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The question "why is this funny" is unanswerable in any context since explaining a joke robs it of it's comedy. If you want a broad answer, like what kind of tone it is, it's absurdity.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:20
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End of Shoelace posted:Here's a joke in Half-Life: Alyx. Russel says he has downloaded the entire internet. This means Russel has hundreds of gigabytes of child porn and animal torture videos on his hard drive. What does the joke tell us of Russel? That he really downloaded the internet? That he's maybe a liar? Most of the dialogue by Russel tells us that he is maybe autistic and Alyx finds him annoying.  The problem here is definitely not the humor in HLA If only there was a way to summon the goons.txt twitter account
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Mar 24, 2020 17:21
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I don't want to skim the thread in fear of spoilers. My questions are: #1 Is this game "Half-Life quality"? #2 Do I have to have VR to play this?
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Mar 24, 2020 17:24
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punk rebel ecks posted:I don't want to skim the thread in fear of spoilers. Honestly better imo and Yes
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Mar 24, 2020 17:25
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I keep getting a popup at the start that I don't have enough gpu ram, but I have a 2080ti with 11gb ram lol
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Mar 24, 2020 17:26
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SCheeseman posted:The question "why is this funny" is unanswerable in any context since explaining a joke robs it of it's comedy. If you want a broad answer, like what kind of tone it is, it's absurdity. The comedy of Groucho Marx is still funny after you explain it to someone, then the person sees it for themselves. It has an uncapturable quality in the way Groucho tells it, there are qualities of ideological critique to the point of satire (negation of a negation etc)... Groucho's jokes can be funny even if someone ELSE tells them, but the comedy of Groucho Marx is still quite unique to himself. Russel's "joke" loses potency under scrutiny because it is found to not be a joke at all. It is a joke in the sense of being written as a joke for the audience; in diegesis, the fictional universe of Half-Life: Alyx, it's just a weird lie.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:28
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massive spider posted:I think the jokes kind of mirror the players headspace as evidently the first thing anyone does when they get in the game is draw dicks on the glass and throw things at pigeons. It doesnt want to immediately tell the player to get srs. I don't suppose there's dialogue on drawing that specific shape? Russell also has some amusing lines if you check the porta-potty
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Mar 24, 2020 17:29
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Drawing a dick in a videogame is already funny. You don't need Cortana in your ear to make it funny.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:33
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Mike the TV posted:I keep getting a popup at the start that I don't have enough gpu ram, but I have a 2080ti with 11gb ram lol Huh must be some sort of bug. I have a 1080ti with the same amount of ram and it doesn’t complain. Nvidia released a new driver with changes specifically for HL:A. Are you on that new version?
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Mar 24, 2020 17:33
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End of Shoelace posted:The zombine joke is pretty nice. It's a rare, occasional joke by Alyx, giving us an idea what kind of humor she likes: very dry, taking this into context with the doctor Livingstone quip. She is awful at telling jokes, but tries regardless. It'sa very nice use of Gordon's muteness to make a second layer for the joke, as she gets no response and is left laughing by herself. There's also the more abstract joke of "combining" two things together awkwardly in the context of the Zombine itself, like the two entitities themselves, or the words Zombie and Combine. Also worth mentioning is the ironic aspect of an alien race striving for singularity finding themselves the victims of it. lol
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Mar 24, 2020 17:34
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Between Alyx and Doom Eternal I wonder if there's a suppression field out there specifically targeting goons to make them rant about writing quality I'm video games.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:36
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Huh must be some sort of bug. I have a 1080ti with the same amount of ram and it doesn’t complain. Yep. Googling tells me I'm not the only one, so definitely a bug. No issues otherwise at all.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:37
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End of Shoelace posted:The comedy of Groucho Marx is still funny after you explain it to someone, then the person sees it for themselves. It has an uncapturable quality in the way Groucho tells it, there are qualities of ideological critique to the point of satire (negation of a negation etc)... Groucho's jokes can be funny even if someone ELSE tells them, but the comedy of Groucho Marx is still quite unique to himself. It sounds like you just don't like the character, maybe you don't like people who think too highly of their own opinions and are completely lacking in self reflection. thinking emoticon.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:40
