Film Review #20: Age of Empires III (videogame)

I dug up AoE3 just a few days ago from the forlorn tatterdemalion of my desk.  It's a real-time strategy game, now actually growing old.  Its parent studio has died, its series with it...  But alas!  So returns the ridiculous joy of obliterating hordes of knights and crossbowmen with lines and lines of medieval artillery.
Age of Empires III is terrific because it looks decent enough, runs well (even on my machine), allows for massive gameplay with large armies both over land and sea, long games, and actually demands use of strategy.  Simple as that.  It's an older game, which means it still has creative cheats and easter eggs for added ridiculousness...  Hm.  What else?  Multiplayer.  A damn long campaign.  A "scenario creator", which basically lets you do literally whatever you want, from map-making to army-building to whatever.  Destruction looks great in an old RTS kinda way; buildings fly into individual dynamic bits when mortars tear them apart, people fly through the air left and right, and trees get blown in half.  Plus ships shatter and sink.  It all looks nice.
I mean, that's pretty much it.  Just a genuinely enjoyable game.  If you have the resources, you can build as large and imbalanced an army as you want (believe me, I know).  The fact that it can't hold up to tens of thousands of individual troops like some other games kinda sucks, but hey, you really don't need that many to get a sense of the genocides you're instigating.  I don't like how stereotypically it depicts indigenous peoples, but hey, watchagonnado.  I don't know much about RTSs in the market and the competition therein, but I say, if you can get this game cheap, ya should.

aaaaand here are the photos.

I won't lie; I kinda swooped in and stole some people's stuff (Sage's).  But hey, I liked 'em; I passed up a helluva lot more.

Gifjjfh

Ill have the actual photos posted around 4 (gotta go work in da LC).

Anyway, stuff I liked:
-dynamic, prominent use of typography
-epic emphasis photos, showcasing a dynamic style for each
-random coolness, retro, whatever the hell
-showcase of cool opportunities n whatnot/lots of stuff bout da emphases
(I.e. The blowtorch thing)
-SOME NICE ART (duh) with room ta breathe
-good use of color balancing/theming

Final draft of Icarus

I went to edit my film thing, Icarus, and it seems the file has become corrupted in various degrees, with lots of its accessed sound effects simply going blank and others crashing the program.  Either way, there weren't really any significant changes; I added a WHOOSH on the initial zoom-in on the first shot along with a couple other do-hickeys, but... Yeah.  So you have an idea what I'm dealing with.  I'll go back and reroute/reset/whateverthehell the file, but that'll take a bit.  />my excuse.

Now, if you won't give me credit for that, I made a stupid amount of progress on a game (the one in the interlood).  It allows for dynamic character rotation, meaning that the player can lose balance and actually fall down and roll freely as a 6DoF rigidbody object.  It also supports different weapons with recoil, ammo pickup, vehicle use and physics, AI, and hyper-optimized centralized destruction.  And dynamic lens flares/atmospherics.  It's a lot, take my word for it.  You can see a bit in the interlood.

I'm sorry for my somewhat sharp attitude (I've done my best to squander it), but I've had a very, very long day, and I'm going to bed.  Good night.

Film Review #19: Elysium (feature film)

We all know District 9.  Best Sci-Fi movie to come out in recent history.  The guy who made it continued onward, making Elysium (not related).

So, as you might expect, it's pretty awesome.  Like District 9 it strayed from the somewhat glossy, overdone crap outa Hollywood and took itself for what it was-- a gritty sci-fi movie about fate, love, and human rights.  The soundtrack wasn't overbearing, but nonetheless epic.  Great casting, writing, everything.  I am going to talk, however, about the robots.

So, the robots.  The robots made up the majority of the policing and behind-the-desk workforce.  They were inhumane, obliviously cruel, etc.  Very nice.  They actually looked like actual robots might, should they have been optimized for their tasks.  For example, the bot behind the counter towards the beginning of the film was simply a plastic head and shoulders with a speaker and a dispenser tray.  Nothing else.  You know why?  Because no one BUILDS A DAMN FULLY AUTONOMOUS, BIPEDAL ROBOT WITH FUNCTIONING MUSCLES to give people insurance claims or whateverthehell.  The Police bots, on the other hand, were humanoid...  But not humanoid as Hollywood seems to think of it.  Gone were the silver rounded plates, the smooth artificial glowing muscles and eyes.  It was a machine.  Look up Boston Robotics: those are the robots of the future.  And ya know what?  The police bots looked like a more advanced version of those.  Because that's the way it would be.  Hydraulics, a metal frame, a camera, a speaker.  There ya go.

Sorry, I really hate Hollywood.  Anyway, District 9, in my opinion, was better.

Gimme a moment for the 5-second-film.  I had to re-render it a couple of times in Blender to get it properly functioning, so I'm a bit behind schedule.

Film Review #18: The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug

Yep, I saw it.  Apparently, I saw the first one, too, but I don't remember that.

Anyway, given I didn't know the setup for the plot except for the basic elements of the LotR series, it was easy to follow.  Made sure to explain what was going on to people who hadn't seen the prequel...  Which is stupid.  I will now rant.

Guys, if it's a goddamn sequel, then there was obviously a part 1, of which it is a continuation.  You're missing HALF OF THE PLOT.  Guys, don't cater to those who don't follow common sense in movie-going.  Like me.  I should NOT have been half as aware as I was as to what was going on 14 seconds into the film.

Now that I think about it, this rant is really flawed and quite circular.  It's good to explain what's going on in a film.  I think what I mean is, the direct sequel following the precise series of events as its predecessor shouldn't function as its own film.  I'm not saying H:DoS did this.  In fact, it actually wasn't SUPER fantastic, but felt empty and somewhat anticlimactic.  The series will only really be satisfiably watchable if you do a marathon.  Doesn't work just to see 1 in a theater.  Get what I'm saying?

Anyway, the CG and stuff was super-cool, acting was good enough (I say this because that bloody imbecile Kate from Lost is in there; god I hate that show...  maybe she isn't such an imbecile as before, but my associations with her Lost character have ruined her entire presence for me), blah blah blah, you get the idea.  Pretty decent for LotR standards, but I don't know if it pulled it off.

5-sec-films: Tuesday

5-sec-films: tuesFINAL - I'm not proud of this.