Slashdot Mirror
X-Files FPS Episode
The Queen
reminded me to post this: Last night's "X-Files" was a weird episode involving a video game gone wrong. It obviously was meant to promote discussion on violence in video games: "Healthy outlet for stress or promoting violence in society?" Personally I thought it was a crappy episode and not very suspenseful. Cheesy. Formulaic. Definitely sub-par for the show (even for its last few seasons), although it did have its moments. Did anyone else watch this?
Lez be friends!
FWIW, I've died in a dream before. I was on this train, then something happened... and all of a sudden it was that train that loops around the outside of Disneyland, you know, with the Grand Canyon and dinosaur exhibits, etc. Anyway, we pull into the station and I can tell something is up, because this isn't the same train I got on... and this woman in white helps me off the train saying "We're going to take care your soul here for a while". It was like Disneyland was purgatory, where you have to work out your issues to figure out where your final destination will be (it was Disneyland without all the annoying color and smarm... just the same physical location). Pretty trippy...
No, the game was not written by a woman. She helped with the project, but it was written by that one guy. The one who didn't want to tell how to destroy the game because it was his life's work. He also knew how to fix the game, but as mentioned above, didn't want to tell. And it didn't have anything to do with money (from the programmer's point of view), it had to do with the fact that if destroyed, he would lose his life's work. Which is another weak point in the story because there really isn't any point to putting a command in a game that would just erase itself and why would the source to his program be stored on another computer?
Funny you should mention dreaming. Before any of these virtual reality movies, there was a movie called "Dreamscape" that put forth the idea that if you die in a dream, you will die in real life. I think a lot of these virtual reality movies borrowed their theory from "Dreamscape."
Yeah, it's the same thing as when you incorporate the ringing of your alarm clock into your dream. I've had dreams where my alarm clock ringing became something in my dream that was ringing, and it took quite a few rings before I was aware that it was my alarm clock, and I woke up.
The most likely explanation is the simpleist one. The writers just didn't think of all the ramifications of their plot. It happens all the time with writers. In other words, you're wasting your time looking for a logical explanation when it's just a simple matter of the writer screwing up.
You have things backwards. In VR you go into it knowing that it is not real, and you would continue with the awareness that it's not real. In dreams, on the other hand, most of the time you think that it is real, and it's actually rare to experience awareness that you are dreaming and what is happening is not real.
I was wondering if anyone has ever seen a movie or TV show that gave a mostly accurate representation of computers? I know that I've never seen one. You would think that writers never use computers, but I know that as ubiquitous as computers are today, most writers HAVE used a computer, but yet time and time again they write such utter crap displaying an utter ignorance of computers. The only other subject I can think of that writers so consistently demonstrate ignorance is weather. All these east coast and west coast writers seem to know absolutely nothing about tornados, tornado warnings, and thunderstorms in general.
I've watched X-Files from the very beginning, and I've never seen a single show that had an original story line. Every single idea that they have ever had was stolen from somewhere else. The strength of the show is in the cast, not in the writing. The X-Files writers are like pop singers who only do "covers" of other people's songs. Sometimes their "covers" are good, but it's never their own ideas.
My biggest complaint about X-Files has always been that they never finish anything. Even shows that supposedly finally give the answers, don't.
The question of the Hour is: Who is JadeBlue AfterGlow?
I don't know about others, but I was just looking at the chick in the leather outfit. Now, that's entertainment,
Hey yeah. I think a good way to introduce danger into a virtual environment would be to have as the interface device a bioport. You know, a head jack or something. Then the interfaces can be extremely integrated into your nervous system. Touch, Sight, Smell, Adrenal, and Sound. With something contacting you in such a deep manner it would be capable of biofeedback to the extent that it could easily kill you. How's that for risk?
yes it was
Trolling is the ancient practice and art of being sarcastic, funny, and sometimes annoying. Trolling is said to date back to the 5th century BC, in northern Mongolia. But, back then trolling was punishable by death. Many troll martyrs have sacrificed their lives in their fight for the freedom of trolling. Trolls have a rich and diverse culture in modern times. They band together and fill our lives with wonder and heartfelt thanks to all that read their witty and insightful comments. But, the cuddly trolls have a dark enemy that threatens their very survival. They are the Moddur-Raetirs (more commonly known as the Moderators). The Moderators have declared all out war against the benign, peace-loving trolls. It is said the Moderators are evil creatures devoid of emotions and senses of humor that want to destroy anything bearing those qualities. But there are Rebel Moderators out there that have aquired these traits by trolling spells, and are helping the trolls in their never ending battle. Let us wish them luck.
Here are some troll links:
ustrolls
The boy who loved trolls
Rare photos of trolls
Troll page
Troll Lovers page
This is obviously the last season. Why else would they be subjecting the actors to such embarassment. I though tthe COPS episode was retarded, then I watched last night.
At least David Hasselhoff is leaving Baywatch in an explosion. X-Files stars are gonna get abducted by Killer Clowns From Outer Space at this rate.
Pure crap...at the geek's expense.
Holy cow, thank you!
Okay, I have watched virtually every episode of the X-files (save 2 or 3) and I've noticed that the first 2 seasons were okay, but lacked a focus, after the middle of the second season through most of the fifth seemed to be fairly focused, and then from the sixth all the way through the end seems to have totally messed up any focus that was created earlier. No longer is there any real threat of conspiracy on the show--they have tried to explain away, 20 different times, Mulder's sister, his Father, and the whole conspiracy thing. It was coming to a head... when it basically popped a season and a half early the middle of last year.
So my question is, what happened to the X-files that had that focus and a certain genius behind it, and how can they possibly recover for a finalle at the end of this season?
The first 30mins of it was funny, especially when that yashi moto (or whatever his name was) guy came in to kill the bad guy.
This reminds me of a Jonny Bravo episode where he mistakenly ends up in a geek camp and tries to tell them scary stories. Of course they don't believe him and ask him questions about how a person can have a hook for a head etc.
The point is, geeks are lame. You just can't make them use their imagination.
WHERE?!?!?
"""And, most importantly, what kind of moron game developer would have a single command that would erase the entire game? Sheesh! """
For a brief second there i thought he was reaching for Control-Alt-Delete.
the whole episode sounds stupid, but when you think about it in terms of oo code with encapsulation and abstraction, you can end up with malicious code from a team member which can truly act on its own. Add self modifying code and microcode on the processor so that hardware response can be disabled at the processor level and you have a true recipe for havoc!
Last night's X-Files was pretty bad ass in my opinion. I like the band of geeks and you gotta love the fact that Billie from DaysOfOurLives was in there wearing nothing but leather and some stalkings :) I agree that the technology behind the idea of the game in the show was pretty lame and disbelieving, but DAMNIT people its just a show, sit back and enjoy and quit criticizing, because you know what? Nobody cares to hear your opinion, or if they did that would be your fulltime job.
Plus, 13th floor may not be one of the best movies, but it was pretty good and had a great idea behind it.
To readers, I highly suggest checking it out if you haven't already!
you're not funny. in the least. you must be french? am i right? thought so. fag
jeeze i hated this episode. one of the worst i've ever seen. and who talks like that? i'm as big a geek as my friends and none of us speak like that. if one did i'd smack him around with a copy of webster's.
Get real people. x-files is a fucking shitty show. I've only seen one episode that was ever suspensful, but it wasn't that good anyways. It's way too cheesy, mulder has way too many arnold schwartzenegger-type one liners, and the plots are far fetched and not interesting. the show sucks ass. face it. I hope this is the last season.
Though the camera was placed to "barely" miss anything.
First off, let me say that this was a pretty bad episode. We were laughing at parts of it, but in general it was one of the worst X-files I've seen.
I am manic-depressive coming from a very violent background. My father and my peers were very violent in my childhood, and I've been working to "break the chain" ever since, though introspection, meditation, and controlling my environment (ie, what I eat, what I see, etc). I think that gives me a handle on violence and the human mind.
There is no doubt in my mind that exposure to violence encourages violent feelings, which can encourage violent behaviour. If this were not true, there would not be such a high correllation between being abused and abusing others. This correllation has been supported by many medical studies, and my own personal experience bears it out as well. There is also no doubt in my mind that the human brain at some levels interprets synthesized information (ie, books, video, dreams) as if it were real. Consciously we understand that it is not real, and we can make logical decisions based on that understanding, but the parts of our mind responsible for forming habits, making connotative associations, and intuitively matching patterns are much less sophisticated, and less under our conscious control. We can choose to exert conscious control over them, but this takes a deliberate effort. They are left "unattended" during most of our lives. Habits of thought constructed under the influence of synthesized depictions of violence can make violence an intrinsic part of our psyche, to one degree or another.
On the other hand, unfamiliarity breeds discomfort. Humans naturally seek out environments familiar to us, even when those environments are themselves uncomfortable in other ways. This is why many victims of abuse enter into and stay in abusive relationships. It is why long-time prisoners will willingly stay in their prisons. It is also why, once we have become accustomed to exposure to a certain level of violence, we need periodic injections of violent input to remain at ease. In my case, I've already been exposed to years of violence of a level no video game or movie could ever hope to match. Most people are exposed to extreme violence other than through the media or video entertainment. Those of us who grew up in the 70's and 80's lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads, violence on a scale initially mind-boggling, but grown familiar after spending our tender young years pondering it. Nowadays, however, we live in somewhat kinder, gentler times. I'm 6'4" and 225lbs of leatherclad karateka, and I haven't had to worry about getting accosted on the streets for a long time. My father is completely out of my life. The threat of nuclear holocaust seems remote for the first time I can remember. Today I am fairly accustomed to a lower level of violence, but it took a period of adjustment to get myself here. When I went away to college, I found myself suddenly protected from most forms of violence, while simultaneously under tremendous academic stress (getting a BS in CS is hard!). In order to keep my sanity and my temper intact, I found it absolutely necessary to expose myself to violence periodically. DOOM was just making its debut, and periodic gameplay and nightly doses of horror movies went a long way to keeping myself from going utterly apeshit. Since the violence I was exposing myself to was considerably less intense than the violence I was accustomed to, I do not believe it was encouraging me to be a more violent person. I think it was entirely therapeutic; that I am a less violent person now supports my position.
My point? That violence in video entertainment can be both, encouragement to further violence, and a healthy outlet for aggressive urges. Few people are qualified to decide for someone else whether violent entertainment is beneficial or harmful, and I certainly do not trust the government to decide this for me or anyone else in the country. The world is extremely complex, and trying to assign simple "good/bad" attributes to complex ideas is almost always counterproductive. The relationship between violent entertainment and the human mind (and human society in general) is a prime example.
-- Guges
Yeah, there I said. It wasn't a wonderful portryal of cutting edge AI gone bad, violence in video games, or an obvious ripoff of the Matrix that I liked rather it was the fact that the epsoide made me laugh. Yes the show was cheezy but if you only look at the X-files as this serious drama then of course you're going to be disappointed with the epsoide. However if you just sit back and laugh at the overall cheezyness of it all then it was a fun show.
I agress that the way the X-files tried to present the sexism in technology fields and violence in video games was done badly. However, remember that the show is only an hour long and there have been hundreds of posts dealing with videogame violence (Jon Katz and the Hellmouth series) and females in tech fields. For a show to deal with these subjects in an hour and stay entertaining would be impossible. Right now I wouldn't be so disappointed with the way the show was done but rather mad that everyone who plays any FPS game will have to defend themselves from people who wathed the show and think that the people who play these games are more than honry, lonely, single, aggressive guys with the emotional IQ of a 13 year old.
Well enough rambling, I'm off to see if I can find a girl willing to wear tight pleather and high heels who knows how to kick ass as much as Ms. Afterglow.
but we're talking about TV here, and we all know TV plays on stereotypes.
That's a stereotype.
ring ring....clue fone is for you, Mr. Gibson
I thought the concept was a good one....they just loused it all up with bad imagery that would make a real fan of FPS's exit the game in about 5 seconds......a neatly arranged row of motorcycles charging straight at you? 50 UberNazis with machine guns that cant hit 3 dorks running down a alley? sounds....ummmmm......LIKE CRAP!!
I don't watch television, and neither should you. Smash TV Now!
Did anyone watch Max Knight, Superspy on Blockbuster shockwave cinema last friday? it's as bad as it sounds.
Eventually, the good guy and the bad guy were duking it out on the Internet, and they somehow ended up in the Half Life game. Both of them were texture-mapped(whatever) half life players, shooting each other with rocket launchers. Yes, there was game footage in it, nicely done. It was the only highlight of the stupid movie.
Mulder and Scully could have been brought into this in other ways than through The Lone Gunmen...I think the only reason The Lone Gunmen were in this episode was as a springboard into their own spinoff series...they had to hint that these guys have lives outside of what we've seen so far so their show has somewhere to go. But if this is it, I'm worried.
Personally, I expected better from William Gibson....
One subtle point. The guy Thresh's name was Musashi. There was a legendary Miyamoto Musashi who was a master swordsman a long time ago in Japan. He is also the author of the Five Rings, a discourse on the true way of fighting. Hence, it was somewhat ironic (intentional?) that the Musashi/Thresh in the X-Files was killed off with a sword.
If this was intentional, then it was an incredibly subtle point; one that probably went over the head of most viewers.
I would even include the choice on whether or not I want to experience pain inside the VR. Etc, etc.
There is also the point that VR is subsuming our perceptions for the most part, our senses. Yes, it is possible to die of 'shock' if we are overloaded by pain, but not if by light or pressure, etc. Only pain, since it is the sense that causes the panic response. If we were forced to listen to a VERY loud noise did not cause pain, only deafness, we would find it disturbing, but it would not be stressful innately. Every simulation movie I have seen so far creates conflict by inventing reasons that we can be 'hurt' through our interactions in this VR.. I think they should focus on how we can be hurt in the RL as a result of our actions in VR. That is much more stomachable to myself, and I would have a better suspension of disbelief experience, I think.
This is exactly what annoyed me the most: the game in the episode was basically a 'realistic' Galax -- something right from the '80s! Or worst even since you can survive without even moving. It seems to me that Wolfenstein 3D has a more advanced gameplay than this. At least you can grab some ammo... In overall, I guess the episode makers didn't bother playing for a few seconds with an actual shooter, and that's bad.
where i can agree the silly tech elements were absurd at best, i was under the impression it was done so atleast knowingly. i thought it was a very funny episode, until the introduction of the over played, annoying, "give me a freaking break" tech-girl-tries-to-get-one-back crap. the only reason this is ever an issue, is when it is made one. nothing like fear tactics to sell crap to the public. why not it works well, as it seems. geeks are just as gullible as the rest of the oh so complacent masses.
What could possibly be more nerdy than arguing over whether or not a tv show represented the world of FPS games in a "realistic" fashion?
the whole thing reminded me of the old television show Captain Power, same campy shooting scenes, similar enviroment if it wasnt for that cyberchick, i too would have turned the channel or booted my comp back up
I think that was actually intentional...
The X-Files is usually pretty good about accuracy and things like that, so I took that episode as a sort of nod to their geek following.
Boy, did last night's episode ever suck.
For a 'holodeck gone bad' plot, Star Trek has done it better... and more realisticly. [now THATS an insult] As for all this 'testosterone' bullshit, the first woman I asked about the episode, the first words out of her lips were "I wish the local mall had one of THOSE!" What a pile of crap. I keep getting reminded why I don't watch much TV, and why I stopped watching X-Files years ago.
There was one really good scene. Otherwise, this challenged the "suspend belief" clause.
Then they go under the desk to "hack the hardware" and they open up some cheap PC case and fiddle with the hard drive wires. Naturally I was the only computer jockey in the room so I was the only one laughing at the inanity of it all...
Perhaps the worst episode I have ever seen. Since I intend on going into game developement, I nearly died watching this episode. I'm sorry, but could they make it any more cheesy?? At least they had a real origional company name... FPS... --Netghost (I was too lazy to remember my password)
Second, there is no shame in being sick of the XFiles. There were a LOT of good episodes (not just the conspiracy episodes) before they went to Hollywood and came up with the past couple years of complete CRAP.
The writing has gone to hell, the show is over. Duchovny and damn-I-forgot-her-name have the worst lines to read ever. I salute them for toughing out every week of this sad ending to X-Files.
boohoo
kabloie
The levels in that game really sucked....
Hmph... I got my ass handed to me when I played Q3 against Kornelia at COMDEX. It was pretty cool. :)
that show has sucked since the start of season 3!! 2 was okay, season 1 kicked ass.. the rest suck!! except for the inbreed one which was never to be shown on fox again!!(but did for holloween). other than that the x-files(or should I say conspiracy files) sucks..
"As regards his gaming dominance, I'm not too sure about that."
a sp
Watch his demos. When he's on he's really on. I've seen him having off days too though.
http://www.firingsquad.com/thresh/demos/qdemos.
Watching his demos has changed my game. I reccommend the Red Annihilation Tournament (Ferrari) Thresh vs. Entropy I've seen it. Talk about getting owned. I think it was like 36-0 (it's been a long time I just remember being pretty impressed).
are you sure ? I was certain it was 'shift + alt+ B-L-O-O-D-B-A-T-H..
Hey man don't be knocking the cool Matrix sunglasses.
if no one had ever beaten level 2, why was this company going to sell this game? wouldn't that be a sign that the game might be too difficult, and therefore people wouldn't buy it?
Wondering about the dream where we wake up with hearts racing - it seems that one's body reacts quite realisticly to the possibility of death (or harm) - even if it's in a dream. Our minds don't know the difference from reality is my bet. I've never actually died in a dream, just woken up in quite a sweat, sometimes with some sort of physical cramping where I was shot/stabbeb/crushed by Dorothy's falling house. I think the waking up that happens to most(?) of us is our minds' parallel to a core-dump, then reset. We crash and reboot into safe mode or something. What worries me a bit is that if I can have frightening dreams where I get my heart racing, can I have a dream that I have a heart-attack followed by a real-life heart stoppage? Evan
Arpanet fantasies? Gibson didn't, and still doesn't, own a computer. He doesn't like them.
Morpheus's spiel with the Energizer Battery was just his way of attracting recruits... they didn't want to face the truth that most people preferred to live in a dream world.
(Of course there were several other problems with the film, but none of them meaningfully impinge its coolness)
It wasn't nearly as interesting as other episodes. . .it seems that the media has gotten to the x-files too. That's really too bad: X-Files started out as a departure from other shows, and it looks like they've caved more than a bit!
So, in closing, there is quite obviously a strong element in Hollywood which firmly believes that the key demographic dreams of a world that is 3/5 TRON and 2/5 MAD MAX. Kinda scarry.
Post my lame assed story on Freshdot too! Snooze for dorks, stuff for the crapper...
...that bad.
Hiro Protagonist
Yes, the Lone Gunmen project is moving ahead. That's all I can say
was asking her out.
She wasn't UGLY.
EVERY geek-girl I know has no problem getting dates. In fact, they get hit on more (they say) than women in most other fields. Mostly because there are so many more males than females in this industry.
I'm reminded of "The Net". Just as unbelievable that any woman in the tech field would have any problem getting a date.
I mean, sure the Lone Gunmen are great, but what the heck were they doing in this episode??
Damn, when I get those dreams, I don't go lucid, and I stay asleep, and usually, I pee, but it's like I never finish, or when I finish, I still have to go, or I go somewhere else and realize I have to go AGAIN, and I can't find the bathroom, either people keep trying to get me to do other stuff, or the bathroom's closed, or there are people in there watching me, and I'll like spend hours and hours trying to find someplace to go. When I finally do wake up, my bladder's like exploding.
Not only did I love it, everyone I know loved it. Can you all say "Satire"??? Also, last nights "First Wave" was the perfect complement to it. All in all, last night was a scifi fan's wet dream, and you can all stuff it! (You guy's probably didn't like the roach episode either, did you?)
No soup for you! Come back 1 year.
and it was a pretty crap show, but how cool would it be to have a game like that.
I have watched perhaps 90-95% of all X-Files in a loyal fashion, but the add for last night's episode turned me off enough that I didn't even peek. Once. B'ob 'You just need a faster camel' - Attributed to Larry Wall
Praise the goat lord!
Hehe. Sad isn't it. A first post that isn't...
Oh man was this one a dud.
A couple funny moments tho:
The "Thresh" clone getting his hands cut off (haha, take that Thresh!) and Mulder aka duke nukem with his tough guy outfit and his line "bring it on!".
HAHA! OK tough guy, whatever you say.
Did anyone else like the kill command for the game? "Shift-Alt- B-L-O-O-D-L-U-S-T"
Woo, just like in ter'arian'hood (or however you spell the world of dreams in the Old Tongue)
didja ever stop to think that maybe there IS no second law of thermodynamics? Maybe the AI's injected that into our learned culture to keep us from guessing the real secret. In capital "R" Reality, this power-scheme actually works. But then again, so does other cartoon physics. . .
So, what happens at level 2?
You face 5 copies of the super-chick. None of which can hit you.
Then you face 9 copies of the super-chick. None of which can hit you.
Then you face a tank, that doesn't fire at you, that has super-chick sitting on the canon (gotta love that Freudian imagry) and she still can't hit you.
The reason no one's ever beaten Leve 2 is that there's nothing to do. Just shoot 'till you're out of ammo and then die.
This is a game?
Hell, even Space Invaders gave you unlimited ammo to face unlimited enemies.
Even without the technology holes, that game would have SUCKED!
And where was the first guy who got killed's brain at? In an FPS, you shoot EVERYTHING that moves. You don't kiss it.
This episode ran like a bad ST:TNG holodeck episode.
They showed her in the last frames but didn't pan down to show her ass.
... (WITH her ass in full view please)
Any nakid pikchurs of Scully on the net ?
Was it just me, or did this episode rip on several other movie/game themes and characters? The "Goddess" chick looked much like Lara Croft (sp) from Tomb Raider; The "Goddess" flipping all kinds of fast...fast enough to dodge bullets, like in The Matrix; The beheading as in The Highlander movies/series; The Holodeck-ish gaming environment, etc...
In one scene they are setting up something to "bypass the system" and shut down the game and all they're doing is plugging in a hard drive ... IDE at that!
I've died many times in dreams. In many different ways.
But, if you DID die in a dream, and it carried over to your waking life (you actually died), then how would you die?
Would you body generate the wounds that killed you? How? You're already dead.
Or would you body generate the wounds prior to death and the wounds would kill you? But no one wakes up bleeding from a near brush with Freddy.
Or would you just die and have it counted as a coronary or whatever? Well, then we would probably see a percentage of "coronary" deaths across all age groups.
Yet we see NONE of this. So, either people aren't REALLY dieing in their dreams or dieing in your dreams (or hallucinations) has no effect upon your physical reality.
So Laura Croft can't kill you, no matter how much you believe in her.
And that episode SUCKED!!!
Scary stuff, kids.
Hmmm, I'd have to second your comment about not being in shape to run and jump and such, just managed to dislocated several foot bones a month ago playing paintball... All in the name of getting my 'yah-yahs' off :) But seriously the worst part of the episode had to be choking down the idea that you could run a completely immersive VR environment on a Windows platform... Since WIndows has BSOD (Blue Screen O' Death) I guess that might make the virtual chick an ABOD (Amazing Bimbo O' Death)??
That the top 3 comments (all with score of 5) say how stupid, mundane, trite and uninteresting the subject of this news is. There are some very good reasons that i don't watch TV anymore, and this is one of them: TV is mind-numbingly boring. There are rare occasions that i find something worthwhile on TV to watch, but usually it is a good movie (which i can rent anytime i want), a documentary on Discovery channel, or Monty Python. There's a reason TV is called the boob tube and idiot box. Go read a book.
