Jubal Early Logic - a new Firefly meme!
This meme is not too well known yet.
Does that seem right to you?
Browncoats, spread this meme!
(Originally posted to r/firefly on Reddit)
The weirdest way my brain has ever altered reality… - A failed Reddit thread
This thread is about the effect when you see/hear/read something or participate in a situation/conversation that is so shocking or weird to you that your brain immediately corrects it and makes it “comfortable” for you. Later on, when you observe the object/text/song/conversation/video/situation again, you realize that your brain deceived you, and at the time, you literally had no idea what’s really going on.
My example is this:
I started to play Half Life 2 Episode 1 on my old computer which had GeForce FX5500 VGA in it. This card is not supported fully by the game, and this causes that some textures don’t show up (cue the purple-black checkerboard stuff) and some key objects in the game are invisible.
I started playing the game, not knowing that my card is not supported. At the beginning, there is a great chasm. You and Alyx have to climb all the way on the ledge of it. There is various stuff scattered on the ledge, and you have to clear the way with the Gravity Gun. In this video (@6:21) you can see a car and some other debris blocking the way. For me that car was invisible. I was literally stuck against nothing.
But what does a gamer do in a situation like this? That’s right: shoots whatever weapon he has like a fucking madman at the obstacle. It didn’t matter if it was visible or not: I could shoot it away and could continue my journey. I suspected nothing wrong.
Next up: our heroes arrive at the citadel - only it didn’t look like this to me. It looked like a purple dollhouse. It was full of “texture not found” messages. The problem was right in front of my eyes. I however figured: since the Citadel is on the verge of destruction, no wonder it looks fucked up. Case closed. I suspected nothing wrong.
After this nicely thought up explanation, I tried to find the way out of this first area of the Citadel. Only problem was: it didn’t seem that there was any. You see, the bridge you can see Freeman crossing here was invisible for me. It just wasn’t there. After much struggling around, I began to accept the possibility that the Citadel must be so fucked up, it could even have invisible bridges.
Since the door on the other side so obviously led to the next part of the map, I just kinda stepped on the air. I didn’t feel like Harrison Ford from The Last Crusade. No. I didn’t say to myself “whoa, the guys at Valve are experts of game design, there is no fucking way they could have planted something like this in the game on purpose”. I suspected nothing wrong.
And so it went until a point which should have been really weird: A few minutes later, the heroes are on an elevator which descends slowly. There are several pieces of big debris falling that you have to deflect with the Gravity Gun, because if you don’t the piece hits the elevator, it falls down and you die. As you can see, every “lethal” piece of debris is foreshadowed by a burst of sparks. Those are the debris pieces you must deflect. Except, they were invisible for me.
I could see the occasional burst of sparks, and 2 seconds later the elevator fell and I died. And again. And again. So what did I do, you ask? I stood there, shooting wildly up with the gravity gun, and with a healthy dose of luck, I progressed after 30+ tries. I suspected nothing wrong.
But everything that has a beginning, has an end. I had to get stuck somewhere where manipulating an invisible object is the only way to progress. And here I was, standing agains this fence, where I was supposed to shoot the padlock, but as you can see, the gravity gun is useless, you need to use the shotgun, as the player does in this video. After countless hours of trying, I finally gave in, and loaded gamefaqs.com into my browser.
As I read the walktrough and found strange references to objects that weren’t even in the game again and again and again, like a revelation sequence in thrillers every such situation flashed before my eyes. The car. The falling debris. The bridge. Everything made sense now.
TL;DR: My brain helped me almost all the way through the first quarter of HL2 Ep 1, when due to a graphical bug with my VGA, key objects were invisible in the game (including a bridge), and several textures were missing. I only detected that there’s something wrong when I couldn’t progress further in the game because I couldn’t see a padlock I was supposed to shoot.
Resident Evil 2 - 2003 közepén, a második végigjátszás alkalmával olyasmit csináltam, amit még soha egyik más játékkal sem: becsülettel végignyomtam mindkét karakter A küldetését, addig-addig újrapróbálva, amíg meg nem lett az “A” osztályzat. Ki is posztolom, mert büszke vagyok erre a teljesítményemre :-)
1:39??? New challenge for me.. Beat Leon’s though, pft.
Yeah, it’s from 2003. What’s your best Claire time?
