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Extremely on topic: it looks like Hideo Kojima and Konami may be parting company soon, which puts the future of games like Silent Hills and Revengeance 2 in doubt.
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Mar 19, 2015 19:16
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Jurgan posted:Off-topic, but on the recommendation of this thread I spent two hours last night watching an anime called Persona 4. I think there might be a video game hidden on the disc as well. If you watched it for two hours you're almost to the part where the game starts.
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Mar 19, 2015 19:41
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Party Boat posted:Extremely on topic: it looks like Hideo Kojima and Konami may be parting company soon, which puts the future of games like Silent Hills and Revengeance 2 in doubt. Why is this and why oh god why
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Mar 19, 2015 19:48
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Party Boat posted:Extremely on topic: it looks like Hideo Kojima and Konami may be parting company soon, which puts the future of games like Silent Hills and Revengeance 2 in doubt. What does Kojima have to do with Silent Hill? I know he was possibly making the newest one, but he's hardly key to the franchise.
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Mar 19, 2015 21:05
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He is making the next one, which is why it would be a bad thing to lose him from the dev team. It really doesn't matter though, it's probably just some stupid stunt. edit: The new Silent Hill game is called "Silent Hills" btw
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Mar 19, 2015 21:35
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Burkion posted:Why is this and why oh god why apparently kojima productions and konami got into a huge slapfight and konami has changed the designation of all of the kojipro management to "contractors", they're not even salaried employees any more also, kojima and the rest of the management but mostly kojima since he's, well, kojima have been disbarred from further promotions for Phantom Pain it's real, real bad over there
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Mar 19, 2015 21:40
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Cleretic posted:He's one of the few national leaders that people seem to genuinely enjoy talking about. Not from a raw historical benefit point of view, there's certainly been more important world leaders, but as a character he does have a certain charisma that can get him genuine fans completely disconnected from his actual political legacy. What about Ol' Bubba Clinton? 
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Mar 19, 2015 21:54
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Toxxupation posted:apparently kojima productions and konami got into a huge slapfight and konami has changed the designation of all of the kojipro management to "contractors", they're not even salaried employees any more It's his exit strategy. He knows it's the only way he can escape making Metal Gear forever.
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Mar 19, 2015 22:07
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cargohills posted:He is making the next one, which is why it would be a bad thing to lose him from the dev team. It really doesn't matter though, it's probably just some stupid stunt. Oh, I thought the plural "Silent Hills" meant you thought there would be no more SH's at all without him.
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Mar 19, 2015 22:47
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Jurgan posted:Oh, I thought the plural "Silent Hills" meant you thought there would be no more SH's at all without him. There's a teaser/demo for it out. It's Kojima as gently caress.
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Mar 19, 2015 22:47
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 lmao
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Mar 19, 2015 22:48
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Party Boat posted:
A less than 1% fall? How will they cope. This always happens when a company announces moderately bad news, and it's always back to the same level in no time. The stock market is a silly game of abstract numbers that people play that has merely a passing connection to the real world, I dunno why people spend so much time pretending that share price means something to anyone besides other players.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:06
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Fair point.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:38
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Jerusalem posted:What about Ol' Bubba Clinton? Oh, Clinton's certainly there with JFK, but neither of them are on Teddy Roosevelt level.
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Mar 20, 2015 08:43
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I'm trying something different this time review-wise, so, here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Moon
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Mar 21, 2015 02:24
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Toxxupation posted:I'm trying something different this time review-wise, so, here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Moon So.... A? There was one thing Nixon said at the end of this episode that just made me angry at the entire episode, even if it was in character for Nixon.
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Mar 21, 2015 02:27
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Toxxupation posted:I'm trying something different this time review-wise, so, here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Moon You should link us all to a site. should link us all to a site. link us all to a site.
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Mar 21, 2015 02:33
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He's going to be doing that in lieu of episode summaries from now on, unless he decides otherwise. Or I will, either one.
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Mar 21, 2015 02:35
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Oxxidation posted:He's going to be doing that in lieu of episode summaries from now on, unless he decides otherwise. Or I will, either one.
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Mar 21, 2015 03:00
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g0del posted:He's not actually reading those wiki pages, right? Because they've got a lot of spoilers for the season arc. no, i'm not, oxx is probably gonna link them from now on in fact
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Mar 21, 2015 03:03
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The climax to Day of the Moon is probably hands down my favourite climax in all of Doctor Who, it's incredible. "You should kill us all on sight!"
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Mar 21, 2015 15:49
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I hear both Oxx and Occ are going to get sick next week, will this Bloodborne pathogen affect the reviews?