Only the Lara-Croft-wanna-be saved this from being the worst episode of the x-files I have ever seen, even the cheesiest episodes from season 1 were better than this.
I love X-Files. I find the Lone Gunmen hilarious(after the new episode was shown, I watched a rerun of a far more entertaining Lone Gunmen episode). Given my remarkable lack of anal retentiveness, I don't care that the writers sometimes exaggerate the uses of technology(similarly, I don't care that Mulder's theories are almost always right on the nose, nor do I care about countless other discrepancies between the X-Files world and the real world). But that FPS episode sucked the big one.
Their "Virtual Reality" first person shooter consisted of a long wide street with thugs lined up in galleries shooting at you. And level two? An old west setting with bad guys who have poor aim spawning in front of you. It sucked. I wouldn't play that game, even if it was virtual reality. Then you have Scully and the programmer chick whining about how the computer game industry is a good old boys club. It doesn't take testosterone to play Half-Life, just a steady mouse hand. Finally, adding insult to injury, they throw in the cliched Lara Croft heroine chick who has gone bad and wants revenge against all men or something. Absolutely spellbinding.
True, I laughed at the scene when they introduced their game-guru(hell if I can remember his name, and he started getting cheesy once he actually got into the game). And I thought the fact that mulder disappeared from the room when he walked off the map interesting(There was no way that the people outside the room could view it except as a virtual world, making it kind of a shrodinger's cat scenario. It's a good thing they don't have no clipping cheat code, though). But that wasn't enough to make up for this lame episode.
If this is X-Files last(next to last?) season, I really hope they get their act together and go out with a bang, instead of shitty Matrix clones.
"Worst episode EVER!" :) The (I ride the small bus!) Weasel
Can't wait for Howard Stern's new Show "Son of the Beach". Should have lots babes
it's the last season
The comic book series The Sandman focused alot on this topic. If I remember right, when someone died in "the land of dreams" their dreamworld persona died as well. Meaning they still were alive in the real world, but they could no longer dream. First Post to Slashdot! I have now lived life to its fullest! Jay
Well, maybe it was stored in transistors and killing it meant hitting the asynchronous reset :)
I belive they are called "Night Terrors."
Gibson did not write that episode.
Once time I was chased by someone who cornerd me on a cliff. I turned to face him and then BOOM!, the bastard shot me in the gut. Then I fell backwards... over the cliff, and after a very long drop I hit the ground and woke up on the floor of my bedroom with a pain where I had been shot.
fear.
The lamest part was at the end when the game creators were stressing over deleting the game.
They were shipping in ten days and that was the only copy they had? Source control anyone? Backups anyone?
I wake up clawed, knawed, and bleeding every time I make the mistake of rolling over on the cat in bed. She's a 20 pound non-declawed siamese.
She is naked yet she is wearing pants?
I think your trolls license has expired. Please proceed directly to jail, do not pass GO, do not collect $200.
Thank you and goodnight.
man that x-files was stinky and it's getting uglier, Mulder and Sculley start getting hot for each other. Has anyone seen the movie Pi? that movie was beautiful...
How on earth should people in other parts of the world be able to watch? Maybe it is time for /. to think about its origin. The world is larger then just the US, and the open-source movement is much larger then the US (e.g. Linux was developed by a Swedish speaking Fin).
I case /. want's to remain a serious world-wide news outlet it is time to change the editors policy. Why, for example, wasn't there a single report about the worlds largest computer show currently going on? Of course just because it doesn't happen in the US. Why seems the planned installation of some filtering software in the library of some obscure cow-town in the US more important than e.g. the news that Windows 2000 delivery has been blocked in Germany by a German court ruling, because of the planned coupling of the OS to the hardware?
With selling out /. it is only the advertising $ that seems to count. The US market might be the largest and best target market, but with focusing on this market /. has lost contact to its origins, and betrays the community.
I'd really like to see that episode, does anyone have a URL for an ASF / MPG / RV file?
is what its called. you are awake and asleep at the same time, from your brains point of view.
>So, my challenge, to all would-be and current >sci-fi writers is this: invent a way to make us >actually care about what happens virtually with a >better plot device than psycho-babble about the >mind manifesting injuries and death upon the >body. Niel Stephenson did a nice job in Snowcrash talking about this very thing. . .
..in a dream...
how the fk would they know?
Well, "not very realistic" implies that it was something else instead, and this was just...film, err...video. It was just a bunch of images, and if Virtual Reality doesn't look cooler than a studio back lot, I ain't buyin'.
The only question that kept my interest was wether the worst part of the episode was the very implausible "computing" aspects...characters jumping progs, a game that won't turn off, except with a "killfile"...errr, password that destroys the game forever, RL damage from VR...
OR if it was worse to see what these folks thought comprises an exciting game experience...stationary good guys, blasting away at a row of identical, stationary bad guys, who, when successfully blown away by the 1500th shot, just rematerializes...oooh, exciting. That was the suckiest game that ever sucked.
The best part of the game was that chicks' ass in that leather half-leotard.
Dr. G
oh yeah!!! what a hot babe??? was she the same actor as the programmer chix? a few more babes like that and it will be Breast-Files!!!
just how do you know so much about her?
I was watching the show last night, and as I was groaning there in agony, I was just sure that this was going to be a story on Monday.
"Westworld" in some regards was just a ripoff of the episode of "The Prisoner" I call "the western" where they pump #6 full of drugs and cast him in a cowboy role. None of the crap on TeeVee today can even compare to the quality of that program (shot in 1968). They didn't even need expensive special effects in "The Prisoner" to do it righteous. Just drape some lamp cords between a cluster of Tektronics 500-series 'scopes and let 'er rip.
Special effects does NOT equal a good movie.
This X-files episode was a rip-off of the Matrix and last weeks was a rip-off of the Blair Witch Project... they need to get some new good plot-line/themes
The Loa were fragmented personalities from the uber-AI of Neuromancer. One of the loa says that it was a concious decision to split, to the effect to better relating to a) humans or b) alpha centauri AI's. I can't remember; I've been awake all night.
I can't remember Gibson ever pulling any kind of zeitgiest-made-real tricks, except for the Gernsback Continuum, which was entirely about that.
I want a game that you have to pour hot grits in my pants.
Thank you.
This episode was obviously tailered to meet the general publics conception of cyber warfare. There were lots of subtle metaphorical inferences that were pretty good, but way to many cyber cliches. Naturally you would kind of expect it to be watered down for prime time TV. Obviously the "can't get myself out of cyber space cliche" was there to provoke talk about violence in video games. I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it had been written as a conspiracy EP with a few more ties to the real military Cyber Warfare training program.
What ... that's no problem. She must have been an ActiveX component. Has all of the markers. Jumps from program to program. Dangerous as hell. Has absolutly no security. And is totally out of control of the people that need to be in control.
They did that. It's called Cleopatra 2525. Just listen to the theme song.
You can experimentally try this on your girlfriend. Tell her that you want to try an experiment. Next trap her somehow. It does not matter how. Pin her down, sit on her, tie her up, whatever...
Tickle her hard for about 10 seconds then quickly back off and tickle her at maintenance level where she's having a mild reaction but not hysterical. Keep this up for about 5 minutes and ask her how she feels. Go for 5 more minutes and ask again. About every 2 minutes do the hard tickling again for a few seconds.
The hard tickling gets her in a fight or flight mode, only she can't fight and she can't flee or doesn't want to. Then you back off and the part of the brain which handles that response says "okay it isn't so bad now" and stops the hysterics. Meanwhile another part of the brain is reacting to it.
In some women the brain dumps some kind of chemical (endorphins?) and makes them feel sort of high. The brain apparently doesn't know how to respond to this kind of thing, and many women will have all sorts of reactions at various points or at the same time.
I have experimented with this a few times and it's had odd results every time provided that you get past the first step. There is even a strange Pavlovian response where the anticipation of the action causes a reaction similar to the action itself.
It would be interesting if someone would do a real study on this. I would like to know what the hell the reflex is even for.
who gives a damn if it wasnt realistic?
I would rather have hot chick any day than inferior story line
During that one, I sez to my wife "Mr. Spock would have allowed as how this is illogical."
During the X-Files episode, I noted "This is also illogical."
But I enjoyed the X-Files anyway. Plenty of mindless action. Can't fault the babe! And both Mulder and Sculley in that gaming gear were cool.
They never did explain, or even surmise, how players suffered physical damage. Psycho-kinetic?
Morpheus might have had reason not to warn Neo. From his perspective, Neo is the One, and the sooner he unlocks his power the better. He might rather risk death than risk Neo holding back and not discovering his power. Another possibility is that the training room has safeties in place, much lie the jumping simulation.
Loved that lether/rubber/metal getup. Ya know, if they just had a no-plot TV show that paraded babes about for 30 minutes, I'm sure it'd be a big hit. Casting would consist of here's 50 bucks. wear this, walk along the line on the floor, do these poses. Demeaning? Not if all the women volunteer like they all volunteered for that "who wants to marry a millionaire" show.
IT ABSOLUTELY SUCKED!!!!!
honestly, it's been going downhill for the last 2-3 years, but there were a few good ones this season (the luckiest guy episde was dope).
the fps in the episode and even the cyber-toys left me a bit cold
the best part of the episode was the commentary on geeks and geek-culture. the lone gunmen working at a game company for stock options. here we have the representation of the mainstream view of geeks (yes x-files is deff. mainstream) selling out and leaving their rooms to go work for some corp. having seen geeks around my school go from worrying about their net-trek scores and complaining about the lack of support for lynx browsers on big web pages, till now when half the computers in the computer clusters that used to have slashdot up on the browsers have instead e-trade or the latest business news and their biggest concern is which startup to go with to maximize their stock options. the fact that the biggest tech news being discussed is more than likely some new ipo instead of some new toy or program, it is a sad transition. geeks every where are selling out and the lone gun men working for a game company was just a great commentary on the state of affairs in the geek world (at least from my point of view).
Yep, The Xfiles episode on virtual gaming was lame. They have no clue. That's what the good old remote is for.
The building they used in last night's episode was the old Lockheed Weapons Research Building in Santa Clarita. The area that they played the game in looked like the space where they used to have the hydraulic mounted cockpit simulator.
It's too bad for DreamWoks that most of the dinosaurs lived during the Cretaceous Period, not the Jurassic Period.
By far the worst episode this season, even the game scenerio's were lame. As was the stereotypic protrayal of money hungry programmer. Scully didnt even have her logical scientific explanation of the phenonemna. It sucked, but I loved the goddess!
Oh wow, is that the sequel to Euclidean Hell: "Calcu-Lust" ?
I think you were misinterpreting it as a "serious" episode. I think that if viewed in the same light as (the far superior) "Small Potatos" or "War of the Coprophages", it comes off better. I believe the intent was to highlight Mulder/Scully interplay with a healthy dose of Lone Gunmen humor and some gameplaying philosophy.
Hey, Ms. Afterglow was worth the hour by herself.
Sorry Taco, but you were the only one watching X-Files yesterday.. :)
System Requirments:
- A large empty warehouse
- 500 bright holgraphic projectors
- A blatant disregard of 3-dimensional physics
- 10 DirectImpact body armor suits
- 10 portable power packs
- 1 "mainframe computer"
- 1 MegaWatt industrial power supply
- 5 Macintosh wireless keyboards
- 20 random LCD screens
- LightWave 4.x
- 12x speed CDROM drive
This episode was ridiculous but you've gotta love the Cops-style episode last week. That makes up for this episode.I have to agree. In the long list of mythos, stories and movies that The Matrix begged, borrowed and stole from Neuromancer is near the bottom.
I used to be big on laser sports though, so I found the plot pretty interesting. It would be neat if that type of gaming technology actually existed, with dynamic environments and such. It'd be like taking Photon or laser tag to the next level.
For Pete's sake, this is not an X-Files site.
Grow the fuck up, and post this shit on an X-Files site, 'he who thinks his shit doesn't stink.'
Gibson is one of the absolute *worst* writers in SF today. His story lines are repetitive & hokey, and his characters flat. Stylistically, he is okay.
Has he written another story since Neuromancer? I mean, besides just re-writing Neuromancer.
I'm willing to try his new book, though. "All Tomorrow's Parties." It sounds like something new.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Somebody who doesn't understand that a simple "killall -SEGV game_process" will result in a semi-clean shutdown of the system while making a nice core dump that you can use to go back and debug stuff.
Maybe a mixture of Thresh and John Romero (the character that played "Darryl Musashi" just reminded me of Romero, don't ask me why)? I was immediately like, "Sounds like Romero"...
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Okay, you have this huge icky computer killing people. Do you A) turn off the computer or B) send in more people to get killed? Of course, they pick B. Oh yes, there's some lame excuse about how it will ruin the game -- but please, didn't these people ever hear of backup????
Well, this just follows my theory about TV shows and movies like this - the whole plot (in this case, pretty thin, but I did get some good laughs) depends on some EXTREME act of human stupidity. This is standard-issue for TV and movies. The longer the chain of really stupid actions, the longer they can stretch out their paper-thin plot.
Of course, there was a lot of ridiculous stuff in this episode - but we're talking about TV here, and we all know TV plays on stereotypes. (Right?)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
A stereotype about stereotypes? How about that...
But back to my point - the majority of TV shows, if you watch the plots, play on some sort of well-known stereotype. It's just the way Hollywood works. Is it so bad to acknowledge that? (There are the rare few shows and movies that reach beyond stereotypes - but they are all too rare.)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
I have trouble remembering dreams, but I remember at least once that I died and saw my dead body below me.
for a while I had this weird recurring dream of being attacked by a rabid(or at least very mean) dog outside my Grandma's house(this was years ago, when I was younger)
another one, maybe the scariest dream I can remember, was when I was very young and I dreamt of a rambo-type guy standing right by my bed, then he shot me. I remember that one as being maybe the most realistic dream I've ever had.
See that oriental video game master guy?(can't remember his name)
all I could think of:
T R E S H
think Mr. Fong works for the CIA?
I loved this scene:
... that's a lot of explaining.
Windows 95 MS-DOS box, with one of the lone gunmen repeatedly typing a command, getting "bad command or file name".
His response: "The computer isn't responding! It's denied our access!"
Now I suppose the AI-consciousness could have deleted all of the exe's or moved them to a secure partition outside of the PATH, but
I find William Gibson's X-File episodes to be very intriguing in some ways, but I can't help but cringe at the the un-reality...
-Stu
Complete trash. The only hope is that Gibson *had* written an excellent story and it was torn apart by the show's writers. Shades of 'Johnny Mnemonic'.
They couldn't just pull the power cord? "We need to download her from the game!" What?
m.
Programmer, Loki Software
"Sebastian you're in a mess. They called you King of all the Hipsters, is it true or are you still the Queen?" -- B
I'd like to prove you wrong. I though the Matrix had amazing action sequences.. which goes to prove that YOU CAN film "real" (well as real as I move around in quake anyways) tactic with amazing results.
The lousy action sequences in last nights episode were do to:
1. Lack Of Imagination
2. Lack of Budget ($$$)
3. Or just plain bad writing.
Ex-Nt-User
I saw Crow... he's the one that turned his head to say, "Shut up and watch the movie!" I almost fell off the couch laughing. But that happens quite a bit during Futurama... :)
--
The Future: Some assembly required; batteries not included.
Another thing I've experienced (only recently that I've been tired enough to fall asleep in class) is when I'm about to fall asleep and I feel as if I'm swaying forward and backwards in a fairly violent manner. As soon as I move or open my eyes it stops. I haven't doen any furthur research on it, though. It was especially prevelant in general chemistry last year -- monotonic lectures, especially during afternoon labs: warm room, no oxygen, monotone for an hour.
I miss that show.
I loved the recent X-Files episode where the girl was "abducted" and the father had been watching TV and Mulder asked him what he was watching (it was Harsh Realm) and the father replied, "I don't know, I had never heard of it before. It was good."
Ouch.
I know this has been commented on already, but I'd like to add my input.
I'm a semi-X-Files fan. I watch it when I can, but I don't have a heart attack if I miss an episode.
Anyway, I think this episode was by far, the cheesiest I've ever seen. It wasn't bad, it was just lame.
The funniest part was the "kill switch." The two guys were on the floor. One of them was plugging the ribbon cable into a hard drive and the other was holding a phillips screwdriver. They looked up and said, "We're installing the kill switch."
Shows that try to portray computers & programmers make us computer "geeks" look bad...very bad. They give us a bad name and it's so embarrassing. Little do real people know that most of us have lives other than computers.
Damn the movie/tv industry, if they're going to portray us, do it right or don't do it at all.
"I wrote a song about dental floss, but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?" -- FZ
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
Question: Who watches X-files for intellectual value? It was an extremely cheesy episode, and I loved every minute of it. Reminded me of, oh, say, Tron, or The Last Starfighter. Really low budget crap that's so bad, you spend the whole movie/show laughing at it.
Although I have to wonder, was that Thresh that starred as Player #2? Yakamuchi or whoever? Or just someone who looked a lot like him?
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
They needed to do this. Chris Carter has to show the Lone Gunmen prominently because of the rumored spinoff featuring them.
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Have you noticed how Gibson & Maddox always make Scully in to an ass-kicking Mini-Trinity? In the "upload" episode, the VR Scully did a Chun-Li on the evil nurse. Last night, she comes in, dressed to frag, with guns blazing, to save Mulder's ammo-count-impaired butt.
:-)
I wonder if Gibson is secretly casting Neuromancer, and wants Anderson to play Molly?
Keith Russell
OS != Religion
This sig intentionally left blank.
I once dreamed that the original female voice cast of Evangelion sung all hundred-odd versions of "Fly Me Too The Moon". After Asuka's techno-bossa version, my head exploded.
My god, that X-Files episode was the second lamest thing I watched all weekend. A few memorable quotes, but completely sub-par and a waste of Gunmen potential.
The lamest thing I saw on the weekend was undoubtedly "Max Knight, Ultra Spy" that I caught a half-hour of while eating lunch at home. It was like they just wrote down random jargon file entries and spewed them back out.
The scary thing is that's exactly what happened... Damn you, Frank Sinatra! :)
>meaning? purpose? grit?
:)
You just had to say that word, didn't you.
And yeah, The Sopranos is pretty interesting. I've only seen a few eps at a friend's place. I don't, read: can't, get HBO. I'd like to see more.
End Fundy Cable's New Brunswick Cable TV Monopoly! I'm surprised MS doesn't relocate head office to Saint John, what with our provincial gov't's love of monopolies.
My impressions of the episode:
:-) I enjoyed the inside joke.
- Nice to see The Lone Gunmen, as always. But a little disappointed to realize that they were partly there to protect their investment. Are they starting to sell out?
- I enjoyed the conversation between Mulder and Scully about video games, and especially Mulder's assertion that she was being a bit sexist (she was).
- The revelation that the game could be deactivated or unplugged could have been introduced after a half an hour with no loss of plot. Better yet, the extra time could have been used to give the digital maven some *depth*. She didn't even have a line, did she? Shades of Darth Maul all over again.
- Was it just me, or did Scully's prolonged target practice near the end of the episode seem especially pointless? No dialog, witty comebacks, Arnold-type lines. That scene was a lost opportunity for either some Mulder-Scully "I told you so!" bickering or some snappy insults by Scully towards the girl who Would Not Die.
- And finally, I wonder how Thresh feels about that guy who went in to end the crisis but found himself... er, over his head.
If XYBR really wanted to show off their stuff, they should make a Snow Crash movie.
you know, snow crash is a pretty good book. i picked up a copy while waiting for a flight at logan a few months ago. i was expecting checkout counter drivel, and was pleasantly surprised.
"onward!" cried the copper man, little knowing brass corrupts...
That episode stank so bad the dog farted and I thanked him for the fresh air...
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
ToiletDuk (58% Slashdot Pure)
Do we have otherwise healthy people dying in their sleep due to violent dreams? Hell no!
How would we know? They'd be dead. Granted, most of us think "dying in your sleep" is peaceful, but maybe it's not. I don't really have first-hand experience on this, and I can't think of anyone that does...
Without you I'm one step closer to happiness without violence.
It was written by William Gibson and Tom Maddox. I would be shocked _not_ to see cyber written all over it.
I had a dream once where I was shot in the head and everything quickly faded out and I had that feeling where you want to scream but you can't and then I woke up. I was freaked out for a few minutes but that was it. I didn't actually die either (obviously). :)
I can't believe that guy that was the head of the company was freaking out about the game not being perfect. Personally, if I had a computer like that capable of manipulating the laws of physics (chopping of heads, hands, what have you), I'd think it'd be worth quite a bit more than some semi-realistic Wolfenstein rip-off.
And the financial folks were calmed just by seeing the FBI signature? Generally I'd think that'd have the opposite effect.
when Mulder woke up after being "absorbed" into the system, took off the Xybernaut headset, and recklessly tossed the unit into the air? Sweet Lucca, I hope that was a dummy unit.
Sure, there were holes all over the plot -- for example, why didn't anyone just stand on the balcony over the big room (where Scully walked out) and watch what was going on IRL? But if you want realism on TV, watch... uh... well, just turn it off and go outside for a while.
Hey, it looks like Duchovny and Anderson have been having a good time with these latter-day episodes. David seems to have had a hard time keeping a straight face at times -- I'd like to see the outtakes. And the state of Scully's "do" at the end of the episode -- ROFL!
-- Dirt Road
Improvise - Adapt - Overcome (unofficial USMC motto)
Was it just me or did the "Darryl Musashi" character seem to anyone else like a hilarious nod to Dennis "Thresh" Fong? I was rolling on the floor with that one. It was one of many times I busted out laughing during the ep but the only one of those where I will credit the writer with maybe intending me to do so. =:)
I also though the whole thing was terribly sexist. Ok, women play FPSs less than men. That's a fact despite some of the best Quake players being female (killcreek, Cornelia, etc). But that line about how Phoebe had to "fight back as a woman" instead of "choking in a haze of testosterone" was ridiculous. I mean if she could code this thing in the first place then her job opportunities elsewhere must be limitless. Was anybody putting a gun to her head forcing her to write an FPS? If she didn't like it, why was she there? It was probrably the worst attempt I've ever seen at making me feel sorry for a character. Besides, her creating a female character is nothing that hasn't been in FPSs out here in the 'real' world for ages (and I'm not just talking about Lara Croft, either).
Basically, my point is this: Brining up issues like media violence is great, but contriving a plot around the misrepresentation of a genre to do it isn't. Oh, and then there's Duchovny's line at the end:
"If the taste of victory is sweet, then the taste of virtual victory certainly isn't sweet 'n low. And the bullets aren't made of sugar, either".
Gibson needs to have his wrting priveleges revoked for that one alone.
Ok. I'm done now.
"(no knowledge of subject matter) + (crack cocaine) = (journalism!)"
I dunno if this is too late to get a response or not but... WHAT? Matrix... Neuromancer... what? Granted its been a while but beside the idea of AI escaping man's control and people 'jacking in' to something that presents its self as a virtual reality, both of which are common themes in sci-fi, how is the Matrix a ripoff of Neuromancer. They seem totally different stories to me.
"(no knowledge of subject matter) + (crack cocaine) = (journalism!)"
I started watching it thinking "The lone gunmen will be in it, it can only be good." but instead, i got a crappy story, and the rehashed AI gone wrong premise.
So, anyway, this didnt touch on anny current issues regarding violence in games, or at least i didnt see much.
Best scene: When donkeylips gets shot.
