Not every Fallout 4 mod is created equal, and this new project channels the often-attempted “DLC-sized expansion with new voice acting” angle and seems to absolutely nail it, with new quests, characters, and even a new ending to the base game as well. If you want an excuse to dive back into Fallout 4, one of Bethesda’s best RPG games, this is an excellent excuse.
MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Fallout 4 console commands, Fallout 4 mods, Buy Fallout 4
Kurt Russell is the preeminent example of gruff, masculine swagger, injecting his performances with a vigorous presence no matter the role. Considering all of his muscly, mustachioed charms, it's a wonder that he hasn't been in more Westerns. That could be simply because films about the frontier aren't quite as common now as they used to be, but the actor takes his choice of roles in the genre seriously. Both "Tombstone" and 2015's "Bone Tomahawk" appealed to Russell, not because of their brutal action, but because of their dialogue, both refreshing to him in their own unique ways.
To be fair, Westerns have inspired Russell's roles, even if the films themselves weren't strictly in the Western genre. There's no mistaking that Snake Plissken in "Escape from New York" is at least partly an impression of Clint Eastwood's The Man with No Name, and Russell's role as Jack Burton in "Big Trouble in Little China" feels like a John Wayne parody. Still, Russell was well into his career before landing the role of Wyatt Earp in "Tombstone," released in 1993. The production was a hectic one, initially installing screenwriter Kevin Jarre in the director's chair before replacing him with George P. Cosmotos. Russell helped modify the script and, according to some on set like co-star Val Kilmer, took up a bulk of directing duties to see the project to completion.
Kevin Jarre based "Tombstone" on historical events and real people, even if, in true Western tradition, they were exaggerated for the sake of storytelling. In contrast, the premise of "Bone Tomahawk" is ripped straight out of a pulp magazine (including some controversial themes that date back to that era), combining Western elements with horror and "weird fiction." Russell points out, however, that the film's dialogue sounds remarkably natural, explaining that a movie about cannibalistic cave-dwelling mutants ironically portrays less of an exaggerated take on late nineteenth-century speech patterns than a classic John Wayne Western:
"I love 'The Searchers.' I think it's a cool movie. But the dialogue style? No way. It can't compare to 'Bone Tomahawk' or something like 'Tombstone.' This is much more of that true flavor. This makes you feel that this could actually be some weird little town in 1897 that is just out there where nobody knows where everything really is. The people talked this way. I believe that. I don't think this is a Hollywood western dialogue movie. This has a style to it. It lends itself much more to the credibility of reality than almost all westerns. It doesn't have a modern day sound to it."
Although the plot of "Tombstone" is much more grounded in reality, Russell seemed attracted to the way both films used their dialogue to humanize their characters. Westerns are known for mythologizing historical figures, but "Tombstone" and "Bone Tomahawk" brings the Western down to sandy earth, even if they both still embrace extravagance in the end. The former aims for an intimate portrayal of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, the latter wants its heroes to feel like ordinary men before the creatures come for their meat.
Read this next: The 20 Best Westerns Of All Time
The post How Bone Tomahawk Reminded Kurt Russell Of Tombstone appeared first on /Film.
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Few things are harder to start than a narrative of the thing you “do” and what all the ramifications of it are. For people who don’t make it the center of their lives, your thing is already hopelessly complicated and gaining enough of a foothold to feign interest is olympic-level effort. For people who do make it the center, your description fills them with a never-abating dread that you’re going to get the explanation “wrong”, or that you’re going to give the Outsiders a bad impression.
So let’s begin at the beginning, again.
My parents’ divorce, taking place in the realm of the beginning of the 1980s, was not in any way friendly and in fact rather contentious. I wasn’t yet a teenager, and I was the oldest, and most notable for the purposes of this story, my mother gathered up her children and scooted off to first a hotel and then a location with family, without telling my father where she had taken us. In modern parlance, the term is “child abduction”, although I’m sure my mother didn’t think that’s what she was doing. Ultimately, connections were made, a nasty divorce proceeding happened, nobody was shot, stabbed, restrained, or attacked.
But in many presentations I’ve given, I mark the moment of being scuttled out of the family home into the great unknown of Outside The Neighborhood as being when my focus and awareness of the world fundamentally changed, because as she put things into the station wagon and tearfully told her kids to get ready to go, she also asked us to take what we needed. Which is a difficult question for someone in the realm of ten years old.
I needed a blanket and my dog.
Woven into the simple declaration take what you need are a host of world and perspective-changing understandings of what you and need are. Let’s not overplay the trauma aspect of it all, and focus on the concepts being dropped on me and my siblings, which first and foremost is a crumbling of rock-solid foundations. Foundations of family, to be sure, but also possession, consistency and location. Home was no longer an immutable realm, but split into multiple locations, one inevitably a favorite, with the other a shadow of the concept of home. Possessions stopped becoming things you could walk out of sight from and be a hundred percent sure (maybe 90-95 percent sure) they’d be there when you came back. And most effective on me was the idea that lack of effort to maintain the talismans and protocols of representation would result in a void. Put more simply: You’re the keeper of yourself and of what matters. There is no consistency that will protect you.
Like a lot of knowledge, this came at some level of heavy price, although I again stress the price is one many others pay at much greater cost. The fact remains that both my parents bent over backwards to provide opportunities, to ensure comfort and food and connection as best they could, and while I can sit back in my fifties and leave notes as to my parents’ actions in their thirties, my own thirties were spent in hacker conventions, shooting films and stumbling through my own home life, so I’m quite the unqualified judge.
This is all to say that when Chris Boufford showed me an acoustic modem in his grandparents’ spare room and how, by calling another number in Mount Kisco and putting the receiver of the phone into a cradle you’d suddenly get words on the screen, I had lived a life up to that point where two thoughts came almost simultaneously:
This is amazing.
I need to save this before it inevitably disappears.
