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Jul 15, 2020 01:16
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There is a part in Dune where Duke Leto is walking around the palace at Arrikeen and he comes across two soldiers. "Where's the shower?" "None here, you scrub your rear end with sand! Oh poo poo its the Duke!" Everyone in Dune is either a noble, a mystic, some kind of desert survivor or otherwise not a normal person, so they all talk in very specific ways, none of it sounds like a regular person would talk, but here you have 2 just regular soldiers and they talk like no one else in the novels.
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Jul 15, 2020 03:05
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The Fremen kind of are normal people for Arrakis, mind.
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Jul 15, 2020 05:24
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 This moment right here. It's a magic combination of the music, the shot composition, the building tension, and the moment of release of three whole movies-worth of struggle and hardship for the TOS crew that begins when Khan fires those first phaser blasts at the original Enterprise and ends right here when the camera pans over the bow of the Excelsior and reveals the Enterprise-A. It's just one of those perfect movie moments that I wish I could live in forever.
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Jul 15, 2020 05:53
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Breen posted:"Carbon stars with ancient satellites colonized by sentient fungi. Gas giants inhabited by vast meteorological intelligences. Worlds stretched thin across the membranes where [the] dimensions intersect... Impossible to describe with our limited vocabulary!" Something about the description of other intelligences in Half-Life 2 by Wallace Breen, and Portal 2 by Cave Jonson, particularity the "gas giants inhabited by vast meteorological intelligences" struck me as something truly alien. A tad ridiculous and at the same time somewhat original. I'm not sure if this concept exists elsewhere in Sci-fi, but the way it's just mentioned in passing really builds up the weirdness of the HL/Portal Universe.
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Jul 15, 2020 07:36
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Linux Pirate posted:Something about the description of other intelligences in Half-Life 2 by Wallace Breen, and Portal 2 by Cave Jonson, particularity the "gas giants inhabited by vast meteorological intelligences" struck me as something truly alien. A tad ridiculous and at the same time somewhat original. I'm not sure if this concept exists elsewhere in Sci-fi, but the way it's just mentioned in passing really builds up the weirdness of the HL/Portal Universe. Both Stargate and Star Trek have explored concepts like that yes. On Stargate SG-1, there’s an episode where the Russian Stargate connects to a planet that’s not just entirely water, but the water itself is a massive alien distributed consciousness. On Stargate Atlantis, there’s an episode of the first season that fakes out the team going back to Earth using a massive planet-covering energy cloud to power the stargate on it to connect to an eight chevron address. It turns out the cloud is intelligent and put them all in a coma dream as a defence mechanism because using the stargate hurts it. So they agree to leave it be and never come back. Star Trek: Voyager has an episode that’s obliquely about a sentient cloud that the crew quarantine an entire deck of the ship to house while they return it “home,” but it’s basically just a Lower Decks episode where Neelix tries to keep the Borg Kids entertained by making up ghost stories about it until they call him out on his bullshit and goes “Yeah, it’s just a weird sentient space cloud.”
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Jul 15, 2020 21:12
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"Gas giants inhabited by vast meteorological intelligences" sounds kind of like the Jovian lifeforms described by Arthur C. Clarke in 2010: Odyssey Two.
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Jul 16, 2020 02:13
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Pondex posted:Important canon-opinions aside, this scene from TLJ was genuinely astounding to watch in a theater. Agreed, it was my favorite part of the movie
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Jul 16, 2020 19:18
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Gas giant uncharitable but accurate description of The Shat
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Jul 16, 2020 22:21
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Looking down and seeing my feet in Halo 2. Not really a Sci-Fi moment but it was my first time playing a shooter where you could do that. David D. Davidson fucked around with this message at 12:42 on Jul 17, 2020 |
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Jul 17, 2020 03:20
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Breakdown had it earlier with full, and whenever you did a spin kick or flip, totally dizzying body movement. Im mentioning this only because Breakdown is some good rear end scifi that also involves punching a lot of shirtless muscle men.
