Scorpia and Baldur's Gate, a discussion from 2006

[FeelTheRads]

Is that pic a raytrace btw?

Huh, I was wondering the same thing, but I thought nah, it looks too good, must be one of those professionally set-up and edited photos.
But then I noticed a mistake... the magazine clips through the edge of the table. Then the drapes started looking weird.

And then I was a battery powering alien machines.

 

[Doma]

Gawd I miss my Amiga 500. Good times.

I still have mine! You can pick one up from Ebay for pretty cheap these days.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_f...A0.H0.Xamiga+500.TRS0&_nkw=amiga+500&_sacat=0

I even have all my old disks from the 90's. Love to play some Moonstone, Desert Strike and Eye of the Beholder <3

Bought one of these to get it working on a modern monitor. Dont have my old Goldstar TV anymore

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Amiga-Sca...840199?hash=item3d1d601147:g:0kYAAOSwZd1VYaG7

Here is a quick picture of my desk. As you can see, I got my A500 running on my modern monitor:

http://imgur.com/xdyvPWs

 

[---]

Why don't start with a mage created by you, fucking retarded?

 

[felipepepe]

And, really, her relationship with the magazine was a relationship with Johnny. Those two went way back. He was the only one who even knew her real name or what she looked like. She was incredibly unfriendly to the point of hostility to all the rest of us (I was her editor for years and she never had one nice thing to say to me), so she essentially had no one on her side once Johnny left. That's what happens when you operate that way.

I managed to contact Scorpia for the CRPG Book years ago (she till uses the same email since the 90's!), and she was extremely nice. Wrote two reviews for the project and allowed me to re-print one of her editorials, gave a lot of feedback, asked to remain in touch and all that...

Considering how CGW declined and lost all relevance once Johnny and she left, maybe the other guys left were the arseholes. It really changed from iconic reviewers talking about their impressions to EVERYTHING IS AWESOME reviews chasing "what gamers these days like".

 

[Theldaran]

Who fucking cares? Let BG rest in peace after being finished off by Beammod.

 

[cherry blossom]

I still have mine! You can pick one up from Ebay for pretty cheap these days.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_f...A0.H0.Xamiga+500.TRS0&_nkw=amiga+500&_sacat=0

I even have all my old disks from the 90's. Love to play some Moonstone, Desert Strike and Eye of the Beholder <3

Bought one of these to get it working on a modern monitor. Dont have my old Goldstar TV anymore

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Amiga-Sca...840199?hash=item3d1d601147:g:0kYAAOSwZd1VYaG7

Here is a quick picture of my desk. As you can see, I got my A500 running on my modern monitor:

http://imgur.com/xdyvPWs

You need an old CRT monitor to view the old art the right way. This has been a rather recent discovery for me too. For years, I was shocked and disappointed at the difference between my visual memory of numerous old games and how they looked now upon revisiting them on modern hardware - my LCD (with stellar interpolation). Wasn't until I saw a YouTube video explaining the tech and display differences.

Turns out, the subpixels on CRTs sort of bled into each other due to the physical properties of the electron beams and the proximity by hexagonal phosphor grid array, resulting in a natural blurring and rounding of rendered pixels through physical properties, thus projecting a softer and clearer, more pleasant image by design, as opposed to the clear cut square grid arrays on LCD displays, accentuating the jaggedness and colour scaling.

After recovering an old machine (an early Pentium setup with a CRT) from storage and checking it out for myself, I could almost not believe how better a lot of old games looked on it. I thought it was the nostalgia hitting hard.

So now, the image you get on CRT tech is what the artists originally had to work with, and naturally, how they intended it to look elsewhere. Not on crystal clear modern LCDs (except for Trinitron CRTs where involved).

There is hope, however, that with increasing resolutions, square grid displays will eventually have sufficient definition to display software-emulated CRT colour matrix reasonably well.

 

[SwiftCrack]

And, really, her relationship with the magazine was a relationship with Johnny. Those two went way back. He was the only one who even knew her real name or what she looked like. She was incredibly unfriendly to the point of hostility to all the rest of us (I was her editor for years and she never had one nice thing to say to me), so she essentially had no one on her side once Johnny left. That's what happens when you operate that way.

I managed to contact Scorpia for the CRPG Book years ago (she till uses the same email since the 90's!), and she was extremely nice. Wrote two reviews for the project and allowed me to re-print one of her editorials, gave a lot of feedback, asked to remain in touch and all that...