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Mar 21, 2015 16:15
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Stormgale posted:I hear both Oxx and Occ are going to get sick next week, will this Bloodborne pathogen affect the reviews? Video games are not a valid excuse for breaking schedule. Unfortunately, I can't sufficiently threaten Occ to make him agree with this point of view, so we'll find out.
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Mar 21, 2015 16:56
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Oxxidation posted:Video games are not a valid excuse for breaking schedule. Unfortunately, I can't sufficiently threaten Occ to make him agree with this point of view, so we'll find out. Well if he's not I guess I'm not either 
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Mar 21, 2015 17:43
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I think you both are looking a little tired.
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Mar 21, 2015 18:03
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An Ounce of Gold posted:I think you both are looking a little tired. I think the only cure is a transfusion of Yarnham blood.
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Mar 21, 2015 18:26
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Doctor Who "Day of the Moon" Series 6, Episode 2 The problem with episodes like "Day of the Moon" is that they come after Moffat's magnum opus of Series Five. In and of itself this isn't a bad episode, and its flaws are relatively minor, but it comes after a season of television that was immaculately paced and plotted, with a clear control of tone and direction for about 95% of its running time. Moffat broke the scale in Series Five, and because of that "Day of the Moon"'s faults become more damning, because what should be usually unimportant or tiny faults with an episode blow out to become major issues, being that I know that Moffat can, if he's trying at his absolute best, ensure that these things don't happen. The irony of "Day of the Moon" is that its biggest problem is Moffat himself, because he's already demonstrated the capability to craft a "perfect" (or as close to perfect as Doctor Who can reasonably aspire to) narrative; the expectations are much higher and his issues therefore become more significant. RTD never had this problem, because his first season of the revival was a loving tire fire of terrrible creative decisions that ended in one of the single worst episodes of television I have ever seen. Every subsequent season he ran would therefore be, comparatively, decent, and my grades reflected his assessed capabilities at that specific point in time. Moffat is damned by his legacy, in "Day of the Moon", which in its own way is a backhanded compliment- "Moon" would have scored a B or maybe even an A (if I was feeling particularly charitable) under RTD's tenure, but because this is a Moffat-penned script during a Moffat-run season I expect better than this, and its failures are simply too significant to ignore. Most significant are its plot issues. The first ten minutes- nearly the entire first act- of "Moon" made very little sense to me, as I had to ask Oxxidation for clarification on what, exactly, was happening as the episode began. Starting from a flash-forward cutting straight to The Doctor imprisoned cutting to a montage of scenes of The Doctor's squad getting gunned down made for a confusing opening that didn't really explain what, exactly, was going on. Unfortunately, the rest of the episode doesn't really adequately explain the mechanics of either the cold open or what, exactly, happened from the end of "Astronaut" to the beginning of "Moon", so what ends up happening is is that the cold open comes across as cool, but confusing, but opens the episode up to a bunch of plot holes. Why was Eleven being imprisoned by the government? Okay, maybe the Silence wanted him locked up and used their hypnotic powers to influence the government to do so, but then how did Eleven convince Canton to be a double-agent? And how were The Silence completely unaware what was happening? It's also that the cold open was completely unnecessary to the setup of the episode, since it only needed to convey a couple of crucial facts- the The Doctor's team spread out over the country trying to figure out how many of the Silence there were and tried, mostly in vain due to The Silence's memory-wiping abilities, to record any information about them. The fact that Amy/Rory/River were gunned down in separate corners of the country while The Doctor was being locked in Pandorica Mk II just introduces more questions than answers and feels like Moffat wanting the scene where everyone meets up to look cool over having it make any drat sense whatsoever. The fact is the episode works just as well if it cut to everyone meeting in the diner from "Astronaut" after a two-month timeskip with the requisite hashmarks all over their bodies, the montage of death scenes was both a really obvious fakeout (yeah, we're totally gonna kill off 75% of the principal cast in the first five minutes of an episode) and complicated and already complex narrative for no real reason. The first act troubles cast somewhat of a pall over the episode at large because "Moon" starts such a narrative-heavy episode on the wrong foot, wherein the first act was clearly meant to be the foundation- the two month timeskip explains how The Doctor is able to figure out The Silence's hypnotic suggestion powers and conceive and execute a plan to stop them. The first act is setup for the rest of the episode, but unfortunately it just doesn't do its drat job; "Moon" at large then spends the rest of its runtime trying desperately to play narrative catch-up and not succeeding very well. The narrative problems are equaled by the pacing and tone issues, which are myriad and also exacerbated by the conceit of its opening. As a matter of course, Moffat has to explain away some of the more glaring holes left in the timeskip- chief among them, for instance, what happened when Amy shot that kid -so what he ends up doing is interrupting his own narrative to have scenes filling in the backstory he intentionally left vague. As a result, the narrative of "Moon" starts and stops throughout because it never has a clear sense of where it's going or how it will progress. It's too start-and-stop to be able to breathe, to follow itself naturally. As a result, Moffat's altar that every script of his worships upon, Narrative Coherency, ends up being virtually nonexistent this episode- to much stuff happens, and too illogically, for "Moon" to feel anything but a jumbled mess of scenes and ideas. Too many plots are introduced, with most-to-all of them getting various short shrift; obviously, as