Hacker Cinema
Horizon Zero Dawn
Film
A live-action Horizon Zero Dawn movie is in the works at Sony Pictures. Plot TBA.
1 positive5 neutralfrom 6 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
6 comments on Hacker News
Love that episode. The relentlessness of those drones is terrifying. I hope we civilians will have countermeasures against robots like those when the time comes...
Another interesting piece of fiction: Horizon Zero Dawn. AI robots armed to the teeth, fueled by biomass, capable of reproduction via onboard factories. They had to reset the planet.
I think that all this really depends upon the game. Some are indeed designed to be more complex, yet in a good way. And there is a bit of a difference between a printed manual, and a wiki. I find that wikis often have solutions you're supposed to hunt for, where as a printed manual may tell a "story" of the land, and just give more generic "how to play" hints.
In this context, I am very much mystified by "I played through game Y in 2.5 hours!". Uh, what?! I just paid for this game, and my goal isn't to run directly to some arbitrary finish line. I want to see things. Explore things. Learn the story that is presented around me.
And I'm not referring to side-quests, although those are fun too. I mean, I've been in some games where there is just "stuff" in the world around me, and you can explore and find random info.
I'm referencing games such as "The Last of Us" re: PS3/2013 version, where you could look at newspaper boxes and make out headlines, something that didn't make it with the same legibility into the PS4 remake. (Newspapers were still to be found in the PS4 remake, but a lot of places where there were papers in newsboxes had legible headlines in the PS3 version, and just blurred stuff in the PS4 version).
To run a max speed through a game with all sorts of side-info, is like watching a plot laden movie at 5x on mute. What a waste of money, and joy.
Another example is Horizon Zero Dawn, where there were all sorts of interesting recordings to be found, and just random info to be gleamed about "what happened", regardless of other main/sub plot info. Again, to fast forward "yay I did this in 2 hours!" is madness in the extreme to me.
My point in the above is, that any sort of wiki requirement for these games is a solid ruin. What a way to reduce fun, if everything about the game, and things such as "how this world came about" is just laid out in a wiki.
Yet at the same time, I don't want all puzzles to be so easily solvable. I don't want my hand held. Imagine playing God of War, with all puzzles solvable in 1 second. Why even bother?
I wonder, there is often talk of great 'apathy' today in youth. Games are a part of youth. An example is 'hide and go seek', which in the real world teaches one how to be sneaky, how to think as another trying to hunt you, how to be clever, and just how to play with others. This game is teaching you to hunt, and to escape when being hunted!
Video games of my youth taught me puzzles, were difficult, required fast reflexes, and by no means did I think better gear was the answer to issues I was having.
Now games are often one dimensional. People look for the solve online before even playing. People have issues and 1 minute later are looking for a work around. When I was a kid, maybe I could find help by phoning a friend, but talk about embarrassing!
Yet with puzzles comes satisfaction when there is a solve.
And with easy answers, comes an empty feeling.
So back to the wiki or not, I really think there should be no wikis, because the potential for lost joy is massive.
I have not played any computer game in over more than a decade, but I played a lot earlier.
Anyway, what I did for a while - not recently due to a lack of good targets - is watch Youtube "playthrough no commentary" videos (and with story-less gameplay parts heavily cut out). That's usually 4-6 hours of game movie.
The Last of Us was good, but the very top #1 for me as far as story goes - ignoring the game play completely - was Horizon Zero Dawn. One of many such game movies for this game: https://youtu.be/W6jbYfmQAG4
That story seemed to be good but kind of stupid and the same as always, completely predictable, you already know what happened when you see the start and it's a bit stupid and too far-fetched - that kind. Until it wasn't. Turned out it wasn't just well-made, when you find out what was really going on it was THE BEST.
Not only does it have two very different stories layered (three, if you count the present time story): One about what happened to earth and its people and one layered inside of two people, the MC and a woman in the past, with seemingly no connection, until we find out the opposite is the case.
Both story-parts actually had me crying. When I found out after about four hours what had actually happened on earth, it was a great emotional shock. Same with the ending, that used the connection between the MC and that person from the past.
Even the machines and their (animal) forms make sense, there is a good and IMO satisfying explanation.
The stories in this game and in a handful of others are much better than most movies.
If you are in the mood for something really dark, watch a game movie of "SOMA". Underwater survival. Earth is gone - a giant meteor made the surface into a fiery hell, the only survivors are some researchers in a deep ocean facility. Best small detail: They get the "uploading your brain into a computer simulation" right, see the very ending of that game which shows it one last time (TL;DW: As someone who knows neuroscience, the idea makes no sense anyway, but let's forget that and assume it makes sense. What will happen is you still stand there in front of the computer, wandering what happened, after the "upload". Because you still exist, and the copy is not you. It's a copy. You still die, there is no magical connection between you and your copy.)
CDPR also owns GOG, the only major PC storefront where everything is DRM Free, at least for single-player. You can download installers from your web browser and use them without any internet connection at all, or any "client" to speak of. And GOG has been getting more and more AAA titles—Prey, Quantum Break, and Horizon Zero Dawn are all available right now!
They also have all of the Batman Arkham games! Can you imagine if Warner Brothers released DRM-Free versions of the Batman movies? That would be practically unprecedented, and yet it's relatively common for video games, largely because GoG has been pushing for it.
It would really suck if GOG got caught up in the Cyberpunk fiasco.
Something I think about is how there have been outstanding games that the majority of people will never play. Just in recent years - Red Dead I and II, Horizon Zero Dawn, Last of Us, etc. These have quality/polish up with Breaking Bad or any acclaimed movie/TV, but no one else in my extended family would have played a second of any of them. How do you bring that experience to people?
> Well, the general horror story that is being told is that intelligence and the ability to use it go hand in hand. As soon as machines surpass our intelligence, all hell breaks loose and there is no turning back.
In literature and popular culture people conflate concepts all the time. :) The way I always understood that horror story was that generic AIs get schooled pretty brutally and quickly and they learn to use anything they have access to -- thus materialising that popular horror story. I think that's not far fetched, having in mind that the organisations that are very serious about obtaining a true AI are mostly corporations and military.
> Here is where I need some more convincing.
Maybe here I got influenced by popular culture. The books and movies I've read and watched mostly setup the generic AIs in situations where they have to be either parasites (Hyperiond / Endymion books) or commandeer a lot of tech and personnel (entrusted to them, like Skynet in the Terminator franchise) for their own ends.
But to me, the mere fact that a future generic AI doesn't have body and emotions like our own already means it's not going to be at all motivated by the same things as us. And we might even serve some pretty grim purposes to it, like the robots recharging themselves with organic matter in the PS4 game "Horizon: Zero Dawn" (which of course leads to consumption and thus extinction of all life).
Meaning, an AI might just view us as a natural resource to be exploited, and nothing more.