

Next PostVirtual Villagers-Mating 

This weekend Virtual Villagers caught my eye. I remembered The Rampant Coyote mentioning this game back in August, and so I grabbed it more or less on impulse.

The tech ladder. My one quibble: FISHING is more advanced than FARMING?!? That is very, very backwards, particularly for island natives.

It’s an interesting game. I was expecting a sort of “Sim City on a micro scale”, but that isn’t what I got. This game is a lot like the “take care of your pet” games, a style that is common enough that there ought to be a genre name for it. You start off with a group of a half-dozen villagers and a few huts, and you must guide them into a flourishing community. There is no save / load system, where you could go back and correct an earlier mistake. The game just runs. If you exit the game and come back later, time will have passed in the game world.

I can see how these sorts of games are intended to be played: You’re supposed to check in on them periodically, and spend maybe five minutes playing every hour or so. I don’t usually care for this sort of thing myself, but it’s a popular game type and I can understand why some people find it appealing. It’s more nurturing than managerial, and more casual than in-depth. My problem is that after five minutes I want to keep playing but there really isn’t anything left to do.

There is a simple tech system, where you can research better ways of living to make larger populations possible. The first group of villagers start off in their early 20’s with little job knowledge. The more a person does a particular job the better they get, so it makes sense to specialize. Eventually they get old and die.

There are also a number of goals, or landmark events that you can reach, but you don’t know what they are ahead of time. This sounds annoying, but it’s actually pretty engaging. There are bits of the environment you don’t know what to do with, and goals which you know are there but don’t know what they are or how to reach them. I found myself experimenting with the environment, trying to get the villagers to examine different things and see how they might be used.

It’s an amusing game.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Dreamfall, The Bitter EndPrevious Post

Next PostVirtual Villagers-Mating 

6 comments

DM of the Rings XXII:
Are We There Yet?

By Shamus Posted Friday Oct 27, 2006

Filed under: DM of the Rings 57 comments

 DM of the Rings XXI:
The Epic Sounds of BattlePrevious Post

Next PostDM of the Rings XXIII:
Happy Halloween 

Wasting Time, Rulebooks, Giving the Finger, Legolas, Gay Jokes, Pizza

In defense of the players, I will say that when this sort of thing happens it is usually the result of the players getting restless or bored. If the players are distracted, it means it’s time to change something and recapture their interest. I’m still working on this particular skill myself.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 DM of the Rings XXI:
The Epic Sounds of BattlePrevious Post

Next PostDM of the Rings XXIII:
Happy Halloween 

57 comments

Friday SitRep

By Shamus Posted Friday Oct 27, 2006

Filed under: Notices 9 comments

 Introducing: Clutter!Previous Post

Next PostThe Site was Pulled Over 

Many random notes and much pointless navel-gazing this morning. Best if you skip this. I should be out of this self-indulgent phase any minute now…

Yes, I have changed the site theme for Halloween. I don’t like it either. I don’t think this particular layout lends itself to Halloween colors. I thought of going white-on-black for Halloween, but there are all sorts of reasons why that would look just awful, unless I wanted to remake all of the graphics. Which I don’t.

My YouTube video Bowling+Rollercoaster=FUN! has had amazing success. Check it out:

135,000 viewers is just crazy. That’s more than the total number of hits to this website in the last 5 months. I stand by my original assessment that YouTube can’t possibly make money like this. Although now the deal I offered Google might not be as tantalizing as before, for reasons I’ll get into in a minute. Last week – when the movie was new – I was (briefly) the #1 favorited videogame movie on YouTube. This sort of thing tends to feed on itself. I’m guessing that once you get onto page 1 of the favorites, it becomes easier to get more visitors and thus stay there.

Still, DM of the Rings is getting many, many links (nearly doubling the total number of links to my blog, ever) and the Bowlercoaster movie went wild – both of these things happened within a few days of each other.

This morning I looked and I’d blown through my allotted bandwidth for the month. This has never been a problem before. (Not even close.) Now I wonder: Is this allotment given by the calendar month which ends in a couple of days, or by billing month, which ends in a couple of weeks? If the latter, I could be way, way, way over by the end of the month. I have no idea what will happen. I can’t find anything on the HostingMatters pages about this. Do they shut me down? Put a lien on my house? Send a couple of goons to give me a beating? This should be interesting and quite painful finding out!

Hmmm. After searching through the help pages, looks like it will just be a few extra bucks. Assuming I don’t get FARKed or Digg’ed (dug?) or otherwise linked by some huge site, I should skate through just fine. Most of this is my own dumb fault. I’ve been generally sloppy about making sure I pick the best file format for a particular image, and I’ve left JPG quality on my images needlessly high. I add lots of graphics to posts that do not need them. I use ten screenshots when three would do. I bet with a little effort (which is still too much) I could make the archives much lighter.

I’ve gone back and added titles to the old DM of the Rings, and will be giving them titles from here on out. This is to make things easier on myself, which is one of my passions in life. The old numeral names were too hard to keep straight in my head, and as I consider new strips and shuffle through the archives I find myself getting confused. So, now we have titles.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Introducing: Clutter!Previous Post

Next PostThe Site was Pulled Over 

9 comments

Seanbaby vs Uwe Boll

By Shamus Posted Thursday Oct 26, 2006

Filed under: Nerd Culture 18 comments

 Battlestar GalacticaPrevious Post

Next PostConcerned, RIP 

Normally I start these little posts off with a description of who I’m talking about. So, if I’m worried that you may not know who Seanbaby is then I will explain that Seanbaby is the inventor of funny and winner of the Nobel Prize for Awesome.

The problem is that I have no way of explaining Uwe Boll to someone. He’s so reviled and so universally hated that all of the insults in every language have already been used in an attempt to describe him. Then people used up all the compliments by preceding them with the word “not”. So, there is no language left at this point and the only way I could tell you about him is if I made up new words:

Snivelium [snivâ€§elâ€§eeâ€§um] – noun

Unit of measure. The number of cubic meters of children’s tears caused by one of Uwe Boll’s movies.

People call Ewe Ball a “filmmaker”, but this is because – as I mentioned before – nobody knows what else to call him. Hugh Bowl makes movies in the same way that a hippo’s rectum makes fresh pastry. The best thing that can be said about him is that he provides work to actors who lack the dramatic skills to get a job making hard-core pornographic silent films. He’s famous for taking very stupid videogames and – against all odds and nature – somehow making them into even more stupid movies.

I heard a rumor that Eww Bowel was going to have some sort of celebrity boxing match against his critics, which didn’t make a lot of sense to me because that would be everyone on earth, including his own mother. While I’m pretty sure he could take her, it doesn’t seem like it would make for good television. Then he found out he might end up in the ring against Seanbaby, and once he’d changed his pants he announced he wouldn’t be available for the fight.

Although now that I think of it: If someone could make a videogame about Seanbaby punching Yoo Bole in the face over and over again, it might be enough to trick him into making a movie about it, which may lead to the real thing. However, it would be very risky to make such a game. The game would probably sell so well that the author would be fatally crushed beneath a mountain of cash and cheerleaders.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Battlestar GalacticaPrevious Post

Next PostConcerned, RIP 

18 comments

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