Hacker CinemaThe Portal: The Hessdalen Light Phenomenon
2007 · Film · 47 min
Hessdalen is a small valley in the central part of Norway. At the end of 1981 through 1984, residents of the Valley became concerned and alarmed about strange, unexplained lights that appeared at many locations throughout the Valley. Hundreds of lights were observed. At the peak of activity there were about 20 reports a week. Assistant professor Erling Strand, the founder of the Hessdalen project, conducted together with the author the first international congress of the Hessdalen phenomena in 1994. This congress attracted scientists from all over the world and boosted the scientific research in Hessdalen. Lights are still being observed in the Hessdalen Valley, but their frequency has decreased to about 20 observations a year.The following is the conclusions from over 25 years of research and after Italian SETI scientists got involved with much more highly sophisticated equipment.
5 positive4 neutralfrom 9 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
9 comments on Hacker News
I'm not sure I would agree with TLOU, but I completely agree with Portal and Bioshock.
Portal is a puzzle game with a bit of a silly story to move the puzzles along. I didn't care about the protagonist, in the same way that I don't care about the art work in a chess game. It's lovely but I'm not emotionally invested in it in the same way I'm not emotionally invested in Fast and Furious.
Bioshock 1/2/Infinite was similar. The world had been lovingly crafted, the antagonists and enemies had backstories but the main character was not anyone I cared about. Having a backstory is completely different to having a relatable protagonist that I want to see succeed.
For every Logan there are 6(?) X-Men films that are just explosions.
Those textures don't look too bad, but I'm reminded of a game that just came out (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1730590/The_Entropy_Centre/) which is basically Portal, with fancy graphics, minus any of the good writing.
Instead of the silent protagonist they have a Marvel movie-esque protagonist who keeps doing "well THAT just happened" lines after every joke so none of them actually land.
Personally, I see it as an equation of Story/atmosphere quality x mechanical pleasure x length where story is the trump card.
A game like SOMA has low mechanical pleasure (it's a walking simulator, essentially) and a short length, but the story and atmosphere are so high that I will forever remember the experience.
Cyberpunk has decent length, decent story/atmosphere (obviously this is subjective) and decent mechanical pleasure so it's a great game.
CoD has a short length, decent to high mechanical pleasure (well at least I hope so for their sake since it's supposed to be about the multiplayer shooter replayability) and low story/atmosphere because it's just a string of action movie clichés. I think that's what makes it sound very mediocre compared to Cyberpunk.
Other gamers might see mechanical pleasure as the trump card, and I can definitely understand their POV (Portal 1 for instance). I'd venture a guess that length is rarely a trump card except if you are stuck with the games you do have. Usually for length to be the most important factor, you need at least a decent degree of the two other factors to go with it. For example, what people love about Skyrim is that the basic gameplay of walking around and doing things is fun and you can just pick up the game everyday for months and still have things to do. The story is nothing special, but the atmosphere is comfy enough. You know the game is there for you when you come back from work.
I just remembered that steam made a similar move with the orange box (half-life 2, HL2:episode 1, HL2:episode 2, portal & Team Fortress 2 for 60 bucks, but you have to install steam to play) also amazingly clever. Still the best gaming deal I've ever made if you look at price v quality of games.
This is my problem with many modern games as well, they think they are movies, but the story, characters, actors, music don't quite pull it off. I love the portal/half-life games because they manage to feel movie-like without ever taking you out of the game. You can tell a good story without making a movie.
Fun fact: Anticipating that their whizzy new machine was going to be hooked up to plenty of spare televisions from attics, the Amiga developers conducted a variety of tests on as much display hardware as they could get their hands on, from high-end color computer monitors to cruddy black-and-white and color TVs from junkyards. What they found was that the four colors most readily distinguishable from each other regardless of quality of display were black, white, blue, and orange. Which is why the Amiga 1.x GUI is based around those four colors.
Blue and orange constitute one of the highest-contrast color pairs, even occupying opposing corners in the YUV color space. This explains their extensive use in movie posters -- to attract the attention. It also probably explains their prominence in the Portal games and the Reddit user interface.