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The funniest joke I've seen in Half-Life: Alyx so far is Russel ranting about club sandwiches for five minutes but getting cut short because Alyx gets grabbed and brain-scooped by a Barnacle. A quirk in programming tells us more about him than all the writing in the game: he can ramble to Alyx inanely for stretches of time about sandwiches, but if Alyx gets strangled by an alien he can't be bothered to ask if she's ok lmaoSCheeseman posted:An ongoing joke in the Half Life universe is the ridiculous levels of technological sophistication secretive R&D labs like Black Mesa and it's scientists are capable of. This is the same universe in which Aperture Labs exists, downloading the entire internet to local storage is something that isn't out of the bounds of possibility in a universe where GlaDOS can power itself using a potato. It also isn't really a throwaway, the overly stoic definitions and trivia he doles out are implied to be from that internet cache. So it isn't even a lie, it's just true. Great joke. I dislike the character because he is badly written. End of Shoelace fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Mar 24, 2020 |
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Mar 24, 2020 17:42
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I'm really enjoying the writing and the back and forth between Alyx and Russel. I have no idea what that guy is talking about. This is easily the best Half Life game.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:42
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Is the game a "seismic shift" in VR the same way say Super Mario 64 was for 3D?Ohtsam posted:Honestly better imo and Yes I see thanks.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:46
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punk rebel ecks posted:Is the game a "seismic shift" in VR the same way say Super Mario 64 was for 3D? No, it's a good game from a very popular franchise, that happens to be a (hardware) exclusive.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:48
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I would say in the VR space it's easily Mario 64 level. As gaming as a whole probably not but in VR yes.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:50
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punk rebel ecks posted:Is the game a "seismic shift" in VR the same way say Super Mario 64 was for 3D?
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Mar 24, 2020 17:51
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punk rebel ecks posted:Is the game a "seismic shift" in VR the same way say Super Mario 64 was for 3D? It is in my opinion the best quality VR game ever made. I think of it like the first iPhone. There had been many cell phones before iPhone and the iPhone did nothing new but it did everything better.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:52
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punk rebel ecks posted:Is the game a "seismic shift" in VR the same way say Super Mario 64 was for 3D? I'd say its a big step up in quality for a VR game, game mechanics wise and story telling wise.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:52
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I wonder why the Combine rations are specifically water-flavored. You do see ads for drinking water in the city, so I'm assuming it's an attempt to have people drink the amnesia-drug mind control water. Kind of a strange choice, because surely you don't need to get used to the taste of water. Half-Life 2 did it right with the endless Chinese takeaway boxes. I'm assuming the Combine started a distribution of pork in spicy garlic sauce with extra soy sauce packets to have people drink all of Breen's Reserve in record time.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:55
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End of Shoelace posted:Here's a joke in Half-Life: Alyx. Russel says he has downloaded the entire internet. This means Russel has hundreds of gigabytes of child porn and animal torture videos on his hard drive. There's something VERY wrong with you, please stop loving posting holy poo poo.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:56
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End of Shoelace posted:So it isn't even a lie, it's just true. Great joke. That you say this right after I pretty plainly state that explaining jokes robs them of comedy (yeah I'm aware of your Groucho Marx non-sequitur) makes me pretty confident that you're full of poo poo and are likely just trolling the thread, with your bland praise about the games VR mechanics mostly serving to be an "out", as if to say that you couldn't possibly be trolling because you have an opinion that is shared with others here.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:57
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Mike the TV posted:I keep getting a popup at the start that I don't have enough gpu ram, but I have a 2080ti with 11gb ram lol Sometimes that means you have "too much" lol, games don't always recognize super high amounts of VRAM and will sometimes assume that if you don't have the expected amounts (4/8 or whatever) then it'll just freak out.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:58
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punk rebel ecks posted:Is the game a "seismic shift" in VR the same way say Super Mario 64 was for 3D? Nope. The gameplay mechanics are all things that have been done before, a lot of them better, in VR. The overall level of polish and quality, especially in the environment, is ridiculously high compared to other VR games, but it's not pushing the boundaries of what the medium can do, in the way that Mario was exploring the potential of a 3d space
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Mar 24, 2020 17:58
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End of Shoelace posted:I wonder why the Combine rations are specifically water-flavored. You do see ads for drinking water in the city, so I'm assuming it's an attempt to have people drink the amnesia-drug mind control water. Kind of a strange choice, because surely you don't need to get used to the taste of water. One thing you see in HL2 but isn't putright stated is that the combine are draining the oceans and taking all the water they can from earth. Its why the water level on the coast is so much lower than all the port infrastructure you see.
