Ross Scott

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Just a quick update, I've finally set up a twitter channel at twitter.com/accursedfarms. I was able to get the Accursed Farms name due to a fan squatting it since 2009. I don't have many plans for this, and still don't completely understand all the dynamics with Twitter. Frankly, I think spending a lot of time on twitter would make me feel like I'm wasting my life. However, it is useful for quick announcements, like letting people know when there's a new videochat, play session, a short status update, that sort of thing. So that will be a good place to check if you just want condensed versions of anything new that's happening with regards to the videos or events, but I don't plan to use it for much else.

 

COMMENTS

Did they create the system for the purpose of making sure letters don't reach the executives, or is that just an inadvertent but convenient side-effect? How did you learn of this?

It's in the video, I have a industry insider whom I have to keep anonymous, but the system is in place primarily to ensure that they have plausible deniability of taking concept ideas from anyone else. It's a legal protection thing for the most part.

 

Questions for next time: Have you looked at HEVC for reducing the file size of your backup copies of your videos? Would you consider using it to provide the non-YouTube downloadable videos here on the site?

My understanding is HEVC makes a bigger difference at low bitrates and high resolutions compared to h.264, with it not being as substantial for the bitrate range I'm working at. I might switch to it eventually, but I'd rather let it become a highly standardized thing first.

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Here's the November chat with fans. A few highlights of this one are that I hope to have a Zombie Panic playsession with fans in the future, although the sheer player limit will unfortunately limit how many can join up. I also discuss an update on the situation with EA killing games. Unfortunately it seems letters will have absolutely no impact as there a sophisticated system in place to ensure that executives never see these letters. I'm still working on other approaches to get this practice to end, but it's going to take some time to implement. Work continues on more videos in the meantime!

 

COMMENTS

"This also puts Clive Barker’s Undying in a new light for me, since some of the influences are really apparent from this game."

 

If we're being fair at least CBU made good use of them, and was overall a really good game with transitions that mostly made sense...except a certain someone's realm towards the end. That one threw me for a loop. The others were good though. It was also a horror game too come to think of it, and actually....wait CBU seems more like a decent re-imagining of this game you were talking about.

 

Weird because I would hate this game, but CBU is easily one of my favorites. The history behind how it got made is really interesting too.

 

At any rate thanks for a great end to Halloween!

Yeah, I think CBU did a really fantastic job in a lot of areas, but it was mostly the ending and narrative that could have been reworked some more. After seeing ROTH, I think I have more of an appreciation for how many things that got right.

 

This game looks infuriating just by looking at it, I honestly can't say anything else other than "this game just straight up fucking sucks". I will never understand what adventure designers had in their mind when they made games like these, how did anyone who worked there not complain about how fucking awful the controls are? I really don't get it, at least one person had to complain about it right? There's no way everyone went "yup, this is good enough, I don't see ANY PROBLEMS HERE", I just can't wrap my head around it.

Well in their defense, I think the developers were high.

Ross, don't trouble yourself with that rude poster; they have no appreciation of the difficulty of creating quality content.

I was very tired when I wrote it (I've since slept) and was watching Premiere hold my video hostage until it could process some stuff prior to rendering, meanwhile the clock was ticking. So I was already tense from how much it was delaying the video and that post really wasn't what I wanted to see. In general I try to keep more perspective on things.

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Welcome to another 11th hour Halloween episode! The irony is thick on this one for me, since I intentionally tried to scale down things so I could be done early for once, so naturally a mildew infection hit my apartment which took a big bite out of my time, hence this barely making it in time for Halloween!

 

This was an interesting game to cover. I never tried the game prior to this month, nor did I know much about it, I just suspected it would be a good pick for the game dungeon, and it certainly qualified. Regardless of what else I say in the video, this game definitely has some heart to it, which can be refreshing to see. This also puts Clive Barker's Undying in a new light for me, since some of the influences are really apparent from this game. Anyway, have a good just-barely Halloween for those farther west of me!

 

COMMENTS

You are going to upload the halloween game dungeon on saturday again to get more views and come up with something like "I worked all day,didn't even sleep and still didn't finish it on time,right?

 

P.S Sorry for being rude but it's way too obvious to me at this point,it's been the same since you started game dungeon.