I couldn’t have known that in the years afterwards, I would in fact collect so many artifacts from this thing, this concept of the Bulletin Board System, that I’d meet many of the people responsible for it existing, that this pile of artifacts would get a name and a branding, and that I’d collect it all so hard that I’d end up being associated with the concept of it for a lifetime. But I definitely understood, taught as I was during that painful childhood lesson, that inaction would be tantamount to approving its destruction and disappearance.
Calling as I did to many BBSes in my teen years, I’d focus on the textfiles, the message bases, the downloadable files, because they felt, I think, like special missives from beyond my little life and easily kept on floppy disks. When disks were the main way to store computer data for home users, you would encounter two kinds of people: folks who kept a small, special set of floppies representing what they needed, and others who had vast, terrifyingly large collections representing not what they needed but what they thought should be held in trust. I’ve gone through a lot of these collections over the years, and have seen rooms full of these things, hundreds and sometimes thousands, representing homemade bunkers of data. I had my own bunker, and while it was only a few dozen, the relative smallness of textfiles meant that each disk could hold many, many examples of these artifacts I thought deserved whatever long life I could provide.
At what point does a hoarder of data, driven by a sense of loss and of fear of same, turn from a mere accumulation of piles and end up with something resembling an archive?
I can point to various choices I was making in my teenage years with textfiles as the whole endeavor being more than just a private copy of things I liked: creating capsule descriptions of the textfiles for my own BBS, giving them unique extensions (HUM, PHK, HAC, PRO) to classify them in general genre headers, and attempting to keep the authorship and context of the files in the form of “buffers”, just saving all the output of a BBS to keep a record of where the files came from. I can find in my stacks actual essays I’d written about what these files were, and throwing my own writings in amongst everyone else’s so my own works wouldn’t be lost.
My college years were where all of it could easily have come to naught. New city, new goals, explorations and discovering my new set of interests could have led to my younger days and their collections being scattered to the wind. In a series of lucky maneuvers and chances across that period, I did not lose my textfiles and floppies and printouts, and they persisted for about 8 years in my hands and in the hands of a friend, David Weinstock, who kept things I was “done with” and critically asked me if I wanted them back. And by the time he asked, I did want them back. My own collection and archive, itself, came at the same risk of entropy and disappearance but the spinning wheel fell on “save” and I had them all again.
In my twenties is when I start creating The Warrens.
I don’t have a lot of handy photos of all the Warrens, and maybe that’s a compilation I need to add back here as I find them again. But over and over again, I turn wherever I’m living, or a single room within it, into a cramped, filled-to-the-brim, often deeply concerning space of materials. These will be favorite books, personal collections of memories, computer hardware and software, and an ever-growing set of amusements and pieces into my own functioning workspace. “Work”, in many cases, being the day-to-day activities of a geek browsing online things or playing with some sort of toy or tool, but surrounded by all the possibilities and options at arm’s length should my shifting focus switch to a new attraction.
I create Warrens a lot. Casting my net backwards, I count six of them, and each one a tiring memory to me, as I consider how much effort it took to build them up, and then inevitably pull them apart.
While it’s fundamentally silly to think each Warren was going to be the absolute last, there was definitely an approach and plan with each one to improve what came before. Bins instead of piles, thematic groupings instead of simple shelves of one kind of medium, and so on. Ultimately, though, they all have had flaws and they’ve all had a lifespan. My life changes and the Warrens soon collapse like a circus tent and travel to the next stop.
The site called TEXTFILES.COM caused me to regard not only my collection but the contributions of others, and the resulting documentary that I shot about bulletin board systems put me in a lot of homes with a lot of similar Warrens, and somewhere along that continuum, I found myself constructing an awareness of the types of items being collected by me and others, and giving them classifications. In more and more cases, I started to take on others’ collections as well, which forced me to think about it even harder.
Here’s what a few decades of this cobbled together in my mind:
When we end up with our physical and digital piles of material, there’s a couple grand classifications that help parse what we’ve got, and for some folks, they need this to process the next steps to take, especially if they’re overwhelmed. And those classifications are things that are you, things held in trust, and things held in indifference.
Things that are you tends to be stuff that you’ve created, be it writings, photos or saved data that represents projects or memories, and which is relevant as your trail of effect through your lived life. E-mails you’ve written, images you’ve made, and the inevitable works we consciously or unconsciously create as people. These items are not necessarily precious, but they are often rare – you have the only copy or item, only you maintain it. And in fact, only you may see any value in it or understand what it is.
Things held in trust are items that may or may not have deep meaning or relevance to you, but which you acquired from without – the downloaded programs, or bought books, or a six-foot statue you won an auction for years ago. You didn’t make these things, and there may be many copies of them, or you again might have the only one: but if they’re not part of your functioning life, then I consider them “held in trust”, as a caretaker keeps maintaining a garden or structure, towards some future.
Things held in indifference are all those pieces of life that acquire around a certain personality – ranging from discarded envelopes from packages you got, to motherboards and loose screws from machines long gone and pamphlets from trips and travel that you shoved into a suitcase and then forgot about. Some personality types (say, someone who remembers that time long ago he had to give up everything to take what he needed) might impulsively acquire things and then forget about them almost immediately. These collections can overlap with the items held in trust or the things that are the person’s own creations, as well.
When I give advice to people on what to do when they wake up one day and realize they have 2,000 CD-ROMs or piles of magazines they’ll never read, or stacks of VHS tapes of shows they bought 20 years ago and now will never watch, is help them reach the “end of the story”. People want a story, and they want the story to have a happy ending. I advise them on how to frame that story:
..but then, after asking a number of message boards and confidantes about what to do about this multi-gigabyte zip of Wojacks, the collector uploaded them to a website, finally resting knowing this long-gathered precious trust of meme juice would survive another generation. The End.
..but in a shocking twist, it turned out there was a weirdo working for an Archive of the Internet who wanted these stacks of CD-ROMs and floppies, and they offered a home which immediately cleared up that part of the garage, allowing the lawnmower to finally be stored inside, The End.
