I'm still in the early part of the game. I've got a lvl 6 Barbarian going right now. The game suffers from what I may as well dub "Modern Gaming Syndrome". What I've seen so far is that the game is going to do everything for me, and my job is just to follow the flashing arrows and click on bad guys.

Now, the previous games did the exact same thing, but I loved them. But the previous games were more about building a character the way you wanted and collecting and crafting loot and stuff to make the most bad-ass character you could. There were elements of strategy to the skill tree and combat. This was the fun part of Diablo 2. They have apparently removed it entirely from Diablo 3. They basically took Diablo 2 and removed the fun part.

Combat in Diablo 2 had a variety to it. You often had to be very careful about how you were approaching a situation. Some enemies you could just kill the hell out of. Some enemies would run away from you while taking pot-shots. Some enemies would attack en-mass and try to stab you in the face as a group. You'd often go up against enemies that would attack you in melee while others would hang back and shoot things at you. It was all random, but the various enemy types for each stage felt very well balanced and worked together well, playing up each other's strengths and make up for each other's weaknesses. Sometimes the only strategy that will work is just "Load up on health potions and town portal scrolls and slog through it".

Combat in Diablo 3, thus far for me, has been "run up to stuff and hit it". There has been no variation on enemy tactics at all. Enemies all (FUCKING ALL OF THEM) go down in one hit most of the time, with the exception of the little mini-boss dudes. Nothing has shot anything at me yet at all, with the exception of the little bat-dudes that shoot lightning. You can take 5 or 6 enemies out with one slash. I have not once used a health potion. NOT ONCE. The game drops ludicrous amounts of gold and loot. I've already got something like 150 or so total armor rating and several thousand gold.

I was so ready to love this game and I was in a state of glee the whole time the beta was installing. That was the high point. Everything after that has been disappointing. I didn't rage-quit like I have with so many other 'big' games recently, but after a couple hours I was just bored. I patiently waited for the next waypoint to reveal itself (since there are no town portals, apparently? These guys did play the previous games before making this, right?) and when I finally did get back to town I went to save the game and realized there was no 'save' thing anywhere in the menu.

So I just said 'fuck it' and quit. I'm about to go back and continue, but if it didn't autosave then I'll probably just say 'fuck it' again and that'll be the last time I ever play Diablo 3.

But the art is amazing. It might be worth buying just to see all the eye-candy.

I liked Timecrimes a lot. I loved that the director's name is "Nacho". His newest movie looks cool as well. He was previously attached to some bigger project, but I don't see it on his IMDB page. His name popped up in some article about some US produced flick that I can't remember. The only reason I remember that it was him was cause his name is Nacho.

"Hello. My name is Nacho. How are you, today?"

I can't go into the TV section at Best Buy anymore cause they play the latest blurays with that crap turned on to show off how awesome the TVs are. I wanna go through and turn smoothing off every single one of them every time I go there.

Yeah, I'd previously been handed down a couple of film SLR cameras and went through several rolls on each of them before I was able to start taking pictures that were consistently in focus and not blown out or too dark. Some of the older cameras especially have some weird quirks to them. I think some photographers prefer film just because they love the personality that older cameras seem to have.

That said, I've got a DSLR now (It only shoots stills  ) and shooting with it is a hell of a lot easier and much more fun. Not to mention the fact that since it's already digital, you can skip like 5 steps and save time and money and go right into touching them up or color correction, and if you've got a laptop on you while you're shooting, you can literally do that as soon as you've taken the photos.

However, I love looking at photos taken with grainy high ISO B&W film on crappy old cameras. Getting a digital camera to mimic that sort of look can be really hard. They shoot too well, sometimes.

Talking about film companies like Kodak and what they could do:

Produce and sell inexpensive digital camera backs or something that would fit inside a typical 35mm camera body. Instead of film, it uses a digital sensor to capture the image, and instead of a canister to store the film, there's electronic bits and somewhere to stick an SD card.

They would sell a bajillion of them, cause you could buy one and use it in any camera made prior to the digital revolution. The 35mm format has been around for, what, 80 years? That's a lot of cameras. I collect cameras like that, but shooting with them is getting awfully expensive. I would love to get my hands on some digital augmentation for them.

People have been talking about Mass Effect 3 a lot because the ending apparently sucks (lawl) and this is the closest thing to a thread there is about the subject of video games and I didn't want to throw it into the video thread and I didn't want to make a new thread, but this is a forum on the internet and gosh darn it all to heck, I have opinions that need to be voiced!

Mass Effect 3's ending and other stuff:

If it were 1995, no one would be complaining about the ending of ME3 at all, because back then gaming was about playing a game and not about being told a story. You didn't care at all about rescuing the princess or defeating the badguy. Gaming in the 80's and 90's was about you, as a player, accomplishing a goal and making it to the end screen of the game. There are precious few games today that do that. Most of them now are about telling a story, but games as a medium don't really support that. The medium has stagnated as a result because they're no longer looking for gameplay mechanics, they're looking for story-telling mechanics and actively removing gameplay.