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Jul 17, 2020 03:29
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I still feel like shooters have taken a step back since F.E.A.R. in that regard.
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Jul 17, 2020 03:37
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The Fremen kind of are normal people for Arrakis, mind. There is nothing normal about the Fremen.
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Jul 17, 2020 03:44
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David D. Davidson posted:Looking down and seeing my feet in Halo 2. Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay did it too. every morning I open palm slam the button on my xbox...
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Jul 17, 2020 04:58
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Escape from Butcher Bay's most unrealistic element wasn't that triple-max security prison existed instead of just executing you but rather that people in the future still smoked.
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Jul 17, 2020 05:37
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Rendezvous with Rama made me think about gravity or the lack of. When the explorers go to use a ladder in zero-g they first have to decide if they're going up or down. If some people go feet first and some go head first it's going to cause some serious confusion and maybe induce panic when you're 'climbing' the ladder and someone ahead of you going feet first. There's also the part in Ender's Game where 'the enemy's goal is down' is used to gain a psychological edge in zero-g.
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Jul 17, 2020 06:48
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nine-gear crow posted:
I could quibble that this probably isn't the type of thing the thread's about... but instead I'll agree, the catharsis of this scene is amazing.
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Jul 17, 2020 17:24
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Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C Clarke. (I think) A huge O'Neill cylinder, 20km wide by 50 km long enters the solar system and humanity sends astronauts to meet it. They make their way inside the darkened vessel and hear a roaring which they eventually realise is coming from a "waterfall" made by a central core pipe running along the centre of the cylinder pouring out water. It's so dark they can't see it, but one astronaut remarks that the water won't be falling straight down, but must be making a huge spiral due to the turning of the cylinder. The idea of that spiral waterfall 20km across blew my mind.
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Jul 21, 2020 19:52
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Two things come to mind. The part in mass effect at the beginning when Nihilus twitches his mandibles around after watching the ground footage of Sovereign, and the part in the first blade runner when they have the long slow pan in on the Tyrell building leading up to Leons interrogation and Holden blowing huge smoke clouds everywhere.
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Jul 22, 2020 04:33
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David D. Davidson posted:Looking down and seeing my feet in Halo 2. trespasser from 1998 would have blown your goddamn mind then 
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Jul 22, 2020 05:46
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thrilla in vanilla posted:Two things come to mind. The part in mass effect at the beginning when Nihilus twitches his mandibles around after watching the ground footage of Sovereign, and the part in the first blade runner when they have the long slow pan in on the Tyrell building leading up to Leons interrogation and Holden blowing huge smoke clouds everywhere. The facial animation in Mass Effect 1 is super bad and doesn't hold up well compared to even ME2 and 3, but that is a really great moment, yes. It's a subtle little thing but it 1) showed up front that they cared in the right places, and it's a nice little visual cue/tic that says "even the super hardcore space spy is terrified of whatever the gently caress this thing is."
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Jul 22, 2020 06:33
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WilWheaton posted:trespasser from 1998 would have blown your goddamn mind then All you are is an upper torso and one arm in Trespasser, you don't even have legs despite them letting you down accounting for the majority of your deaths.
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Jul 22, 2020 07:15
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Barudak posted:All you are is an upper torso and one arm in Trespasser, you don't even have legs despite them letting you down accounting for the majority of your deaths. This is just something literally all FPSes do for no particular reason
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Jul 22, 2020 08:10
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Ghost Leviathan posted:This is just something literally all FPSes do for no particular reason As mentioned Halo 2 and Breakdown have very detailed body models, to the point of nausea in the latter's case. One of my favorite current ones is Doom 5 have a second set of arms for when you are climbing because they need to be bigger.
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Jul 22, 2020 08:48
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Barudak posted:All you are is an upper torso and one arm in Trespasser, you don't even have legs despite them letting you down accounting for the majority of your deaths. I will never forget what the player model in Thief: The Dark Project looked like. 
