It definitely does have a lot of 'auto' options. You can basically have a fleet of ships automatically trading for you, set up a few space stations and be able to generate mass amounts of money. Definitely a good way to get used to the game and it's mechanics. There's a LOT of stuff floating around out there, tho, and exploration is often rewarded (and occasionally punished severely). I usually tend to have multiple pilots going at once in different save files so I can be a pirate one day or be a cop the next day or be a millionaire supply trader the next, etc.

There are a lot of mods for it. I would recommend snagging one of the various multitude of cockpit mods / collections. Pretty sure there's one that allows you to turn on time compression during non-computer-controlled flight, though there are good reasons why you wouldn't want to do that too often. Also pretty sure there's one that allows time compression up to something like 10,000x, though any computer-controlled flight is sometimes a risk, especially in busy sectors. My current install was made a year or so ago and I only got a cockpit mod. Out of the loop on mods now, so there might be some awesome new ones. I might have to see what's out there now.

But there are lots of mods. Large modding community for that game, and many of them are the nerdiest of nerds. Many of the cockpit mods are ridiculously detailed.

EDIT: nope, time compression mods don't work in my version. In Rebirth they've done something to it, tho? SETA is something I only tend to use in short bursts anyway, and generally avoid it in crowded places.

Also EDIT: I forgot to add that I also like Mount & Blade a lot. Another one of those games that lets you do your own thing with quite a nice bonus feature of being able to assemble large crowds of people to stab each other. I've not played that one as much as I should.

I think Zarban had a link to that one on his site, but it's not there anymore? I remember getting it from somewhere, tho. Fucking hilarious. Dorkman was firing on all cylinders on that one.

I used to only listen to it with the movie going, but when the intermission started I downloaded the first ten or so to listen to in the car. Then I had all this extra space so I dumped a bunch of commentaries on there as well, cause why not? Then I listened to the Roger Rabbit commentary in the car and found it extremely enjoyable, so now DiF is pretty much all I listen to in the car, unless I really need to rock the fuck out after a stressful day at work or whatever.

The unfortunate thing is that I have nowhere to go that takes me 90 or more minutes to drive. A lot of the time I'll get to where I'm going and sit in the car listening "just for a minute longer" and accidentally burn ten minutes of gas idling in the grocery store parking lot.

You guys owe me about 50 bucks worth of gas now.

I used to use the 'T'-word when talking about this stuff to people, but...  man you think people react badly to the 'interactive movie' thing... drop the word 'toy' into the conversation. You're totally right, tho. Toys are the perfect description of what I like to play with. Adult toys where I can send a squad of guys to tactically stab another squad of guys.

Or you could compare it to the sort of 'game' that cowboys and indians is. It's not really a game, it's more a defined area of playable space where there are certain rules (if you get 'hit' you're dead, don't go outside the back yard), mechanics ("bang!"), coupled with the potential for a dynamically generated story that the other players (or the computer in the digital world) can add to or alter along with you to suit whatever needs you have for the story at that particular moment.

Cowboys and indians isn't really a game. It's more like LARPing for kindergarteners. I want games to try heading in that direction a bit.

I dunno if you can extrapolate what sort of an effect this will have on the VFX industry due to the pretty widespread ramifications any sort of radical departure from the norm may have on any number of industries. In a vacuum it may very well be something that would have more work head overseas to enjoy cheaper labor, but when you remove it from the vacuum it becomes a bit difficult to see anything clearly. Too many variables flying around at once.

If you live there and you're an effects guy and you think this will end up driving more work your way, then now's the time to set up shop and try to cater directly to that new market. If you have an effects house and you're expecting a lot more outsourced work coming your way, now might be a good time to hire more people and expand. Of course, if you're wrong then you basically just bankrupted your company.

Honestly, the VFX / film industry never entered my mind at all when thinking about what's going on in europe. Definitely something to keep an eye on.

I honestly haven't thought much about economics like this at all, so if I sound like a moron, you can just chalk that up to me being from the US. We live in our own little vacuum.

