Tobar

Fringe (2008-2013)

Just watched the series finale. Overall, a good show. I liked the modern X-Files vibe it had when it first began. I started to grow concerned when it abandoned that for these huge season arcs but I think it turned out alright.

The cast was great. Though I had reservations about the casting of Joshua Jackson. Coming hot off LOST you could tell Peter Bishop was supposed to be the new Sawyer. The way they wrote the character and his backstory, how he kept calling women "Doll." It takes a certain kind of man to pull that off and not sound ridiculous. Joshua Jackson is not one of those men. But after the writers figured out what Joshua Jackson could bring to the table I think he did just fine in the roll.

I really hated the alternate timeline storyline though. That whole season was pretty frustrating and I hate that they never resolved it. They just gave Olivia her memories from the other timeline and called it quits.

The whole Observer invasion never made a lick of sense though. Nor how the resistance could exist or make as much progress as they did. It was established that the Observers could not only travel through time but also through the infinite timelines. Suddenly now that they've invaded though all they can do is teleport and give people nosebleeds.

On an emotional level, the finale succeeds but I think it could have been a lot better. I was fully expecting that once their plan succeeded that EVERYTHING would have changed. If there were no Observers then September would have never interrupted Walternate's test for the cure for his son. Which meant he would have cured him on his own and Walter would never have stolen Peter in the first place. A somewhat bitter end but the logical one given the course of events.

cain spaans said:

I want V2.5 on myspleen and I want it now.

*HONK HONK*

Harmy said:

This has been discussed somewhere recently and someone said that they 3D scanned the models into a computer and then used that, at least in Episode 3.

Ehhhhhhhhhh, they might have scanned the maquettes to use as a basis for the CG characters but I can't see them scanning entire miniatures.

xhonzi said:

 Minerva's Den is now available on Steam!  And, what's more, it's on sale for $5, but not for long.

Interesting....the initial reports were that Minerva's Den was going to come free for everyone that owned Bioshock 2 on Steam....

xhonzi said:

Tobar said:

The Lord of the Rings Online (2007)

So part of an online class I signed up for requires you to play LOTRO.

What class is that?

Online Games: Literature, New Media and Narrative over at coursera.

All Star Batman & Robin, The Boy Wonder #1

So Batman: Arkham Origins comes out later this month. In preparation for that I decided to delve back into the Bat's early years. This title in particular was name dropped by one of the game's developers as an influence. Apparently there's a lot of controversy surrounding the depiction of Batman in this series. I can definitely see where that's coming from but I kind of like it. I was sad to find out that this storyline still hasn't been resolved.

Dark Moon Rising - Batman & the Monster Men #1

Love the title for this one. Basically I'm sticking to storylines that tie into Year One. The art isn't that great but the writing was decent. It's apparently part of a trilogy of stories. Looking forward to the next part.

Legends of the Dark Knight #1

Nice tie-in story to Year One that fleshes out the whole bat thing.

The Lord of the Rings Online (2007)

So part of an online class I signed up for requires you to play LOTRO. I had dabbled with it years ago but didn't get very far. So now I'm back with a fresh new character and it's amazing. For an older game it can be amazingly beautiful at times. The landscapes are stunning. I find the longer I play and the further I get I'm surprised more and more by the scope of the world. It's HUGE! Combat is decent and the main quest is epic. The level of interactivity with the NPCs is also surprising at times. They also seem to have found just the right balance for F2P, unlike SW:TOR. It doesn't feel unfair and I actually am tempted at times to invest in the store and I don't feel resentful about that.

How Star Trek: Into Darkness Should Have Ended

greenpenguino said:

I might be alone in this, but I want to play a game that takes place in the GTA universe but is from the point of view of the police. Sort of like a Serpico type thing where the system starts out corrupt and gradually is sorted out by the end of the game.

Have you ever played LA Noire?

I got the the latest Humble Mobile Bundle because it included Star Command. A game I've been dying to play since it first met its goal on Kickstarter. Only gotten to play an hour or so of it but it's everything that I had hoped. Can't wait for the PC version.

As an added plus I also got (well most were) a game I'd never heard of before. It's called Ravensword: Shadowlands. I'm shocked a game on my phone can look this good.

Hmm....

valinkrai said:

Knight of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has always been my favorite. I got it and Battlefront II for my birthday in 2006, and enjoyed the crap out of it. It really surpassed the first in terms of character development in my opinion, and a lot of ways, was stronger in terms of story. I can see why some prefer the original though. One of my biggest regrets is that I got KotOR spoiled. Wish I hadn't got KotOR II first. XD

You're just all kinds of turned around aren't you? =P

Have you tried the fan made update that restores a ton of the content that got cut for time?

sonofjones said:

I get why he hasn't been a threat as a trained Jedi, but he should've been seen as a threat as a rebel. He was the one who destroyed the Death Star and the Emperor and Vader know this.