Here's what it's going to take to rid myself of the foul taste the Gibson episodes of X-Files left in my mouth...
Neal Stephenson writing an episode for the (announced and upcoming) Lone Gunman series.
Anyone else think this would rock?
Disclaimer: I have not heard anything indicating that this will happen. This is just what I want to see. Desperately.
Hmm.. Spontaneous code generation. Wish that'd happen to me on a midterm or assignment.
Ben
I once died in a dream standing on some railroad tracks. The train kept coming closer and closer. I was looking at the pretty bright white light on the front. The light kept coming closer too.
Then, the train hit me and I woke up. I found it funny because I actually forgot to jump out of the way.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Because all in all, it was pretty weak. But then not all X-files viewers are /. readers as well. We all know that Gibson has done some amazing stuff, and X-files has been drawing us all in for a long time. To broascast the concepts of real technology to the mass public as well as present some futuristic horror oriented storyline in an hour means that there will be a lot lost in the translation (read, dumbing-down). Although I can't say I think they did it effectively, it's just necessary. How many people do you run into on a day to day basis that misuse the word 'download'? It's common for peole to use the word out of context and away from anything even resembling the original meaning. Personally I thought it was a kind of funny insider joke that they so blatently misused 'download' and many other bits of jargon. The friends I watched with were sucked into the general story rather than the technical mistakes.
;-)
I have to admit however that the technical mistakes made it an episode I probly won't watch as a rerun, regardless of how hot Scully looked in body armor
---------- Hot Rats!
Ever watch ER? One of the things I like about the show is they make an effort to include a reasonably high degree of technical accuracy, without totally letting the show get bogged down in trivia. Sure, they use the defib pads and crack open chests a little more often than real-life ER teams do, but generally speaking, what the characters do and say is grounded in the sorts of things that really go on in an emergency room.
Why is it then, that when television shows deal with computer technology, they simply cannot *ever* get it right? Obviously these guys did *some* research -- the parallels to real FPS games and the guest appearance of an adolescent, asian "Thresh"-alike show that somebody involved had skimmed a copy of PC Accelerator at some point -- but what the characters said and did *made no sense*. "He's not waiting for the reset! He's going straight for the kill!" What the *hell* does that mean? Why does the World's Best Gamer's brilliant strategy consist of standing perfectly still and firing a pair of lightweight MGs, then running full-tilt into a darkened room without looking? I didn't even stick around to see how they were going to explain how Hotshot Gamer managed to psychosomatically eject his own head... I switched off the TV and went off to play some Q3 CTF.
And I got my ass *whupped*, I'll have you know.
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
Death is not the only "interesting" thing that can happen in a story! In a virtual world, you can have just as much interpersonal interaction as you can in the real world. People can change mentally, conduct diplomacy, relationships, whatever. All that stuff can definitely be interesting.
Of course, the problem is that we're dealing with VR in an action environment, and in action movies, you DO have to have people dying, I suppose.
But still, I can imagine a story where someone's, say, trapped in a VR world and can't get out and stop the program.. (Yes, I know it's been done.) That's interesting even if there isn't an immediate threat to the person's life.
Well, for one thing, their real body is then helpless unless they can escape, and they'd die of starvation/dehydration if they don't escape..
So that'd be one way to have a life-threatening situation without silly dying-in-VR thing.
The saturday repeat (in the Minneapolis area, anyway) with the Lone Gunmen continuing their own subplot with the blonde conspiracy woman was much more interesting by comparison.
That said, it looks like the X-Files are winding down their series run. The Lone Gunmen might be able to support a spin-off (the Geek Files?) but only if they're not burdened by episodes such as this one.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Clever, but way below what I've come to expect from this show. On the other hand, if they could have had Gerry Ryan make a guest appearance as her Borg character *of9, it sure would have made for some interesting scenery.
They never actually left the Matrix of course. They were simply in a simulation where they thought they were outside the matrix...but it was only a simulation. What a good way to keep people who have the tendency to try to "wake up" from actually waking up: simply make them think they are awake even when they are not.
And who knows what actually happened to people once they "died." It's likely that the Matrix simply put them into an after-life simulation until their physical bodies finally gave out.
BTW, not only was the freedom experienced by the characters of The Matrix an illusion (at all levels), but Neo was really just an AI that did not know that it was an AI. How else do you explain the fact that he was able to react at the speed of the other AIs? Reaction speed is not something that occurs because one has control of the system (unless we consider some Quake client-style manipulation)...it is a result of brain latency which is much more limited than what he was demonstrating at the end.
Have you ever read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson? it deals with some of the issues you're complaining about, while I can't say much more without giving away plot points...
I post links to stuff here
who programs in a kill command that kills the executable AND the source? That's just silly.
I post links to stuff here
Regarding the lone gunmen, what a bunch of weenies. What exactly is their appeal? They suffer from a severe case of misplaced hero worship (whatever the name of that guy that got his head chopped off was). If there's one thing about techno nerds, they never admit there's anyone better than them. Their hero universe consists of exactly one--themselves. It's all part of that "expert" arrogance, maybe shameful, but true. The whole hero worship notion is a fiction of the great masses to somehow bring us down to their level in an effort to humanize us. He, he, he...
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Every other phrase spoken was a cliche. And Mulder as the computer expert ("texture-wrap it!")? Come on! He's every girl's equivalent of a wet dream, bu he's not techno expert! Just a pretty boy really.
I'm sick and tired of computer technology in movies. And frankly, I'm sick and tired of X-Files. I used to hate it in the early days, then it kind of got interesting when they worked hard on the alien conspiracy stuff (around the time of the movie), then it slacked off again. Bait-and-disappoint, that's what the show is about. They tantalize you with some great ideas, then throw you some bones, only to leave you hanging without any real explanation whatsoever. The truth is out there--if only the producers knew what it was.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I thought one of the more entertaining aspect of their attempt at a plot was that the IPO and the release to the public of FPS's first and only product were on the same day. I have to say I would have trouble investing in a company where no one had ever seen the product. Of course, the fact that turning the game off was impossible, and would destroy the software(!?) was pretty funny too. And that power switches seemed to have been forgotten.
Sam TH
Sam TH
AbiWord Developer
Warning: If you haven't read Snow Crash, this contains spoilers
One story that actually did introduce drama into a VR setting without going completely stupid was Snow Crash, and I must say i was fantastically impressed to discover it could actually be done. None of this "You die in playland you die in real life" crap, but rather a mechanism that would scramble someone's brain when they see it because of some fundamental doojobby of the brain. Nothing in particular about VR makes this work, it's just a weapon that will affect you in VR. Within the context of the story, it worked.
But yeah. After I saw the Matrix, i went home and did some lucid dreaming. I got the jump on the first time, then I deliberately jumped off a tall building into the pavement, jumped through some large plate-glass bullets, and got shot at by killer robot zombies. Woke up without a scratch. Bunk.
Another damned comic
+++ NO CARRIER
Judging from the last 2 main characters in ST:DS9 and ST:VOY (Sisko, and Janeway respectively) I wouldn't want to be in the same sector as either of them.
I do not want to start a flame but you cannot possibly compare DS9 and VOY their two completely different shows. I believe the only thing they have in common is the Star Trek name. It seems the more they spin off a show the worse it gets now and days. DS9 was very good in the beginning and pretty good at the end, but VOY was always bad from the get-go. The same will go for the X files' spinoffs.
Recently, my roommate got a renewal letter from Rolling Stone magazine that asked "What went wrong?" since he had no plans for renewal.
I remember the Gibson episode from either last year or the previous (the maniacal computer trying to destroy his creators) and thought that it was a well done episode. I missed the credits last night, and did not recall anything in the promos talking about Gibson, but if the prior post is correct and he was responsible for that episode, I must ask, "What went wrong?"
My answers, acting, plausibility, and acting. To start off, the acting in this episode was lackluster. The Lone Gunmen were not the usual paranoid freaks that we love. Their entrance is simply proof that we aren't in for the usual quality when they're involved. Next, Scully and Mulder seemed like hack jobs compared to the normal characterization Duchovny and Anderson give in "normal" episodes. And finally what was up with Phoebe? A programmer definitely does not just repeatedly hit one button to kill a program. (I usually use a variety of kill commands in an attempt to remove a process).
Next, plausibility. Gibson's previous X-File gave us a wild, if not always plausible, ride. A computer that gains the notion of intelligence and oversees the survival of the species rule. Definitely not unique in concept, but well written and exciting. This X-File started with a semi-plausible concept (albeit overdone) in a mix of Quake with Lazer Tag or Paintball. I've participated in the two styles (computer FPS and real-life FPS Lazer Tag) and the combination of the two would be interesting. But after the initial intro with the three guys in the arena, everything seemed inplausible. The Lone Gunmen didn't aid in plausibility by being drooling geeks. In fact, the only plausible moments come from the greedy project leader and the awe filled moment while watching the best FPS player go in. That was plausible cause we all know guys that would drool at the chance to watch John Carmack take on his own creation. We may even be those guys. Beyond those moments, nothing seemed to flow correctly.
Finally, the acting. Yeah, I've already gone over the acting, but it's worth mentioning once again how hacked the performances were. Like the tense moment in the fight for the keyboard, I was tensely waiting for the episode to begin shining. I'm still tense with anticipation, but the episode ended 16 hours ago, and it's not showing any signs of getting better.
Sorry if I spoiled the rerun for anybody, but you'll probably forget in the year it takes for them to replay it anyway. And then you too can truly groan at the horrible X-File that was aired last night.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
Next thing I knew, I was in the surf in Malibu trying to figure out if I was in heaven or hell.
I've died in my dreams before, and even been dead at the start of the dream a few times (somehow I just knew). Most times I end up with an afterlife I have no idea if it's heaven or hell and keep trying to figure it out.
Needed 1 Cryogenic Canister
One Human, In good Condition.
Freeze Human in Cryo Canister, awaken in 1000 years.
The hard part is getting back.. or, if something like (it was either Niven or Asimov) but where they have huge organ banks, that contain much more than organs, like arms.. eyes.. etc...
--
Insert Witty Sig Here
Worst episode ever.
Actually I thought he was more of a nod to Thresh, winner of that quake contest for one of Carmack's rides. He was/is simply in a different league than almost any other FPS player. Quite awesome. Check out his page. He even looks like the guy from the episode.
You do have to admit that the Lone Gunmen in LA was a good episode, though.
Actually, overall, I've been pleasantly surprised with this season. Other than this episode and maybe "Hungry", they have really pulled things up from last season. The episodes about that lucky guy, the magicians, and the speed ones were particularly good.
"It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblences to merit."
i used to love the xfiles. then something changed at the beginning of this season (and possibly last season). the xfiles became a monster of the week show, with no mention of the underlying story save but a few episodes. it really sucks. the x-cops episode was slightly entertaining, scully's evil woman looks made it very enjoyable. :) fortunately, i was forwarned of sunday's episode and did not watch. it just seems that the focus has shifted to making the xfiles silly and each episode be a 'stand alone'. oh well.
Speaking of Crow and Tom Servo, did anyone else see the suspiciously MST3K-like silhouettes at the movies at the beginning of Futurama? I could swear I saw Crow, but it went by really quick.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I have fallen in one of my dreams. I was climbing a tree and fell off one of the branches. When I hit the ground I really hit the ground. I actually fell off of my bed. It was kind of freaky.
I think it's kind of funny that the same thing happened about thirty years ago, during the last season of Star Trek. During that season, they knew they weren't going to get another season (they'd been given one of the crappiest time slots possible...) and the writers wrote some really crazy story lines. A lot of them were trying to start some kind of discussion (the examples that come to mind are discussions of discrimination based on skin color...) I think that whenever a television show starts trying to address social issues like this, to avoid sounding preachy they have to go overboard.
I'm glad that the X-Files people are having a good time with it. I'm also glad that I watched it in a dorm lounge here at college, where we made snide comments whenever something funny happened. ("Can you texture-wrap her?")
I watched it, and although most of it was complete crap, I did admire the way a lot of it was handled.
Given: the technology to produce such "gamespaces" doesn't really exist right now, but in a few years, it might....and THAT would be cool.
About Mulders Disappearance: Has anyone given the thought that he didn't really disappear, that the program may have just made everyone think that he did? With the technology that was given in the game, it allowed that blank room to be converted into a warzone, including a dark alley or a Wild West fantasy. Who's to say that the computer, knowing what was up, didn't just create a room that -looked- like the regular room, while in reality, it was still inside the gamespace, with Mulder on the other side where the game was still being played out.
Sounds feasable enough to me...although I really don't want a computer game that can slice my arms off!
Cheers,
-Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
X-Files has become a parody of itself. Hadn't you noticed? The COPS episode was hilarious. The FPS episode likewise. They're comedy episodes. Deal.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
The COPS episode was brainless but cool. :P
I preferred the bit where they bit their hands after looking at the chick the killer was modelled on
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
It was a floppy drive power connector. :P
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
Maybe Gibson has the hots for Anderson so he always dresses her character up in hot outfits. Hey, I'm not complaining.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
My problem with the episode is that they never even bothered to explain where Mulder actually went when he disappeared out of the game room. In retrospect, he could have (possibly) been in the entry-way box or whatver the portals were, but I don't think that fits within the scope of the plot.
Also, How on earth did the Game Guru Guy get his head and hands cut off? The Gunshot wounds I can strech mentally from the suit providing too much "tactile feedback," but decapitation?
Mike Hollinger
Michael C. Hollinger
There was also a guy with a pace maker who couldn't allow himselft to "die" in the game because it simulated death with electric shock. BTW - I think the reason they couldn't get out was because some h4x0r disabled their logout command.
I've died a lot in my dreams. My most vivid dream death was getting shot in the head execution style at the movies. Next thing I knew, I was in the surf in Malibu trying to figure out if I was in heaven or hell. Pretty cool.
If they ever perfect these immersive 3d environments, I hope that someone codes a good afterlife. That would be much classier than a giant GAME OVER screen.
-BW
-BW
What was horrible was when they were in the game, cut back to the group watching, and one of them goes
"LEVEL 2!@*#!)(@*# NO ONE HAS EVER BEATEN LEVEL ****2****!@(*#!)(@*#)!(@ THEY WILL DIE(*#)(!@*_(#@!"
That was when I got disgusted and just had to leave the room.
I mean.. c'mon? How hard can level *2* be?
BilldaCat
Yesterday's episode reeked of sci-fi-by-numbers. Computer programs that refuse to accept commands from thier masters, physical matter disappearing into "computer space", heroes who go in and "defeat the program on its own turf". I thought it had some funny moments and was a good showing of sets and FX, but a damn poor episode. Especially considering how few episodes are left in the series (6? 7?) it was disappointing. Hell, I'm happy when my computer programs run at all. If one started running on its own, I would be happy.
-B
I mean ... barring alien involvement with FPS ... did the physical impossibilities bother anyone. At least when the conspiracies are involved, I can believe that there is technology that we don't understand causing effects beyond our comprehension.
But this episode seemed to be trying to sell itself as 'it could really happen!'. They took it far too seriously to make it as funny as it could have been, but not seriously enough for me to find it a palatable platform for discussing the issues raised.
I think the acting from all sides was sub par, particularly from andersen and duchovny. Could they have been any flatter?
Overall, IMO that was the worst xfiles episode i've seen, and i've seen all but three or four.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Yes, there was a time when a computer game could cut off your head and some crazed or misguided developer loved his machines just like you or I love our dogs and cats.
*imagines someone playing pong on a huge room sized computer (complete with Big Flashy Lights (tm) ) and a magnetic disc flying out of it to chop the player's head off when he looses....
why yes... those were the days... i think? lol
-confidential
The episode sucked in far too many ways. Maybe it's all (co-writer) Tom Maddox's fault.
I wasn't expecting perfection, but please! Gibson can do much better than this.
He could do much better than this and still call it crap.
I want Kung-fu Scully from the last William Gibson episode to come back. *pant, pant*
Lighten up people. It was silly and for the most part fun.
Skippy
"False modesty is the refuge of the incompetent." - The Stainless Steel Rat
The first William Gibson one was far far better.
What I didn't like:
- Physical wounds from virtual reality.
Dying from believing you've sustained wounds which were only virtual or receiving real wounds because your equipment (didn't have/had malfunctioning) fail-safe mechanisms; that's good sci-fi. But having your arms and head fall off from holographic projections? That's um... not.
- Matter disappearing into a virtual world running on non alien/secret-military hardware.
Ok, I'm fine with your consciousness being drained from you and running around free on the net (like the first Gibson episode... Anyone else wonder why they didn't just cut the T3). But come on! They showed this stuff running on PCs. Lone-gunmen using tweasers to move jumpers! They were going to roll this out is malls!
- Level 2
Ok. It's a chick with a gun sitting on a tank's cannon. Freudian implications aside, that's just boring. Let me summarize Level 2: Bad guys pop up. In the same place every time. You stand still and spray them with bullets. Wolfenstein 3D was more interesting. (That Goddess had LOUSY aim, BTW).
- No off-site backups.
Someone already mentioned this, but I think it's worth mentioning again... No software company would have a command that wipes out all their source and no backup tapes. As a programmer, I just can't suspend disbelief on that.
- StaticLimit
P.S. - My apologies if you see this twice. The first attempt threw an error and after checking my profile and the comment list I was unable to find it.
I tend to suspect the holodeck is the writer's biggest copout right behind solving the current deleamma with tachyon particles/field.
Right behind tachyon particles? No way.
The most diabolical copout? The sudden scene change, a cousin of the Jedi mind trick.
It has been seen most recently in parody in Galaxy Quest. The crew flies the ship into a deadly mine field cued with deadly mine field music. After allowing sufficient time to empathize with the crew's surely imminent death, the scene and music cut to show the crew unconscious on the floor. Woohoo! They're safe! The captain grumbles, "Let's not do that again."
Sweet.
Gibson most certanly does own a computer. I know this for a fact. He didn't own one in 1984, when he wrote Neromancer, but he does now.
[ c h a d   o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
for one thing, Neuromancer was not his first story.
And secondly, how the hell is All Tomorrows Parties like Neromancer? I mean there obviously some parallels, but they are hardly the same story at all.
[ c h a d   o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
OOops, appears I've forgotten what paragraphs are for again. :) I keep doing that!
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I had one just like that when I was a kid... pissed me off actually. I was in the park by my elementary school, had to piss real bad, so I ran to the bathroom, when to a stall, and releaved myself... and I'm sitting there whistling or something when I realized it was a dream, I woke up still whizzing. :) Then about a week later I had the same dream but this time just when I got to the stall I realized it was a dream and woke up. :)
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Maytreya is from Buddhism, and is supposed to be the next Buddha to arrive after Siddharta Gautama (the "original", or current, Buddha). Of course, he won't show up until everyone forgets everything about buddhism. Some people suggest that this is already happening.
Freud & catharsis
Well, I think in some ways you have to make some allowances for the recent episodes. I mean after completing a whole cycle with Mulders sister two shows ago, I think the producers are trying to move us out in different directions now. Hell, this show *never* finishes anything and they managed to give us a fairly concrete finale to that whole saga-piece of the story. So, after that they aired that ridiculous COPS spin-off which was more hilarious than anything else, and now the Video Game spin-off. Theyre just trying different things to get off the main story-line for a bit. In effect, I cannot really blame them. *shrug*
-oMaT
> But come on already, enough is enough! Can anyone point me to any study or theory that says Virtual Reality deaths may cause you to die? I doubt it.
Perhaps not in a violent, gory way, but just imagine if (when?) Microsoft gets into the neural interface VR business. Sure, it made perfect sense to allow the software to interface directly with primitive brain functions, after all, so long as you use our APIs your VR experience is guaranteed to be non-fatal (Note: use of Microsoft DirectNeuron invalidates all expressed or implied guarantees). I would be impossible to reverse engineer the DirectNeuron interface since we have used the sophisticated, state of the art Ceasar's cypher to encode all interactions. Any reported cases of general central nervous system faults (GCNSF) are likely due to the use of substandard, third-party biological organs.
Yeah I watched it and even taped it for a friend. I thought it was ok, nothing really special. It did deal a bit with AI but not overtly. All in all I thought it was a nice change from the ones I'd seen before, no major conspiricy or government coverup. I did find how they treated technology questionable.... did anyone else notice that the one guy plugged power into the data pins of a device? (I think I was only half watching) Or the fact they couldn't just kill power to the whole building to save Mulder.
What ever happened to the aliens?
Isn't that what the show was about?
Has every episode in the last season seemed like a special intended to bring in audience?
Are they pushing away the loyal fans who want <i>ALIENS</i>?!!!
I'm sorry, I didn't get the whole violence in video games message there. What I saw was a not so disguised attempt to reap the rewards of the current The Matrix craze. The little beady sunglasses, the big machine guns, the black clothing? This episode was nothing more than a Matrix clone, and a poor one at that.
I'm sorry to see the X-files stoop to this level. I've enjoyed the X-files for years, mostly because of the originality of the story lines, but obviously originality is no longer necessary for Chris Carter. Perhaps he's just tapped out...
Most of the plotlines that involve people dying in real life when they die in a video game involve heart attacks from the excitement and mental shock. I think that was the method they used in the X-Files last night -- it *was* a boring episode, and I was surfing at the time. The neat bit they added were the armor plates with electroshock wired in to keep 'dead' people from reentering the game -- yeah, people are gonna play *that* -- and the fake bloody wounds the armor would create with electric stimulus. But for all that, it was just a Laser Tag game, and nobody without a cardiac problem should be dying from the excitement of it.
The Matrix had a different angle. Humans were tied into the Matrix via wires jacked into their brainstem. I can see an overload of data there frying a few braincells that are important to the autonomic nervous system. Gibson killed people in his cyberpunk books the same way -- too much juice to the temporal lobe makes johnny go flatline.
I think Snow Crash is a better model, myself. Someone cuts off your arms, legs, and head? Darn, now you have to reboot to reinitialize your system back to your default avatar. By which time, of course, the bad guys have delivered their crypto nuke...
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Regardless of how good or bad the episode was, I'm sure that it will only be a matter of time before that Scully wireframe complete with textures is ready for Quake and Tribes! ;-)
Just 6% tax on my $.33.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
It's been a while since I took a psychology class, but I recall that dreams are 'plotted', so to speak, by at least the following factors:
So, what you describe could very well be true. I know there've been a few times when I was listening to a radio in a dream, and it turned out to be the sound of my clock-radio's alarm.
Dude, I get the same thing, only after seeing other people fall asleep in meetings and classes and such, I think you're prolly actually starting to tilt forward or sideways or what have you. Like I'm sitting there, trying to pay attention, but the coffee hasn't kicked in, and I am falling asleep, and then I fell myself falling forward and I jerk back awake, only seeing someone else do it it's sort of slow motion. Very entertaining to watch.
itachi
the cheesy COPS episode
<br>
i for one liked the COPS episode...
<br>
it has to be the best COPS i've seen. loved it when the mulder tells the lady cop there are looking for a warr-wulf and she asks to see his bage... i like some think diffrent. COPS could learn something from XFILEs...
<br>
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
I remember reading about patterns of black and white lines that cause headaches in some people, anyone have links on those?
just what the web needs pic's that cause headaches...
hmmm, so you what a link...
well if your brain coredumps it's not my fault!
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
n/p
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
I liked the Snow Crash version better. Tranmitting a virus into your head via visual input causes your brain to coredump... Ouch!
Seriously, what's possible in this area? I remember reading about patterns of black and white lines that cause headaches in some people, anyone have links on those?
How far could you take that concept?