... besides, we elected our own communist / socialist president a few years ago and so far he's done nothing but drive our economy, traditions and morality into the ground. Good luck, France. Keep a close eye on the purity of your bodily fluids, etc, etc.

haha, good question

Actually, I think the story for this sort of movie really has to be simple. Something like The Dark Knight can be full of plot twists and complex story bits cause you can sit there and focus on the one thing for a while and connect all the dots. In a movie like this there are too many main characters to be able to focus on one of them too long, so the plot has to let you spend some time with each of them.

I think that's the problem a lot of modern action movies have, really. They try to hard to cram too much into the plot. Die Hard is about a guy fighting thieves/terrorists in a big building. Simple idea that you can hang a lot of cool action sequences on. They don't overcomplicate it, it's mostly just a dude attacking / running from guys with guns. There are other things in that movie, but all of them come back to the main plot about the guy in the building.

Transformers 3 should be a movie about a giant robot that wants to teleport his world over here and enslave the world. He needs to get these things in order to do that. The movie should be him saying "I want to get these things" and the good guys saying "We'll stop you!". You go to different locations where they have a fight and the good guys lose and the bad guy gets all the things. Then he sets them up and starts teleporting his world here and begins the enslavement process and the good guys rally together (maybe the first time all of them have been together and not split up to protect multiple targets?) and there's a big fight and they beat the bad guy in some clever or awesome manner. The end. Everything should relate back to that basic plot in some way.

Instead we get about an hour of a kid looking for a job and dealing with his overbearing parents.

The Avengers brings it old-school.

EDIT: god damn, guys, the movie made $80 Million on Friday alone. That one day puts it at the 34th best opening for a film ever, and second highest single day take for a film (Deathly Hallows managed $91 Million on it's opening day...). With two more days to go, not to mention the very positive word of mouth going on, it wouldn't surprise me if it has the best opening weekend ever.

Also, I should have asked, is it worth seeing in 3D? I went to a 2D screening. I think next weekend I might try to see it in 3D. There were a few parts where I thought "wow, I bet that bit right there would kick ass in 3D"

I wish I had been in the chatroom for this.

On defining "art", I generally agree with Scott McCloud. His definition is extremely broad and encompasses any activity that humans do that isn't directly related to survival or reproduction (although I think you can take it further and eliminate a lot of the aspects of reproduction, just not the instinct...  some people are artists in bed...)

He drew a comic to illustrate this. The first page had a caveman looking to catch and procreate with a female (reproduction), but is interrupted by a sabertooth cat which he runs away from (survival). Here's the second page:

At this point I have to plug his book, Understanding Comics, which is one of the greatest books ever written and applicable to pretty much all things creative, not just comics.

The little segment with the cave paintings illustrates why art is so great. Some caveman was 'arting', just dicking around and realized that he could make marks on a wall that resembled whatever, and then used that new knowledge to draw a tutorial on killing buffalo, or used it to draw some significant event that he remembered from the previous week. Either way, if those images were meant to be practical, then those paintings are literally the most significant bit of human history we have, as that's the oldest 'written' history or store of knowledge. All cause some caveman was dicking around with a bit of charred stick on a wall.

My issue with videogames is more to do with story, in that games aren't inherently a storytelling medium, they're a story creating medium that people are trying to use to tell their stories.

People didn't play Pacman or Joust because they had amazing stories, but those games did have stories that you created while you played them. They had a beginning when you put a quarter into the machine, a middle while you were playing the game and an ending when you either beat the game or (more likely) ran out of quarters or just decided you didn't like the game. Based on that story, you decided whether you'd ever go back and play that game again, or whether you'd go try a different one. The novelty of games is that the experience you have is different every time you play it (ideally). The rules and mechanics are the same every time you play PacMan, but the game will be different every time you play it.

Modern games have that going for them, but they're no longer that pure. Games have evolved into these interactive movies where the goal is no longer to have an experience based around some mechanics, but to experience a series of events and have some level of control in how things play out. On the other hand, sandbox games like GTA4 and Skyrim are heading in what I feel is the correct direction, but are still trying to crowbar that modern gaming "experience the excitement of playing an epic film" philosophy in there.