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Mar 24, 2020 17:59
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Lemming posted:Nope. The gameplay mechanics are all things that have been done before, a lot of them better, in VR. The overall level of polish and quality, especially in the environment, is ridiculously high compared to other VR games, but it's not pushing the boundaries of what the medium can do, in the way that Mario was exploring the potential of a 3d space A better example would be maybe... half-life. Its just an FPS game like Quake and uses the quake engine, but its really polished and tells a better story than Quake ever did. Alyx is the... half-life of VR games. There, I said it 
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Mar 24, 2020 18:00
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End of Shoelace posted:I wonder why the Combine rations are specifically water-flavored. You do see ads for drinking water in the city, so I'm assuming it's an attempt to have people drink the amnesia-drug mind control water. Kind of a strange choice, because surely you don't need to get used to the taste of water. I figured it was a thing like Battlefield Earth where the aliens are like "What do man-animals like to eat? We saw one eating a rat, so rats must be their favorite meal!" Also just general depressing dystopian life with no flavor or anything exciting allowed, like 1984 or Equilibrium or Logan's Run or something. It just feels so Soylent Green, "enjoy your water flavored ration, citizen".
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Mar 24, 2020 18:01
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SCheeseman posted:That you say this right after I pretty plainly state that explaining jokes robs them of comedy (yeah I'm aware of your Groucho Marx non-sequitur) makes me pretty confident that you're full of poo poo and are likely just trolling the thread, with your bland praise about the games VR mechanics mostly serving to be an "out", as if to say that you couldn't possibly be trolling because you have an opinion that is shared with others here. You think that explaining a joke robs it of its joke quality. I just simply disagree, and say that it only happens to a joke that is bad, a storyteller who is unfunny or something that is not a joke. It's also possible to think two things about one thing. Half-Life: Alyx is the best VR game to date with a lot of the quality that made HL2 explosively popular, but it is also mostly poorly written. I also admit it is as easy to critique something with specifity than it is to praise in generalities, but I have yet to see anyone defend the writing in this game in any substantial way. The writing in this game seems to be easy to critique negatively... Also, I'm not trolling. I'm talking honestly.
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Mar 24, 2020 18:04
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End of Shoelace posted:Also, I'm not trolling. I'm talking honestly. This is comedy.
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Mar 24, 2020 18:05
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https://twitter.com/FruitGhana/status/1242221435457867777 Everyone shut up and say something nice about Minnie Driver and her tiddy heart tattoo.
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Mar 24, 2020 18:06
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End of Shoelace posted:You think that explaining a joke robs it of its joke quality. I just simply disagree, and say that it only happens to a joke that is bad, a storyteller who is unfunny or something that is not a joke. 
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Mar 24, 2020 18:07
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I would totally be down for a Trespasser VR remake. The technology exists for it to work now. It is time.
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Mar 24, 2020 18:08
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End of Shoelace posted:You think that explaining a joke robs it of its joke quality. I just simply disagree, and say that it only happens to a joke that is bad, a storyteller who is unfunny or something that is not a joke. Quarantine owns
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Mar 24, 2020 18:08
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I see. Thanks everyone. One more question. Is this game worth forking over $400 or whatever the VR headset costs for? It's literally the only VR game I'd want to play.
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Mar 24, 2020 18:08
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I refuse to talk about tweets, technical specs or merchandise. I'm here to talk about Half-Life: Alyx and the Half-Life series.
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Mar 24, 2020 18:08
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punk rebel ecks posted:I see. Thanks everyone. Yeah cos after you get bored you'll maybe play Lone Echo and be blown away all over again  Honestly there will be stuff you discover that you love, there is a lot of good poo poo out now
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Mar 24, 2020 18:09
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Al Cu Ad Solte posted:https://twitter.com/FruitGhana/status/1242221435457867777 *she, both games have lady protagonists! (Hard to forget when your health meter is a boob)
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Mar 24, 2020 18:10
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My usual recommendation is Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, sort of an immersive sim ala System Shock/Deus Ex with VR interaction and physics. It's not AAA, but it's pretty close and I actually prefer some aspects to it's gameplay over Alyx.
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Mar 24, 2020 18:12
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