If the X-Files, or some other quote-unquote drama were to do a realistic VR story using today's technology, they would have to use Everquest or Ultima Online or something similar. That would be pretty boring.
[Cut to fat, late-twenty something girl slouched in a comfy chair, mouse in hand. The monitor shows her fishing.]
~click~...~click~...~click...
[No fish shows up. Repeat for 10 minutes.]
You could see how viewership would drop off. Let's beef it up.
[Cut to sexy leather clad Lara Croft-ish imp. Replace mouse with double-barreled shotgun. Replace monitor with cables hooked directly into her breasts, allowing her total control over her complex looking Beowulf cluster.]
It just seems to me that the whole sex angle gives this overused genre a little bit more oomph. But that's just my opinion. And fer Christ's sake DITCH THE EXISTENTIALISM. It's been done to DEATH. Gimme Baywatch-meets-the-Matrix and I'll be happy, k?
-REv
was when our beloved four gunmen (or "the geeks" as the writers surely refer to them) are standing around an open box and one of them merely connects a hard drive to a power source. Upon being asked what they're doing he explains such an esoteric procedure, "Oh just making a kill switch to get them out of the game." Which is of course not mentioned throughout the rest of the show, as CTRL(ART BLOODBATH) manages to delete all exsisting game files, and of course they're supposed to be shipping (how does one ship a game that you need a 100 square foot garage in which to play it?) that same week and you know they don't have any copies in exsistence yet.
I will agree with you...a longtime Phile, I've seen only two episodes this season (for two reasons - one being swing dancing at the Willowbrook, and the other, more recent reason, is the new season of The Sopranos).
However, here in Chicago, Simpsons is on at 7 PM...so La Familia is on opposite X-Files...lately what I've been doing (read, for the last two weeks) has been to watch X-Files on Sundays, and let my TiVO catch Sopranos later in the week (the wonderful thing about HBO...they run they episode about several times per week PER CHANNEL...which nets about five viewing chances per week).
Sopranos is the only reason I got cable.
m.
Photography, technology, and my dog Scout - http://mattstratton.com
Even though it is not currently possible (if it is let me know) I thought that it was a great episode. I had seen every episode and started to get bored with it, then I saw the commercial for this episode and I was hooked into watching (The chick in the skimpy leather did it for me). I thought it was a great episode, lame in a few parts but over all a good episode. I have to say that I thought the ending was lame.
I figured that the "proffessional gamer" was a reference to Thresh, the most well known Quake player in the world.
Out of curiosity, did Gibson credit the visuals of Blade Runner, or the storyline/setting of Do Androids Dream Of Electronic Sheep? I thought the world in Dick's novel was much bleaker than the world created in the film, Neuromancer definetely left me with more of the book's bleak feeling than the movie.
Fact is, the Matrix works where usual explorations of the virtual reality theme suck. Why? Because these humans were raised from birth to be part of this VR. All their neural pathways would be organized around the Matrix, which explains why it seems real to them and why one death would imply the other. Both the body and the matrix itself have co-developed to recognize the same death, as it were. Most VR doesn't get hardwired into your autonomous neural functions, CRAPface.
As an X-Files episode, well, let's just say I'd rather see them back underground being slowly digested by a giant hallucinogenic mushroom than watch some rather tired sci-fi tropes get some smirks from Mulder, but not much else in the way of original commentary.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Being physically "sucked into" a virtual environment is totally ludicrous. When will they get this? They are trying to blur the line between the real, physical world and VR. Sure, there are fuzzy areas that we need to address, but these are all psychological, not physical.
They attempted to show some of the culture behind these games, but could have done more. There was the worshipped game guru, who didn't have one line, except "ahhhh!" There was some attempt to explain these games' attraction, but not much. The "deathmatch" craze wasn't even touched.
So, how did a VR entity do so much physical damage? Sure, X-Files could have done something paranormal with this to explain it, but they didn't even try. Even some sort of psychosomatic thread might have worked. The "ghost in the machine" turned out to be an impossible program gone wrong; that's it. The virtual world took on a physicality all by itself; accept it. Not!
Hollywood really needs to get some writers who have a clue when it comes to computers. I've learned quite a bit of restraint when watching these shows -- yelling at the screen certainly doesn't help the TV show, and is not an option at the movie theater. When are they going to hire some real geeks for their technical advisors? Hey, the Y2K people are looking for work, now.
I was actually a little excited to see it, though, because it looked like it might be a fun episode. It was also an interesting idea: VR games that become too much like reality and thereupon becoming dangerous. I know this is an old idea dating back much before we had computers powerful enough to even come close to doing the visual part, but I still think it is a cool topic.
As for me, I have been watching every show for the past 3 or 4 years, but lately I have just gotten bored with the same old 3 minute long soliloquies about how our beliefs are being questioned and blah, blah, blah. I have only been watching the Off-plotline shows now, the silly ones. They are funny and fun to watch as opposed to dragging a theme too far without ever actually coming to any conclusions.
Oh, and as soon as Scully leaves, I'm not watching...
Gillian Anderson is just plain hot.
IANAL, but I play one on
William Gibson ... caught the opening credits and the first 10 minutes or so.
So they crammed the well-formed babe into the tiny patent-leather outfit. Scully said it all in the first 10 minutes, and it was true of the show -- they were pandering to "lonely male" fantasies in the show too.
Was it just me, or did the whole thing come off as a direct ripoff of the "Holodeck gone wrong" episodes from ST:TNG?
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
I think you are all chauvinist, sexist....ah hell who am I kidding I watched it for the chick too.
Much as I like Bill's work (hey, it was my idea to have him as GoH for Westercon, after all), I thought this was too juvenile. I much preferred the 10th Kingdom first episode - episodes like this one were why I only sporadically watch the X-Files.
...
And, yes, I thought Scully said it best (and wore it best)
Will in Seattle
I've died numerous times in dreams too. I've been stabbed, shot, nuked several times, and incinerated (in a non-nuclear way). The funky part was I actually felt those things happen to me in the dreams. Being incinerated was kinda freaky.
This episode was pretty vile though.
Oh well, maybe next time.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Learnin' from each other's knowin,
It's all well and good for us techies to bemoan the sheer stupidity of last night's episode. I particularly hated the scene where the lone gunmen connected a hard drive cable and called it "rerouting the circuitry to bypass the infected system" or something like that. The general public doesn't understand technology, though, and that's the audience TV is aiming towards. Until the general populous knows enough about technology to say "Hey that's stupid," we'll still be having conversations like this:
friend> What's that? Is that a printer?
other friend> No, that's a transmogrifier. (it was actually my printer)
friend> What's a transmogrifier?
I've been watching XFiles since it started. One of the first in my 'hood to spread the word of this cool-ass show.
But ever since the movie was released and the whole alien-conspiracy thing was (somewhat) resolved...it's just lost it's...edge? meaning? purpose? grit?
I dunno, but for the past few months, I've been BORED with XFiles (maybe cause Dave/Dana don't wanna do it anymore).
So a friend turns me on to the Sopranos (HBO). Kickass show, no doubt. When I first heard of it, I though it was some gay show about opera singers!
Was I wrong....
Too bad for the non-HBO folks, but if XFiles is boring you, Sopranos are a good alternative. (this Sunday, though, it's on at 8pm, dammit, cutting into our Simpsons time!)
XFiles is over
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
I thought the episode was hillarious. I admit, I had to go and play some Quake 3 afterwards so I could (as Scully put it) get my "yah-yahs off." It was cool definately. The whole concept of the program running itself though was too much though. And you can't just make someone disappear from reality like Mulder did. Come on. This is why that episode is dangerous. John/Jane Q. Public watch that and start wondering if it's possible for such things to be. Like a computer program (it wasn't even the same program) jumping into another. Alternating realities. Real deaths. Not being in control of a system... etc. This could make the computer games realm look dangerous.
Also, I speak for myself here and many others. I'm in no shape what-so-ever to be actually running and jumping around like a Quake game. Forget the all night LAN parties. Hell, i'd be tired of the game in 10 minutes.
So, I definately like the episode for it's fun... and those shots of Miss Afterglow (hubba hubba), as a long time X-Files fan, it sucked.
The plot is out there.
For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know.
Or rather id Software's own Graeme Devine didn't. See his .plan entry for the 28th.
Frequently. I've drowned, I've been shot in the head (that was an abrupt death), I've smashed through glass and felt my jaw tear off. It sucks. :) But yes, I have died in a dream.
And now I've come to get you...Even worse, I can see the obvious Windoze window interface when the programmers and the Lone Gunmen tried to "hax0r" their way into the computers... No wonder the game has gone bonkers!
On a secondary note, why did the woman who created this "game" have to be so... ashamed for all of this stuff, to make a character that killed the players? Is this another way to say that women geeks should be ashamed of working with such games?
--
As opposed to lacking creativity, and feeding off an unrealistic dream of gaming/Lara Croft sex adolation, this episode was poking fun at the sexually deprived 25 going on 14 year old gamers who get their jollies off of sillicone as well as silicon.
Chris Carter has done this in mode than one episode-for example, the COPS episode could easily be taken as a parody...they followed all the conventions of a COPS episode-hookers, topless skinny men, and the men wearing(without which no COPS episode would be complete) wife-beaters.
I think the one where Michael Milkin guest starred, where Mulder and His character switched bodies would also qualify as this type of episode.
This entire episode was just a parody of campy Xena/Japanese Animation/Married With Children(which I actually thought was funny sometimes..)/Natalie Portman/Britney Spears/Me so horney type of games/tv/music/movies.
A friend of mine can get down to 10/12 beats a minute.
Doesn't this mean the brain (or something, never liked the idea of a central thinking/memory source for the body) can somewhat control the heart?
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
That episode was pure tripe. I have heard rumors of a Lone Gunmen spinoff. I truly hope that if Carter undertakes such a project, he hires on some full time computer consultants that have *actually* used a computer.
I don't know what happened to the writing and research over the last couple of years, but the show currently has little more credibility than Relic Hunter.
I was actually thinking last night while watching the FPS debacle, "I can't wait until morning when this gets flamed on Slashdot."
Thanks everyone.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Not to split hairs, but 2500V @ .1A is pretty much the same as 250V @ 1A, which would knock the hell out of you :)
Yes, I saw it. Definitely a load of crap, especially with today's technology. And the bit about Goddess "breaking out" of her program and into the other game -- whatever!
And remember the scene when the lone gunmen had the case off that computer talking about "Were gonna reroute power to set up a kill switch, but we can't get back online".
And "Jade Blue Afterglow" who went thru a "body scan" had an AI that jumped out of Phoebe's hard drive into the mainframe and took control of the game? Who wrote this script? Whoever it was obviously has never seen a computer.
This episode reminded me more of that UPN show "Deadly Games" (anyone remember that?) more than the X-Files. There was nothing paranormal about it, except perhaps the god aweful plot.
Was Mulder a "Neo" lookalike or what? Maybe it was just those sunglasses. For a second there I thought I was watching the Matrix
unplug
what's with the kill command bs?
- tim
- tim -= remove "-spam-" from address before spamming =-
I was hopeful - the first episode Gibson co-wrote was pretty good, I thought. A similar "AI gone wrong" premise, but at least it didn't feature TLG futzing with a hard drive power connector while prattling about building a "kill switch"(!?!)
The X-file here (even though you could see it coming a mile away) was a digital character affecting the real world, and they didn't even attempt to explain that. Add plot holes big enough to drive a truck through (would you enter a machine that just killed someone without explanation??) and CC's annoying pseudo-intellectual Mulder voice-over...
Pretty awful.
"I certainly hope Gillian Anderson felt as foolish as she looked in the "cyberpunk" geek gear. "
Really.
And what happened to the character Scully's cynicism? She simply puts it aside to walk into a VR. No, more than that...she buys into what is happening.
The older X-Files were so appealing because in a sense, they had two endings. You could land on either the Mulder or the Scully side of the fence and be "right."
In this episode, Scully simply gives up explaining how someone could be killed by a virtual weapon and walks into the game, suited up like a fool, blasting away.
She sold out. Disappointing.
Consigned to flames of woe.
Sometimes, you have to love being able to MiSTy something when it let's you down!
We are Mike (or Joel) and the robots this time!
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Still... it was the X-Files and my brother owns the X-Files computer game, so I have to assume it was incompetance rather than deliberate malice.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
I'd have to agree with the majority of people posting...this week's episode pretty much sucked. I guess not a whole lot FPS players were on the writing staff of this game... /w random things dying.
/w "Cops" to make that show. It was funny, but scary at the same time...and had the same flavor and feel of realism as "Cops".
In what game do you just sit there and shit at things coming at you w/o moving? Even the tamest of FPSs would kick your ass if you fail to move at all...Not much action really..just guns blazing
But..last's week's episode was kickass. I think they did a fantastic job teaming up
You make some good ones and bad ones...o well.
Salis
Favorite
Amen!
/.ers but at the same time figured seeing Scully mow down the baddies might make up for it...
...especially at the end when her head was pasted on the hot girlie body. ;-)
This episode made me laugh, and it made me cry... I knew that the bungled geek-talk would piss off all
But seriously, I agree with the lot of you that they could possibly have handled this issue better. Like maybe doing better research. Anybody think this show hurt/helped the FPS image? (Or are the only people who watch the X-Files already gamers anyway?)
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
First of all, if you are going to bash on the episode try to be somewhat constructive.
I think that this episode suffered from lack of development, and from some of the comments that I have read I think that some of you would agree. Had they taken the time to explore the lone gunmen's role (player vs. programmer), shown what the "Goddess" char was doing to block commands, as well as making the conflict with her more complex. My suggestions had anyone asked, and no one did, would have been to make it a 2-parter where the first one developed how the Goddess had developed into A.I. and maybe broken the show up where Mulder disappeared. I enjoyed the funny parts though.
Finally (I promise), I agree that this episode drew a lot from ST:TNG and Matrix. BUT, All good writers have drawn from great ideas that came before them. To expect or believe that everything that you see is original is infantile. Very rarely, if ever in the near past, has a truly original idea come out. ST & ST:TNG both drew from past ideas that gave Gene Rodenberry (sp?) the good ideas that he had. Why? Think of your own life for a minute every thing that you are has been developed by the input you received throughout your life. Books, Visual Media, and the Spoken Word define who we are. What I am trying to say is that you might want to think about what you are "ripping off" in your own life before you start bashing what you see around you.
And, oh yea, you could have just turned it off, right?
Fear leads to anger, Anger leads to hate, Hate leads to suffering. -Yoda
The preview for this episode looked like it might be something cool. Hey, wait. Actually I think this episode may have been correct. I mean how many games have you brought home for your PC cause you downloaded the sweetest looking intro demo file from the net only to find out that the game is a festering P.O.S.
e s.htm
There's a fair review up on Somethingawful.
See http://www.somethingawful.com/reviews/review-xfil
While I cannot back this up with specific scientific journals, there is a known phenomenon in south east asia where people die from some scary ass nightmares.
In the Philippines, it's called "bangungut." Older people are warned not to eat too much before going to bed.
If ever a virtual reality game were so realistic that senses beyond visual and aural were simulated, a heart attack could happen if the player was so engrossed in virtual battle.
I don't think they could get their head chopped off though.
I was all psyched to see it.
MAJOR fan of the Lone Gunmen.
I was willing to swallow a lot of the story line if they would have simply come up with some kinda high tech explanation for it like that other Gibson episode.
Have these people ever heard of backups?
Am I the only one that would like to see them get some new writers and spin the Lone Gunmen off into their own show?
They are my heros.
Their kung fu is the best.
-Mu
When you can't find your jello don't come screaming at me to remove the weasle from your headgear.
I loved the episode. I'm a big FPS fanatic, from Quake 3 to Ut, and I can't get enough of gun touting and cross fire episodes. The episode in my opinion was a nice change for the people at X-files, whose original format was a bit dry. Don't get me wrong there were a couple of episodes:Santa Claus, seriel killer and the small pox/alien season finale episodes, that left many expecting more. Sometimes too much of a good thing becomes boring. And eventhough many of you disliked it, you have to admit that some scenes had you laughing and/or in awe. One keynote, I found it interesting that X-files pointed out that a warrior/master in fps game play means nothing in the real world.
Do we have otherwise healthy people dying in their sleep due to violent dreams? Hell no! I've been chased by dinosaurs at least 5 times, and I've yet to wake up clawed, gnawed, and bleeding.
Be careful, my friend! DreamWoks Studios (makers of fine movies and cooking equipment) has a patent on being chased by "anything from the Jurrasic Period". If they find out about your dreams, you could be slapped with an infringement lawsuit.
I don't care to watch it anymore after they got too indepth over the alien crap. The alien thing is played-out. It appears that they must be running out of ideas. They should cancel the damn show.
One of the most amusing things with this episode of the X-Files was that the game was run from a lowly PC. When I saw the guys tooling around in a PC case, I cracked up. Get a clue.
And the Matrix was a complete ripoff of Neuromancer... So, in essence, Gibson and Maddox wrote a ripoff of a Gibson novel... Also, if you only watched fifteen seconds at a time can you be sure that you watched enough to form a sound opinion?
Adam
Ummm... What part of the show spread the idea that violent games are the toolbox of Satan? Sure, Scully complained about them, but that doesn't mean the show was promoting censorship.
Adam
You're bitching because this X-Files episode was "not very realistic"? Right... Would you care to point out an episode that is very realistic?
Adam
Hmm, anyone got a "Assistant" Unreal skin? muhahaha
The prevailing theory I've always heard suggests that the body's perception of death (in a dream or whatever) results in neuro-chemical shock usually ending in a heart attack and death. But we cannot exactly go ask dead people if this is true :-)
As for being wired to a machine... DUH!
I can offer a suggestion on the effects of the sword... Most holographic projection systems in the real world use lasers. We'll have to apply the Hollywood Filter (tm) and say they were using high powered (visable?) lasers -- which I admit is a real damned bad idea :-) The apparent lack of blood supports this.
While that _can_ explain the broadsword, it does nothing to explain the effects of the flintlock.
Note: in ST:TNG, their holograms are light held in a force field (magnetic?) The force field is what presents the danger -- and the fact of matter/energy conversion [holodeck matter won't maintain molecular cohesion outside the holodeck.]
Television is fiction, the X-Files doubly so. Part of my enjoyment of the show is my willing suspension of disbelief. For an hour a week, I can believe in ghosts, UFOs, government-wide conspiracies, flipper men, life after death and a host of other unproven, unbelieveable, fantastical stories.
The X-Files last night was a hoot. Entertainment - pure and simple. As if providing entertainment is a bad thing - really, shame on you.
As a woman, I find the depiction of female characters in modern games laughable. But the Matrea character was accurate. Like it or not. Cries to the contrary go back to Victorian fallacies. But game characters are larger than life. Have you taken a closer look at the male characters? Exaggerated male physical characteristics and hyper-violence. I find it refreshing that female characters are every bit as butch as the males. And why is it so unbelievable that a woman would create such a character? If I wanted to create a female gaming character, I'd probably give her enormous outstanding, uhm, features, the better to disconcert my opponent.
At least Mulder and Scully actually did something instead of the usual walking around, looking at clues, and saying things like "oh, look at this clue, what do you think it means?" "but Mulder, that doesn't make any sense..." blah blah blah.
This season does suck. X-Files was a lot better with the conspiracy storylines.
I don't think any psychologist has to state it. When i'm stressed out I do one of 3 things. Sleep, play guitar or play Half-Life. Games like Quake allow you to reduced your stress in a safe enviroment.
-Ellis of Geeknews.com
...to this episode was seeing Gillian with a BFG ;-)
Anyone else think that was cool?
BTW, I missed the Cops episode. Did that one suck more than this one?
Here's my copy of DeCSS. Where's yours?
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
I strongly agree with Malign's article. I hope this doesn't end up as the pilot for the Lone Gunmen series - they'd do much better forking off of the Lone Gunmen at Defcon or some of the Lone Gunmen Help Mulder Sneak Into Places episodes.
And Scully was wearing too much gear -- Mulder did a better job of loking like beefcake in the gamer suits
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"I stopped watching the X-Files after the 6th episode. (Yes, it took me that long.)"
Uh... I don't know about most fans of the series, but in my mind the first six episodes were awful compared to the good ones. I think it took them two seasons to realize that research is necessary even for shows about unrealistic phenomena.
That's kind of like saying, "Man, I hate Doonesbury. I stopped reading it after the first month."
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
I was very intrigued when I read about the
episode in the paper, it was co-written by
William Gibson.
I thought the comments it made on gender issues
both in high-tech and in gaming, in particular,
were thought-provoking but have to admit the
resolution of the episode was less than
stellar... (Scully did kick some a$$ though)..
Pros
----
the lone gunmen.. they rule
jade blue afterglow.. (biting my fist..)
scully/mulder got to run around like a
marine in Quake blasting stuff up
Cons
----
raising for the n-th time the idea that
gaming is the cause of societal violence
the idea that they HAD to delete the
whole game to get rid of the ninja chick..
no CVS depot?
That dork in charge of the game.. just
didn't like him..
-- "This is my sig... there are many like it but this one is mine"
You mean they did an episode on First Post Syndrome?
I've had several friends who have died in their dreams. They usually wake up in a cold sweat, but their hearts still beat. Remember that the heart beating and the lungs breathing are automatic reactions that aren't controlled by the concious parts of the brain. Since it is the concious portion of the brain that would interact with such games, the concious portion of your brain would have to have some way of telling they unconcious portion "hey.. we're dead.. quit that".
Example.. the concious portion of the brain can tell your body to stop breathing (you can hold your breath). However, unless you gag yourself somehow or put a plastic bag over your head, you will not die. Instead, the concious portion of your mind will shut off first, and your unconcious mind will start your breathing process again. Granted, this tends to kill brain cells, but it is not life threatening.
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
I watched this one while doing my taxes...and the taxes were more entertaining.
So, how come Scully never even got a nick? Other than she is so hot she vaporizes the lead befer it hits her?
Ducovny (sic) himself defined this show best in the last scene when he muttered with obvious irony "Now THAT'S entertainment".
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, 1977
I stopped watching the X-Files after the 6th episode. (Yes, it took me that long.)
What does everybody find so intreguing about that stupid series? The believing character and the nonbelieveing character perpetually stumbling across mysterious phenomenon X, only to lose all trace of it by the end of the show, neither believer nor nonbeliever changed in the least.
Rob, add an option so I can turn OFF stories about X-Files.
Wow, everyone I've talked to has taken this episode /way/ too seriously. It was supposed to be funny, people. This was obviously one of those episodes where the writers of the real plotline (whatever that is now) was given a break, and a chance to add some much needed comic relief to the series. I mean, there was even a nod to Thresh (that Danny character that got his arms and head sliced off), even if 'Thresh' played a pretty poor round of 1v1. :) And you must admit that Mulder was hilarious in his Morpheous-style glasses and his 'Bring It On' attitude. I'm not a hardcore gamer in any sense, but I was behind this episode all the way.
In other words, just take a few deep breaths and relax. Not everything is meant to be a stab at the hacker culture, and I'm sure your regularly scheduled 'this is the episode that reveals it all' X-files will be back next week.
Hacksworth
well, I've had some weird dreams. I've had dreams where at some point in the dream, I had to take a piss, so I did. Weird thing was that in real life, I'd just pissed myself.
Is that the same thing?
That's called a bladder problem dude..
Movie News - "Entertainment news, bitch!"
Not only was some of this thing unrealistic, but nearly every single part of it was completely preposterous. Come on, laser-tag vests?!