Well first off, yes, you are being rude. You're accusing me of being a liar about working hard on the videos essentially. The fact that you're saying this to me when I HAVEN'T slept recently makes your timing impressively bad also. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that this is a comment made out of wanton ignorance about everything involved with what I do, rather than intended malice. I hope you at least understand how insulting what you're saying is to me. If that's your intent, then congratulations. As a play on words from Metallica: "If you hate me, I don't want you as my fan."

 

The smart thing for me to do is probably to ban you, because you're showing a complete lack of respect with a comment like that, but just in case, I'll try to deconstruct what you're saying:

 

-I've never intentionally held a video back from the public for even 24 hours unless it was for a contest that didn't allow for public release until after it was over. The most I'll do is if I see it's going to be VERY late before I'm done, I sometimes push release to the next day during more optimal hours.

 

-I'm not even aware what days are good or bad to release on, I just get them out when they're done. Obviously for a holiday release, I try my damndest to have it done on or before the holiday. This doesn't mean I'm good always good at that.

 

-Carnevil was released very late Friday on Halloween and I believe was the longest Game Dungeon I made at the time. The Secret World was released on late Saturday because it was Halloween also a long episode on top of 3 others I did that month. I was also very late on the 4th of July releasing Arcade America. I was also running late releasing Polaris Snocross on Christmas, and even finishing Freeman's Mind before New Year's Day. I almost didn't finish my birthday video in time last year. Many projects unfortunately take more time than I was able to anticipate, so sometimes the only way to make a deadline under those circumstances is to work around the clock. Even recently, I was hoping to have all 3 Deus Ex videos done before the new game released, but wasn't even close to making that.

 

-Releasing very late in the day is NOT good for views, it means I'm desperately trying to make a deadline. Moreover, releasing a video a WEEK late, is much worse for views than a DAY or hours late.

 

-I would LOVE to have videos out early. That was even my plan this year, I cancelled 3 videos I was planning on going so I could have a sane amount of time to work. I did not forsee having to clean out a portion of my entire apartment due to the air quality being so bad I was choking on it. This set me back severely.

 

-I have never lied once about being low on sleep when I say I am or working around the clock on something. It's a source of shame for me when I can't meet a deadline, especially one that's holiday themed. I fucking hate having to lose sleep on a project. Working while you don't have enough sleep is a horrible feeling and means things are not working. I really hope to transition to something that's a little more sustainable in the future. I push myself because I know people want more videos, but I can only deliver something of a minimum quality level so fast. I honestly don't know how some Youtubers are able to crank out quality videos as fast as they do.

 

-To the best of my knowledge, I haven't lied to anyone online when it's not April Fool's Day. Even if you don't believe anything I'm saying, I'm sure you can look up the times and releases of my many other videos to see it doesn't especially follow a pattern of optimized release dates, or times, when it comes to holiday ones. Afterall, I can't fabricate when the damn videos were released.

 

All I can figure is if it's "way too obvious" to you that I'm somehow holding back videos to be released on Saturdays, then lying about working on the videos and losing sleep trying to make deadlines, that you have no experience whatsoever making videos with a similar level of effort as what I try to put into mine. I try to be as tolerant as I can, but people who think I just clap my hands together and a video is made can be frustrating to deal with. I share the frustration I haven't produced more than I have, but at the same time, I have an understanding of everything involved with it. In the same way a cartoon is easy to watch, it involves tens of thousands of frames of animation.

 

Anyway, you can post a defense if you want, but if you make more comments with a similar tone as that, you're going to get banned. People don't have to agree with anything I say, but civil discourse is a requirement for these forums. Accusing someone of lying (especially me, because I KNOW I'm telling the truth about myself) without evidence is not civil behavior. If I ever say something that I'm misinformed on, I encourage people to fact check me, but this is not one of those cases.

The episode is edited, but Premiere is giving me a hell of a time about processing peak files before I can even render anything. I discovered a bug I wish I had discovered years ago, but it means this will definitely be late European time, maybe not USA time though.

I'm sorry to hear that, but it's all good. I always enjoy Game Dungeon. Has your pulmonary situation improved at all?

Best I can tell, yes. I found a small patch of light discoloration on that wall that seemed to be the source of the problem that I've treated pretty thoroughly. I'll mention it more when I do the next videochat.

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As a follow-up to the last update, I'm afraid I'm going to have to cancel (or at least postpone) the Zombie Panic session I was hoping to have. The reason is simply that I think I'm going to need all the time I can get in order to finish the next Game Dungeon and I'm concerned that will cut into things too much. This is a disappointment I know, but I would be more disappointed if I didn't have the next video out in time for Halloween. I'm still interested in having a session of it in the future, so maybe that can happen in November. While it of course fits the Halloween season the best, for me, any day is a good zombie invasion day. Anyway, the next update should be the Halloween episode!