As for Leon, I never really went for best time, I was just glad to get the “A” ranking.
Star Wars: Force Unleashed Review (PSP)
(No spoilers, until a certain point where I will warn you!)
I have finally finished this game. I couldn’t wait to get over with it, because it’s really not that good.
But let’s start with the good:
- The storyline is set between EP III and EP IV. It’s always nice to see a game that’s not about the prequel trilogy era.
- You can play as Darth Vader! This is so awesome that’s worth repeating: you can play as f***** Darth Vader! At the start of the game, there is a brief segment where you are the Dark Lord. It’s an excellent start of the game.
- The graphics have sometimes really nice effects, like the moving blur that accompanies the Force Push ability.
Now, on to the bad stuff.
It was advertised as God of War in the SW-universe. Well, the controls and the combos are much more crippled and in general not as interesting as Kratos’ moves. You basically have three kinds of attacks:
- Using the square button, your character uses the lightsaber. While Kratos had many different combos for his main weapon (Athena’s blades), here all you can do is… spam the button, and different moves come out sequentially. But when I have a lightsaber in my hand, I want to control it properly! You can do nothing else with it, except for holding down square to deflect shots and holding down square in mid-air to strike down on the ground. So you are forced to combine your lightsaber attacks with your other powers.
- The triangle button activates the Force Push ability. Holding it down, you can throw around objects and enemies. This is good. By doing a quick combo (square-square triangle), after two lightsaber cuts, there is a ground slam. It’s decent, really.
- The circle button activates your Force Lightning attack. This is really useful against bosses, and combined with the lightsaber, it has the best combo in the game: square-square-circle sends your enemies flying into every direction - which can grant you some breathing space if you use it in the middle of enemy crowds.
There are many more moves (lightsaber throw, aerial force push, etc.), but if you master the aforementioned square-square-circle combo, you will not have too many problems in the game. Combat is very, very repetitive, the only variety lies in the type of enemies (I hate Jetpack Stormtroopers!!!), and the bossfights. In a game like this, the leveldesign and the overall atmosphere must be really good to sustain the urge to keep you playing.
The leveldesign is hit & miss. The first few levels are a bit better than the latter ones: the Jedi Temple has a certain ancient vibe to it, and the planet where you defeat the female Jedi, is really nice visually with it’s organic backdrops. But as you move forward in the game, these creative levels either get overused (you go back to the Jedi Temple three times!) or replaced by bland and grey Imperial bases. About 60% into the game, be prepared to see no colors at all up until the end of the game - everything will be grey. This is horrendous. I know, I know, Imperial bases must be grey, but I would not complain about the visuals, if the leveldesign would be creative. But it isn’t.
Compared to the God of War series where you manipulate items, turn switches and do various other things to interact with your surroundings, this game has - nothing. Literally. It sounds a bit ridiculous that throwing in a few switches/door puzzles on a few levels would improve the gameplay of SWFU, but it’s true. The only interaction you can do on the levels is sometimes when a door is closed, you have to hold down the triangle button to destroy the door and free the passageway. And that’s it. Other than that, there is only combat.
There is one point in the game, where you are attacking and Imperial shipyard, and there are some TIE Fighter panels you have to move into the right position and edge into the wall to be able to get one level up by jumping on them - but this is too accomplished by holding the triangle button down, and the TIE-panels find their way to the most ideal position for you to jump on them. Why, oh, why couldn’t the creators make this a bit harder? They should’ve let the players figure out how they can progress by just letting a few TIE-panels laying there. There is a reward if you figure out on your own that you can use the panels to get up. A few more puzzles like this, and the game is much better.
Gameplay-wise, this game is a no-brainer. Almost no interaction with objects, no puzzles you can figure out on your own, no interesting levels, nothing. Combat is repetitive, with recurring bosses and repeating game-mechanics. When you play through 70% of the game, you are so tired of it all, you just have to get over it and finish the story.
The story has interesting elements (Proxy, for example), but a few really silly things ruin all the fun that’s left in it - the ending is especially stupid:
SPOILER WARNING!!!
So at the end of the game, you defeat Darth Vader and the Emperor. But then Kota says: “He is defeated. Let’s go”, when you were just about strike him dead. WTF??? The rebels just let them finish the Death Star? Let the Emperor live? After all the things he did? Yes, it would be and un-Jedi way to kill him, but when the rebels planned to destroy the Death Star, they planned to kill Vader anyway, and later when they planned to destroy the DSII, they basically wanted to kill the Emperor too, so again, WTF???