Considering how CGW declined and lost all relevance once Johnny and she left, maybe the other guys left were the arseholes. It really changed from iconic reviewers talking about their impressions to EVERYTHING IS AWESOME reviews chasing "what gamers these days like".

Interesting insight, but to be fair literally all 'professional' VG review-outlets have descended into this pattern.

 

[Doma]

I still have mine! You can pick one up from Ebay for pretty cheap these days.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_f...A0.H0.Xamiga+500.TRS0&_nkw=amiga+500&_sacat=0

I even have all my old disks from the 90's. Love to play some Moonstone, Desert Strike and Eye of the Beholder <3

Bought one of these to get it working on a modern monitor. Dont have my old Goldstar TV anymore

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Amiga-Sca...840199?hash=item3d1d601147:g:0kYAAOSwZd1VYaG7

Here is a quick picture of my desk. As you can see, I got my A500 running on my modern monitor:

http://imgur.com/xdyvPWs

You need an old CRT monitor to view the old art the right way. This has been a rather recent discovery for me too. For years, I was shocked and disappointed at the difference between my visual memory of numerous old games and how they looked now upon revisiting them on modern hardware - my LCD (with stellar interpolation). Wasn't until I saw a YouTube video explaining the tech and display differences.

Turns out, the subpixels on CRTs sort of bled into each other due to the physical properties of the electron beams and the proximity by hexagonal phosphor grid array, resulting in a natural blurring and rounding of rendered pixels through physical properties, thus projecting a softer and clearer, more pleasant image by design, as opposed to the clear cut square grid arrays on LCD displays, accentuating the jaggedness and colour scaling.

After recovering an old machine (an early Pentium setup with a CRT) from storage and checking it out for myself, I could almost not believe how better a lot of old games looked on it. I thought it was the nostalgia hitting hard.

So now, the image you get on CRT tech is what the artists originally had to work with, and naturally, how they intended it to look elsewhere. Not on crystal clear modern LCDs (except for Trinitron CRTs where involved).

There is hope, however, that with increasing resolutions, square grid displays will eventually have sufficient definition to display software-emulated CRT colour matrix reasonably well.

Yeah, its just temporary. I want an old Commodore Monitor. Problem is that old CRTs weigh a ton so the usually cost a bit to ship.

So I am on the lookout for local stuff that I can just go pick up. Until that, I am content playing it on my LCD.

 

[felipepepe]

Interesting insight, but to be fair literally all 'professional' VG review-outlets have descended into this pattern.

But I think that's the point beneath all this... these people were more like us, as niche as a codex reviewer.

Imagining Bubbles or Roxor in a modern VG outlet is insane, but they could very well fit in older, more opinionated magazines. Another famous reviewer of old I've got for the book was Ferhegón, from the Spanish magazine MicroMania. And his reviews are also "hit and miss", but you get a real sense of who he is and what he likes.

 

[Daemongar]

I heard there are writers who started out with DOS word and still use it to this day, via Dosbox

considering the abomination that Dos word was, I'm having contradicting reactions ranging from respect to utter horror

Nobody used DOS Word. Wordperfect or Wordstar were the standards for DOS. Word only took off when it became Word for Windows.

 

[animlboogy]

Interesting insight, but to be fair literally all 'professional' VG review-outlets have descended into this pattern.

But I think that's the point beneath all this... these people were more like us, as niche as a codex reviewer.

Imagining Bubbles or Roxor in a modern VG outlet is insane, but they could very well fit in older, more opinionated magazines. Another famous reviewer of old I've got for the book was Ferhegón, from the Spanish magazine MicroMania. And his reviews are also "hit and miss", but you get a real sense of who he is and what he likes.

In the era of clickbait, you'd think this would be a more common approach to reviewing. Anything that gets people talking about a review and actually visiting the page, right?

That implies a lot about just how much these people care about not rocking the boat. Certainly film criticism has no qualms in a general sense about crapping down the throat of the Michael Bays of the world.

 

[felipepepe]

Problem is, if you rock the boat too much the companies will black list you. Back then, CGW was king and companies ben to them.Now they have all this power, and it gets hard to later get exclusive stuff, as well as work as a freelancer in other websites or take the Vidya Gaem PR prestige class later on.

Seriously, most of gaming journalism issues comes from how they are all paid shit and fear for their jobs/work as freelancers, so they can't do anything potentially dangerous. Like, who is gonna criticize Polygon or Kotaku if they contract a bunch of freelances regularly? The hired staff has some stability, but if they are hired you can bet they drank the Kool-Aid.