 

COMMENTS

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I have some developments stacking up to the point where I thought I should maybe make an update:

 

-I recently had a small crisis where the air quality became so bad in my apartment I had trouble breathing. It happened practically overnight, it seems to be the result of some sort of mildew growth. I cleaned the ENTIRE room, disassembled and moved out all the furniture, pulled up the carpet, pretty much went in full assault mode to sanitize everything. Currently, it seems to be solved, however it's possible it occurred due to some growth coming in from the outside of the walls of the apartment, I don't know yet. Either way, I can currently at least breathe well enough to complete the next video.

 

-The problem above set me back quite a bit time-wise on the videos. Because of this, I'm afraid I'm only going to have one Game Dungeon out this year for Halloween, but it will be a longer one. I was hoping to have one additional one, but I figured better to have one good one than two unfinished ones and nothing to show for it.

 

-I'm still making up for lost time, but I'm hoping to still have some sort of live event in Zombie Panic Source with fans for either this weekend or Halloween. Right now I don't want to commit to anything until I have a better sense of how far along I am on the next video, but check back on Friday or Saturday and I'll have an update on what's going on with that.

 

 

COMMENTS

Hey Ross, I'm still up for hosting the zps server.

Did you email me also? I just sent a reply to that. Also, anyone who wants to investigate how to mod the game in order to support more players is welcome. If we could have even more than 32 players, it could get quite interesting.

Ugh, link fixed. The erroneous post was brought to you by the Windows function of copy / paste ONLY WORKING WHEN IT WANTS TO.

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Here's the footage from the latest Planetside 2 session. Nothing too notable happened this time, I spent half the time discussing the possibility of playing Zombie Panic Source with people close to Halloween. I'll make a new post here when / if that gets underway. In the future, I may stop posting these Planetside sessions on the site itself since it's really just footage of me screwing around in a game, rather than an actual edited video meant to be more watchable, or answering questions people have from the videochat. I see this stuff as a way to do something with fans, but mostly throwaway material otherwise. I'll still keep posting all the sessions to the Accursed Farms Junk Youtube channel, but not make further announcements here unless something more major is going on (like we end up switching to Zombie Panic!). Anyway, work is continuing on the next Game Dungeon, more updates before Halloween!

 

COMMENTS

This makes me think of the time you spoke of "hell jobs" in that murder mystery episode of GD and reminds me of my own current job in a way i am a combo welder now for some reason i have always worked in the oil industry but where i am currently employed is a total hell job and how i got into welding is beyond me its full of rednecks and other unsavory characters but the money is there so whatever i just hate the conditions at times the hilarity of this all is that i have a degree in computer science and quit out on programming because i hated the conditions.

Yeah, finding a job that doesn't make you want to throw yourself off a bridge is important in the long term.

 

Also speaking of welding "Metal Dave" from the Go To Hell episode used to work as one and for a while he was worried he was going bald prematurely. After he quit the job, his hair started to grow back, turns out he was just slowly singeing off at work.

I could see some evil modder remaking this game as a Portal mod or something. Really, any modern game engine would probably accommodate it without a lot of tweaking from the looks of things.

 

And I've always had a soft spot for AdLib music, for some reason. Even though the only game I've played at length that used it was Monkey Island 2 (I had the CD-ROM version where the music didn't work in the first game, and the rerelease just uses raw MIDI). I've spent a lot of time searching in vain for OPL3 soundfonts or MIDI editors that run inside DOSBox or something so I could try my hand at composing some of my own. With chiptunes of various kinds being so popular, it's kind of amazing it's not easier to find.

I don't know, for me Adlib was always just short of the kind of definition I wanted. MIDI is either pathetic or glorious, depending on how it's being rendered. I'm not against synth music by any means, I just feel like Ad-Lib never really had great tunes that would sound better with better defined instruments. I actually feel like Super Nintendo music had a lot of really excellent tracks where the rendition was good enough it didn't feel like it obviously needed better technology to throw at it.

I, for one, am definitely interested. I believe you said you wanted to try and beat The Cathedral from SS:TSE on Serious mode without dying. IMHO that would be a good way to unwind after making the Halloween episode.