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Jul 22, 2020 09:17
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It's actually kinda surprising we don't have more stealth based games that are basically 'steal anything not nailed down', since that's basically the default behaviour games have trained players to have anyway. Might as well cut out the middleman.
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Jul 22, 2020 11:26
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The Hyperion series. There are many interesting aspects to them but the one that stood out to me: want to travel through space faster than anybody else can? Attach a med bay to giant engines and use alien organic implants in your pilots. Set your destination, jump into a pod, and be crushed into a puddle by the g’s. Arrive at your destination and have your body and mind regrown (*users may experience some side-effects)
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Apr 9, 2021 07:56
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Barry Foster posted:
"Karan S'Jet was the last to leave the Mothership" is my favorite ever gaming moment.
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Apr 9, 2021 20:27
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nine-gear crow posted:
When you really pull back and look at the chronology of the mega-franchise, this was very arguably the moment when the era of "Peak Trek" began. The next major release was "Encounter at Farpoint" which set off a run of spin-offs and theatrical releases which spanned around 13 years. It's weird to think of now, and it's not like Star Wars didn't exist during that time, but there were no major Star Wars releases so for the late 80s and nearly all of the 90s Star Trek was the big sci-fi franchise in town. I honestly took it for granted as a kid, and now having had literally 2/3rds of my life bombarded by Lucasfilms' creations I wish I had appreciated that era more.
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Apr 10, 2021 16:48
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The Revelation Space books had a lot of mindfuck moments. In particular, it's a series in which not only does FTL travel not exist but every attempt to experiment with it ends disastrously by wiping the people attempting it from the timeline. The only way to piece together that an accident even happened is leftover residual evidence from the old timeline and figuring out ways in which the new timeline isn't quite right.
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Apr 10, 2021 18:41
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Vernii posted:The Revelation Space books had a lot of mindfuck moments. In particular, it's a series in which not only does FTL travel not exist but every attempt to experiment with it ends disastrously by wiping the people attempting it from the timeline. The only way to piece together that an accident even happened is leftover residual evidence from the old timeline and figuring out ways in which the new timeline isn't quite right. This is a cool idea because it also has a built in reason for whoever figures out FTL to share their method with pretty much everyone, even if just to avoid more timeline fuckery.
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Apr 10, 2021 22:53
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mind the walrus posted:When you really pull back and look at the chronology of the mega-franchise, this was very arguably the moment when the era of "Peak Trek" began. The next major release was "Encounter at Farpoint" which set off a run of spin-offs and theatrical releases which spanned around 13 years. It's weird to think of now, and it's not like Star Wars didn't exist during that time, but there were no major Star Wars releases so for the late 80s and nearly all of the 90s Star Trek was the big sci-fi franchise in town. I honestly took it for granted as a kid, and now having had literally 2/3rds of my life bombarded by Lucasfilms' creations I wish I had appreciated that era more. This is my little moment in Sci-Fi Pop Culture that blew my mind when I realized it. Mid-90s to early-00s you've got multiple Star Trek shows on television and a wealth of other SF shows on the air (Stargate, Farscape, Andromeda, Earth: Final Conflict, Babylon 5, probably others I've forgotten or never saw). At the time, I didn't realize just how weird that was, because I had no pre-mid-90s television experience.
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Apr 11, 2021 00:05
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Vernii posted:The Revelation Space books had a lot of mindfuck moments. In particular, it's a series in which not only does FTL travel not exist but every attempt to experiment with it ends disastrously by wiping the people attempting it from the timeline. The only way to piece together that an accident even happened is leftover residual evidence from the old timeline and figuring out ways in which the new timeline isn't quite right. That quite fun, as it matches up with physics showing that all forms of FTL are effectively a time machine, and how any kind of time travel eventually leads to massive problems. I guess once you have a time machine the time line becomes unstable until sooner or later someone winds up travelling back far enough to prevent time machine technology ever coming about (probably by virtue of any FTL capable ship being capable of wiping out an entire planet by velocity alone). Maybe the civilisation lasts for a subjective time of trillions of years, but it getting time wiped is inevitable and once it happened it's like they never existed at all. Man, that is mind blowing. 