Up until recently with the new Dark Horse Star Wars title it was always held that they didn't know who it was. At least not for a while. In between SW and ESB, Marvel comics made it an ongoing mission of Vader's to find out who was responsible for the destruction of the Death Star and they'd show him hunting down rebels and questioning them until he found out.

So it wasn't supposed to be until shortly before ESB that they finally found out who he was.

I'm in the same boat on waiting for 2.  

For those that are curious and don't own any, Amazon is currently selling all three as a bundle for $20 bucks. Deal ends on the 25th, so you better act while you can!

brycebayer said:

-1 has been promising stuff for years.  We might be dead before he finishes. 

Sigh. I think poita said it best:

poita said:

A lot of people are working really, really hard, and investing a lot of our own money to get Star Wars on 35mm preserved.

It takes enourmous amounts of (personal) time and money, I can't count the hours and don't want to count the dollars that have been put into 35mm preservation of these films.

If the wait seems too long, then one can always start up their own effort, you just have to track down and buy some prints, build or buy a film scanner, somewhere around 80TB of HDDs (say around $3000 worth), build a computer that can handle working with 100MB per frame and dedicate most of your free time to it.

Then you need to go through all 173,000 frames (for each film) make sure none are missing and match the colour to the print, and fix any bad damage. Then sort out the sound track and synch it, and then sort out the best way to get the 30TB or so of film down to something that someone could watch on their home TV. And all that is just to be able to deliver a very rough watchable print, not a cleaned up one.

Anyone can do it, and perhaps someone out there could do it faster, so by all means give it a shot if you want a faster result.

I'm not being harsh, anyone really can have a go at doing this sort of thing themselves, but if you haven't then criticising the time it takes is not really all that productive. It takes more time than you could imagine. Just moving a capture of one reel from one hard drive to another can take many many hours to simply just copy the file. Waiting for anything can be frustrating, but it is even more frustrating working on something huge and it taking longer than you would like.

So why don't you take a step back and think about all the hard work that's being put into this before you speak.

They just announced they're doing an American remake of Troll Hunter. =(

ray_afraid said:

I'd prefer if the one-offs were just that- One-off stories about characters and places we haven't seen and not prequels or origin stories about characters we already know.

This. Period.

Dang, hey doubleKO in your searchings did you come across a game that was said to have been developed by a 7 year old?

It was the first game I ever played. Back on the original Macintosh. I'm not certain it was programmed by a kid but I think I remember it claiming it was. The art certainly looked like a kid had done it. =P Looked kind of like Highland Computer Services' Mummy's Curse.

I don't remember a lot about the game. Just that you had to wander around the world and sometimes you'd go the wrong way and be killed by a ghost. Man, I wish I could find out what that game was. =(

Harmy said:

And now imagine what kind of detail level could be achieved if they did a proper 4K scan of the original negative, when even a poor 1080p scan of the o-neg, that doesn't actually resolve much beyond 720p, can show more detail than a 4K scan of a projection print.

I wish that could still be done. This was taken from a recent article about the rediscovery of Black Angel, the short film originally shown before ESB:

Tanaka: I remember when we were working on the Star Wars restoration, that was a different process. I think we optically recreated interpositives. But in order to do this, it went through some kind of warm chemical bath cleansing. The weird thing about Star Wars was that it was made up of different film stocks, so it went through this bath and they didn’t know what would come out on the other end...

Parker: You mean if it would survive or not? ‘George we might destroy your entire film, but it’s... we think it’s going to be OK.’

Tanaka: There’s a space battle shot and a close-up on Hans Solo, and the original negative is coming out of this cleaning solution and it’s just acetate.

Parker: It’s all clear. Oh no, did the bath dissolve it?

Tanaka: Yeah, it dissolved it, depending on the film stock.

='(

Ronster said:

So does anything happen when we get to page 1138?

Considering we are on page 1137 we'll find out soon enough....

Personally, I'm waiting for page 3263827.

xhonzi said:

BioShock Infinite (PC/Steam) for $11, may or may not include free Mafia II.

http://slickdeals.net/f/6282820-bioshock-infinite-mafia-ii-pc-digital-download-11

Nice!

Meanwhile, in my brain I've directed a Shadows of the Empire film where Dash Rendar and Leebo are replaced by Kyle Katarn and Jan Ors!

'Star Trek' director JJ Abrams 'emotionally hurt' by video game tie-in