I'm not sure I ever said Serious mode, but since people seem to be saying that, I should try and gauge just how doable that might be. Either way, I would have something spookier for Halloween. I'd love to have more Zombie Panic Source (especially in zps harvest), if anyone wanted to help set up a server for that.

 

 

If I just randomly stumbled upon it I don't think I would've ever figured out you that you are supposed to hit that switch multiple times when you get stuck. It would probably just come off as a bad puzzle to me otherwise, seeing as out of instinct because of how the whole game trained me so far, instead of flipping the thing I would've restarted the whole game, that's pretty bad design right there, I bet a lot of players just outright reset the game instead of flipping it once again.

 

I guess anyone who was persistent enough flipped it twice, but if I considered restarting right there, then it means that someone screwed themselves over at least once (like the weird pointless death elevator part, where Ross got confused.)

 

Something like this also happened in Syberia to me, where I honestly thought the game broke, seeing as I assumed that I had missed some item beforehand, I was stuck forever in some dream sequence, I can't even remember how I got out of that.

I'm not saying that the puzzle/game was well designed, taking it from the RGD it really isn't. I'm just saying that it isn't total insanity - it just has you in the role of an 8 to 3 demux. That makes me wonder if this game was designed by programmers for aspiring programmers, like a more primitive and visual TIS-1000, as the logic seems like moon logic at first.

 

I knew it was made for a specific group in mind, but these type of things often come off as kinda pretentious to me though.

 

"You don't know how to solve this? You are stupid, ha ha."

 

It reminded me of those impossibly difficult Portal 2 mods, which focus more on insane reaction times or hidden mechanics you are supposed to look up by yourself, instead of having some actually good puzzles.

I almost left in a line where I said one thing I hate the most about a puzzle game is when you figure out how to solve it, but the mechanics are so frustrating that you can't pull it off.

The puzzle with the switch you have to press 8 times is binary. Every flip of the switch adds 1 to the counter.

0 = close, 1 = open.

000

001

010

011

100

101

110

111

 

It's a cool little puzzle if the game introduced the idea of using other numerical bases beforehand. Otherwise, it's just the programmers fucking with you because they know binary and most people think in decimal.

But see, a good puzzle would have THREE switches that I figure out is using binary (Rama has something like this). In Zack, I'm trapped and the ONLY thing I can do is hit a switch repeatedly. I literally have no other option of anything I can do.

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New Game Dungeon, a week and a half late again! I'm honestly amazed with how long this one ended up being. I thought it would be about 10 minutes or less, but ended up a lot longer, though I think it was more tightly arranged than some other Game Dungeon episode. I'll have at least one more video for Halloween, hopefully more than one. I'm also considering doing something on twitch on the 30th if people are interested, though I'm still trying to figure out what (and only if I'll have free time). There definitely won't be as many Halloween videos as there were last year because I'll be busy with all kinds of things, but a lot more videos are coming in the future!

 

COMMENTS

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Here's the latest videochat, I had a few more announcements this time:

 

-More Game Dungeons coming, one in the next few days, at least one more for Halloween, hopefully more than that.

 

-The game The Crew (an open world driving game) is free to download and own permanently until October 11th. I encourage anyone interested to grab it and hopefully crack it in the long term, as I think this game is going to be killed within 4 years.

 

-If you're a graphic designer interested in submitting layout ideas for the website redesign, go ahead and email me ([email protected]).

 

-Alternately, if you have a legal background on consumer law for any European countries (or any other country that has relatively strong consumer laws), go ahead and email me also, as I'm trying to determine if the current practice of killing games that people have paid money for technically violates some laws in some countries.

 

-Assuming I get done with the Game Dungeon episodes early, I'm considering doing something on Twitch for Halloween if anyone has any ideas.

 

I think my mind may have been a bit scrambled for the rest of the video, but maybe not, I'll let you be the judge.

 

COMMENTS

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Well I was hoping to have a new Game Dungeon out today, but since that's not going to happen (it'll be a few more days), here's a much-delayed Dead Game News episode. This is essentially 3 months' worth of news, so I ended up trimming it down a bit. In the future, I may try to get some editing assistance to improve the quality a bit without having it eat into my time. Hopefully it will be a while before the next episode for the right reasons. Also as a reminder, the next fan videochat is tomorrow on October 1st, 4pm EST on twitch.tv/rossbroadcast, you still have a chance to submit questions here, or email me.