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Apr 11, 2021 09:25
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Wasn't that similar to the gimmick to some popular fantasy series where the ultimate death spell didn't kill you so much as it made you never exist so using it could, after it murdered you completely, have unintended consequences like the caster having long ago been murdered in this new time line.
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Apr 11, 2021 17:25
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mind the walrus posted:When you really pull back and look at the chronology of the mega-franchise, this was very arguably the moment when the era of "Peak Trek" began. The next major release was "Encounter at Farpoint" which set off a run of spin-offs and theatrical releases which spanned around 13 years. It's weird to think of now, and it's not like Star Wars didn't exist during that time, but there were no major Star Wars releases so for the late 80s and nearly all of the 90s Star Trek was the big sci-fi franchise in town. I honestly took it for granted as a kid, and now having had literally 2/3rds of my life bombarded by Lucasfilms' creations I wish I had appreciated that era more. The 90s was the decade of Star Trek. Star Wars at best had video games, comics and books, but without a TV and movie presence it was not going to unseat Star Trek as the nerd thing. There was always 2 shows on the air during the majority of the decade, movies came out regularly. The quality might be debatable, but Undiscovered Country and First Contact were extremely well received, Generations a bit less, Insurrection was probably better than is given credit for.
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Apr 11, 2021 23:38
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Barudak posted:Wasn't that similar to the gimmick to some popular fantasy series where the ultimate death spell didn't kill you so much as it made you never exist so using it could, after it murdered you completely, have unintended consequences like the caster having long ago been murdered in this new time line. Balefire, in The Wheel of Time. Retroactively destroys objects, farther back in time proportional to how much energy was used to create the attack. Then, the world has to adjust to the new causality implied. The examples given for why using it became taboo, even among servants of the shadow, are all about entire cities having been destroyed and weeks of history rewritten, so "long ago" doesn't mean years. (Unless there's actually a different fantasy series with a similar gimmick?) In theory, this can be disastrous for the fabric of reality, but in practice it's an incredibly useful tool that saves the lives of a few of the people closest to the main character.
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Apr 12, 2021 00:13
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twistedmentat posted:Insurrection was probably better than is given credit for. ------------- The little moment that always got me was Geddy Tartakovsky's Iron Man 2 flight sequence, watching the HUD chart his flight path. They really went out of their way to show the Iron Man suits as almost vaguely plausible as military devices in the visual details, and while later Marvel movies were fun I did miss the times when the Iron Man suits were these tank/flight suit hybrids with weight and heft.
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Apr 12, 2021 00:48
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There's a passage in The Expanse where they talk about the way that conversation changes when you're on different planets due to light lag, and how getting to have a real-time conversation is a rare thing that can only last for a short time. I thought it was an interesting way to discuss the way that communications over those distances would cause its own etiquette to develop.
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Apr 16, 2021 04:04
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thrilla in vanilla posted:Two things come to mind. The part in mass effect at the beginning when Nihilus twitches his mandibles around after watching the ground footage of Sovereign, this one's really good I also liked the fractal pattern section breaks in the Jurassic Park novel. First time I'd seen fractals. Also the bit where Malcolm tells them to have the computer try to find more dinosaurs than there was supposed to be. Kind of an introduction to "read as written vs read as intended" and also that computers are not smart.
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Apr 16, 2021 07:24
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Mazerunner posted:Also the bit where Malcolm tells them to have the computer try to find more dinosaurs than there was supposed to be. Kind of an introduction to "read as written vs read as intended" and also that computers are not smart. this still informs the way I work, even nearly 30 years after reading the book
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Apr 16, 2021 20:00
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