…having discovered that there are plenty of National Geographic issues to go around and there was no need to keep them around, our hero contacted a local old folks’ home and donated them to the residents’ library, where they were happily passed around and enjoyed for years to come. The End.
What is now past a decade working for the Internet Archive has meant that I’m working in both physical and digital concerns, and each one has challenges and its own peculiar qualities. Millions of items are being shipped to large warehouses controlled by Internet Archive, and millions of files and “items” are being added to the online presence. In some cases, they live in both places, existing in boxes in pallets in shipping containers in rooms in a building, and also inside a .zip file inside an identifier inside a search result on a website.
I’ve concocted ideas, then, on Archiving.
It’s probably as good a time as now to say that I am not universally beloved as a figure or authority. I am not a professionally trained archivist, but I’ve spent my entire life somewhere in the discipline, and it is not hard, if you seek them out, to find people who consider my very existence in the field to be a cavalcade of gaps in judgement by the world and by, perhaps, destiny itself. Why, in a world overflowing with top-notch expertise by individuals educated by some of the finest academic programs and concerns, would this street-wise dandy be considered the one to listen to?
Well, for one thing, I’m fuckin’ hilarious. But I also think it’s because I come to a lot of my conclusions and efforts from the point of view of ad-hoc need and not because I read somewhere that it’s where I should be putting my resources towards. I made a documentary about bulletin boards because I was concerned many of these people would die and there’d be no record of them and their perspective; and I was right. Doing this work put me in touch with lives and people who had collections that lacked a specific interest by established institutions, and so I was the one who helped keep them around, or even take them personally. And when the time came for me to join forces with Internet Archive, I was already strongly my own thing and it was a partnership, not a subsumption.
And so from this situation comes a pile of general credos and rules of thumb I’ve picked up in my travels:
Where possible, save the original. Where possible, digitize the original or maintain a digital copy. Ephemera and transient content is just as important to maintain as products and projects. Digitize at the highest resolution and fidelity possible, but realize you’re never going to get it perfect and keep the originals around, if you can. Make digital copies as widely available as possible, all the time, so it finds its value to people seeking it.
It seems pretty basic stuff, but some of it is hotly contested and virtual ink spilled by the gallon about process, style and considerations along the way. It’s what works for me, and on the whole, it’s been a succcess.
In this world-view, one of the critical parts of the whole aspect of “archiving” is making that digital copy of something physical or analog, using tools and equipment to do so. Naturally, “Born Digital” items merely need to be kept around and maintained, but items that are sitting in another medium or container need to make the leap over the Air Gap into virtual/digital reality and that’s where it gets complicated.
I’ve been asked, in all manner of ways, what the most difficult part of the process is – is it tracking down items to work on, or finding the right order, or devising which video container codec is best for a ripping of a VHS tape, the DPI of a paper scan, or which equipment stack is best for the job?
No, none of that.
It’s the crushing loneliness.
It’s the functional experience of facing down a pile of things that are in one format, and doing whatever steps are taken, over and over, to convert them into another form: the loading of the papers into the feed reader, the stacking of CD-ROMs into a ripping device, the constant movements of putting tapes into tape players and turning the capturing software on and off, typing in the filenames with metadata information as it’s done. Doing it endlessly, facing down hundreds and sometimes thousands of components in a single “collection” with lots of potential for mistakes, do-overs, unexpected failures, and all the bumps in the road for what seems like a very straightforward task.
It’s slowly grinding through a backlog of promises and easily-said agreements to turn This into That, and then finding hours, days, and weeks of your life drained out of you, resulting in barely enough data to fill a percentage of a modern hard drive.
The secret-not-so-secret is a lot of this work falls under “it should be paid for”, because it requires just enough mental capacity as to not be automation-ready, but the minute-to-minute joy of it is absolutely minimal, repetitive, and only enjoyable in the rear view mirror looking back at all the stuff you did. The occasional bright gem of something truly interesting and weird won’t make up for the hundreds of times you’ll be getting a necessary but basic item hoisted into digital, and after enough time, you just wear out.
When I started digitizing VHS tapes en masse, I did a bunch of research and asking a number of people how they approached the task, and an interesting theme of conclusions came out: Most were working with a specific set of items, and most of them burnt out after 20 to 50 tapes. Almost nobody went past that amount, even when they had many more to do.
My solution, then, was to Stream.
For the years I’ve been doing the fundamentally boring VHS and U-Matic tape ripping as part of my projects, I’ve almost always had a stream going on Twitch. It’s at https://twitch.tv/textfiles and it has ranged from a non-camera showing of what was being digitized to a full-on just-short-of-a-televised-show experience, while I move through piles of cassettes stacked to the ceiling from donated sets.
In this way, I’ve digitized (at this juncture) over two thousand videotapes, with many more to come.
The initial work was being done out of my actual apartment, which made sense until it really, really didn’t.
The nature of this sort of project is spare parts, awaiting cardboard boxes, and a mildew smell that starts to hit you when you walk in. At some phase of life, this is tolerable, but just like separating things that are you from things held in trust, it’s better to have a dedicated workshop away from a living space.
So, I started renting an office.
It’s in one of those facilities where they have dozens of rental rooms and has a set of group amenities like a kitchen, copy room, and even meeting rooms. Obviously, it cost more than just stuffing everything into my home, but the separation has turned out to be particularly healthy, both in terms of knowing what lying around is my own stuff, and what is destined for long-term storage after being digitized.
After consulting with my friend Kyle, I re-imagined the entire “streaming” approach to be focused on the image, and having it both look good, and look informative. The result is striking:
People have asked what the huge monitor is, behind me. I’ll answer that one straight off – it’s a cheap LCD TV, purchased for my apartment and long-since superseded by others but still working enough to look fine on a camera. The lighting is from two $25 LED lights designed for the purpose, along with a webcam aimed down the maw of the U-Matic tape device, since I have to keep the top off anyway (constant cleaning). The camera recording me is a mirrorless DSLR (a few hundred dollars) in constant monitor mode, and sending it all to a HDMI-to-USB Camlink.