It's not that most current AAA games or movies are good, it's just that I think we tend to see past ones with rose colored glasses, and to compare best of "the past" (decades) with "the present" (a few years), which is clearly unbalanced.
I was never a big fan of playing games for their stories or characters; I value gameplay over almost everything, preferring mindless fun (e.g. Metal Slug) or multiplayer games, but Portal 1 & 2 are certainly better than most of the big budget games I remember playing.
As for movies since the 2000, sure you have crap like those, but you also have decent movies like (from the top of my head) the Coen brothers', the Eternal Sunshine, Mulholland Drive, Children of Men or Crash. Were the previous decades much better? I don't think so.
> Game engines have long supported OpenGL. Mobile profiles are now more common, but if your argument is that DirectX is no longer relevant because of OpenGL -- this arguably would have happened a long time ago. Game engines were probably some of the first to support the OpenGL (even before DX and D3D became relevant).
Actually, no. The largest game engine of last generation was Unreal 3, which never had comprehensive and direct opengl support (I don't know how they hacked OSX in there) and supported the ps3 through the DRM library (handhelds were through GLES). The only U3 game ported to openGL was Dungeon Defenders for the recent Humble Bundle. If more games and engines were on opengl, porting to Linux would be a simple recompile a significant majority of the time, because they don't depend on win32 for the sake of the same cross platform behavior.
> Steambox stands a chance if they do exclusives on their platform of things like HalfLife and Portal.
They could just be the best value proposition. I don't think people will ever stop buying Xboxes, Playstations, or Wiifus since they always have first class exclusives. I just think that if the Steambox and steam sale system works, either the other platforms will have to dramatically cut prices to compete, or they will lose out on major sales. And a big difference is that Steam games work anywhere you can install Steam, and the platform is also a value proposition.
> Shield doesn't look particularly more inviting than the PSVita. I think the dedicated portable game device is probably dead.
In many ways, that is the beauty of Shield. It isn't a dedicated gaming device, it runs stock Android and has controller buttons built in. Sure, the platform isn't a great idea if you aren't going to game on it, but it can easily function as a general purpose tablet outside of gaming. I am certain one of the analog sticks on shield will behave like swiping for the purposes of app emulation. It would be nice for reading web pages. It also can act as a netflix machine, or any movie or audio player. PSVita doesn't have that luxury.
The other reason to put more faith in the Shield than Vita is that targeting Shield targets 70% of the phone market and 30% of the tablet market. It targets a platform that will continue to grow, and you release your game not as an in-store one time purchase physical flash memory card but off the Play Store and as such will be a continuous source of revenue (despite Play games selling for significantly less than console counterparts, but I imagine dedicated Android gaming platform owners will buy games).
> Ouya -- breakout success for them would be getting 1% of the market. Which they may get. It'll be niche at best.
They won't even get that. The Ouya succeeds not if they move a lot of units but if games developed for Android start supporting hardware controllers. As soon as that happens, the Ouya isn't niche at all, and games that target Android and work on it just make it a positive value proposition to complement other Android devices you already have. It runs reskinned Android though, so I don't know if it as capable as a Shield as a general media device.
> I will let you know right now what can totally change the tide in gaming... Oculus Rift (and VR headset in general). Seems easier to pull off then the MS Illumiroom and would provide a more immersive scenario. If a platform can pull this off at a reasonable price point ($99/headset max) -- I predict they win.
I'd like to see the OR work out too, but I think the market for VR headsets isn't that big. It is comparable to 3d tvs, albeit less gimmicky in most ways. I don't see myself going out of my way to stick on a helmet to play Doom 3. Then again, I didn't like the ideas behind motion controllers either, so I'm probably just outside that demographic. I like moving pictures with some buttons to press to make things happen.
I don't even try to play multiplayer games anymore, as within moments I get the feeling of time wasted. I do however, from time to time, play single-player games (like Portal, or Modern Warfare series, or more recently, Bioshock) for their artistic / story value. The best games have stories much better and deeper than most of the movies, so I find them important intellectually and artisticly.