 

COMMENTS

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Here's the latest Planetside 2 footage, for those that are interested. We ended up conquering a continent this time, though it probably wasn't because of us. I'm still brainstorming ways to try and spice up the game in the future. I'd like to try and set up a mobile base, but that may take more coordination than we currently have. More real videos coming in the near future, hopefully one this month.

 

COMMENTS

BTW, on a different topic - oil shortage. Oil shortage problem isn't a exactly a problem. You see - 90% of transport is works on oil, right, but it doesn't mean it can't work on something else, if there gonna be no oil. And oil is not going to just end up instantly - once oil production will go below consumption (and that's not the case right now by a far value) prices will go up and people will be forced to seek another fuel sources. And they do exist already, along with technologies.

 

The most obvious replacement is a natural gas - propane or methane. There are mass-produced cars that already come with hybrid oil-gas engines. Most of Russian municipal and commercial mass-transportation and heavy duty vehicles are already using propane for a fuel (most of cars could be converted to use propane - so it's not like you need to buy a new car).

 

Natural gas is obviously isn't much different from oil - it's just pushing the problem further away. But we have more technologies! You see, the problem is - there is no fuel/energy-storage with mass-to-energy ratio better than oil and gas AND is easily obtainable. We have hydrogen fuel cells and pretty much a production ready technologies - we may start producing hydrogen-running engines in a year or so. But you can't "harvest" hydrogen, you need to produce it by spending electricity. And due to imperfections in the process you gonna spend more energy producing the hydrogen than you may later extract from it. Compare that to the whole oil situation, when you spend like $10 to extract a barrel of oil and then sell it for $60. Who's gonna replace 600%+ profits with something that will give you like 5-10% profits (producing and selling fuel cells). And yes - access to oil fields is restricted, while hydrogen might be produced by anyone with access to the right technology, water and electricity.

 

Another possible solution are advancements in energy storage designs - better accumulators. If you can charge the thing and then extract approximately the same amount of energy out of it (unlike fuel cells), it can hold a lot of energy (better mass-to-energy ratio) and can be used for a few years without replacement - suddenly it doesn't matter how you get the energy - it all the same. Shortage of one energy source will be substituted by an another.

 

And oil or gas is not gonna end instantly - it will take many years of extraction decline to really spend it all. During that time other sources and technologies will gradually replace the failing market and that it. So no economical tragedy for the whole world. But a shift from oil to something else will really tip of all existing power balances. So it may simply end up in war, but not for oil, but for who will control the new power source, whatever it will be

One thing I want to emphasize is civilization running on CHEAP oil. We're not going to "run out" of oil in our lifetimes. But once demand outpaces supply, it causes a negative feedback loop. High prices of oil drag down the economy, which in turn makes it harder to transition to something else. So even if we have more electric cars on the road, if the economy has become so depressed people can't afford them, that doesn't solve the problem either. While alternatives are conceivable, everything I've read says that it's highly unlikely we'll be able to have a smooth transition in time. In the USA especially, we're decades behind where we should be ideally. If we wait until prices are high enough to warrant further investment, then that's too late, we're already entering a second great depression. In game turns, it's like discovering in an RTS that you should have been upgrading your buildings and conducting research 15 minutes ago.

 

I actually just got around to watching this and I really enjoyed it. I thought much of what Ross had to say about the less than believable character conduct and the suitability of "high sci-fi" elements in a prequel to a much more sober and speculative game were rather good. I did have a few thoughts to share on his criticisms of the world's fashion sense. My art-ponce senses are tingling and I hope nobody views this as an attack on his review. Maybe I just see this from a different and less technically minded point of view, because I'm used to the nebulous and often pigeonhole-proof circular evolution of art, but there was a couple of things I felt I ought to be rigorously contextualised.

I feel like you would have some points if only some workers were dressed like that, but figures like Elisa Cassan and Zhao Yun Ru throw it out the window. Even as fashions wax and wane, they haven't DRASTICALLY changed for televised news reporting since its conception, and for business executives in what, since the 1800s? When you look at it in perspective of everything else, I think it's more obvious that the game just doesn't care about the believability that much and simply wants to have a more expressive look. Which don't get me wrong, I'm not against that whatsoever, I just think they picked the wrong game for it.

I actually like the yellow filter thing in the original HR. I feel it's on of the few games that actually uses color filters for real artistic style purposes, and not just blindly cramming it into the stack of cargo-cult "must have" features like other games. I feel like a lot of the hate it gets is basically a case of all the jackass devs misusing a thing causing people to be so sick of it that they can't enjoy it even when it's done well. It's victim of a "this is why we can't have nice things" situation.

