Looks like Ebert is really set in his curmudgeonly "new forms of media are trash and always will be" pattern. Guess what -- 2D cinema already violates many of the visual absolutes that our ancestors took for granted. This article complains that 3D separates focus and convergence, but 2D cinema already separated those from visual perspective, something that never happens in nature. We also evolved to have control over the plane that we are focusing on, which 2D cinema takes away. Even aside from depth cues, our ancestors only needed to perceive motion when they themselves were moving, there was no idea of sitting still and watching from a moving camera. I guess this "motion picture" thing will never catch on. It will always make some people motion sick from camera movement or give them headaches from the brightness and flickering.
What is with the timing of this article anyway? The most successful film of all time, Avatar, is a flagship of 3D cinema. Maybe his next article should be "why the cell phone can't work, ever" because calls sometimes drop. Or maybe "why flat TVs will never catch on" because they don't have as deep blacks as CRT.
Um, that's still 10 miles per donut, no matter how many resources it took to create the donut. If you're counting the cost of creating the donut in the bike's MPD count, then you need to count the cost of creating the gasoline in a car's MPG. Do you think gasoline extracts, refines, and transports itself?
Totally missing the point...
on
BioShock Backlash
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The biggest complaint I have seen about Bioshock is that you never need to make choices in how the player character develops. By the end of the game you will be a gun-wielding, plasmid-blasting tank who is an expert hacker. This causes several key gameplay problems:
There is little reason to play again because you will follow the same path in the same way. In System Shock 2, when you play again you still follow the same path, but you have to deal with obstacles differently depending on your character's abilities.
Because you have so many different weapons and powers, it creates a paradox of choice. Since you have so many ways to kill any particular enemy, and there is little feedback to help find the most efficient way, it becomes less satisfying because I feel like I could have done it better.
The choice of harvesting or freeing the little sisters has very little weight, because you end up with the same abilities either way. This would have been an obvious place to add some kind of character variation.
Bioshock was also "dumbed down" in many other ways, such as having an infinite inventory capacity for weapons (and nothing but weapons). This adds to the paradox of choice, thus making combat less fun, while also eliminating other kinds of customization.
Bioshock is still one of the best games of the year for me, and it raised the bar for story and atmosphere in games, but the gameplay mechanics show several clear design errors.
This has nothing to do with open-source... they are releasing a demo of their animation rig for 3D Studio Max in order to trick animators into using it so that they will shell out for the 'deluxe' version later. From the OGDC announcement (http://www.ogdc2007.com/session.php?id=33 , May 14):
"We're proud to announce that CRYPTIC AR Lite will be released as a free "learning" rig... The Cryptic AR Deluxe is much more robust version of its Lite counterpart. The Cryptic AR Deluxe was developed to make animating on the Cryptic rig easy for animators of a variety of backgrounds and experience levels. It also allows for quick animation prototyping for different character types before final game assets are completed, removing a potential bottleneck without compromising final animation quality... The CRYPTIC AR Lite version 1.0 will be available for download at www.crypticstudios.com"
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like Ebert is really set in his curmudgeonly "new forms of media are trash and always will be" pattern. Guess what -- 2D cinema already violates many of the visual absolutes that our ancestors took for granted. This article complains that 3D separates focus and convergence, but 2D cinema already separated those from visual perspective, something that never happens in nature. We also evolved to have control over the plane that we are focusing on, which 2D cinema takes away. Even aside from depth cues, our ancestors only needed to perceive motion when they themselves were moving, there was no idea of sitting still and watching from a moving camera. I guess this "motion picture" thing will never catch on. It will always make some people motion sick from camera movement or give them headaches from the brightness and flickering.
What is with the timing of this article anyway? The most successful film of all time, Avatar, is a flagship of 3D cinema. Maybe his next article should be "why the cell phone can't work, ever" because calls sometimes drop. Or maybe "why flat TVs will never catch on" because they don't have as deep blacks as CRT.
Um, that's still 10 miles per donut, no matter how many resources it took to create the donut. If you're counting the cost of creating the donut in the bike's MPD count, then you need to count the cost of creating the gasoline in a car's MPG. Do you think gasoline extracts, refines, and transports itself?
- The choice of harvesting or freeing the little sisters has very little weight, because you end up with the same abilities either way. This would have been an obvious place to add some kind of character variation.
Bioshock was also "dumbed down" in many other ways, such as having an infinite inventory capacity for weapons (and nothing but weapons). This adds to the paradox of choice, thus making combat less fun, while also eliminating other kinds of customization. Bioshock is still one of the best games of the year for me, and it raised the bar for story and atmosphere in games, but the gameplay mechanics show several clear design errors.But no screenshots or video. Are we supposed to take their word for it? How is this supposed to be interesting? This is just an ad for their new game.
I'm glad I'm not the debt collector.