Some time in the future, let me go into further detail of The Setup and the Toolchain, which a certain segment of audience can’t get enough of, and another can’t stand a smidgen of.
Instead, let me say that what’s obvious, looking in the context of my full life with this endeavor, is that I’ve built yet another Warren.
Cameras and framing are very deceiving. The room is tiny, barely 70 square feet. The day I toured the facility and was sent the stack of paper I needed to sign up for a year of long-term residence, they included a “typical” picture, which is either my office or the one next to it, and the difference is striking:
Because of the equipment, it runs very hot in there. Because I’ve got all the projects going on from so many sources, it’s also a bit noisy. Filters on my studio microphone prevent my audience from hearing the never-ending humming.
Composing the dull, generic room that I was given into the cyber-scape of fluorescent dreams that now appears on the Twitch stream has been a multi-year project. Tapes and other products move in, get processed, boxed up, shipped out. Streams have been a few minutes or many hours, depending on what I’m focused on and what time permits. And because I have a dedicated space, I can be very loud, very intense, and be able to speak freely on subjects without worrying I’m ruining anyone’s living conditions or sleep. It has worked spectacularly.
But again, the real purpose of this Warren is to share – to share with people online (thousands of them, over the years) with what I’m up to, to have conversations or debates through chat and phones, and to be able to conduct myself in a way that doesn’t feel like a prison sentence, even if the space I’m functioning in resembles a jail cell a little too much.
I know this set of decisions and designs is not for everyone. Not everyone wants to yammer constantly while doing their job to a shifting, weird audience of onlookers. Not everyone feels they need multi-colored lights and a massive background video to conduct themselves, but not everyone is processing thousands of videotapes all their waking hours, with a dreary consistency that would have long-ago wrenched all joy and delight from the occasional discoveries. Even with my motivations to archive and share being life-long, and my individual cramped spaces being laboratories that I use to experiment and improve my processes, it turns out that isolation didn’t give me focus – audiences do.
Here, in the contemporary time of my archiving life, really an archiving lifetime, is me now trying to turn the promise of endless stacks of media and materials into digital form, to make them reachable to the world, before something, and there’s more than a few somethings up to the task, takes me out of the game. It’s a life born of a tragedy, but that tragedy caused perspective, and that perspective has given me an awareness of how much has been done and how much is left to do.
From my cramped Warren launches hundreds of recorded moments, and maybe, with the help of a kind set of eyes, I’ll get a lot more of the work ahead done.
The twitch stream is at https://twitch.tv/textfiles. See you there.
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Few actors have enjoyed a Hollywood career like Academy Award winner Christian Bale. An artist utterly devoted to his craft whose films have totaled over $5 billion at the worldwide box office, Bale's career has traversed plenty of peaks and valleys since his jaw-dropping performance in Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun," back in 1987 -- we don't talk about "Mio in the Land of Faraway" -- and he continues to demonstrate an incredible ability to transform into an assortment of unforgettable characters. Whether he's playing Batman or a murderous psychopath, Bale's intense commitment allows him to disappear into roles big and small to a frightening degree. In fact, at times, he's so good I often forget I'm watching an actor.
Now, I could rank Bale's top performances, but that would be too easy -- hint: Number one on my list would be "The Fighter." Instead, I thought it would be fun to sift through his vast portfolio and highlight Bale's 15 greatest movie moments -- no easy feat, mind you. There are so many outstanding bits to choose from, but the following list consists of the scenes that most stood out to me from Bale's storied career.
In 2005, Christian Bale slipped into the cape and cowl and became our new Dark Knight in Christopher Nolan's impressive "Batman Begins." Eager viewers had to wait an hour to see the hero appear. Luckily, Nolan rewarded our patience by delivering one helluva introduction.
Following a lengthy prologue that shows how orphaned billionaire Bruce Wayne (Bale) attained the skills required to serve as Gotham's savior, Batman interrupts a drug pickup at the nearby city docks and picks off a group of criminals one at a time. Nolan shoots the sequence like a slasher film. Gun-toting baddies disappear into the shadows; others flee in terror, and Batman swoops in and carries them off into the night. He eliminates the remaining forces and sets his sights on a nearby car containing crime boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson).
"What the hell are you," Falcone mutters as the unseen attacker lands atop his vehicle. Glass shatters. A hand reaches in and brings Falcone face to face with the Dark Knight. "I'm Batman," our hero growls before lifting Falcone into the air. The iconic moment captures Bale's ferocious new take on Batman, a superhero far more fierce than any we had ever seen. While some took umbrage with the raspy voice, I've always felt it matches the character's monstrous personality. Here, we have a Batman who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty, a hero as demented and menacing as the criminals he battles. In short, he's magnificent.
Long before he hit his stride as Batman in 2005, Christian Bale was that kid from Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun." The story, based on the book of the same name by J.G. Ballard, follows a young posh British kid named Jim (Bale), who spends World War II in a Japanese internment camp where he matures from wide-eyed youth to world-weary adult.
A key sequence occurs midway through the film when Jim gets caught up in a bombing run performed by attacking American P-51 Mustangs. An avid fan of planes in general, Jim rushes to the top of a pagoda and locks eyes with one of the pilots, who, in turn, waves to the overzealous boy. Overjoyed, Jim raises his hands and declares, "P-51, Cadillac of the skies!"
It's a powerful cinematic moment brought to vivid life by Spielberg's impeccable, dream-like direction, Allen Daviau's gorgeous cinematography, John Williams' breathtaking score, and Bale's dazzling performance. Indeed, this might be my favorite scene out of any on this list for its raw emotion, power, and the way it juxtaposes Jim's boyish naïveté with the striking horrors of war.
In 2009, Michael Mann released "Public Enemies," the (mostly) true tale of famed criminal John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), who embarked on a series of bank robberies across America following his escape from prison in 1933. Christian Bale co-stars as the soft-spoken Melvin Purvis, the man tasked by J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) to bring Dillinger to justice, whose devout dedication often clashes with his moral consciousness.