Now most big-name games are a series of scripted sequences that are only marginally interactive, full-on cutscenes that are totally non-interactive and the games actively and constantly tell you where you should be going and what to do when you get there. They allow you as a player a certain small level of freedom, but they do not trust you to be able to get on with the business of playing the game, so they constantly remind you of things that shouldn't need reminding with big flashing arrows or explicitly stating "go here and do this".

The fact that the ending of this game is getting people so upset should be an indication of how far off the rails (or how utterly and completely on the rails, i guess...) gaming has gotten. However, I don't want to come off as one of those people who says "Things were better back in my day". I think there's a place for games that tell stories, and if people just want to play adventure games all the time, then that's fine. So long as they actually are games.

There was a gameplay video on Mass Effect 3 before it came out where you as the main character were running toward some giant alien ship thing and stuff's exploding all around you and you're being shot at and it looks fucking epic and amazing. It's not, tho. That's all scripted. The game will keep nearly hitting you with an explosion or a laser blast, and it might actually hit you if you stand still for long enough, and it might hit you and make it look like you're barely making it, but you are making it and you will make it. It's the same sort of crap you see in watered-down big budget action movies. There's no tension at all. There's no skill necessary. All you have to do is keep moving and watch the pretty lights. ME3 isn't nearly the first game to do this. This has become standard practice in a lot of games. There's a video of a guy playing through the first level of one of the CoD games on 'hard' difficulty and never firing a shot. The game literally played itself. All he had to do was follow the big flashing arrow.

Here it is:

This is what videogames are now. At this point, in my opinion, these are no longer games. Calling them games is wrong. You can call them "interactive entertainment" because they are that - barely - but they are no longer games.

And it doesn't even really matter to me, except that these games are the ones that sell 10 million copies and win 'game of the year' awards and shit. And this is the part where you might think "well, indie games are better, you should play indie games", but no. Indie games are usually just as bad. One gimmick exploited through a dozen levels. Overly simplified mechanics - there's a 'one button' game movement - ironic use of pixel art by people who shouldn't be making pixel art and most of the time the games themselves are just deconstructions or parodies of established videogame 'tropes'. And that's the just the guys that the indie fanboys all drool over. Most of the indie game devs are copycat sellouts trying to exploit the casual market by rehashing old games or talking some popular game, changing the graphics and renaming it. Even the better indie devs have started shurning out garbage for the most part. They'll take a good idea and dumb it down to 'play it for five minutes on your iPhone' levels of stupid.

Gaming as a whole has utterly failed, and yet it's THE creative industry in the US. Games make more money every year than movies do. At least hollywood releases a lot of decent movies every year to balance out with all the Transformers and Battleships. Games are 49% Transformers, 49% The Zookeeper and 2% actual games made by people who want to use their brain when they play a game or be challenged in some way.

This rant is coming from a guy who has effectively quit playing games, tho. I had a 360, but it did nothing but piss me off so I got rid of it. I have a PS2, but I only ever play a half dozen or so games on it. I get more use out of my NES and PSX than I do any of my other consoles, but most of my game playing is either late 80's PC games or stuff like Dwarf Fortress.

Frankly, I find the idea of people being upset about the plot of a videogame kinda laughable. There have been a few videogames that I will readily admit have had amazing stories that were very well told - for a videogame - and I have watched playthroughs of people playing the first ME and various other modern games and no.

No!

The double standard is amazing. If they made a movie out of most any modern game that had the same sort of story and dialogue people would roast it as a campy, poorly written, poorly acted, cliche pile of crap. And yet the story is often the big selling point of a game. At least, I assume the story is the selling point. The gameplay obviously isn't, cause there's nothing there to play half the time. I absolutely do not understand this at all. Why is this shit selling millions of copies?

I don't know why I'm having a rant like this except that I love games and I would love to make them, and maybe I'll get back into coding so I can take another shot at them, but games could be so much better. You can do amazing things with a video game that you can't do with any other medium, and those aspects of gaming are not only being ignored, they're being actively removed from games by the developers in an effort to make the experience of playing a game as sterile and generic as possible. Big games have become so long and expensive to make that they need to be positive that every player will have the best possible 'experience', so they script every little thing.

Even something like Skyrim or GTA4. You have a massive open world to explore, but as soon as you step into that big flashing mission circle the game plants you one some rails and gives you a scripted experience that will be largely the same for anyone who plays the game. You could skip some missions if you wanted to. You could play all of them. You could take a different route from point A to point B, but your experience with that game will be the same as most other players' experience.