Yes, it had to happen that way, since we know that he Emperor lives. OK, I can live with that. But they should’ve made it so that the rebels can only narrowly escape and no one gets the chance to finish the Emperor. That way it would have been a better ending. This way, it’s just stupid.
But to say something positive about the story, The final conversation between Juno and Kota is good, and I liked the way the whole romance thing was not force-fed to the audience - although for this to work better, the game should’ve been a great deal longer with many more moments between the Apprentice and Juno. However, it was still a good way to end this game.
END OF SPOILER WARNING!
Overall, this game could have been soooooo much better, if it weren’t for the horrible repetition in gameplay and bland leveldesign. If you like third person action games, I would recommend the God of War series instead. That series is not without its own flaws, but it is better than this game in every department. Which is a real shame, since I like the SW universe much better than ancient Greece…
5/10
Netflix and Firefly - Round 2
You can read an insightful (albeit speculative) blogpost here. I myself have speculated about this already.
For the whedonesque post about this, the following comment was submitted:
People seem to forget or have not heard that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was asked specifically about Firefly this past summer:
“…a colleague wanted her to suggest Firefly, a show Fox canceled almost a decade ago after it ran for just one year. Hastings acknowledged the show is popular among Netflix streamers, but that it would be impractical to create new episodes, given the actors have aged and the sets no longer exist.”
Well, yes, just like the cortical electrodes we forgot this. Why? Because it’s BULLSHIT.
Here you can read the pwnage of these “arguments”.
Bring it back already!!!
Whenever I look up the sky at night,
I imagine the following: since the universe is infinite, therefore it’s like a huge library of babel for galaxies - every kind of galaxy exists, with infinite habitable planets. Therefore an infinite number of solar systems exist just like ours, with very little differences.
So there must be an inifinte number of planets that are very similar to our planet. In my imagination, I always pick one of them, which has an identical history to our Earth, up until 2002. The planet has identical people, so there is a Joss Whedon on it (that version of him has a cell in his body at a different place than the one here), he creates Firefly, and the history of the two planets begin to change here: FOX doesn’t cancel it, and it runs for 10 seasons. I find comfort in the thought that somewhere in the vast infiniteness of space, there should be a world where browncoats like me can enjoy the brilliance that is Firefly in it’s originally intended form.
I always smile at the sky at night when I get to this part in my imagined scenario. And I smile a little more, when I realize, that infinite possibilities mean that somewhere in space, very, very far from here, there should be a real Serenity out there, piloted by Wash, who is playing with his dinosaurs right now. And they keep on flyin’.
Infinity is a shiny thing.
“God gives you supreme control of the Star Wars universe, what do you do?”
Asked someone on TvTropes. Here is my answer:
Withdraw the Zahn Trilogy from canon immediately, hire Joss Whedon to write and direct a CG-animated, serious episode VII, VIII, IX trilogy - using the voices of the original actors.
Make a Firefly/Star Wars crossover CG-movie too (also written by Whedon), if it gets popular, use the popularity to fuel Firefly Seasons 2-10.
Make a live action Star Wars Tv-series, that takes place between Ro TS and ANH. Have at least 7 seasons, reagrdless of ratings and/or financial success.
Make a live action new trilogy which takes place in the era of KOTOR, lifting some characters from the game (Bastila, Malak, Revan, etc.) Regardless of it getting successful or not, follow it with a second trilogy and a third one and wrapping it up with an EPIC ninth movie.
That’s what I would do.
Sure, that may sound like a stupid First-world problem, but I’ve had memories with that thing. I’ve had it since god knows when and it’s served for hundreds of hours. It kept working past the new generation, and I amassed like 50+ games for it. Today I turn it on to play some Gran Tourismo 4, and…
If that was a phat, you could try playing games from HDD… Other than that, I’m sad for ya… :-(
“I have found the best hiding place ever! Now please go away and don’t forget that you haven’t seen anything!!!”
The image that says it all.
One reason, and one reason only, Lucas: You can’t dub any edition as The Complete Saga which does not have the original theatrical releases in 1080p.
You can’t.