I believe Gibson and Maddox have just delivered the first major prime-time TV troll, aimed directly at US. They win.
-Mike
It seemed like an excuse to give Scully a machine gun and dress her up in combat gear. Although that was kind of cool...
A lot was left unexplained, without even a lame explanation. Why did Mulder disappear? Why did the computer babe come to life in the first place?
And, most importantly, what kind of moron game developer would have a single command that would erase the entire game? Sheesh!
I give it thumbs down.
Wedge
After this and the COPS episode, it's official. The X-Files is now mainstream and beyond hope and all we can pray for now is a relatively plainless death.
Although the move to L.A. and Scully's new hairdo aren't good omens either.
It was the "Judge Dread" of X-Files episodes. It was bad all around. The acting, the writing, the everything. It didn't make sense, and didn't even try. The munch who wrote it should be shot. It had no redeeming qualities. Thank God it wasn't the "Last Action Hero" of X-Files episodes.
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
Joe Haldeman's "Forever Peace" deals with the issue in a slightly more realistic way. In his novel, people jack in in groups to control a bunch of "soldierboy" robots. When the robots are hurt or killed it doesn't necessarily kill them, but it is very stressful and can cause pain similar to phantom limb syndrome. They lose people to cardiac arrest or stroke occasionally too, due to the very high stress.
The technological premise is somewhat interesting, as it's sort of a cross between machine assisted telepathy (with the others in the platoon) and classic "jacking in". All in all it's probably a better treatment of the subject than the recent X-Files or the entertaining but all too predictable Matrix.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
I saw that one at the theater. I guess that dates me. Pretty good for it's time. Tron, Thunderbolt and light foot made it for Jeff.
TheQ
TheQ
My comments are the direct effect of your comments or lack there of.
I am a huge Gibson fan, but this episode was ATROCIOUS. It started out OK, and could have been much better perhaps if the 'mystery chick' was actually a rival hacker's avatar instead of the 'goddess'. I am really looking forward to the neuromancer flick....other than neuromancer.org does anyone know of any updates?
http://andreas.materns.com
1. It was sexist.
/only/ men like first person shooters. I was pissed off with Scully's comment of "Hey, don't pick on the girl."
I was gagging when they had "Jade Blue Afterglow" walking through the room and Mulder was salivating like a dog. I was annoyed with the idea that
2. It didn't pass the "Can a five year old see plot holes?" test.
Okay, you have this huge icky computer killing people. Do you A) turn off the computer or B) send in more people to get killed? Of course, they pick B. Oh yes, there's some lame excuse about how it will ruin the game -- but please, didn't these people ever hear of backup????
3. Was Gibson on drugs?
As a friend of mine said, "Okay, did we all just like Neuromancer so much just because we didn't know anything about computers then?" It's obvious that this script was written without a concept of how computers worked. Is Gibson that lacking in computer knowledge or did some hack destroy the script?
Argh. All in all, worse episode ever.
It's amazing, if you ever saw the Kyoko Date stuff from Japan which entered Korea as Diki - there was a virtual idol just like that, and in the video (free for downloading) she IS texture-wrapped, right up the legs, stopping just short -
http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt trAce writer-in-residence http://trace.ntu.ac.uk
Was anything explained here? How exactly were the "images" generated? Holograms? Special goggles and renderers? What? Star Trek's had some silly hologram eps, but this was just lame. A runaway computer program? That's what the reset button is for. A programmed character "magically" moving itself from one computer into another, incorporating into software she wasn't apparently even programmed for?
The whole thing bottomed out the moment Scully stepped into the arena and just went downhill from there.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
i had a friend that dreamt she was having sex... and woke up with her pants & underwear lying on the floor... she also had a dream that she had been bleeding, and woke up and saw the trash can was full of bloody tissues - nose bleed.
--
DeCSS source code!
--
you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
The episode was lame. 80's video game terminology and inaccurate statements. Writers should know a subject before they write about it.
The killer was cute. Fit in well with the discussion from last week. Does playing with a female skin give you an advantage? It would if you wore that leather bondage queen outfit.
That happened to me once too.. I don't remember what the circumstances of it, but I woke up just after finishing to realize I had pissed myself. Pretty annoying.
-palp
Are they telling me that they worked this long on building only TWO maps (warehouse/ghost town)?
Well, that was because "no one has ever gotten past level 2 before." *shudder* Apparently, neither have level designers.
-Shawn "If the Name Don't Rhyme It Ain't Mine" Conn
I think we'll have this someday, but it won't be the way it was portrayed in FPS or on Trek's holodeck. Seems to me it will be done with electrodes or actual implants (something like the droud in Niven's Ringworld or the "plugs" in The Matrix). Great topic for SF/X-Files. Poorly done in this episode.
being able to "upload" your conciousness on the internet
I like this idea. There was an interview in a recent MIT Technology Review with a guy about this idea of translating ourselves into a computer. My first encounter with this concept came from the Gateway novels by Fred Pohl. Another excellent topic and I thought that X-Files episode was much better (William Gibson wrote or cowrote on that one I believe - someone mentioned in this discussion that he cowrote FPS.)
cracking government and industrial databases with impunity? These ideas are cracked at best and dangerous at worst.
Why not? (Not "why not do it/try it?", but "why not" use this as a SF topic.) I don't see the ideas as cracked so much as the way they are portrayed on episodes like FPS. Dangerous? Why? Because people might try these things?
This was a terrible X-Files. The worst part for me was all the phony tension and conflict at the end. "We can't shut down the program, we'll lose everything!" It also looked like a boring game - mostly all you do is stand there shooting at things that come down the road at you.
Yep, a couple of times that I remember... but it's probably a bit of a giveaway after you fall/get crushed/blown up and see your own blood on the wall in front of you, that as the scene fades to black you spot the pixellation and think "Aha.. that's *Half-Life* blood!"
I was quite content the first time it happened (after waking up and checking the wall) to have a counterexample to the folklore, but I have to wonder, does the fact that I never died in a dream before playing FPS games mean that they are making us feel that death can be taken less seriously, even at a sub-conscious level?
Or maybe I *am* dead, and /. is the circles of Dante's Inferno - The Great Barrier being my comment threshold, with Hypocrites, Deceivers, Sowers of Discord and Falsifiers below.. Hmm.
Attacking a Matrix-like plot is perfect for X-files. It isn't little green men, but it has the "paranormal" factor.
What it seemed to be missing was an adequate cause of death for the unlucky duo that died. But they could't make it too much like the Matrix either. :-).
I give it an 8 of 10 for effort, 6 of 10 for execution, and 9 of 10 for the geek factor.
-ted
Remember when the X-Files was something to look forward to?
-Legion
Of course there were similarities; I'm was surprised that they didn't introduce characters in the episode based upon Mr. Carmack and his id posse...ponytails and stuff. Although the Asian "master player" they brought in did remind me of someone, and I don't mean Dustin Nyguen. The thing is, the episode might've had a bigger impact (and been thusly more enjoyable) if it had been from several seasons ago when the first person shooter was newer and fresher, especially to /.ers. Plus, the show has touched on the whole premise of VR before, so this wasn't even groundbreaking for the series. I bet the non tech-saavy viewer enjoyed it a lot more than me 'cause the suspension of disbelief probably came easier.
I think you may have just forgotten to stop OST 3 playing before you went to sleep, and caught the billion odd FMTTMs that inhabit most of the disc while you slept ;P
Yes.. Well at least thats what www.lucidity.com say about things. Lucid dreaming is knowing you're awake whilst in a dream, and therefore do whatever you want in the dream. They have little devices to help you achieve lucidity that make mild stimulus such as flashing lights, to help you realise you are in a dream.
:). The whole basis of their stuff is that your dreams can and are easily influenced by the outside world.
The idea is that if you train yourself to look out for flashing lights etc all the time, you will recognise it when you are dreaming, as your brain will translate it to something like a fluorescent light flickering or something, in your dream. Then you will consciously know you are dreaming and are free to have fun
Formulaic? FORMULAIC?! Don't make me summon unholy powers from the nether depths of...oh, excuse me.
Um.
What I meant to say was, what's wrong with formulaic? That adjective is often hurled as invective at much of fantasy writing. And it's true. A lot of it is formulaic. But that doesn't mean it's bad.
Yeah. It's a formula. But what if it's a good one? Besides, anyone can fill a formula, but the good authors put in just the right values for each of the variables (gods, that sounds nerdy). sometimes, that means it fits the formula, but in a wonderful new way. Other times, it just means they're a darn good writer.
Examples: Terry Brooks. Terry Pratchett(in well-done mockery, though). Robert Jordan. Terry Goodkind (lose the sex and gore, though). David Eddings. Tolkien, maybe, though it seems to me that he wrote the formula, or at least modified it from Homer's.
Back to the matter at hand. I don't watch the X-Files. For some reason, I don't like it. If, mayhaps, a Lone Gunmen spin-off materializes, I might watch it. Anyway, I can't profess enough X-Files knowledge to judge the formulaicity (is that a word?) of this episode. But keep in mind that formulaicness (how about that?) isn't necessarily a bad thing. Take ST: Voyager, for example.
PS: I can probably expect flames about Voyager being the spawn of Satan. Frankly, it's a free country. If you don't like it, don't watch. Also, about the authors list. Those're my favorites. Feel free to contribute your own(in a friendly manner?).
PPS: And yes, formulaicness (?) can be and is abused. The examples are boundless.
-Ravagin
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is NPR! And that means....it's time for a drum solo!"
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Yes, the FPS X-Files episode was about as lame as it gets. Many problems like "how did Mulder and Scully get digitized and transported into the computer/gaming realm"? Yeah right. Even the trailers for the episode were lame. The "Thresh" clone was amuzingly bad as he stands there gauking at the awesome Krista Allen. Legendary world-class gamer? Phfffttt! And although Krista Allen comes about as close to my ultimate dream-babe (second only to Pamela Anderson Lee as Barb Wire) even *she* couldn't redeam this episode. - Speaker
I enjoyed that little tribute to Thresh with "Daryl Musashi". Only problem is that we know that the real Thresh would've rocket jumped himself out of there.
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
I have nothing against William Gibson as an author. I love his books. However, he REALLY needs to keep his hands off of TV and movies...Johnny Mnemonic, this X-Files episode...I don't think he realizes he can't quite pull it off. Just my own opinion, and I'm sure I'm going to get blasted by those that liked Johnny Mnemonic ;)
> This is true, but have you actually died in a dream? I havent, I always wake up just before I do. Perhaps if you do indeed die inside of a dream you die in real life, but if its true it can't be proven...
I've died a few times in dreams, usually from being shot. They're not at all pleasant, and while a few of them have ended with me seeing my dead physical body, the others have ended with the flash of the gun in my face and that's it, blackness.
...Except maybe Mulder just wanted to show off how he looked in the get-up!
I normally don't watch X-Files, but when I saw the preview for this one, I thought it had to be a must see. Man, was I wrong. The storyline started great (I loved them bragging about getting their IPO!), but it went downhill so fast. Nothing of the plot was ever resolved...granted, X-Files loves to little details hanging for suspense, but they didn't even give one shread of evidence of why she jumped from one computer to the other, why the program could actually kill, etc.
The only thing I really liked about the episode was bring up the subject of male testosterone. We have a laser tag arena in our town, and I can relate perfectly to "the need to blow the crap out of others."
So, when they rushed into the game room and Mulder was missing, they said there was only the exit they just came through. But at the end, we find out there's another exit - okay, so it's not very big, like closet sized, but still they should have thought of that when Mulder first disappeared.
Also, I can buy the idea of someone dying from shock, simply because they think they've been killed - ala "Spectre of the Gun", in original Trek, or the Matrix. But what physical object blew that hole in the one guy's chest, and what physical object sliced off the other guy's hands and head? When the Agent shot Neo, Trinity saw no bullethole. There wasn't any. The bullets weren't real in Matrix, and they weren't real in FPS.
Btw, why didn't Mulder and Scully just strip off their suits? Without the suits, the game would have no power over them, right?
I'm a big fan of the original Descent, and Freespace. I'm not sure if FPSs are the same, but in Descent or Freespace, if you stop moving, you die. These people used no strategy, no way to defend themselves, and they didn't move.
And I know this is a touchy subject, but who wrote Scully saying, "No fair picking on a girl?" A. That ain't Scully, B. no fair picking on anybody, and C. why the mudslinging at males? Maybe males are by nature more apt to hurt people than females. I don't know. What I know is I've known 4 abusive people, and 3 of them were women. I know my sample size is too small. I know different people have had different experiences. But women have no monopoly on pain. We've all been hurt. Blaming it on whites, or blakcs, or males, or females, or teenagers, or adults, or rich people, or Jews... it's all the same. It's collective self-pity, and it just spreads more hatred around.
I don't mean to offend anybody. I like girls, I'm a big fan of the female species. But I'm a scrawny geek, so don't tell me girls don't cause pain.
I found this kind of funny since me and my friend had been saying "Worst episode ever" all the time since the comic book store guy on the Simpsons said it a few weeks back. Now, just an hour after the Simpsons time slot the worst Xfiles ep rears it's ugly head.
-Pasty
I have too jumped off high places while asleep just to see what happens. I didn't die, but woke up. Then a couple of nights after that I was in the same place again. This time I decided that I wouldn't wake up, and jumped off. I hit the ground, but didn't wake up. It was fun, the free fall was like in a roller coaster.
But has anyone here experienced this:
You're lying in bed, just about to fall asleep. Your thoughts are going soft. Then all of a sudden you hear this sound like someone screamed at your ear via a distortion effect VERY loudly. The sound is very short, maybe a little bit over half a second or so.
Then you sort of "snap out of it", your heart is pounding madly and you feel sometimes terrified. Sometimes it's just a similar feeling to being awaken abruptly while in sleep, except that your heart is racing wildly.
I've experienced these things many times. Has anyone else? Does anyone know what they are?
--
>(8< ~ we come in peace
Sometimes I feel that the dream actually comes after something has happened.
Eg. you hit your head to the wall while rolling around asleep - BAM! - then your brain interprets this signal, but it's messed up in sleep (the hit generated the same responses as if you'd hit your head somewhere), and so eventually you see a very fast and short dream about getting a huge rock on your head or something before you actually regain consciousness. Not very scientific, but that's my theory...
--
>(8< ~ we come in peace
I've died in dreams, or fallen, the weird thing is, I always wake yup with my body remembering things. I've fallen in dreams, only to wake up still feeling like I was, or been shot in dreams, and I feel pain for the first moment of being awake. I think it's just more of that "mid-state" where your brain hasn't decided if you are awake or not, and is overloading itself. NOthing fatal...but really weird.
---------
---------
Moo, Baby. Moo.
No more quotes, since I'm probably pushing the bounds of fair use. But again, a decent interview that at least lets you know what the writers were attempting to do in this crappy episode.
------
FPS, to me, seemed to have struck many of the threads that weave throughout Gibson's books. The idea of software becoming more then what it was written, technology rebeling, emergence of AI in unexpected ways, etc...
:)
So when I watched X-files, I looked beyond much of the cheezy visuals (and some bad dialog... oh, let's not forget the unexplained "kill room"
The only real problem I had was the codechick striking "back as a woman". I just plain didn't understand what she ment by that... if it was about "No one finds me sexy so I need to role-play to simulate a healthy selfimage", why couldn't they just say that?
Wiwi
--
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
I tried to watch the show but after the 1st 10 minutes the sheer chessiness of the show made me reach for my remote control. I had a good evening with Fox too with the new Episodes of the simpson's and malcom in the middle...but after only 10 minutes of X-files I swiitched to HBO to watch the Sopranos. Now that's a good show.
,Christopher's growing awareness of his talents and junior (Tony's kid not the uncle) quoting Nietzsze (sp?) and Master P when asking what man's purpose for being is. This is a great show.
Too bad it doesn't qualify as News for nerds cause I'd love to yak about Tony's neurosis,
Watching X-files has been a rather tedious experience for months now, and this episode is the straw that has broken this camel's back. Such cheap exploitative TV I expect from Fox but not on the X-files. This will mark my departure from watching the show. Adieu Mulder and scully it's been fun.
Further, some psychotics have created simple stigmata on their hands, using their fingernails, during religious-frenzy induced "VR" episodes (all without hardware or software!).
I've even written a short story that used a similar theme (man dies after being shot at by a blank, because he believed it was a real gun/bullet).
That all said, the whole thing would have been much better (IMNSHO) if:
- People had not disappeared when the game was shut down,
- The killer female had actually been a physical person who had tied into the software for a VR skin over a normal body (nice chance for a morph scene here). Even the dissolving escapes would be allowed if the players had been wearing video glasses fed from the program.
It's too bad the people programming the special effects don't get to give feedback to the writers, maybe then they'd get it better.However, in the final analysis, X-F is a fantasy show, not a science-fiction show.
i know, i'm probably stepping in it here, but i just haven't watched the x-files since the Sopranos. it's currently on in the same time slot for me, and it is a (and i do not say this lightly, nor to offend, i hope some of y'all will take my advice... it's free, after all) _vastly_ better show. the characters, stories and jokes are all great!
:)
it's really worth a look.
ta in advance for not spamming the fsck out of me for the above heresy
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
What nobody has put forward is that it might be possible that the Subconsious is ALSO being manipulated by the Matrix, and after getting 'unplugged' or shot in the matrix it would stop giving it info, and before your brain can realise "hey, I'm in charge again" you've already died.
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
First, I agree that the death in VR = death in real life may be foolish.
However, your use of dreaming to support your argument is not made with the proper perspective. In your dreams of dinosaurs chasing you have you ever been killed or even felt pain? I doubt it. I don't know any scientific proof behind this, but from what I've experienced and what other people have told me, I have no stories that support the presence of physical pain or ones own death experienced in dreams. Even though what's happening my seem real, the body knows it isn't.
However, in VR the senses could be fooled into thinking it is real. Pain could be felt and you might be able to die.
Like I said before, I'm not saying this means you will die in real life, I just feel you need a better comparison to support yourself.
I think she was intended to be.
It's like the episode of the Simpsons that was on last night -
Casting Director: (after rejecting Moe) I want "Maryanne-on-Gilligan's-Island ugly", you know, "TV ugly", not "ugly ugly".
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
I'll admit it, I watched just to see if I could see Scully in a skimpy leather outfit. Sorry, I have a thing for her.
;)
But it's leading me to wonder what's going on over @ Fox. Did anyone see the episode a week before done in a "Cops" format? Now that was cheesy.
The the missus and I did have a interesting conversation after the show. Me being an avid gamer, not so much FPS, she asked why do I enjoy playing these games when they do nothing but contribute to a persons violent urges. I said not really. Most people who play FPS or any other type of game realize it's not real and that using a rocket launcher to frag your friend to lil itty bitty bits is, in most cases, not a good thing to do. But there are some people who will and do take it a step to far. I mean, if you look at almost anything in our society, there will be a small group of people who will take it to far, whether it be the idea, or the actually action itself.
Then she brought out the dead horse question: "Well what about Columbine?" To which I replied "Well where were the parents?"
But she seemed to think that all games are FPS and frag fests. To show her that that was a false generalization, I logged on and jumped to an Unreal server. She started going on about how bad it was that all there was to the game was frag frag frag. Then I logged onto a Rainbow Six server and found a friend of mine and we did a few co-op missions. From there we went to Gamestorm.com and dropped into MultiPlayer BattleTech: Solaris. From there I took her to a C&C:TS server. ALl of this to show here that not all games are frag frag frag. And what she got out of it, which I was hoping she would catch, is that it's just not teens playing these games, but a lot of adults as well, many well educated with good jobs.
I think it's starting to dawn on her that she's been a victim of media hype
GIHM -The light at the end of the tunnel is only the oncoming train.
Did you catch the scene where they were trying to figure out who had shot the first "player"? Mulder was saying, "Can you bring up the 'wire-frame?" and "Now can you 'texture-wrap' it?" Everyone was staring at him like he was from another planet (has that been dis-proven yet). Even the programmers were like, "Duh, who is this guy? That was a great idea!!" The show was definitely not up to par with their other "tech" related shows. I can't wait to see the episode about the AI gone wrong again! THAT one ROCKED!!
(Close-up of Neo - Look of agog on his face - Said in a half-whisper)"Whoa!"
Entertaining in a campy sort of way though. It had nothing to do with the main storyline of the show, as do most of the "monster" episodes, but was at least a little entertaining. I can think of plenty of episodes that were worse. As far as making a statement about FPS games, I wouldn't think FOX would want to shoot themselves in the foot. I bet a HUGE percentage of their audience are gamers.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
That wasn't actually Scully's head. It was the head of the programmer gal who created the killing female as her "goddess". I think it was supposed to demonstrate her acceptance of herself or some such.
At the end of the episode. The CG-Afterglow avatar's head was replaced with Scully's. That's why I said that it wasn't really Gillian Anderson, but oh-so close!
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
Ok, so it wasn't really Gillian Anderson, but that made the show worth it, right?
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be Thresh. It looked kinda like him...but then again, a lot of us Asian guys look the same. I had to watch the credits to figure out if it was him.
As regards his gaming dominance, I'm not too sure about that. Then again, I've never faced him. So, until then, I'm just going to engage my standard cynicism, and figure he's good...but not godly.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
I think you have found great meaning in your response... It reminds me of the other post a few days (weeks?) ago talking about how men use the female characters to test the other gender. I think that the difference in our sexes dictates how we play games. I'm not trying to say that one gender is better at FPS's than the other, I just mean that sometimes one gender needs for it to be so unreal that they can "get into character". I saw the episode, and I thought it was different, but in no way could I see it as realistic, nor the usual "unrealistic reality" of X-files... Ello Darkstar [There's always room for Ello!]
Well, since the general consensus is that the espisode sucked...
www.jumptheshark.com
Any one else notice the horrid over-use of cyber-speak? Does _anyone_ talk like that?
c
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
* "Uncle this droid is malfunctioning" -- Luke Skywalker
Started off OK, but after 100 abused/overused tech terms and the whole scene with the unattached hard drive and "magic kill switch" they were trying to rig (careful guys, you might bump into the power cable and end the game!) I just left the TV on and went and did my taxes. Let's see a latex-clad Scully vs. "Goddess" in a RailTag match! That would have been worth watching TV for. My TV watching sually consists of Japaneese DBZ tapes, occasionally breaking for the Simpsons, Futurama, Dexter's Lab, Space Ghost, or some other animated goodness. X-Files is the only "live-action" show I even bother with (except Discovery or Animal Planet specials :).
I just really wish Gibson's stuff was better on screen. I don't know who is to blame, but his books totally rock any of the onscreen stuff (re: shit) he has been involved with.
"You point your finger at the moon, the fool stares at your finger."
Dude, Digital Theatre is about movies. You think he know less than a substantial amount?
I believe the first time was tron.
am I too old?
"A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire
I don't know if I could even give it that high a rating... No explanations about where Mulder disappeared to (unless you count the idea that he somehow got sucked into some digital pseudo-limbo [and if that was the case, THAT was never explained]), how a simulation managed to cause RL damage, etc...
... Well, it left me with a distinctly sour taste in my mouth...
On top of that, things so massively unrealistic that the whole idea of suspension of disbelief was completely impossible - things like a character hopping programs, a video game "getting stronger" due to players' testosterone rushes, and the fact that nobody could turn the damn machine off
--
--
It's not the rambling I object to, so much as the mumbled incoherancies...