We see this struggle in a scene involving Dillinger's love interest, Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). Members of the FBI capture Billie, tie her to a chair, and mercilessly interrogate her using physical force. Before the situation gets too out of hand, however, Purvis arrives and carries Billie to safety while his fellow agents stare in astonishment.
Purvis is unique in that he fundamentally believes in Hoover's mission, but disagrees with his no-holds-bar approach to the law. His saving of Billie serves as an inflection of the film's overarching battle between moral integrity and the need to achieve justice, and a reminder that the good guys aren't always operating on the right side of the law. It's arguably the best scene in "Public Enemies" and one of the most potent of Bale's career.
In the dark drama "The Prestige," Christian Bale portrays Alfred Borden, a magician on the rise in 1890s London, who engages in a violent game of obsession with Hugh Jackman's Robert "The Great Danton" Angier. Eventually, the two men meet at a crossroads. Alfred is in prison for allegedly murdering Angier. However, Angier is very much alive and makes his presence known to his rival on the day of Alfred's scheduled death by hanging.
"All I wanted to do was prove I was the better magician," Angier says matter-of-factly. Yikes.
Angier is indeed a great magician, but Alfred still manages to one-up him even in death. After his execution, during which Alfred whispers, "Abracadabra" to no one in particular, he reappears to Angier at a playhouse. How? Alfred is actually Freddy, an identical twin to the real Alfred. The brothers took turns playing the part of Alfred, but the trick, unfortunately, got out of hand, leading to Freddy's death. Now, only Alfred remains, and he murders Angier to break the cycle of violence.
This twist stands as arguably one of the most shocking in cinema history, a secret hidden in plain sight that only the most astute viewers will catch. It's the perfect end to a near-flawless film.
Full disclosure: David O. Russell's "The Fighter" is one of my all-time favorite sports films. The drama about real-life boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and his problematic relationship with his eccentric family always strikes a nerve.
Christian Bale co-stars as Dicky, Micky's wayward brother, a once-promising fighter whose career was cut short due to cocaine addiction, and who now lives vicariously through his brother. Following a tumultuous sparring session, Micky's crew breaks into two factions: his family in one corner and Charlene (Amy Adams), the love of his life, in the other. Dicky realizes Micky needs both parties to succeed and sets out to make things right with Charlene.What follows is perhaps the best scene of the film, during which Dicky uses his gift for gab (replete with plenty of f-bombs) to persuade Charlene to return to his brother's side. Bale's performance in the film is an all-timer, but this moment gives him plenty of room to strut his stuff. He's incredible as Dicky, a broken man trying to glue the various pieces of his soul back together, fighting his neurotic tendencies. When Micky arrives moments later and says, "You were my hero," we can't help but get teary-eyed when Dicky, walking alone down the street, quietly responds: "I was. I was." Movies don't get much better than this.
Never let it be said that Christian Bale isn't a funny guy. One need only check out the darkly humorous "American Psycho" for proof. Bale stars as Patrick Bateman, a clean-cut investment banker who spends his nights brutally murdering innocent people.
In an iconic scene, Patrick lures a business chum named Paul (Jared Leto) to his apartment to listen to some Huey Lewis and the News. An intoxicated Paul has no reason to fear his co-worker. He doesn't question why there are newspapers laid underneath his chair. Nor does he suspect foul play when Patrick appears wearing a plastic see-through poncho. Instead, he listens to Patrick's boisterous speech about "Hip to be Square," and only freaks out when the man shouts, "Hey Paul!" moments before bludgeoning him with an axe.
Bale is magnetic in this sequence. He uses his goofy charm to keep his victim (and the audience) at bay, then quite literally morphs into a horrifying monster. There's a great bit where Patrick steps away to put on his plastic garb and then stares at himself in the mirror. We see his transformation into a ravenous murderer in real-time, a steely resolve slowly spreading over his face. When Patrick attacks Paul, you can practically see the pent-up aggression depart his body with each wild swing. He's a unique villain, free of empathy but not entirely unlikable. This moment catapulted Bale to the big leagues.
Long before John Wick avenged his dog, Christian Bale used gun kata to take down a group of officers (working for a totalitarian government, no less) after they discovered a puppy hiding in the trunk of his car. It's complicated. Suffice to say, this future dystopian society doesn't take kindly to cute and cuddly animals, necessitating Bale's John Preston to break out some wicked moves to protect his furry pal.
"Equilibrium" is more "Matrix" knockoff than an original sci-fi extravaganza. Still, the film has plenty going for it and, at the very least, ushered in an era of Bale, the action star. The puppy sequence, in many ways, reflects our first look at Bale as a square-jawed hero, and he slides into the part like a glove.
Bouncing about with all the grace of a trench coat-wearing ballerina, Preston swiftly makes mincemeat of his foes before posing like a boss, light rays emanating from behind his person. Say what you will about the remaining film, but Bale was born to play a badass, and this bit in "Equilibrium" placed him front and center for all the world to see.
Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" pits Christian Bale's Batman against Heath Ledger's anarchist Joker with beyond-stunning results. The duo square off multiple times throughout the picture, most memorably during an interrogation scene set at Gotham City Police Department. After a wild chase through Gotham, Batman and Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) lock the Joker behind bars. However, when Harvey Dent goes missing, Batman confronts the Clown Prince of Crime, leading to one of the best moments in comic book movie history.
The dialogue -- "You complete me!" -- acting, and ferocity of the sequence are flawless. Bale portrays Batman as a man trying to maintain his composure, even as the Joker threatens everything (and everyone) he holds dear. Eventually, he snaps and pummels his foe repeatedly, and Joker merely laughs off his vicious attacks.
"You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength," Joker snarls. This is the moment in "The Dark Knight" where things drastically turn for the worst. Batman finally sees Joker for what he is: an unstoppable, even cunning, unpredictable force of nature who, as Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) foreshadowed earlier, wants to see the world burn. Taut, well-executed, and undeniably intense, the interrogation scene encompasses everything great about "The Dark Knight."