To elaborate a little on what Trey said, there's more parallels to be drawn between early films and gaming. The earliest films were just spectacle and amusement. The first games were pretty much that as well. Then movies started telling stories, but they mostly used stage techniques cause that's how you did that story telling thing with actors, right? Then they started using editing and the camera to do things that you couldn't do on a stage, but most of what you did with a movie you could do on a stage. I think that's where games are right now. They're basically making movies, but putting little interactive things in there that only a game can do, but you could make a Mass Effect movie because that's what a lot of that game's storytelling elements are.

When we get to a point in games where you can no longer make the game into a movie and do it justice, that's when games will have come into their own. I think the earliest movies did that perfectly, but purely as a "look at what we can do" sort of way. You couldn't make "Humorous phases of funny faces" a stage production. You couldn't really make Tetris or Donkey Kong into movies because the novelty of them is how videogamey they are. They are purely videogames. In another 30 years we'll probably be at a point where videogames have gone back to those fundamental ideas to tell stories that are uniquely tellable only on the terms of games - probably having to do more with your own personal preferences over how you'd like the story to go, rather than how some guy at EA decided it should.

If you're interested in games that make my dick hard, check out X³, which is a space combat / trading / etc game. You get a space ship or two and a little money and a massive universe and that's the game. There are missions and stuff, but you don't have to do them, and in fact I would recommend not doing them. Just flying around and exploring the world is worth it. It's one of those games where there's a ton of stuff to do and you can play the game however you want. You can be a good guy or a bad guy or an innocent bystander.

Or check out Dwarf Fortress. Or check out any game that has some sort of random mission generator or sandbox mode like Sim City or IL2 or ArmA 2. Check out Tower Climb if you just wanna play a simple 2D game. Check out The Binding of Isaac, a game that has a bit of story but fits that onto a totally random game. Skyrim is a great game to explore in as well, although that's pretty much all you can do if you don't do at least some of the missions. You have to unlock a few things before you're free to just play the game however you want, and even then you can tell that that's not how the game was meant to be played.

Also, I love longplays and let's plays. The best collection of longplays on youtube is here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/cubex55?feature=g-user-u
Those guys upload everything from modern games to old 1980's arcade games and everything in between. No talking or commentary whatsoever. Just the games.

Some of us post walls-o-text with every other post. Maybe I should have posted every paragraph separately?

I'm a Kane defender. I fucking love that movie, not cause it's a 'classic', but cause it's a fucking good movie and the sort of film I like: A movie about a guy and his issues.

He mentioned La Strada in that list as well, and that's another one I'd probably put on a list of 'greatest films of all time (that I've seen)'. Doesn't hurt that it's also the movie that got me 'into' movies.

However, Aside from those, I'd probably put mostly modern films on my list, cause I'm young and a lot of old movies are like torture to me. If it's pre 1960's, then it's gotta be fucking La Strada or Kane or 7 Samurai or cut from that sort of cloth to keep me interested.

But Citizen Kane is amazing, and I want you to fucking acknowledge it!
(yeah, I know that's the wrong scene. I couldn't find the proper car shot...)

I go into every movie with an open mind, but it has to give my brain something worth chewing on in the first ten or fifteen minutes or so, or i'll end up picking it apart the whole time, starting with "This movie still doesn't have a plot that I can see..."

Very rarely can a film shake me out of that nitpicky mindset once it's kicked in.

Look guys, Shia finally made a movie that won't make you sigh sadly every ten minutes!

I'm not too worried about the Hobbit looking like crap. The footage they showed off was probably a lot more raw than you'd see in the theater. You look at just about any direct-from-camera footage and it just looks wrong until you go in and make it look like a movie. If there's still green screens in the shots, then it's probably not been color corrected / balanced and all that junk.

What I'm more worried about is the lack of motion blur on the versions projected at 24FPS. There have been movies that shot with a short exposure for some scenes (Saving Private Ryan had a number of scenes like that, I believe), and it's noticeable.