the second half to "Astronaut" it has to continue the overarcing storyline of attempting to prevent The Doctor's future death, on top of the various shenanigans with The Silence that dominate "Moon" proper. In addition to that the plot of "Moon" quickly fractures, with Canton and Amy off in the orphange whilst The Doctor does his own stuff with Apollo 11. It's just too much, so minor subplots like River's realization that The Doctor is starting to know less and less about her, or the subplot about Rory overhearing Amy's potential confession of love to The Doctor (which turns out to be, of course, a confession to him) don't get the screentime they need to feel fully formed. It feels...rushed and unfocused, as an episode of television. Most damningly, at least to me, is its tonal changes. "Astronaut" was a great, depressing, cynical episode of television, focusing on The Doctor's friends as they come to terms with his own death and their delayed grief. "Moon" feels all over the place tone wise, unsure if it wants to be the usual cracking wise sort of romp (The Doctor's antics, especially with President Nixon, seem to lean in that direction), a Moffat-brand horror episode (all the orphanage stuff seems to reinforce that notion), or something more serious (River and Amy's subplots). It hurts the episode, as well, that Moffat has to stop the main plot from progressing to explain what the hell happened functionally in the intervening two months between last episode and this one, because it not only delays pacing but also tone as well; Moffat's not able to set a scene and create an emotion organically from the action happening onscreen because it's so often immediately bookended by exposition, or something completely off-tone from whatever he was attempting to accomplish beforehand. The orphanage scenes suffer the most from this; it's hard to find a scene frightening when it cuts immediately away to whatever wacky adventure Eleven's gotten himself into this time. Essentially, Moffat lost control of his own script. He doesn't drive the narrative in "Moon"; the narrative drives him, and it's clearly evident onscreen that at specific points throughout the episode he's just grasping at straws trying desperately to make sure the entire plot doesn't fall down around him. And to his backhanded credit, it doesn't; no matter what, Moffat is still an excellent writer and he's able to craft an at least acceptable episode of television in the end, but the ride is so bumpy and so jarring and so...uncharacteristic of what Moffat's talents should be it's hard to congratulate him. RTD's biggest sin when showrunning was his resistance to kill his darlings. In fact, he was predisposed to undeservedly rewarding them, which is how he would so routinely destroy good narratives; Oxxidation himself has argued that Journey's End would be good, or at least tolerable, if it weren't for the fact that Donna's sacrifice is so directly juxtaposed with Rose's Ten clone. In contrast Moffat's biggest sin when showrunning, at least so far, seems to be how he envisions a scene or sequence and then breaks the script in half to include it, despite the resultant damage to the episode in question. What's most frustrating about this is how avoidable all of it was. The first act kneecaps the second and third as Moffat now has to explain what the hell happened, since he employed a timeskip. The only real reason he did, at least in my opinion, was because he wanted to include the scene set in Area 51 where The Doctor dramatically reveals that all of the murders were staged and part of his own master plan. It's a cool and fun scene, admittedly, but it's so clear that Moffat wrote with that scene (and the death sequences) in mind and went backwards from there, as opposed to progressing the story naturally forwards. To me, this is one of the worse offenses a writer can commit; writing should follow where the story leads and not try to force it. For instance, Vince Gilligan, showrunner of Breaking Bad, was famous for "following the story"; he would often, by his own admission, write himself into impossible corners when running Breaking Bad, with no idea how seasons would end because he trusted the plot developments to lead him out of those corners organically. In fact, the one time he tried to force a narrative inorganically was in the second season, where he had an ending in mind and tried to build the season to that end; season two is infamous amongst Breaking Bad fans for being divisive at best and I would argue that the second season finale, in my opinion, is the only really "bad" episode of the show, because its end feels so authored. "Moon" is worse by comparison because it's the second half of a two-parter that started with "The Impossible Astronaut", which "Day of the Moon" in no way lives up to. "Astronaut" was a dark, moody, existential piece in perfect command of exactly the tone it wanted to set and the messages it wanted to convey; in contrast "Moon" is a hodgepodge of disconnected scenes, themes, and ideas, most of which receive too little screen time to mean much of anything. On a personal note I was rather disappointed that the themes and ideas, to wit grappling with grief, weren't at all continued in "Moon", but that's low on my list of complaints within this episode. That all being said there's still a lot to admire within this episode; there are disconnected scenes that still work removed from everything else, such as the repeated uses of Nixon that Eleven employs to get out of trouble, or the visual motif of the hashmarks on everyone's faces and bodies. The climax is genuinely incredible and reflective of Moffat's singular ability to have the climax of his episodes bring together all the disparate information already present throughout the episode and come off with a genuinely clever in-universe solution (as opposed to RTD's tactic of "Have The Doctor flips switches randomly and yell technobabble until something explodes"). The reveal of how The Silence is able to use the fact that it's forgotten once seen in order to imprint ideas- essentially psychic manipulation -is a cool one, with Canton's chilling realization that he recorded a message landing particularly hard. But that's just the problem with "Day of the Moon"- there are good scenes. As a narrative work, end-to-end, it's a mess, and sprinkling great scenes here and there (hello, Rory as an accountant!) doesn't make up for fundamental plotting issues. A disappointing followup to one of the best episodes the show has ever done. Grade: C Random Thoughts:
NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Mar 22, 2015 |
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Mar 21, 2015 22:19
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One grade off. One drat grade!