Which means those games are basically Super Mario 3 on the NES. Only Skyrim has fewer enemy types and isn't challenging in the slightest.

I really had to get that out. The videogame industry pisses me off so much, and I can't go ten minutes without stumbling over someone bitching about ME3 or calling Skyrim the best game ever. I want to slap people sometimes.

I never paid much attention to act structures and I don't remember if any of the books I've read on story focused on that sort of story structure stuff. Like Brian, I tend to think of stories as just "start here, go there and end here".

You could say that most movies fit both the three and five act structures because you're basically writing the same thing in a different way. With a three act structure you're looking for a catalyzing event that begins to build tension for the duration of the movie, and then a final moment where that tension is released. The acts are the bits before, after and between these two moments

From my understanding (which is just me guessing based on my own attempts to figure out what the hell people were talking about when talking about 'acts' and 'structure' and 'writing' and 'movies'), a five act structure is just an elaborate way of describing a three act structure, where the end of the second act is broken up by a couple of specific moments that describe the climax of the protagonist's arc and the climax of the main story arc. From what I've discovered, it's not the acts themselves that matter, it's those moments that separate the acts that you have to pay attention to.

But I've come up with my own way of defining how and when those acts begin and end as well, and I dunno how close to 'real' story telling theory I am. Probably quite a ways off, honestly, since according to my rules the first act of Revenge of the Fallen is nearly an hour long... unless Megatron's supposed to be the protagonist...

I totally agree. I was kinda skeptical about some of the earlier stuff I'd seen, especially the setting. The weird fantasy 1920's NY setting seemed totally out of synch with the previous series, but after watching the first two episodes I gotta say that I like what they're doing with it a lot. Hopefully it can keep doing more of that, though I'm leery of the anti-bending movement as they've established it thus far. Here's hoping they keep it in a generic organized crime / corruption direction and avoid any sort of... commentary... beyond the generic.

In other awesomeness:

Skip to 4:20. That guy made me feel really good about people, which is hard to get a jaded person like me to do.

That was awesome, thank's for posting. That dude articulated something that a lot of people wanting to make original content on the web have probably thought about.

I loved the first 20 minutes or so until the very first wolf attack after the crash. I kept getting more and more pissed off at it up until the... eating scene. At that point the movie goes from "jump scare every five minutes" to having really suspenseful scenes created by the characters active attempts to escape the wolves. So... First 20 minutes are great, last half hour or 45 mins is great, the middle half hour or 45 mins kept punching me in the face and screaming "I'M A MOVIE LOL!" It was also during this period that the worst couple of wolf effects are shown, and where the wolves suddenly no longer growl like animals and instead sound like someone left their lawnmower idling. I think one of the wolves may have been operating a dump truck somewhere in the darkness as well. The sound design in the middle bit of that movie is really odd.

That ghostbusters photo is awesome. It would be so much fun to build a miniature set that huge. It would probably be even more fun to put the suit on and stomp around in it like Godzilla.

In reality it's probably horrifying to know that you'll have to fix the model for every take and the suit probably gets up to 130 degrees with all those lights on it.

I asked Zarban a while ago if he'd be cool with me doing a poster for "Sharkitect". I've been noodling on a variety of different ideas for the poster pretty much every day since then and have not been happy with any variation. I tried again a couple days ago and recorded the whole thing in a time-lapse video. I've gone from trying to do it in a very 1960's monster-movie painterly style to a more graphic 1970's 'sploitation style to...  whatever the hell this thing was trying to be...

I start with a thumbnail in the video, but that's not what I ended up going for. I've got a few pages of sketchbook devoted to thumbs for this. I went with one of those for this version, so it's not in the video...

I think I'll do a few other fake posters before I go back to this one. I think I know why my brain is rejecting everything related to this. I'm currently testing my current theory out on a different poster that I have yet to start working on digitally.

Also, it looks like I paint on the far left of my screen, but I'm not showing the whole window. I've got tool bars on the left. The image on my screen is more or less centered. I'll have to remember that for next time...

Also, I may or may not be doing a web comic.

EDIT: I realize that you're probably refering to the thing I referred to in my previous post where I was all "I'm working on a thing LOLOLOL". That is something I'm still being way too anal retentive about to post anything from it, but it's a comedic animated short thing that is currently called "The Stunning Climax To Maximum Force IV: The Revengining". It's basically the last ten minutes or so of a really cheesy action / buddy cop movie from the 80's done with PSOne / Minecraft style visuals. I'm still really early on it in terms of animating and such, and I've been doing to it what I do in that video...  I tend to scrap things and reboot them in a different direction when I don't like where they're headed even when other people tell me the stuff looks fine because I'm a perfectionistic bastard to the point where even when something doesn't particularly bother me, it bothers me that it's not bothering me.