I'll just give some quick points to this:

 

-I get into the atmosphere of a game I play. If something throws me off, that affects my enjoyment of the game. Tinting it all one color halfway ruins the game for me. Almost every game I've seen do this universally I think looks very bad. So you can reason with me all day, it doesn't matter if I immediately hate what I'm looking at when I play the game.

 

-Besides detracting from my enjoyment, I see tinting largely as both ugly and lazy. I feel if you want to create a mood in the game, do it with the LIGHTING. HR did this also, but I suspect they modified the base textures themselves in addition to that, which is almost a roundabout way to achieve tinting (which they also did). For example, Silent Hill 2 uses fog and overcast lighting to achieve a dreary effect and it looks pretty good. Tinting the whole screen is just a sloppy way of achieving a certain mood unless the director really knows what they're doing.

 

-Scale matters. This is a mainstream 30 hour game, I'm bombarded by yellow the entire time. If this was a short indie game with stylized graphics, I wouldn't be so hard on it.

 

-Once again, this is a prequel to an established game. Deus Ex had no universal tinting. IW went kind of overboard with teal lighting and I though it looked a little ugly for it. This is turning that upside down, and it makes me increasingly critical of it. I feel like if you really want to do something original, it should be something original, not deforming established IP unless it was obviously broken in the first place.

 

-We'll just have to agree to disagree that making your entire game tinted a specific color adheres to an artistic vision. I think it's the art director being full of themselves and trying to find a way to stand out, not because of some actual clever perception. Honestly, while I wasn't crazed about the green tinting either, I can respect The Matrix's use of is, because it's only done inside the matrix. So it's a clever way of communicating it's a separate reality, whereas outside things look normal. Sure, the art director SAYS yellow is meant to symbolize the golden age, but those are just words. I can say the polygon edges in DX symbolizes the rough nature of humanity; there's nothing inherently true about it. And this comes at the expense of having to stare at bombarded yellow for 30 hours. There's no contrast to this where HR is only yellow for SOME parts. There's no scene in this game that is not yellow. It's all yellow, just varying degrees. I honestly think this is garbage, but hey, art is subjective. Point is, I'm of course not against variation, but I hated how it was handled in this case.

 

can be ruined if it's overused, or used in the wrong contexts.

Pray tell, since you liked it, what would Human Revolution have to have done in order for the yellow effect to be OVERUSED?

 

There's been doomsayers about oil every year since we started using it. Them being wrong about a 2015-2016 crash is only the latest of dozens of examples of this happening.

Well once you get past the 70s alarmism, the predictions for conventional oil have been pretty spot on for the past couple decades. Once you move to unconventional oils, the price rises substantially. As the price of oil rises, it starts to drag down the economy after a point. Now I've heard some optimistic views that electric cars will pick up the slack, but most projections I've seen show it not happening nearly fast enough to meet the demand for a drop in CHEAP oil. I would compare it to geologists getting earthquake prediction dates wrong 5 times in a row in one area, then getting one right (in the same area). Predicting exact dates is difficult, but looking at enormous trends can tell you a lot about where we might be headed.

 

Ross, I just can't understand why didn't you like the DEHR music. So far our tastes were essentially identical in this regard (e.g. I'm a diehard fan of Alexander Brandon, just like you).

It's not that I DISLIKE it, I'm comparing it to Invisible War's, which I said was pleasant. HR feels like a pure halfway point between Invisible War and Tron Legacy. Tron Legacy has some obviously distinct themes. Human Revolution "fades" almost EVERYTHING. I don't know what the appropriate term is, but instead of the music sounding like you can hear every subtlely, something is done so that it sounds like it's in the next room and less defined (maybe a music major knows what I'm talking about). It's not BAD, but I don't find that especially memorable. I think part of the deal is I've seen people PRAISE the soundtrack up and down, and in my eyes, it's not THAT different than Invisible War's, except for a couple tracks. I feel like Tron Legacy's soundtrack was similar, but was much more distinctive and pronounced than this.

Ross, it seems like you're almost deliberately missing the point: AUGS DON'T ACTUALLY NEED TO BE TAKING MANY JOBS FOR THEM TO BE A BIG ISSUE OR PEOPLE TO BE SCARED OF THEM. Politicians always have political scapegoats from incredibly small minorities. How many people in the country to you think are actually transgender relative to the importance of transgender issues in the media? It's nowhere near proportionate. Didn't you say in your Deus Ex review (I could be mis-remembering) that way more people are killed by falling pianos than terrorists, and yet look at how important of an issue terrorism is?