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Mar 21, 2015 22:37
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I see my method of only grading at the extreme ends of the scale is going to lead to problems for me this year. Yeah, no matter how much I love the climax to this, and the concept of the Silence is great, the start of this episode is really all over the place and pretty confusing. This is obviously a two part episode so to take that tact on it, the first half here starts out really strong and tight, and then kind of falls apart into a sort of confusing hodgepodge where a lot of stuff just kind of happens arbitrarily, coming together into a cool climax at the end.
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Mar 21, 2015 22:46
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My personal favourite part of this episode is that, despite his half-hearted defense of Nixon when they land in Astronaut, his final interaction with Nixon in Day of the Moon is to casually cause Watergate.
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Mar 21, 2015 22:49
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Absolutely spot-on, this episode has a ton of moments that are excellent in and of themselves, but as part of the greater narrative story of the episode they don't quite jibe together. The climax is magnificently handled, but everything leading up to it feels disconnected or otherwise disjointed - and the timeskip to begin the episode is the culprit. It puts the viewer on a backfoot they never really recover from, and negates the impact of the cliffhanger of the previous episode (Amy shot a child!) completely. It's still an episode I really enjoy, but mostly because of the moments within it, as opposed to the episode as a whole... and the climax of course, which I think it just wonderful. I also love how casual the Doctor's recognition of the Silence's ship is - paraphrased: "Last time I saw this it was in the future, abandoned and all the crew dead.... I wonder who caused that to happen  "
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Mar 21, 2015 22:49
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Toxxupation posted:(hello, Rory as an accountant!) quote:One grade off. One drat grade!
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Mar 21, 2015 22:51
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For all the faults of this episode, the climax/monologue is still one of my favorites ever in Doctor Who.
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Mar 21, 2015 23:22
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I remember when this episode first aired, everyone talked a lot of poo poo about that one Silence that accidentally betrays his whole race by trying to sound tough.
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Mar 21, 2015 23:32
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Bobulus posted:I remember when this episode first aired, everyone talked a lot of poo poo about that one Silence that accidentally betrays his whole race by trying to sound tough. Dammit Steve!
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Mar 21, 2015 23:42
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Bobulus posted:I remember when this episode first aired, everyone talked a lot of poo poo about that one Silence that accidentally betrays his whole race by trying to sound tough. Barry the Silence 
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Mar 21, 2015 23:49
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The Silence are a terrifying concept that fall apart when you realise they are meant to be literally everywhere on the planet so people would be seeing and reacting to them all the time, they'd be captured in photographs and so on. It would work better if there were only a small number of Silence.
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Mar 22, 2015 00:55
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Senor Tron posted:The Silence are a terrifying concept that fall apart when you realise they are meant to be literally everywhere on the planet so people would be seeing and reacting to them all the time, they'd be captured in photographs and so on. It would work better if there were only a small number of Silence. Ever trip over something and decide you just fell over your own feet Ever feel exhausted in the middle of the day even though you can't remember doing anything
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Mar 22, 2015 00:59
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Oxxidation posted:Ever trip over something and decide you just fell over your own feet Ever experience static electricity? That's actually your mind's interpretation of watching someone get shocked to death by something you can't remember also, ever notice how people just disappear sometimes
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Mar 22, 2015 01:03
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Senor Tron posted:The Silence are a terrifying concept that fall apart when you realise they are meant to be literally everywhere on the planet so people would be seeing and reacting to them all the time, they'd be captured in photographs and so on. It would work better if there were only a small number of Silence.
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Mar 22, 2015 01:08
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