For "The Machinist," Christian Bale slimmed down to 120 pounds to portray Trevor Reznik, a man dealing with grief resulting from a past incident. Creepy, haunting, and unreasonably grim, "The Machinist" is an engrossing psychological deep dive into the dark pits of despair, highlighted by Bale's go-for-broke performance.
Director Brad Anderson paints Trevor as a pathetic figure trapped in a personal hell of his making, drenched in moody grays and heavy shadows. "The Machinist" is borderline horror with its gruesome imagery, frightening monsters, and incredibly dark subject matter. Indeed, in arguably the film's most memorable bit, Trevor visits a haunted house called Hell Ride on Route 666 and relives memories he tried hard to suppress. This is where everything comes together, and we see a realization on Trevor's face even as he tries to make light of the situation: "This is one heck of a ride," he quips after seeing dismembered body parts and a man hanging next to a "Guilty" sign.
At one point, he and Nicholas (Matthew Romero), his traveling companion, reach a fork in the road -- right to salvation or left to Hell. Naturally, they go left, much to Trevor's annoyance, and the poor guy continues his downward spiral.
I've only seen "The Machinist" a few times, but this scene haunts my nightmares. Sure, it's a little on the nose, but Anderson uses the sequence to illustrate Trevor's inner turmoil and allows us to see a visual manifestation of his grief. It's brilliant.
"3:10 to Yuma" marks one of Christian Bale's most underappreciated roles. This action-packed western from director James Mangold captures the gritty frontier like never before and tells the tale of Dan Evans (Bale), a poor, despondent rancher tasked with delivering ruthless criminal Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to a train bound for Yuma prison. Throughout the picture, Dan and Ben bond and come to respect one another, leading to a thrilling showdown.
Taking a brief reprieve in Contention, Ben ultimately agrees to allow Dan to take him to the train, primarily out of sympathy, and the pair battle ruthless outlaws (led by Ben Foster's terrifying Charlie Prince) and greedy townsfolk en route to their objective. Mangold punctuates the action with an emotional undercurrent that stems from Dan's fractured relationship with his son. When the pair finally arrive at the train, Dan is mercilessly gunned down by Charlie Prince and left to die. Distraught, Ben effortlessly kills his crew and boards the locomotive, ensuring Dan's family collects the reward. Dan's son, William (Logan Lerman), watches his father pass away, the chugging train engine mimicking his fading heartbeat.
There's a lot to unpack here, from the film's deconstruction of heroes and villains to the many ways Mangold plays with our expectations. Nothing is ever as it seems. Of course, Bale and Crowe are magnificent. Their astounding performances are why I'm always left wiping tears from my eyes once the credits roll.
In "Ford v Ferrari," Christian Bale stars as Ken Miles, an unruly British driver with an apparent disdain for authority, who teams up with hot dog former American driver Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) to prove that a Ford race car can beat a Ferrari.
Ken and Carroll initially butt heads, but eventually learn to work together to craft an all-time vehicle that effortlessly stomps the competition. Unfortunately, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) and his wormy vice president Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas) expect all of their vehicles to finish simultaneously in the name of publicity. As such, when Ken blows past his foes at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans, he must make the ultimate decision: slow down and play team ball or race on and achieve fame and glory for himself.
Bale does an impeccable job displaying Ken's range of emotions. The man goes from elated to vexed to heartbroken in seconds. Eventually, he slows down and lets his teammates catch up, a decisive moment showing Ken's incredible character growth. Once a loner whose racing career had already zipped by, Ken now understands the value of teamwork, even if his decision ultimately leaves him in the dust due to a technicality.
No matter, Ken shrugs off the disappointment, knowing full well that he got to experience one helluva drive. I'm not crying, you're crying!
There are so many wonderful bits in David O. Russell's "American Hustle" that it's hard to pinpoint one above the other. Still, suppose I'm forced to make a choice. In that case, I'd either go with the scene near the end where Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) take down Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) -- a satisfying conclusion for the two-faced character -- or the first scene of the film that introduces us to our trio of characters.
The latter hits hard because it's such a fabulous tone-setter that deftly establishes the duplicitous nature of the picture. We can't take anything at face value. Irving's entire look is little more than a facade; the man strategically hides his bald spot using what appears to be super glue. There's also the use of mirrors, which always represent duality in motion pictures, but here further enhance the extremes Irving is willing to go to see the job through. The sequence is also side-splitting, especially when Richie appears and messes up his look. From this point on, it's hard to trust anyone.
Later, we see Irving and Sydney at a pool party draped in summer attire, except it's winter outside. Another subtle hint at the couple's duality or a group of people trying to make the most out of a cold day? You decide. In any event, the opening to "American Hustle" is a perfect example of how to kick a film off on the right note.
"The Dark Knight Rises" may not live up to its predecessor, but it's still an outstanding film with some of the best sequences of the entire series. One such scene occurs late in the picture when Bruce Wayne crawls out of the pit where Bane (Tom Hardy) left him to die following their dramatic encounter. At this juncture, Bruce has learned to fear death once more and opts to do the treacherous climb without a rope. Arriving at the top, he must leap across the deep chasm to reach a ledge on the other side, allowing him to escape the prison -- no easy task, even for Batman.
With the stakes raised and staring death straight in the eye, Bruce stands, takes a deep breath, leaps into the air, and ... reaches the other side. Hans Zimmer cranks his thunderous score to maximum decibels as Bruce rises from the pit and returns to Gotham City to take on Bane.
The climb marks the peak of Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" trilogy, a thrilling beat ironically lacking in costumed heroes or villains. Nolan doesn't aim for cheap theatrics but instead for something more profound. By climbing out of the pit, Bruce mends his broken soul and finally overcomes his anguish. He's now free to live a life devoid of Batman, bringing the character's emotional journey to a very satisfying conclusion.