I fully understand this point, sorry if I haven't explained this clearly. My issue is assuming that is true, I still don't find it PORTRAYED in a believable way. You can absolutely have a minor issue get blown out of proportion, but it needs FUEL and would be done in certain ways. Transgender stuff has gotten disproportionate media attention because that riles people up to get views, but it doesn't persist. If you talk to 10 people on the street, none of them are going to be talking about transgender people. Terrorism has had way more fuel, but 9/11 killed about 3000 people in the most public and symbolic way possible in what was the largest foreign attack in the USA, bigger than Pearl Harbor. If you noticed, I didn't have an issue with the believability of the Templars in IW, because the whole game built up what a huge deal religious influence is in that culture, so it MAKES SENSE for that fictional world, if you suspend your disbelief about there being a one-world religion. HR wants suspended disbelief after disbelief.

 

Disbelief #1:

VERY few people would get augmentations because cutting off your arm, having brain surgery and becoming dependent on a monpolized drug is really scary and isn't worth it, even if you have a better chance at getting a job. It's a borderline horror story.

 

Disbelief #2:

I don't get anything concrete as to how much of an advantage this really is. If you're 10% better at your job, that's no guarantee of employment. Look at how many QUALIFIED college graduates have trouble getting work.

 

Disbelief #3: The game doesn't make a case that augmentations would actually be hired en masse, because CHEAP "good enough" workers are what most businesses need for most of its workforce. I don't hear any economic argument for this. "It helps Malik fly better." Like we don't have an abundance of qualified pilots right now? A lot of pilots are underpaid as it is. How is an augmented person going to be able to afford to work at rock bottom wages?

 

Disbelief #4:

I don't understand how this is shaping human evolution anymore than having pro-athletes or astophysicists walking among us today does. Life is still extremely competitive even if you have talents. You can be an amazing athlete and still not make it into the NFL. If I'm going to cut off my arm, it needs to make the best artist on the PLANET. The game just likes to get really vague about all this and makes it seem like a minor advantage.

 

Disbelief #5:

(I'll make a one-world news network a freebie) It doesn't seem like there's any MOTIVE for the Illuminati to create artificial controversy on augmentations, it sounds like they want to control it, which means not letting it spill out too much.

 

Disbelief #6:

The game doesn't make much of a case as to why people would buy this reasoning. I don't hear any stories from people who thought it wasn't an issue, but then came around and realized it was. How is everyone being sold on this?

 

Disbelief #7:

If the wool is being pulled over people's eyes and blaming augmented people for something else, how come in this entire world I can't get the ACTUAL reasons for what's going on?

 

 

So you're trying to convince me #6 can happen, and yes, I agree. It's absolutely possible under the right circumstances, but the game doesn't make a very compelling case for it. So if I accept 6, I need to accept 1-5 also, which the game also doesn't explain clearly. It's this chain of faith combined with unrealistic people sprinkled about that just suggest bad writing. Do you see what I'm getting at?

 

So yeah, nothing to do with anime. It's part of an aesthetic--see The Fifth Element for something pretty similar. Now, it may be an aesthetic you may not like, but it seems to me you saw one FF reference poster and decided, Ah ha, everything I don't like about the aesthetic of this game is because of this. At the very least, I don't think anyone else has made a connection to anime.

Two things you're misunderstanding:

 

1. I don't hate the costume design and other over the top things they do. I think they have a lot of talent and it's interesting. I just think it's in the WRONG GAME. I don't want to see a bunch of Carribean pirates if I'm playing a game about ancient Rome. Same concept. This is a prequel to an established IP, so of course I have some expectations of the range of possibilities. It's irrelevant whether something in the game is truly an anime influence or not, that's just a guess on my part. The point is it's not Deus Ex.

 

2. The decadence is SO decadent it destroying the strength of the first of game of being grounded in reality. It's fantasy. It belongs in an over-the-top sci fi environment. The 80s were somewhat decadent for America and newscasters looked about the same, maybe they had a little more shoulderpads in their suit. Businessmen had more slicked back hair. Human Revolution gives us a Lady Gaga news anchor and Queen Elizabeth as a biotech corporation CEO.