>Think of dreaming, we've all experienced dreams that seemed very very real to us, more real than any virtual experience is, or probably will be for the next 50 years. Do we have otherwise healthy people dying in their sleep due to violent dreams? Hell no! I've been chased by dinosaurs at least 5 times, and I've yet to wake up clawed, gnawed, and bleeding.
Well, the difference here is that dreams are more like just thinking about something, whereas the aforementioned programs created the actual scenario in the mind, probably creating the sensations in the body by stimulating the brain, at least The Matrix has that idea.
Just my thoughts
BlightX
The absolute worst flaw in the Martix, which for some reason no one seems to ever notice, is that humans are not a very good source of power. Although technically its possible to strap a human into some device to suck out the electricity, if you only feed them the bodies of the dead humans, then you won't be gaining anything in energy...its basic thermodynamics. The basic flaw in the premise is that humans ultimately gain energy from the same place as everything else -- the sun. If the machines wanted power that badly, they could have just launched a satellite to collect solar power above the atmosphere or tapped into a geothermal energy source.
If you change the plot a bit then it works fine -- for example, the AI's need cheap, powerful computer hardware to run themselves on. The solution? Wire all our brains together to form a massive neural network which they can move freely in. In this case, they are hijacking our brains to run themselves on, while keeping the concious potion busy with the Matrix, which is running over the same network, but on a completely different "layer" so the AI's (except for the agents of course) do not appear there.
-W.W.
"Well it should be obvious to even the most dim-witted individual who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology...
The whole show seemed geared toward a 13 year old male adolescent. Similar to Natural Born Killers, the episode advocates the exact subject it's trying to critique. remember: quitters never lose
I thought it was a bad take off on the Matrix. First Cops... now the matrix. Get original
I thought it was funny episode (for the ironic HAHA yeah right aspect) ...But how many people actually *KNOW* you cant do this type of thing. Its probably a bit more believable for a non technical person ;p
What is it with TV and even movies, when it comes to representations of both computers and gaming? Are these stories written by forty-five year old men who have never actually picked up a computer game in their lives and still use a typewriter to make all the scripts, and which are then approved and decorated with "with it slag" by gen-x posturing producers who like to THINK they're hip to all this, but likely were busy getting girls drunk in their frat houses while the real video junkies were spending the laundry money at the local college video arcade or networking university computers for Doom/Quake deathmatches after hours? Or do they just let a monkey with brain fever throw it's own excrement on blank pages, and then send the resulting mess to a typist? It could hardly do worse. I lost interest about ten minutes into the damn thing, as it rapidly degraded into the worst X-files (ok, except for the babe...) in a long, long time. Someone else already mentioned the "magical computers" that they use in the series, technology that not only doesn't exist, doesn't even follow any sort of internal logic or consistency. What a f*ing boring game! Yea gods, even the ol' holodeck nonsense had more creativity and elegance of design. Man, Tron would beat the snot out of those FX (except again I suppose the scantily clad villain, which then just looked silly in strange Tron like bulky black outfits). Anyway...what a disappointment.
that cyberspace episode involving that AI that had gotten loose and at the end the girl disappears into cyberspace?
Just like la Femme Nikita, X-Files may be a good show, but anytime they do anything computer related, it sucks... Damn Hollywood.
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
C'mon man, how can you shudder about that game?
Rise of the Triad (R.O.T.T.) featured huge levels of up to one million square feet and 16 stories high. Thirteen different weapons could destroy almost every object or pane of glass in the environment - even bullet holes remained on the walls. Other new developments that R.O.T.T. brought to the arena were the ability to look up and down, magical power-ups (remember dog mode and god mode?) and weapons, and support for eleven players on an IPX-compatible network upped the bar on the number of people that could play at the same time. There was also adjustable violence for concerned parents, the choice to play one of five characters, and other unique qualities.
Unlike Doom, R.O.T.T. had more of a story and setting behind it. You played a member of an elite group of operatives called HUNT (High risk United Nations Task force) and were assigned to stop a maniacal cult leader from killing millions of people. Trapped on a remote island and inside the enemy's fortress, it's all you could do to survive.
Other new features were jump pads that could spring you up into the air and over obstacles, walls, and other players, and the "Remote Ridicule" (RTS) files that were assigned hot keys allowing players to send vocal messages to others. Players could also make their own files with a microphone, and soon gamers began trading RTS files over the Internet.
This game is/was definatly a landmark game, and it helped bring in games like Duke3D with it's destructible objects and moving things.
So what if there was no configurable heights or orthagonal walls.
--
Talon Karrde
rather than sit there and enjoy X-files (been a VERY long time since i've done that), i ended up sitting there staring at the chick in leather :P i mean, what heterosexual guy could not look at her? i personally wouldn't mind fighting her, even tho i'd guaranteed get the crap kicked outta me, anyways, X-files haven't been that good for quite awhile now, i still watch it hoping that some day they will have another interesting episode to watch, btw, i think it'd be kewl to have a virtual game like that, just reminds me of star trek's holodeck, just not as realistic, of course that episode of x-files is supposed to take place in the current time while star trek is in the distant future, ok, well i've rambled long enough, x-files is kinda boring right now, but that chick was hot!!
sure have. remember one nuke dream I had. I closed my eyes in the dream and felt my body dissolve away.
--------------------------------------------------
I expected an apology in the credits.
It doesn't take an expert to say that gaming is an outlet for stress. To deny that someone does something to 'vent' or to denonunce its justification because it does or does not have the 'Seal of approval' from a shrink or whatever...Begs the question; Why do YOU game?? Why do YOU you drive around with your stereo cranked when you're ticked off? If you don't want to look at it as an outlet, think of it as a redirection of energy. I'm not implying it's the only reason that one games, but it can be an outlet. -Q
Gaming being an outlet for stress has NOTHING to do with virtual violence or your primal kill instinct. Again it's redirecting your focus, and it's not just done with games. -Q
Hey, did you see X-files? It kinda sucked, but was kinda interesting, maybe. Oh well, it was vaguely technological oriented so let's post about it. Reminds me of Chris Farley's movie reviews on SNL. "Hey, you remember that part where they were like playing video games? That was cool"
I'm surprised the FBI doesn't teach basic anti-computer self-defense techniques like this at their academy.
Opening scene: three techno-geeks are getting pumped, they lock'n'load, they're ready for action. The countdown is complete. They rush forward
TG1:Quick, everybody in the same bunker!, we can't be more than 1/2 of a foot away from each other or our screaming will drown out any attempt to communicate tactically
TG2:Bunker? what the hell are you talking about? this thing's just an extruded v-shape. Shit, if bunkers were made like this do you have any idea how much easier d-day would've been?
TG3:No time for that techno-geek 2, the virtual bikes are coming! Open Fire, dakka dakka dakka
TG2:I don't mean to be a party-pooper, but i can't help but notice that the three most central bikes are pointed pretty much directly at us and firing constantly despite a serious lack of visible ammo feed (i guess it's all internal anyway). Anyway, since we're pretty much taking all the space (at least from a 2-d topdown perspective) of this "bunker", shouldn't we be cut to shreds if their guns are aimed at a height appropriate for assaulting said bunker? And if it's not, then this is a pretty dumb level, no?
TG3:Silence techno-geek 2, just fire...phew that's the last of them. You know it was pretty cool how we managed to keep up a constant stream of fire without ever requiring to reload. Fortunately mulder will run out of ammo at a critical moment since he's dumb enough to pick the gun running on windows 3.1
The three techno-geeks rush from cover and fire at the nazis (?) in the buildings to their side, who despite having the tactical advantage of cover, angle and height are unable to hit anybody except captain chunky.
TG1: Thank god captain chunky died. Heheh, look at him squirming cozza those 12 volt shocks. God that's great. Anyway, i'm off to get to level 2, so long sucker!
Tg2:Wait no! you're about to enter a non-combat zone!, since we're just the superflous extras, you're sure to die in there!
Techno geek 1 does not heed TG2's warning and instead rushes into the virtual garage where he meets up with supervixenbabe. Naturally he lowers his weapon and kisses the hand of svb since he's in a virtual videogame where he's supposed to kill everyone and you never shoot a lady.
TG1:Oh shit, this is just like that time i zoomed in on that chick in Q3 with the "naked britney spears" skin. You're about to frag my ass 'aint ya? supervixenbabe: yeah, that's about what's going to happen, ah-huh. Fortunately you will not suffer any kind of nueral-response of any strength which might cause some kind of mental-breakdown. Instead, you will actually be shot with a flintlock pistol that, and this is the cool part, leaves a bullethole, but no gunpowder residue. Now, regardless of whether the pistol is virtual or not it can't do that. Muahahah, clever huh? The truth is we haven't finished coding the supervixenbabe and somebody forgot to add the explosive residue effect.
Naturally Sculley and Mulder are called to the scene, especially since there's no sign of paranormal activity which means this definately does NOT constitute an X-file. Stuff happens, Mulder learns that the entire game is run on a Windows NT machine service pack 2 (olea32.dll errors anyone?) . Mulder is unfazed because he gets to say "Uhh, can you texture wrap her? *smirk*"
Mulder: Holy shit sculley it's thresh! Yeah, we've got a homicidal VR system which is clearly a police matter, but we're okay now because we have SOMEONE WHO PLAYS VIDEO GAMES TOO MUCH, phew, now we're saved. Hmm.... he appears to have been cut up by some kind of virtual-sword. A broadsword at that. Wait a minute, isnt' a broadsword like 6 feet long? hmm, i guess this one isn't. Oh well, this looks like fun, i better go in and play
Geeky guy in charge: Oh shit, people might start getting the impression chicks like FPS games....uhh what do we do? quick, somebody hire an emotionally-retarded mal-adjusted female to be the lead-programmer whose complete lack of self-respect will cause her to program some kind of supervixen to anihilate everybody
Geeky guy second in command: uh. sure
Mulder goes in gets opened a can-o-whoop ass, sculley runs in and saves her in some kind of really warped level 2
Geeky guy in charge: Shit nobody ever beat level 2!...fuck what was it...uhh...idkfa, that's it, IDKFA! quick, somebody tell them...oh noo it's too late, the chick's on the tank. In a western setting. hmm, must've been one of the levels we sub-contracted to those macintosh guys...
Sculley kicks supervixen's ass.
lone gunmen:Tell us the command that deletes the entire program and any backup files you may have!
Geekey guy in charge: Why the fuck did i program that command in again?...
lone gunmen:i dunno, that was pretty dumb huh?
Geekey guy in charges begins to hug the keyboard for no apparent reason. This worries many viewers, parental discression is strongly advised.
The Lone gunmen: Shit, i can't end task! the program is not responding....! quick ALT-CTRL-DEL....aww fuck, why is this taking so long? does NT HAVE to hog the ram..., multi-task my ass....
It turns out the system admin terminated the SINISTER_PLAYER_OF_DOOM account which kills supervixen and causes the entire program to shut down, delete itself and make the geekey guy in charge cry. Yay for our heroes.
~~Lofwyr "iLLusive"
Talk about an episode which started out as potentially interesting, but quickly degenerated into politically-correct claptrap. I'm rather sorry to see that Chris Carter feels the need to present a Steinem-ish "men are inherently bad" episode.
:-)
I'm a little sorry that I didn't tune in to the Sopranos instead, as I usually do, but then I can catch that episode tonight.
What is it with Fox these days? After giving us all these very violent reality shows they now feel that they must browbeat us about how violence in any form is bad. Hypocritical little sh*ts. The sole good point of this move is that we won't be seeing any of these neo-fascist John Bunnell (sp?) shows anymore
TAE
My sig is too lon
Most likely not. There are several different kinds of fear. The first is composed more of worry than actual fear and is mostly psychological, not involving the adrenal glands too much. We all experience that a lot. The second type, which most of us don't experience as much, is accompanied by a rapid release of epinepherine and a bunch of sympathetic nervous system activity.
An example of the second kind is if you're walking down a corridor then suddenly hear a gunshot and see a bullet hole appear in front of you: Your body dumps epinepherine into the bloodstream which increases the heart rate and strength of contraction. It also acts on muscle cells and causes a chemical cascade which results in glycogen being broken down into a phosphorylated glucose, which is then shot down the glycolytic pathway; this is why your muscles seem to have a huge amount of energy when you're terrified, and why people can do some amazing things when high on epinepherine. The effect doesn't last forever, of course. Then there are the activities of the sympathetic nervous system which come into play, such as shutting down digestion. If you're running from the bear, you don't want to waste the blood in the stomach.
There's a reason I went through all that. Your brain probably can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality in a dream, so it gets scared and triggers the flight or fight response. One of the reasons you don't start killing people is that your brain paralyzes your body; this is why sometimes you get blown out of bed and can't move for a while. If you dream that you have a heart attack, the same thing will probably happen and you'll wake up with your heart pounding.
I thought that the episode was so-so. The plot was bad but then again the way mulder was written into the episode was haliarious!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I certainly hope Gillian Anderson felt as foolish as she looked in the "cyberpunk" geek gear.
There seemed to be only two things they were trying to accomplish: get the Lone Gunman on screen during the Feb sweeps and have some lame discussion about video game violence and sexism.
Of course, the violence had to turn out to be real (in a weird and never-explained way) in order for it to be an X-File.
Was the oriental gaming guru who got sliced a nod of the word processor to Stephenson's Hiro Protagonist character from "Snow Crash?" If so, you'd think they'd let him swing the blade once before dying.
Kurt in Atlanta
Actually I have died in a dream, it wasn't anything very dramatic mind you, I died of old age. it was pretty boring until I started haunting things... damn good dream if you ask me. I got to run around and posess people and in general cause mischief.
...and that was enough reason for not watching the episode.
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
At least the matrix was a simulation that enveloped the user. Believe me, a body that disappears from the material plane and into the computer plane (and comes back) using only laser tag equipement and a "mainframe" is the real trick!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~ Read my lips; no new faxes ~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~ Read my lips; no new faxes ~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Why did it suck:
1. I can't let go of my version of technical reality - especially in a show that is supposed to take place in present day.
2. Anyone who could create the technology shown (basically ST:NG holodecks) would be an instant trillionare.
3. No one fears the kill command if you have a back-up of all your data.
It was candy:
1. If you could let go, and just watch it as if the technology could exist - it wasn't bad. Even if the storyline was lame.
2. Mulder was amusing. Especially with the sun-glasses.
3. The slut was nice to look at.
4. Scully in the game uniform was probably every pre-pubescent's wet-dream come true.
BlackNova Traders
Well, the first thing I thought when I saw him was "Thresh!", and I've never even seen a picture of the guy. If it wasn't him, it sure was supposed to be a similar type of guy. Obviously a reference for those of us in the know... Except the bit about coding for the CIA, Thresh doesn't code does he?
(His handle should have been "Flail" - that woulda been hilarious!)
Freedom: "I won't!"
I dunno about you guys, but Scully was just kicking ass with that huge machine gun. Do we have a natural gamer on our hands?
--------------------------------------------- "You could have it all, my empire of dust..." ~ Nine Inch Nails
It was Freud, actually. He came up with the whole idea of catharsis. These days, though, it isn't an accepted theory. Studies have shown that violent tendencies aren't released by acting violently, they're learned.
I still don't see how they were trying to portray the game itself. You suit up in real equipment and walk into a white room that's covered with texture images. The room they were in was nowhere near the size of the game with textures on it. Like the scene where the motorcycles came from. And those WALLS that they were surrounded by suddenly cease to exist when they have a texture mapped to them? And the fact that they went downstairs in certain parts of the 'game'. And Mulder just DISAPPEARING.
I know the producers and effects people aren't stupid, but I could have done a better job.
Long signatures suck.
Hehehhe. Your post made me laugh...
Long signatures suck.
At least it had the lone gunmen in the episode. I love those guys. :)
Slashdotters,
I watched the episode last night and I have to say I wasn't too impressed. I figured in the beginning that it was going to be one of those "dying in virtual reality kills you in real life" type of theory, but by the end it just seemed like a confusing bunch of holes and loose ends. No a flame or anything against X-File (I normally enjoy it).
However I do think it was an attempt at one of thier "semi-parody" episodes. Poking fun at gamers, the software company and all that. In the end all that happened was the game was "erased". No possible theories not even some outlandish Mulder-speak theory either. Seems like an episode that Chris Carter just wanted to have fun with.
In my youth I was once stabbed through the chest by a large monster, and I watched all events thereafter in a 3rd person perspective. Since that time, I've been shot once, and "hit bottom" after falling more times than I can count. What's weird, is at the same time I hit bottom I wake up, and my body, anticipating the shock, actually bounces upwards in the bed slightly. In any case, I'm still quite alive.
Desperation is a stinky cologne
I have a feeling their writers quit years ago and that the scripts being filmed were found in their trash cans.
I agree. Stephenson's Snow Crash effectively uses the "Metaverse" as a plot device without having to resort to any of this dying in VR equates to dying in RL crap. It is a must-read.
"Perl 6 will give you the big knob." -Larry Wall
Read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, a virtual world plays a key element in the book and yet if you do die, which happens once in the book, via sword fight, you are just kicked from the server for a given amount of time. The way a virtual world effects the real world should be based on how it is used. Ex. You are killed (read baned) from an IRC server, from that point on you can not affect discussion on the server nor can you see what is hapening on the server. That is a rather crappy example but I can't think of a better one, just read Snow Crash
"The anwser to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is... 42" -Douglas Addams
This X-Files episode was so funny! If you didn't taken it seriously at all, it was a romp. Mulder totally stole the show on this one, he was absoultely hilarious.
The equipment (guns, armor, headsets) reminded me of Aliens.
Considering that TV is normally written for "the masses" (as an excuse for them to watch commercials and spend more money), what can we understand about Chris Carter's view of his audience?
That they don't really know much about how computers/networks/games/etc work?
That they might care but will consider it good entertainment anyway?
That they might care but will consider it entertainment anyway?
That there's nothing better on but they will sit through it rather than pick up a book?
Remember that "they" is "us"
%DCL-E-OPENIN, error openingDISK$3:[Sjev]LIFE;
-RMS-E-LNF, life not found
1) how many shots does it take to blow up a tank where the girl was straddling the cannon? who was driving anyway? 2) that's one heck of a "cheat" to be able to destroy the whole game (including source!) with a ctrl-alt-del-esque keystroke. 3) and who ever heard of trashing the code because you killed the process? 4) my girlfriend kept asking me "what does mean?" 5) what? no rail or BFG? who cares about a silly machine gun. c'mon, get creative! these episodes cost $1M+ per. 6) Quake III has better graphics. in all, one of the worst episodes, though not as bad as doing it in COPS format from last week. and besides, who would play a game where you just stand behind a metal barrier and shoot at mitosis-ing stuff that doesn't move? oh, wait...what was I thinking... Fox has sunk to a new low. - Bart Simpson
Perhaps the episode was crappy because it was written by those other than the regular staff?
I immediatedly logged on to the internet and posted my discontent!
This
Look this EP was a Troll! let's see who was this EP for... US, geeks! Afterglow WAS Lara Croft, period. M&S were dressed as Space Marines ala Doom/Quake/Duke (I think M even spouted some Duke lines) the computer fairy tales were SUPPOSED to tick us off. but the final answer ctrl+alt+bloodbath... come'on you laughed it was funny. No off switch. huh! plus the "game" was as boring as a space invaders rip off! The whole thing was meant to get us writing. It did. They won. PS- That WAS the worst episode ever....
This
Doctor Who did it in the 1970s. And the environment was called the Matrix then, too.
Although both participants "died" quite a bit, they didn't (quite) die in real life, though they came close (temporary stoppages of brain activity and so on). What finally did for one of them was when the villain put the physical system into overload and fried his own henchman.
That story contains the classic line
which I think about every time some computer at our office joins an NT domainAnybody else notice that the suits, deliver a "strong 12 volt shock" to keep players on the ground after getting shot. Considering 12 volts is hardly more then you get from a 9 volt battery. Definately not enough to actually be felt by a human. Not to mention the fact that voltage isn't what would keep a person down, it would be amperage. Because 2500 volts at .10 ampers would barely tickle a person.
However, once you take it seriously all sorts of stuff goes wrong. I can forgive the mystical computer mumbo jumbo, this is hollywood, computers doing magical things is quickly becoming an easy explanation. However the uh.. attitudes.. that's where I had a problem.
How many of you, when you play an FPS, stand still? Just whip out a big gun, plant yourself down, and mow away? Do you get a rush from that? I can understand if it's team defense, but see, I think FPS's and games are popular cause they let you do the impossible... take a rocket to the feet and fly waaaay up for instance. Or teleport into someone (ala translocator). Not sit and shoot.
Female attitude.. HAH! Great one to cop out on, but I don't think it's honestly that bad. I'm a MALE though, I don't know any FEMALES who play this in Real Life, so I can't really say how to portray this well.
"The bloodlust is unsatiable." Oh god. I don't even wanna touch that.
Still, for all the bad points, if you just remember that it's TV, MAKE-BELIEVE, it wasn't bad. I kinda found it funny how matrix-ized mulder was ;)
Admittedly my celtic mythology is pretty weak, but do you mean Tir Na Nog?
...Upgrade now to Schrodingers Dog...
The series is totally formulaic. There are only a handfull of episodes that are anything but formulaic. It was still cool to me. And the any episode with the Lone Gunman is tops in my book!
Everyone in the world is doing something without me. Poor bastards
The episode was just lacking something. I personally really enjoyed the other AI episode a few seasons ago, but this one was just too silly. And how did the lone gunmen get into business with this company? What were they doing there? There were just too many holes in the plot and nothing was explained at all.
Oh and I loved that program jumping.?!
Axiom
I am not sure "Thresh" can retain the title of Quake Champ. With him pimping Gamers.com and all he has not been able to play in any majhor tournaments. Maybe he has lots his touch or is a little rusty and could get spanked by a better player.
OH NOES! TEH INTARWEB IS BORKEN!
What the show really needed was rocket jumping. :)
OH NOES! TEH INTARWEB IS BORKEN!
Let's just pretend this episode never happened and suppress our painfull memories
My qualms aren't even with the technical issues such as how one could 'lose' people in a game, etc., but in the deus ex machina type ending. A kill-switch that destroys every last bit of memory of this game? Christ, just pull the power cord out! Reminds me of the James Bond films with the ubiquitous 'Self Destruct' buttons (labelled, with countdown naturally) located at his arch-nemesis' lair in plain view. I for one, cannot fathom one reason that a person would need such a device.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
This may be off-topic, but I had dream once where I died. A cop shot me twice in the stomach and I then fell to the floor, quite dead and unable to move (but still conscious of all this happening, weird...). The only real-life effect was waking up with my heart racing.
---
Two things just have to be mentioned. Didn't you just love it when they were "rerouting." The guy is fiddling with the hard drive, ha, the least the could have done would be mess with some cables and a piece of mystery hardware. The "bad command or file name" responses in msdos were the kicker though.
Rabenwol f
Just watched your parody, it's really great! *ROTFL*
But anyway, I thought the episode was just far too overblown because while the demographic gender differences are obvious in the FPS world, the whole "need to have a hot female character to compete with the men" plot was idiotic. It's not like female skins aren't available.
That's a good answer -- I completely agree. For some reason, I have too many friends who constantly cut apart sci-fi movies based on today's knowledge and today's technology. "Aliens" is another good example of a plausible movie that gets attacked because certain aspects seem/are impossible because of either ignorance or because the viewer mistakenly thinks technology or humans will be the same hundreds of years from now or at some "unknown date" in the future! I can understand doing a story at some "unknown date" in the future when things are possible that seem impossible today, but you can't do that in a story that is set today (unless they travel to the future or something like that -- assuming someone invents some means to time-travel).