As stated above, Christian Bale goes to great lengths to raise his performances above mere showmanship. In "Rescue Dawn," the actor goes all in to portray Lt. Dieter Dengler during his time in a prison camp during the Vietnam War. From the moment he arrives, Dieter tries to figure out how to escape and rallies the starving men of the prison camp to his cause. As hope turns to despair, Dieter continues to fight. In one stomach-churning scene, he eats a plate full of live maggots while conversing with one of his inmates. Dieter doesn't hesitate to eat the food, knowing that he must keep his body and mind intact to return home.
Bale, who actually ate live maggots and a snake to boot, believably conveys a desperate man clinging to hope in this sequence. While the others in the camp have all but lost their minds or are on the brink of insanity, Dieter does whatever he can to keep his eye on the prize. In the end, he remains the lone survivor, and the maggot-eating bit is a telling example of how he survived where others died.
Oh boy, do I love "The Big Short." Everything about Adam McKay's Academy Award-winning film works, from its impressive cast to its wicked humor to how it uses Margot Robbie in a bathtub to explain the United States financial system. Christian Bale stars as Michael Burry, a hedge fund manager among those who predicted and gained from the subprime mortgage crisis. We first meet Michael during a meeting where he explains the fragile state of the housing market. McKay cuts to footage of Michael as a young man and shows why he is the way he is -- eccentric. He enjoys solitude, primarily due to a glass eye that makes him look a tad senile and his inability to carry on meaningful conversations. "Even when I compliment people, it comes out wrong: you have a very nice haircut. Did you do it yourself," he asks an eager applicant. Even his smile appears forced and off base.
Here, we have a man whose unique mannerisms and social ineptitude made it possible for him to predict the housing market crash in 2005, two years before it occurred. We return to Michael at various points throughout the film. Still, this opening scene says all we need to know about who he is and why few listened to or believed his predictions. There's a reason the man earned another Oscar nomination for his efforts.
Read this next: 12 Best Performances In Steven Spielberg Movies
The post The 15 Greatest Christian Bale Movie Moments appeared first on /Film.
(Welcome to Tales from the Box Office, our column that examines box office miracles, disasters, and everything in between, as well as what we can learn from them.)
M. Night Shyamalan is a name that is downright synonymous with moviegoing. The filmmaker's career began by being shot out of a cannon, with his studio feature directorial debut, 1999's "The Sixth Sense," becoming an absolute sensation that set sky-high expectations for him. Some even called him the next Steven Spielberg. No pressure!
That's not exactly how things panned out. While Shyamalan did have several other hits with "Unbreakable" and "Signs," even by 2004's "The Village," the whole "where's the twist?" thing had started to catch up to him. The burden of audience expectations was, fair or not, being placed heavily upon his shoulders.
Things really started going sideways with the widely-panned "The Happening," which was followed by his big-budget, back-to-back bad turns with "The Last Airbender" and "After Earth." Those legendarily bad flops left the once-promising director in a bad place with critics, audiences, and even studios. Where was he to turn?
The answer was to go about as small as one could go with a tiny, self-financed found-footage flick in the form of "The Visit," which ultimately became a huge hit and revived Shyamalan's career in a massive way. In honor of the filmmaker's latest film, "Knock at the Cabin," we're looking back at "The Visit," how it came to be, how he had a very difficult time finding a home for it, how it managed to set him back on the path to success, and what lessons we can learn from it in the modern context. Let's dig in, shall we?
It cannot be overstated just how bad things looked for M. Night Shyamalan after "The Last Airbender" and "After Earth." The former was a 2010 adaptation of a beloved animated show that cost $150 million to produce and made just $319 million worldwide. More to the point, the reviews were downright scathing and killed a would-be franchise. "After Earth," meanwhile, was just as bad, earning $251 million worldwide in 2013 against a huge $130 million budget. Couple that with preceding critical failures like "Lady in the Water," and you've got a recipe for trouble.
What was Shyamalan to do? After spending some time thinking it over, the filmmaker took a big bet on himself and took out a $5 million loan against his house to self-finance his next picture, which we would come to know as "The Visit." He had no studio partner when he began production, and had no guarantee of distribution. Be that as it may, he wanted to set himself on the right path and was willing to risk millions of his own money to do so.
The movie was originally called "Sundowning" and was flying pretty under the radar when it entered production in early 2014. It focuses on a single mother (Kathryn Hahn) whose two young children (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould) visit their grandparents (Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie) in the country. Things start out a bit strange, but over time, they devolve into straight-up nightmare fuel. Sure, there is a little twist at the end, but it's nothing like the "Bruce Willis was dead the whole time" bombshell that Shyamalan couldn't get out from under for all those years. This was, at the end of the day, a simple, small horror film that was more of a crowd-pleaser. Getting to a final cut, however, wasn't easy.
Once the film was in the can, the real trouble started. M. Night Shyamalan was left to his own devices in the editing room, and he had some real trouble putting together a movie that anyone wanted to release. A 2018 Rolling Stone profile of the director revealed that just about every single studio in town turned down his first cut of the feature.
Shyamalan was worried he was going to lose millions and be stuck with a movie nobody wanted. But that was before he recut the movie into something Universal was interested in, with Blumhouse head Jason Blum also getting on board, given his place as the emerging king of low-budget horror. Speaking with Bloody Disgusting ahead of the film's 2015 release, the director elaborated on the brutal editing process:
"This one took me a long time to edit. Much longer than I thought. The very first cut that I put together was like a full-on art house film. Then I went comedy, like it had all of these comedic tones, then I was like, 'You know what? Let's anchor this as a thriller.' Once I came to the conclusion that the predominant spine of the movie was indeed a scary thriller that becomes a horror film, then I knew which of the other things ... the artsy things ... the humorous things ... could stay in service of the movie."
Universal's marketing kicked off in earnest, with the first trailer attached to screenings of the found-footage flick "Unfriended" in 2014. That proved to be a good strategy, as "Unfriended," another micro-budget film, turned into a $62 million hit. And so, the stage was set for a much smaller Shyamalan picture to enter the fold and help build back his good name. Spoilers: It worked perfectly.