 

[pippin]

I heard there are writers who started out with DOS word and still use it to this day, via Dosbox

considering the abomination that Dos word was, I'm having contradicting reactions ranging from respect to utter horror

Nobody used DOS Word. Wordperfect or Wordstar were the standards for DOS. Word only took off when it became Word for Windows.

Oh man, i still remember WordPerfect.

Interesting insight, but to be fair literally all 'professional' VG review-outlets have descended into this pattern.

But I think that's the point beneath all this... these people were more like us, as niche as a codex reviewer.

Imagining Bubbles or Roxor in a modern VG outlet is insane, but they could very well fit in older, more opinionated magazines. Another famous reviewer of old I've got for the book was Ferhegón, from the Spanish magazine MicroMania. And his reviews are also "hit and miss", but you get a real sense of who he is and what he likes.

In the era of clickbait, you'd think this would be a more common approach to reviewing. Anything that gets people talking about a review and actually visiting the page, right?

That implies a lot about just how much these people care about not rocking the boat. Certainly film criticism has no qualms in a general sense about crapping down the throat of the Michael Bays of the world.

Clickbait means people has to click, not to read. Notice how sometimes articles are divided into pages instead of being posted in one page only.

 

[SwiftCrack]

Top 20 reasons these games are racist.

25 pages to click through with no direct method to go to a specific page


(and somehow these sites are not dead yet)

 

[Dorateen]

Four pages and no reveal of JVC's accurate portrayal of Scorpia in Might & Magic III?

 

[Severian Silk]

That's just low....

 

[SwiftCrack]

Salty before it was a meme.

 

[aweigh]

It is commonly accepted even by the General Audience that modern-day movies are by default worse movies than those of the 70s and 80s and 90s. This does not impact actual movie ticket sales and the like, or the marketing, as people will always want to go and see a brand new movie because it is exactly that, new.

However in video-gaming it is commonly accepted by the General Audience that modern-day games are by default better than those video games of the 80's and 90's. It is very hard to argue that this is true especially when one looks at how badly new games are designed.

Why does the video game marketing affect the minds of the General Audience of game players in a stronger fashion than the marketing for movies; to the point where it dictates what game players supposedly want to play in a new video game?

I believe it has to do with the video game industry still being relatively young whereas the movie industry has been around for so long that the cycles of "dumbing down" of film have had decades' worth of time to allow the General Audience to teach itself what they like in film in generational gaps, while in the video game industry we are still currently living in the 1st generation of video game players.

 

[mindx2]

Johnny Wilson is an interesting character in his own right. A games magazine editor who is also a professor and Christian pastor and theologian. Here's an interview with him from 2012.

I have a feeling Johnny and I would have gotten along quite well. We have a lot of similar views.

 

[A horse of course]

Is Wilson the one that caused some controversy after a mass shooting by saying that violent games played a small part in it? I vaguely remember CGW responding to a bunch of angry emails (though not as many as the vampire chick cover). Interesting to read those comments Infinitron stole/copypasta'd, as reading through CGW there is clearly some tension between Scorpia and the editorial staff, who seemed annoyed at her refusal to do scores.

Anyway, anything's better than those stupid, myopic Jeff Green entries.

 

[pippin]

If that vampire chick cover is april 99's issue (no. 177), then that same issue has the Scorpia guide to character building in BG1. http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?year=1999&pub=2&id=177

 

[BobtheTree]

It is commonly accepted even by the General Audience that modern-day movies are by default worse movies than those of the 70s and 80s and 90s. This does not impact actual movie ticket sales and the like, or the marketing, as people will always want to go and see a brand new movie because it is exactly that, new.

The fuck is this shit. Probably only true if you only watch mainstream American movies. Arthouse/world cinema is amazing right now. At least as good as the 90s. Probably better. Maybe as good as the 70s.

 

[Bubbles]

The 90s were a dire time for movies, so it's not such a great feat to be better. Though I liked Underground a lot, and that's a very 90s film.

 

[aweigh]

Average shot length + use of special effects = better in the 70's and 80's. Even "arthouse" cinema of today features an average shot length of no more than 5 seconds, which is woeful.

 

[Bubbles]

Average shot length + use of special effects = better in the 70's and 80's. Even "arthouse" cinema of today features an average shot length of no more than 5 seconds, which is woeful.

Is Birdman one of your favorite films?