After everything's said and done, we have to remember that these *are* just stories that are meant to be enjoyed, not scientific hypotheses meant to be dissected and scrutinized. Sci-Fi has a basis in science fact, but that percentage is totally up to the author. This is one episode that I could watch once, but it was just plain boring the second time around (we have a satellite dish so I can watch it on the East coast and West coast again if it was good) -- this one wasn't worth replaying.
I would say the more important thing is that X-Files isn't supposed to be like "the matrix". It's a totally different thing and that's why this episode was crap: It was just not X-Files like. And another thing: X-Files has its setting in the present. All these things described there (especially perfect virtual reality) are not yet available. Obviously not what X-Files was in the first place.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'"
"It may be your sole purpose in life to serve as a warning to others."
Well the chick in leather *was* interesting... Anyway, I agree that the episode wasn't done all that well. The worst part by far was that at the end they completely moved away from the original purpose of finding out why the people were dying and went into saving Moulder. It was a blatant trick to divert your attention away from the fact that it isn't possible for a computer-generated character to kill people. They also could've found something better for the woman in the black jumpsuit to do than just appear time and time again on top of that stupid tank that didn't fire. And the fact that seven of those women were firing at Scully with automatic weapons and not hiting her was completely unrealistic. True, I liked all the talk about a video game that is almost completely real and I did like all the hot women, but the story was truly lacking. If they had just taken a few extra hours to fix all the glaring errors and replace them with subtle ones, it'd have been a lot better.
Thanks to my personal goal to never watch a single episode of the X-Files, I was not disappointed by last night's apparently horrible episode. I encourage others to make a similar commitment. Hopefully, actions like this one will eventually vanquish the evil of mediocre prime-time television.
Trying is the first step toward failure. - Homer Simpson
that's right it did, but the one from last week was awsome, and the camera wasn't annoying as crap like in the blair witch project.
Yesterday's episode was pure crap, way below the quality we used to get from this show.
Did Scully really needed to shoot like 5 whole minutes at the end to make any kind of point? It was so ridiculous...
The script was very weak, i just cant believe they went for this teen-full-of-testosterone-and-zits kind of story.
Please, oh please, give me reruns instead!!
--
Win2k: 65000 bugs can't lie....
I normally don't watch the X-Files simply because i find a lot of the plot lines shallow and uninteresting... but last night i got sucked in more or less because of my interest in 3d-FPS.
I think it made an honest (although not completely successful) attempt to raise discussion about senseless violence. It fell somewhat short in this area because the only deaths in the game were from the game it's self, not the result of the players going out and reinacting the scenes in real life.
As for the technical aspect of the show, I found some of the ideas intriguing(sp?). Specifically, i was interested in the idea of the electrical shock used to simulate injury to players without actually harming them. Anyone know how realistic an idea like this actually is?
On a final note, I'd just like to say that i thought having mulder disappear into the game it's self was a tad too imaginative... I think a little bit better plot development could have been done in that area to make it more realistic.
-hunnr
200 Quotloos on the newcomers! The dialog just plain sucked...
"Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought." - fortune cookie
Speaking of ya ya's Scully with a BIG GUN
Yeah, the technology and storylines were all pretty sub-par, but I loved the little moments when Mulder was totally involved with the game: especially with those sunglasses. And Scully! Who wouldn't want a screen capture of her in the gear as the wall paper? She just looked so cool and out of character! I loved it! Better than the episode where virtual-Scully did martial arts.
that was definatly the highlight of last nights episode.... that and the commercial breaks where family guy was announced to be returned =) ... the_ph0x
Why don't people ever think about the fact that you could easily pipe in data from another source without the system knowing where the data is coming from. So instead of piping in the data of them in their virtual world they would pipe in a perfect solution in its place? Just a thought.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
I think the special effects guys were just jealous of Star Trek's holodeck and wanted to show they could do it too. ;-)
Agreed. Pat Cadigan dealt with this issue in her latest book, "Tea From an Empty Cup," but it was handled much better -- can't say how, it's a semi-spoiler. But at least her answer made sense. And her book was much more interesting than this crap episode.
If we are using dreamstates as a current example of virtual reality, though, you can't entirely discount the possibility of causing yourself damage. I've dreamed that I was swimming only to wake up when I finally had to take a breath -- and look at sleepwalkers -- or the opposite physical effect to sleepwalking, Old Hag Syndrome. Sleepwalkers' minds don't always put them into the state of semi-paralysis that the average person's mind does and so they can walk around and do things, sometimes even holding conversations with people or otherwise convincing people that they are wide awake when in fact they are still sleeping. And with Old Hag Syndrome, your body remains in the state of semi-paralysis for a moment after you wake up, giving you the feeling that you can't move or that something is sitting on your chest (hence Old Hag -- since it used to be thought that this was caused by a witch sitting on you for some nefarious purpose). We may just be lucky that when we sleepwalk we generally aren't having the sort of dream that would cause us to take a knife to our arms or something.
But I have to say, I preferred this episode to YET ANOTHER theory as to what happened to Mulder's sister (what, we've gotten at least 5 entirely different answers to that question?). Just barely, though.
The more glaring problems re Gibson are (1) what happens when people who know nothing about a show, try to write for it; (2) what happens when s writer is past his prime, but still paid well--his last book was barely readable; and (3) the lengths Chris Carter will go just to make it through this season. And forget about how lousy the show was. What a crappy game!
I used to like William Gibson's stuff. I loved the Neuromancer-Counter Zero-Mona Lisa series. I even like Virtual Light a bit. But I guess it's true what they say: Past results are no gurantee of future performance.
What was it about that game that required an AI? The game was basically "Duck Hunt" with bigger guns and better graphics. The computer thugs on cycles drove in exactly the same pattern and started shooting at the same place every time they were shown. That's not AI, that's just a script.
And, how is shutting down a running program going to destroy it? Hello? Backups anyone? So we're supposed to believe that a company that's going to revolutionize the entertainment industry as we know it has the most incompetant IT people in history. Okay...
Same goes for the girl, what was her name... oh, yeah... Phoebe. So she's brilliant enough to create indepently thinking digital oraganism, but too stupid to, say, make a copy to a Zip disk every once in a while?
The worst part about this episode was that I missed 2 episodes of a Red Dwarf marathon on the local PBS station. Smegheads.
You'll have to excuse me now, Lara Croft seems to have disappeared from Tomb Raider and she's now running amok on my Quake server. It's a real bloodbath there now...
Suspention of disbelief my ass..
Don't even get me started on how the hell a computer generated image inflicts real wounds or where the hell Scully and Mulder werer when they were "sucked into" the game. Or how they go back out. Though Scully in armor was kinda cool, it certainly won't make up for that hour of my life that I will never get back.
Look. I'm a guy. I know plenty of guys, and plenty of girls. Every last one of them, and, I'm pretty certain, almost any human being, male or female, would rather have sex than do anything else. Are there exceptions? Sure. I'm one. Maybe you're another. But this is one stereotype that is really not at all unfair. I would just prefer to see it applied to women as well, because IME it's just as fair in that context. Of course, I'd rather see people change their ways but that seems unlikely at best.
I thought it was an ok episode, in that the non-tech dialog made me laugh. (The tech dialog made me laugh too, but not in a good way.)
The fact that they didn't explain how virtual wounds became real, or where they vanished to, didn't really bother me, because this is the X Files after all: ghosts are real in their world, remember? They pulled similar tricks with the christmas episode with Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin... So presumably Jade is really a ghost that materialized through the game as some kind of frustration-avatar of the female hacker... (Didn't Gibson do a similar thing in Count Zero, with the Loa?)
The use of technology was pretty hard to take, though. But no worse than any other use of computers in tv or film. Of course, I completely loved Hackers, because it mostly didn't even try to be real: it was all abstract dream sequences, because watching someone hack is boring.
I thought the COPS episode was one of the funniest they've ever done! I got the feeling that a lot of it was improv: ``ok, go over there and question whoever answers the door...''
Why not? I think that the idea of a few isolated accidental "reanimations" of human batteries is kinda compelling. Imagine the shock and horror of waking up in the Matrix "real world", but being entirely alone, instead of in the company of people who understand what's going on.
I'd be happy to see this as the story explained in the upcoming "prequel".
You'll have to forgive Chris Carter for the computer-based story lines because this last one was co-written by William Gibson, as was the one about "uploading consciousness to the Internet".
He's never been one to let reality get in the way of his version of cyberspace.
I really like William Gibson, but it's hard not to cringe at some of the unrealistic footage.
-Stu
It was a crappy episode on many levels.
/censorship/, what a bunch of suck.
First, there was indeed little suspense. The plot "twists" were pretty much perfectly predictable. If there were other redeeming features, this would be excusable. There were not.
Second, it suffered from what I like to call "'Hackers' disease", ie: it portrayed computers in that surrealistic, super-dramatic way that we all know is bullshit. The characters were slinging buzzwords like there was no tomorrow. Even the name of the company, First Person Shooter, was a blatant attempt to hook into a word someone might have read in some article. It wasn't quite at the level of the "hacking" scene from South Park, but it was pretty bad.
Third, and most important, was that it gave precious little airtime to *our* side of the story: that violent games are an OUTLET for violent urges, that we would be MORE violent without the release they give. There was what? one line from Mulder suggestion that idea? And Scully even cut him off and made him sound like some kind of adolescent (doncha love how that's a pejorative?) fool. To me, it seemed that the point of that episode was that violent video games destroy society, and that the greedy game developers know this and don't care. Bullshit.
I would have been able to excuse this episode if it had given at least equal air time to the idea that violent games are anything other than the toolbox of Satan. But as it stood, it seemed that the show whose motto is "The Truth Is Out There" was promoting
MoNsTeR
I GM'ed a "Matrix" roleplaying game for awhile, and the question came up: WHY does the body die when you get killed in the Matrix? My explanation was simple: until the PCs were able to figure out exactly how the COMPLETELY UNKNOWN PIECES OF TECHNOLOGY in their skulls worked, nearly anything oculd be justified. After all, an AI with nearly 200 years worth of R&D could probably devise a neural interface that killed you if you died in the simulation, and would have absolutely no compunction about doing so (letting the "real you" live when your Matrix persona had died made no sense, and you could always be recycled for food for the rest of your fellow batter-- humans).
For anything NOT involving a neural interface where you are more or less electrically wired into a computer, it's unrealistic. But when you suggest that electrodes are buried in your scalp, braindamage and death become all too possible.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
As the other guy said, Matrea -- the name of the VR character, not the hackeress -- bugged me almost as much as anything about this episode.
At the risk of starting another ``it sucks to be a woman in the computer industry" thread (heck, if it makes you feel better, follow up with your own rant), let's admit that working as the lone female on a coding project can suck. Not only are you putting in 70-hour days to prove you can hack code as well or better than some unwashed mook with no social skills, you have to listen to his crude jokes that aren't even funny. So what do you do relieve stress?
Tell even raunchier jokes? Maybe. Pull some practical jokes of your own on the bathless mook? Maybe. Do a body-scan of some stripper, dress her up like a dominatrix in PVC, & create your own fantasy game (might not be a FPS) around her?
I don't think so.
If Gibson did write this episode (not to argue the point), it shows that he has no idea of how women actually think. One of the charms to the X-Files is the NON-SEXUAL relationship between Mulder & Scully: even though she's stated that she thinks he's something of a loon with his obsession over the occult & paranormal, he treats her like a colleague & not like a little girl -- which I'm sure she fears or knows other FBI agents would do.
Likewise, if a woman was the second technical lead on a project as big as this one, she'd have gotten her act together a long time ago. And if she had a software project on the side to her her blow off steam, it would be a lot more interesting than the one the show's creators dreamed up.
Then again, I seem to remember somewhere that Mataeya (sp?) was a Hindi goddess of fertility or life. There was a hint at the end that the guy tech at FPS had stolen this program from her, & had perverted this into his own means of destruction -- but I may be reading too much into a confused & technically laughable script.
Sigh.
It's clearly the last season for the X-Files.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
They had the lone gunmen blabbering on about stock options and IPOs. Learn how to poke a little fun at yourselves, guys!
________________________________
I never intended to insinuate that Scully's conceptions were female-like, or that Moulders were male-like. The story might have meant to portray that, but I don't beleive it. If I did, I might never meet my soul-mate: a female Quake III player who can kick my ass to q3tourney1 and back. ;)
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
This was simply the worst episode of the X Files ever. This demonstrates that they really should have ended it a season earlier. Ick.
Personally, I had been hoping that they would do a spinoff series based on the Lone Gunmen long before the rumors of it actually happening surfaced, but if this episode is any indication, I really hope those rumors are false. The characters are cool, but they desperately need some decent writing.
Hey! We can save the universe by channeling (x) through the Deflector Array!!
Talk about cop-outs...
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I also had problem with the whole idea of anyone involved being upset at the thought of delaying the game release so it wouldn't queer the IPO. How do they think their stock would do after the first few deaths in the shopping malls?
;-)
Venal greed does a lot of harm, but even the most ruthless capitalist knows that killing your customers reduces repeat business (unless you kill them slowly, like with tobacco)...
I also laughed out loud when they said shutting down the game would wipe out the program. I'll bet at least one team member took a floppy home...
I've never been afraid of these "computers take over" plots. The one thing The Matrix almost got right was the "real" threat of our technology -- that the technological fantasy will one day become so much more appealing and compelling than "real life" that we would come to prefer it. The trouble is, I think this has already happened. The world of television, advertising, music viedos, and games is already preferred by many to the world of love, pain, boredom, and loss that real life is. Real life is long, dull, and ends in death. Fantasy life is short, flashy, and has reruns. Real life has love, which is half joy, and half pain; and having love means knowing loss. Fantasy life is pleasure without commitment, shallow gratification, and you can always play it back.
Try reading a little book called "The Continent of Lies" by (James?) Morrow. I think it gets to it...
http://www.salon
Note -- I didn't see the X-Files episode in question (no tv), so this may well be the worst episode ever, but this is still food for thought.
_________________
rooooar
My problem with this episode falls the same lines as yours. The big problem I had with this is that they weren't wearing full simstim suits, these were holograms, not of the calibre of a force hologram from Star Trek. That sorta bugged me. The references to Rise of the Triad was kinda funny with the baddies looking like the triad officers. The baddies and the level layout reminded me of RoTT terribly. *shudder*
Lowmag.net
The entire episode reminded me of playing online Quake a few years ago. Apparently you can be shot and not killed, would it be possible to find a health pack and re-generate your health. Or even, when Mulder ran out of ammo, could he locate an ammo pack and re-arm?
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
I barely watched; I listened and looked over at the TV when it sounded like something good was going on. But I didn't watch more than 15 seconds at a time.
Programers of FPS games must have HATED this episode. There were just SO MANY things totally out of whack to anyone who programs games for a living. The company only had ONE copy of ONE build of the game? Every game company I've ever known keeps hundreds of builds and code caches on several computers. And what was up with the "we've never explored this area before"- as if rooms can simply create themselves in a BSP structure? (not that this was a BSP, but...) I mean the wireframe showed that the "level" was far less geometrically detailed than even most Q3 levels are (with the exception of the models). Are they telling me that they worked this long on building only TWO maps (warehouse/ghost town)? Full of repetitious geometry? Worse, the whole idea that the "code is so complicated we can't figure out what's going on" conciet just doesn't make any sense. Anything like "afterglow" would have to take up lots and lots of code in itself, and it would be obvious that it was there. The actual code that runs quake-like isn't THAT hard to understand, especially the enemy AI. The really complex stuff is in the renderer- game logic is something simple enough that almost anyone can at least get a good grasp of what's what. I admit at the begginging I was VERY confused as to what the game was- i think someone said that they were "going to be selling this in malls"- I spent lots of time figuring out how they could get a gynasium laced with 3d hologram projectors into a tiny cardboard box... The episode sucked. SUCKED.
I have a hard time thinking that the equation simply is that I've built up tons of stress, and I release it thru virtual violence. It ain't like that all. I build up tons of stress, but stress isn't like a tea kettle (this is pretty much psychological fact, though almost no one seems to want to believe it)- it doesn't have to be "released" to go away. It can just go away. When I play a FPS game, I can just sort of zone out into another world- it's exciting and fun- i FORGET my stress because I'm doing something better. It may be violent, but I don't get off on the violence. One could almost saw that it's _relaxing_ to play a FPS with pounding music- it's comfortable and reasurring. If it really WAS to take out virtual violence, study after study shows that acting out violence only make you more likely to be violent- it doesn't release anything. Physical Tension DOES work that way (which is why punching a pillow can help)- mental tension DOESN'T. So I do think this whole "we're too civilized and stressed out- we need some outlet for our primal KILL instinct" is crap.
Man- forget even that criticism- this show wasn't anywhere near sensible enough for it. The show never bothered to explain how: people can walk thru walls (when Mulder dissapeared in the game room)- or how a hologram could cut someone's head off with a broadsword. Worst of all, the action sequences were just awful- boring and repetative. Who the hell would ever play a FPS game where you just stand in one place and shoot a tank that blows up when hit with a machine gun? You're right though- the "body cannot live without the mind" stuff in the Matrix is CRAP. Even a full body simulation of death would NOT cause you to die. Worst of all, the Matrix seems to pretend that you can't jsut unplug someone from the simualtion, as if their "mind" were out there in the computer. Whatever. whatever. whatever.
so... you're agreeing with me or what? TELL MEEEEEE. I'M GOING TO KILLLL YOU!!!!!
Yeah, and what kind of game only has 2 levels? Talk about lazy.... From the look of the tech they were playing with (i.e., extremely simple wireframe geometry) I could have written hundreds of levels in the years it took them.
The biggest gripe I had with the Matrix is that Neo and Morpheus fought for the first time BEFORE Neo knew that he could really die. And also he starts moving pretty fast and is about to flatten Morpheus' face but pauses right before punching him. Also morpheus came flying down about 20 feet doing a knee drop on Neo who barely moved in time to avoid definately being killed... all this BEFORE Neo knew! If it was real Morpheus would explain that to him FIRST just incase Neo happened to kick his butt right off. Also how come Morpheus said they don't know exactly what year it is? Let's think about this, Zion was a city underground where people who were free of the Matrix lived right? It had to have been built by people who were around during the resistance against the machines, there's no way a few people who somehow slipped out of the matrix could have built that city. Ok, so nobody down there had a watch or bothered to keep time? A calendar? There must be plenty of people down there, they have enough technology to repair the Nebuchadnezzar, and other scout ships like that, they must have energy or some sort of fuel to run the ships. Why do the Agents need the code to get into Zion? If they have some electronic way of entering a code to get into the city or it's mainframe or whatever, then why don't they just dig up the wires and follow it back to the city and just drill their way into Zion? I particularly like the idea someone posted about Neo being an Agent and not aware of it, and that the "real world" was really another layer added onto the matrix. That explains how Neo could really dodge bullets and move as fast as an Agent, and also explains WHY they can "bend the rules" in a VR simulation. Obviously the whole IDEA of the Matrix was implanted inside the actual matrix to keep really enlighted people from figuring out what's really going on. So those who figured it out for some reason could escape from the matrix into the "real world" where they would find a more rigid and strict physics program that would force them to conform to "reality". (Which is what we live in ;) It would also explain my arguments against the fact that the machines were not able to destroy Zion, since the REAL matrix lets people think they're outside the matrix so they'll stop there and never discover the real one. So they think they're free, and that's as far as they go. Very good, very good. :) But Morpheus STILL should've warned Neo about death before he sparred with him. ;)
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
They hit the kill switch. That deletes all the backups, DUH!
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
There were just too many holes in the plot and nothing was explained at all.
At least on ST:TNG they try to make up words describing something that sounds like it might make sense (the Exobit episode I caught last night was a great example (has to do with AI and "Life")
I liked the promos for the FPS X-File (esp the "Rear View") but the episode sucked mightily. Standing in one place and shooting (as ALL the actors did when in the game) is the best way to die in any FPS. I did like seeing the smug "Thresh" character getting his head chopped off, that certainly cut him down a few inches (da-dum dum). But both the action and plot were weak and contrived, the dialog was o.k., I give it a 5/10.
--
+&x
Well, aside from the never ending barage of mis-used buzzwords, I have again been mystified by my lack of modern hi-tech knowledge. The computer in last night's X-files was one such computer. I have a short list of proofs to show how myself, and all the other nay-sayers are simply not familiar with the magical 'tv' computer.
,machine to another, and the spontaneous execution of that code. With this special technology, the MtvC can 'invade' other systems and carry out all types of mischief. Such was the case with last nights evil woman in the game.
proof a)
The users of the computer were all at the whim of the MtvC (Magical TV Computer), who's advanced 'holographic' technology simply altered time and space to avoid all of those pesky laws of physics. This is further demonstrated by the computer's ability to swallow up poor old Fox, as he tried in vain to escape it's evil game.
proof 2)
The MtvC uses a top-secret file system that allows for the unobsereved and unstoppable movement of code from one
proof 3)
The MtvC massive filesystem prevents it being backed up or re-started. Due to the awesome ammount of data involved, the MtvC cannot be backed up by current technology. The simple fact that when the idea to 'kill' the program came up, the project designer violently opposed, shows that there was no way, once 'killed' that the game could be re-created or destroyed. We are not talking about a simple machine processing data, no, we are dealing with an electronic 'magical' engine, that creates entire worlds in mere slivers of time. You just can't re-code something as complex as an entire universe.
proof 4)
The MtvC is immune to electrical dependencies that we all (with our primitive computers) must deal with on a daily basic. The MtvC could not be taken offline by disconnecting it from power, nor could it be removed from the offending network. This proof alone, should show all of those nay-sayers that the situation in last night's X-Files, was not only realistic, but if anything, a bold move on the part of Chris Carter and firends to educate the masses on the danger these new devices hold in store for the human race.
Don't be found un-aware when the Magical tv Computers begin their reign of terror. Contact your local govenments and urge them to force Chris Carter and friends into dis-closing the location of the MtvC from last night's episode. Only with perseverence and diligence, can we mere humans prevent the upcoming apocalypse of the Magical tv Computer.
Thank you for your time
Piers Anthony had a VR world where there was a character who would die if she couldn't beat the game. You see, she was diabetic and for some reason the game was rigged up (don't remember if it was designed that way or if it was sabotaged) that she could not actually be released from the VR equipment to take her medicine without accomplishing something in the real world.
:)
The closest I know of in the real world to compare is when you are mudding, most of the time you have to escape from the dangerous place you are to get back to town and save so you don't lose all your stuff. This causes it to be a game where if you have a lot of yourself tied up in the game you will not want to log out even if it means missing classes and failing out of school (I've seen this happen).
See the "Bishop of Battle" sequence in Nightmares was the best because there was never any question that the Bishop had transformed from video game villain into supernatural real world villain. Essentially, a variation on the old "you sharpen the pencils, then the pencils sharpen you, " plots out of the old E.C. Horror comics. That's why it was cool, especially, because they didn't have video games back in the days of E.C. Horror comics. It was basically a genius machina story, like Christine, except about a video game...
Oh...um.. and this is on topic because that's how they should've done the X-Files episode, too... uh-huh... Yeah, that's the ticket..
For more information about Nightmare's consult your local Library, or click the link.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Your studies, if there are any, are garbage anyway because you can't legally do controlled experiments about violence with human beings and not other studies are worth a tinker's damn.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
It doesn't seem so, his computer episodes on The X-Files (and, of course, Harsh Realm) just annoyed me. On the other hand, the computer themes on Millenium were normally handled well (computers were a huge part of the symbolism on Millenium).
I'll be honest, I decided to just drop this episode out of the whole X-Files continuum, because it just annoyed me so much. Oh, and it does not bode well for The Lone Gunmen spin-off. (Note to Chris Carter, hire a computer consultant, preferably one who is actually into computers.)
I also dislike the fact that Scully (our hard-headed rationalist) was the one who rattled off the whole "video games lead to real world violence" thesis and Mulder (our new-ager who'll believe any credible thesis, except mainstream religion, that you care to name) was the one to refute it. Of course, Scully is usually wrong about everything (on the X-Files, the irrational thing is usually the truth), so maybe that's a plus.
Hmm, Fox needs to sit Dana down in front of a Playstation with Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, come back in a few hours and say, "Scully, we had a report of a giant buglike thing in Queens, NY" and Scully could reply, "Uh-huh," totally mesmerized. For those who find my game choice to be sexist, I chose it because it's the opposite of an FPS... and not just because its the one all the women I know like to play. I'm not sure why women like Tetris style games, anyway, is it because it is considered "ok" for them to like them or something else? It just seems to be a genuine phenomenon, so I'm curious as to the cause. Besides, the whole portrayal of FPSs on the show was sexist, against men and women. (I mean, considering that some women do enjoy playing Quake and Half-Life what does it say about them? If I were a female Quaker, I'd be pretty mad after watching that!)
Incidentally, I spent most of that Sunday playing Heroes III my first native Linux game (hooray!). It kind of annoyed me that the only way to start off with a Necropolis and an undead creature as your main guy is to get lucky in one of the random start scenarios. I mean we have the scenario where you fight Necrolord, but where's the scenario where you are Necrolord fighting off pesky humans? (I mean, I got a Necroplois as a starting city in a random game, but it isn't quite as cool as a balanced scenario where you are assigned to play an undead lord that isn't designed at random.. it's still fun though.) Oh well, off topic now....
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
The Matrix did it, X-Files did it last night, The Thirteenth Floor (avoid this movie), did it too. The Matrix explained it as "the body cannot live without the mind" as I recall.
"Video games are real" was a tired old plot back in the mid 1980s. You can find editorials in writing magazines about this being a science fiction plot to avoid at all costs. Not too surprising that poppy mass media TV shows and movies are falling back on corny old plots, now is it?
It obviously was meant to promote discussion on violence in video games: "Healthy outlet for stress or promoting violence in society?
Naw. As I see it, it was meant to bash the networks' competition for eyeball time - by spreading the meme that video games need to be suppressed. (It promotes that discussion only as a tool.) If they're lucky, they get government anti-videogame action going. If not, at least it gets a lot of parents to restrict their kids' video-gaming and switches their eyeball time to TV.
It also gives them a scapegoat when the censors come after them for the violence on their shows. "You think WE're violent? Look at Slasher Deathmath VII!". (Meanwhile they get to do an ultra-violent episode themselves and call it socially responsible.)
They've done lots of stuff like this in the past: Alleged entertainment that makes villans or monsters of home computer users, the web, role-playing games, and even cable channel broadcasters. (I recall one cop show, for instance, where the murderer was a cable-channel operator, as part of a scheme to get access to a cable system.)
You'll also see a lot of it in network news: Computer programmers are evil "hackers" (always misused to discredit the experts), tearing down the business infrastructure and compromising national security. Computer games turn children into violent criminals and mass murderers. The web is full of skinheads, revolutionaries, cults, and child molesters. And so on.
It's interesting to see that they're STILL up to their old tricks.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yes, there was a time when a computer game could cut off your head and some crazed or misguided developer loved his machines just like you or I love our dogs and cats.
That era is over and has been, for the public anyway, since PCs have gotten cheap enough to be in your house and your last 4 boxes are in some landfill awaiting the fifth. I think scifi reached the saturation point with Tron. "Yes its nice and all but this is getting too fake even for movie standards," echoed through more minds than ever.
Now we have the same producers and writers fondly regurgitating 'mad scientist' stories except atom rays have been replaced with VR hoping it'll be exciting as Superman pounding Lex Luther. It isn't, and probably will never go away, on television that is. This is a medium where the sitcom formula was perfected 30 years ago (set up line then punch line over and over) and every year theres 20 new sitcoms begging for your attention.
Yeah X-Files isn't exactly a sitcom but it is network TV, which occasionally shows us its graying hair.
Yeah, I re-watched that part, and the guy plugs the power into the device id (master/slave) controller pins.
-Tim
The FPS Episode demonstrated that the X-Files simply is losing sight of its true audience. Those of us that have been loyal to the X-files since its inception know that the show is simply trying to grab ratings now. It has obviously been corrupted. But, considering it is a FOX show, we should all be grateful that it hasn't been corrupted too much be the greedy 'Who wants to marry a multi-millionaire' 'when cars attack (I hope im not the only one guilty of watching that)' bastards in the front offices at Fox. I, for one, was just happy to watch Scully whoop the hot, cowboy chick's ass with a wicked machine gun. Plus, there was the decapitation, the broadsword, and the chance to see the Lone Gunmen again.
Granted, the X-Files is nowhere near what it used to be ( see the cheesy COPS episode ), but we should all be grateful that it hasn't been screwed up THAT badly. Plus, Scully is a definite hotty ;P
Does anyone know if there is any truth to the rumor of a Lone Gunmen series? I am really curious...
=====Remember, a truly wise man never plays leap frog with a unicorn.
Remember, a truly wise man never plays leapfrom with a unicorn
I also like the bit about how killing the program would destroy the game, or how they couldn't shell out to kill -9 the game process... I guess Chris hasn't discovered the joys of source code... :)
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
Yes, I agree that it lacked realism.
/. readers chuckle (like jiggling a PC drive's power connector in order to reroute something to work a kill switch into the system? Huh??) but the whole concept just totally missed it with me.
It's one thing to take poetic liberties with reality in order to have a good plot... but this x-files episode was just goofy, as if nobody really did much research into video gaming (namely FPS games).
Now there were specific instances that I'm sure made all the
For one, the actual videogame that the show featured was just lame and the technology behind it didn't even make sense, it was just thrown out there for viewers to accept. Was it all holographic, or were they plugged into a Matrix-style world where all the images were projected into their minds while they physically walked around? If the game was about to ship everywhere, do customers have to buy a big concrete room with holographic projectors in order to run it? And by the way, did Mulder really say "Can you texture-wrap it" in reference to the wireframe model?
Now about the game itself (and this is just a rant) but it seems like the last video game the writers ever played was one of those police-shooter type games in the arcade, because that's what the FPS game looked like. Boring. They definitely missed the boat as far as figuring out what the hardcore game players are actually doing. The fact that what's-her-name created the "Goddess" character for herself may have had some influence from the RPG/MUD sector... or just a cheesy coincidence.
However, I think Mulder did get it right as far as saying that violent games are an outlet for the primal anger that is being more and more constrained in a civilized society. In other words, games such as the X-files FPS(or real-life games) don't cause real-life violence, but serve to relieve the pressure that would otherwise cause it, which is the view already expressed countless times by members of the gaming community.
Man, this episode could've been for US, it's a shame it had to turn out like it did. At least Scully gave in at the end and kicked some ass.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Alright you perverted kids.. The Chick is Krista Allen and She has starred in many lame ass Soaps as well as a softcore series called Emanuelle in Space.. in which she proved that she can act as good as a porn star.. although she did do good in Liar Liar in which she was the Busty Woman on the elevator that Jim Carrey was Harrassing just enough to make her slap him.. but anyway
Movie News - "Entertainment news, bitch!"
Is it just me or are half the things that the lone gunmen and the X-files actually protray just crap? I mean the concept of being able to do fantastic things I for one can understand. However massive virtual reality?, actual working AI, being able to "upload" your conciousness on the internet, cracking government and industrial databases with impunity? These ideas are cracked at best and dangerous at worst.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I hit the ground in a dream once. You don't die. You just wake up and it feels like someone hit you in the gut really really hard.
What I was thinking was, "Damn, I hate it when I'm sitting there trying to gun down the psychotic AI in the VR world and the fucking OS is hourglassing on me. That's the problem with those primative single queue non-preemptive (or single queue preemptive like OS/2) OSes. If they'd used UNIX they could have just kill -9'ed the AI entity's process but they probably couldn't find the right 3D drivers for their VR World. Damn proprietary Virtual 3D worlds..."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Mulder wants a _PRINT OUT_ (Giggle!)"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Ever read Snow Crash?
Esperandi
Why does everyone keep saying there were holograms? The way I took it was that their suits did all the work, but they were in a mockup of the scene in real life. Why would the screenshots of the game include the buildings if not?
Maybe I missed a line or something in the show, I woul just thought the mock up of the scene was so they didn't have to stand in those dorky VR rings like we have now, this way when they ran or jumped they really ran and really jumped, making it more realistic on the physical side...
Esperandi
If they made a game like this, I might even freaking work out... that'd be scary. We must stop these games. Screw the violence in society angle, think of the EXCERCISE this will introduce into our culture! Buff geeks! I think that's sorta like hell freezing over.
I contest that vote, I'd have to say the worst X-Files episode ever was that episode with the wolf-woman, the crazy one that valued the lives of wolves more than humans... it was just terrible in every aspect I could imagine.
At least this one had some really nice ass shots.
Esperandi
We are closer than you think, the only thing we don't have yet that was on the show was the graphics quality. We already have photorealistic renderers and such, so as soon as they get optimized enough or processors are able to trace the light rays fast enough - boom - we're there. We already have chestplates that make you feel like you got drop-kicked, we have that inner-ear thing that makes you feel like you're moving, all the rest of it...
Esperandi
I don't know who Straffe is, I'm assuming you mean STRAFE, or side-step... anyhow, when I saw them run up to the bunker I too said out loud (I was at a friends place, I wasn't talking to myself... that time) "Its like paintball!" Well, sorta like paintball, strafing is not a good idea... its a great idea in traditional FPS games, but in a really real environment, strafing often leads to falling on your ass and getting nailed ;)
And anyone who thinks paintball is for crazy Vietnam vets or militiamen is missing out on an absolute BLAST of a time!
Esperandi
Wipers suck.
Ahhh, but the point is, when you play FPS games, you're not acting violently... you're pressing keys, moving a mouse. FPS games only scare people who have never dealt with violence in the real world, have never held a .44 and blasted away at something. They assume its just like the game and people learn it from the games. Nope.
Most people that get shot in the face die from their neck breaking, not the obliteration of their brain. That's a little fact most people don't know and don't think enough about the real side of gunfire to realize... If you know anything about guns, you usually laugh at violent movies and games because the guns just aren't used correctly. When you "cock" a shotgun, it ejects a shell, yet on many movies you see people cock the shotgun multiple times before firing.
I almost wet my pants watching an old episode of the X-Files when Scully goes to Mulders apartment where someone shot at her (the one where Mulder has his aprtments water spiked with LSD) and pulls out of the wall not a slug, but a CASING! A *CASING*... the thing that gets ejected onto the ground or stays in the gun (if its a revolver). It would not be stuck in a wall.
Just remember, there are no mazes with cheese at the end in nature, running rats through them proves nothing.
Comparing people who type with people who fire real firearms is not valid either.
Esperandi
I guess when "BladeRunner" originally came out, Gibson was immediately intrigued, but refused to see it. When he finally broke down and went, it drove him nuts to watch the film because it was EXACTLY the thing that he wished he'd done-- like as though Dick/Scott had mined the ideas and images directly from his brain.
Karl Jung would have said that this was a synchronicity and claimed that the situation was just more evidence to support the existence of a mass subconscious. Guess that just goes to show what an asshole Jung was.
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
I haven't seen this posted yet, so sorry if it's redundant.
Daily Radar has an interview with Tom Maddox, who co-wrote the FPS episode with William Gibson.
It's a good interview. Interesting to read his perspective on what he wrote.------
for a start look at that apalling film "hackers" from the mid-ninties. And that ripped off the images from legions of dodgy 80s and 90s films and TV shows.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
As for the X-Files last night; I didn't watch it and haven't watched the show much this season. Those guys need to move back to Vancouver, LA is killing that show. I watched Ghost In The Shell instead; now that's a cyberpunk flick!
-=RR=-
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
The episode was funny and in general, entertaining. I personally like the way most of the season has gone, not taking itself seriously, and having fun with some of the characters. The serious plots are obviously being saved for movies, etc. and I guess we can just hope they won't try and spinoff the show. I don't want to finish watching Malcolm in the Middle and see "The Smoking Man Hour" someday in the future.
Granted, everything in the episode that had to do with anything technical was utter garbage. (But it was kinda nifty to find out that Mulder was a gamer.) I mean, there are obvious flaws...operating on the hard drive to perform a reset...and the hard drive not having a data cable connected to it...and the one line "cheat code" to completely wipe all his work from all his systems. You, know, industry standard stuff like that? I'm sure if you hit "Shift+Alt+AncestorCode" Win 95/98 will just delete themselves. The model of the chick...that was horrid rendering...I was also kinda disspointed in the actual woman...nice body...needed a better face, though. And the chick coder working on her own seperate game...by herself, on one machine. (How exactly was it a "house of testosterone...with one guy, and one girl working there? Did the testosterone just beat the shit out of the estrogen?) However, there were moments where I was just laughing my ass off.
I personally nearly died laughing every time the Lone Gunmen would go over to monitor someone and they would yell out "Bloodthirst is Unquenchable!" or they'd just start going off about a player, "It's because he knows no fear." The fat kid not being able to keep up, and getting wasted was hilarious. I also really liked the Thresh figure getting mauled. (He looked totally gay with the arms and guns crossed, though.) The idea of getting shot in a first person shooter and having 12 volts run through your body not letting you get back up seemed a bit extreme...I don't think I'd pay for that experience, personally.
I don't know if it was supposed to spark discussion about videogame violence and related topics...it really waffled on that issue. For me, it fell far, far by the wayside.
However, I personally expected a lot more from the X-File guys in the way of research, though. Usually, they do lots of research into the technical aspects of the show, so that when Mulder talks, he doesn't sound like a moron. However, this episode was sadly not that way. Nobody did any more than a lick of research. You figure they'd talk to some of the guys that were doing the rendering to ask about computer stuff so they didn't get reamed by the internet people...who I figure probably make up 75-80% of their viewership now. I was thoroughly let down, but I'd be lying if I told you that that was a waste of an hour. I was definitely entertained, about as much as I was during the "COPS" epsiode last week.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
This episode made me totally sick! not that the x-files *hasn't* devolved into complete drivel anyway....but i tuned in cause the ads with scully decked out in VR armor were just too much for me to pass up....... needless to say the episode was a complete disappointment. and not just cause all *3* of the woman in this episode (not counting the killer-chick's holographic duplicates :P) were like stereotypes of a stereotype! both genders were maligned equally, imo. at least for women, there were 3 *different* stereotypes......scully, moralizing for the sake of the children, the freak-of-nature hackergrrl, and the homicidal fembot. *all* the men were portrayed as sex-crazed automotons -- especially mulder, leading with his Wang, as usual........those cops were sickening!! ok....except maybe for those 3 nerdy guys (what are they called again?).....mulder's tech buddies......they always amuse me. anyway.....i should know not to expect anything more than the most trite generalizations from this show......women, men, hackers, gamers, whatever........ i guess this makes me an ex-x-files fan :P, sonicblnd
----------
Computer programmers do it byte by byte.
Greame Devine of id software posted his opinions on last nights X-Files episode. check it out at blue's finger
but just in case, here is the text:
flip - out
I think we all know it was just an excuse to dress Molder and Scully up in those uniforms.
I had thought that this episode was going to be a Pilot / spin-off episode for the ?lone gunmen. I hope it wasn't. I think the shows writers and producers got together, got high, and rented a marathon of early 1990's tech-horror/ tech-is-bad movies- ghost in the machine, lawnmower man, etc. Last nights x-files would have been much better if Eschelon would have planted something in the game. Let maury, and sally jesse raphial cover the lame video-violence crap. X-files should just creep us out in a cool way.
The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue -Verloc
I totally agree. This has to have been one of the worst X-Files EVER to have aired. Glad it's over.
I like William Gibson. I love his books and I really like his views on technology. I also love FPS style games. I help run a good sized LAN party and have tons of fun playing Quake III and UT. That being said, I also like X-Files. So last night promised to be a spooge-fest for me.
I have never thought that our current technology, nor the budgets used for first-time movies or TV shows could ever meet Gibson's desire. Sometimes I feel that Gibson's flash in Johnny Mnemonic and his X-Files writing escepades have been a horrible product of a lack of translation between what's in Gibson's head and what people hear coming out of his mouth. So when I watched last night, I really expected cheese out the yin-yang. I was not disappointed. So I try to look past that and try to see what the real meat of the episode was.
I think Moulder and Scully are two different people with very different attitudes about what is a game, and what is real. To Scully, picking up a gun and shooting people is a real thing. It can never be a game. It's too attached to reprecusions. Moulder, on the other hand, can detatch from those consequences for a game and enjoy the sheer simple act of blowing up stuff. I don't normally devide the world into two groups, but most people (I think) fall into one or the other. Once you understand what's going on by experiencing both, you start to realize neither party is WRONG, but experiencing the same thing generates diffrent emotions and feelings about what is being done. That's what I saw last night. Maybe it was wrong, who cares.
Until Gibson posts or something and tells us all what was going on, I really think some of it was good old living vicariously through your technology. Nothing more, nothing less.
Enough rambling from me.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
check out www.defcon.org, it's a computer underground conference held yearly in Las Vegas.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
For probably the past 2-3 seasons, getting "new" stuff, particularly in non-myth episodes, has been pretty much moot for me. I mean, even in the myth episodes, I for one can pretty much ALWAYS predict what is about to happen, even as far as predicting the second part of a two-part episode. For me, the entire POINT of the X-Files is the cool technology, the occasional funny lines, and all of that. Who cares if it isn't 100% technically perfect all the time? BFD. Who cares if they gloss over some things? It's just a one-hour TV show. You have to give them credit with coming up with as much material as they have; once you try to do the exact same thing for seven years, you kinda start running out. I don't think I'll be particularly sad when X-Files ends after this season, but I won't be jumping for joy in the streets. It has been a good show, even in its predictable moments. And I really liked that episode; lots of kewl stuff blowing up ;)
Just my $0.42 or so.
---
Tim Wilde
Gimme 42 daemons!
Where did this "outlet for stress" concept come from anyway? What psychology expert decided that stress is something that accumulates and must be disposed of?
I can see the board meeting now.
"Hmm, well we've only got a few grand left. Should we get some type of back-up or go with the retinal scanners?"
[group chorus] "RETINAL SCANNERS!"
--
+&x
"I was a nice try the first time... when it was called The Matrix. "
Oh, so you never saw Tron?
What do you expect?
Seriously though, I found out about this early last week, as Xybernaut announced in a press release that X-Files would be showing off their equipment. Unfortunately, they were really nothing more than props (the head-mounted displays), and really didn't add anything to the show.
If XYBR really wanted to show off their stuff, they should make a Snow Crash movie.
Getting back to the violence bit, that's a hard question to answer. Women are not *as interested* in FPS, or shooters of any kind (well, my wife likes Area 51..). Then again, there are definate differences between the female and male minds. So it's hard to say that it's a testosterone thing, or men need to get out their agression lest they take it out in another way. Unfortunately, I think it would have to take a lot of research to find the links. And research means there'll be data, and data will be skewed by whoever reads it.
Is there more violence in the US? Probably. Is violence increased as a percentage of the population? I don't know. Is said violence a result of watching too much South Park/3 Stooges/Baywatch? Could be.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
My gf asked if thats what I do at work all day, in a serious tone...
"Yes, dear... very similar."
It's easier then explaining.
I know there's a lot of comments already, and I don't want to be redundant... I do, however, want to throw in my thoughts.
Yes, the episode had difficulties, most of which everyone else has covered. But I'd like to answer some of them; to the question of why didn't they use actual game graphics? Well, think about it. It's probably a lot cheaper and faster to hire an actor and say "move like this, say these lines" than to actually go through and render the exact sequences the script and director call for.
Someone else brought up the seeming lack of an AI in the game. I have to agree that this was the case for Level II. The game's level 1, however, reminded me a lot of the opening level from Duke Nukem 3D, and I thought that was good. It also seemed like it had a lot more potential for AI involvement than the second level, which was, essentially, a duck hunt or Carnival style shooter and that's it.
Someone else asked how they planned to ship the game. At one point one of the lone gunmen said it was being sent to "50 malls next week." that gave me the impression that it was going to be set up like the lazer tag places and virtual reality arcades that are in existence now; it wouldn't be sent to homes but would be an amusement desitination.
Ignoring all the implausibilities, I thought the episode was just fun, darn it. We all know mulder's a geek, and to see him go in to the game in his groovy techno armor was cool. It reminded me of how I felt playing Doom II over a network for the first time around '94. And I think that's what the episode meant to do, besides bringing up the issues of game violence, sexism, etc, I think it just wanted to create the same feelings that arise among players of First person shooters, perhaps providing a bit of a glimpse into a culture that non players might not know exists.
And while I'm asking for it, I thought that the COPS style episode last week was really cool too. And before I get skewered let me remind you of Pohl's law... Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.
-Wombat
Because. Syntax Error in line 10. Core dumped. Please bugger off.
The best reason to have an IPO is so that you can afford a $300 backup solution. Or a CVS repository. Or a hard drive to go along with your ramdisk, so that if the power accidentally goes out, you don't lose all of your work.
Gosh, you'd think William Gibson wrote "Neuromancer" on a typewriter or something.
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
The opening scene within the game seemed right. You could almost feel the tension and adrenaline gripping the players as they get ready to go. They bounce back and forth.
Chomp at the bit.
Buzzer. Gate. Violence unleashed...
And all the players run to the same bunker. "Newbie cluster!" my wife yells. She doesn't play FPS games. But she does play paintball. In either case, it makes everyone one big massive target. I suppose it also makes it easier to get the camera angles right. Better make the scene quick.
The next thing we prove is that Hollywood can not produce a bad guy who can aim. Even if they program them. Our 3 players in the opening scene run forth into a gauntlet of machine-gun toating bad guys who have the advantage of cover, angle, and height. Our heros' guns blaze and take out Bad Guys left and right. Granted, one of the players gets hit. He probably shot himself.
Savor this moment. Other than the shapely Laura-in-leather killer AI, this is the end of the action within the FPS environment.
The rest of the "action" scenes involve our heros standing still and wiggling around a bit as they squeeze a trigger. "Wow! Look at her go!" admires an onlooker as Scully mows down the bad guys. Yea. She's skillfull with that trigger squeeze.
I find myself yelling "Straffe, damn you! Straffe!"
Once again, I suspect its so much easier to shoot a scene involving a solitary figure waving a gun around. Interject a bit of reality, and the majority tail end of the scene is our hero's gibs.
I suppose its silly of me to complain. I should be happy with what they seem to think is action. Next thing you know, I'll be demanding something that can be identified as a story-line and plot.
None of it was found in this XFiles episode.
Post-apocalyptic 'industrial' scenery - check.
Misused techy buzz words - check.
Overuse of leather and plastic costumes - check.
Life and death struggle inside a computer - check.
Goofy sunglasses - check.
Yep, sounds like a typical portrayal of a 'cyber' world to me. I was a nice try the first time... when it was called The Matrix.
I did, however, enjoy the part where the game reverted back to a DOS prompt - no wonder things went wrong.
-SG
NerdPerfect.com : breakfast of champions.