Universal released "The Visit" in theaters on September 11, 2015, with more positive than negative reviews. September has historically been a dead zone for big films, and the timing provided an opportunity for something like this to sneak in and grab some cash. M. Night Shyamalan's lowkey comeback picture was opening against "The Perfect Guy," a movie that arguably few remember aside from those who saw it in theaters that year. It was a thriller with a much higher budget, however, that most figured would win the weekend — which it did, albeit by just a hair.
"The Perfect Guy" topped the charts with $25.9 million while "The Visit" barely placed in second with $25.4 million. But as we talk about frequently around these parts, it's all relative. With such a small budget, Universal and Blumhouse didn't need much to become a hit. And in the weeks that followed, "The Visit" held better than "The Perfect Guy," even against bigger competition from the likes of "The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials," "Hotel Transylvania 2," and "The Martian."
In the end, the horror/thriller finished its run with a $65.2 million domestically and $33.2 million internationally for a grand total of $98.4 million — there's nothing like making nearly 20 times your production budget to put a guy back on the right track. Safe to say, Shyamalan got his money back. What's more, he found a home and new business partner in Universal, who has teamed with him on every movie since including "Split" ($278 million worldwide/$9 million budget), "Glass" ($247 million worldwide/$20 million budget), and "Old" ($89 million worldwide/$18 million budget), as well as "Knock at the Cabin" which, again, looks to be a big hit.
What's most amazing about the run that M. Night Shyamalan has had since "The Visit" is that he continues to self-finance his movies. Yes, he partners with a major studio for marketing and distribution, but what he accomplished with this little found-footage horror flick stuck with him and completely changed the way he approached his career from that point forward.
No more $100 million, massive blockbuster tentpoles. No more getting caught on the wrong end of someone else's movie — just him betting on himself and his ideas, relatively uninhibited. Shyamalan explained why he continued down that path in 2019 when "Glass" was coming out:
"I get the financial incentives, but what's the creative upside of a small budget? It allows me to do whatever I want. Cast whomever, crew whomever, shoot it however, reshoot however, don't shoot whatever. Take huge risks. Look at 'Split.' If I said I was going to pitch you a movie, and I come into the studio system and said, 'Here's the movie, guys. Girls get abducted.' Already, the pitch is over. The pitch is over."
Shyamalan's approach comes from the privilege of having a profitable career for nearly two decades before things went south, but the lesson of leaning into one's strengths as a creator is profound. The sheer integrity of what Shyamalan is willing to risk to do things his way for nearly a decade is difficult not to respect. Self-financing aside, filmmakers and moneymen would do well to look at the riches that followed when Shyamalan got away from the "bigger = better" mentality that far too often permeates this business. In short? More of "The Visit" and less of "After Earth."
Read this next: Horror Movies You Don't Want To Miss In 2023
The post Tales From The Box Office: M. Night Shyamalan's Low Budget Thriller The Visit Kicked Off His Big Comeback appeared first on /Film.
Dwarf Fortress has been around since 2006 and I’ve actually been wanting to try it for years, but the ASCII visuals combined with the complexity of the game was somewhat of a deterrent. Although I did consider using a skin pack, I never got around to actually playing it. To my surprise though, a Steam … Continue reading Dwarf Fortress Premium PC Review →
The post Dwarf Fortress Premium PC Review appeared first on DSOGaming.
When John Carpenter released "The Thing" in the summer of 1982, critics reacted to the paranoid sci-fi horror with unjustified vitriol. While it's one thing for a film to receive lukewarm reviews or completely slip under the radar, the unanimous hostility towards "The Thing" was relentless and immediate. In hindsight, this sort of reaction is baffling, given how the film is now considered a cult classic and a staple when it comes to understanding the different facets of horror in cinematic history. What was then deemed as outrageous and excessive has now undergone re-evaluation and emerged as cynical and anti-establishment — thematic threads that Carpenter explored in greater depth in his "They Live." Even from a purely technical standpoint, the practical effects in the film still manage to shock and terrify, a good case in point being the defibrillation jumpscare scene, which in my humble opinion, goes hard.
So, what went so horribly wrong when "The Thing" hit theaters in 1982? A mix of several factors could have potentially contributed to its icy reception, including unfavorable comparisons to bonafide genre hits, such as "Blade Runner" and even "Tron." Moreover, the open-ended nature of the film's ending might have added significantly to mainstream aversion to bleak nihilism — as the film deliberately avoids catharsis, character arcs, especially that of MacReady, could have been perceived as depressing or anti-climatic. In contrast, sci-fi entries that were critical darlings or commercial successes predominantly ended on a relatively positive note, while evoking emotions that were bittersweet at worst.
Kurt Russell, who played the sardonic, no-nonsense helicopter pilot MacReady, has his own conjectures as to why the cult classic was so poorly reviewed at the time, while he maintains that it is a gripping tale about paranoia masterfully handled by Carpenter. Here's what Russell had to say.
In an interview with Esquire, Russell explained that a possible reason why audiences took time to warm up to "The Thing" was that Steven Spielberg's "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" had been released two weeks before Carpenter's film. As opposed to Carpenter's icy foray into an alien invasion from hell, "E.T." posited a warm, cuddly rendition of extraterrestrials, while etching a story about childhood wonder, nostalgia, and found family. Moreover, while E.T. is a perceivable figure capable of compassion, the murderous, shape-shifting alien from "The Thing" cannot be seen, as it assumes the form of those we know and care about. Russell commented on this "paranoia" that the story posits and how it defied genre expectations at the time:
"It came out the same year as E.T. and we had an alien most of the audience couldn't watch! It was just a story of paranoia, extremely well handled by a master. Yet at the time, it was just 'Holy s***, what is this?' What would you call that genre? The horror genre?"
"The Thing" is a loose adaptation of John W. Campbell's novella, "Who Goes There?," which follows an Antarctic research camp that discovers and thaws the remains of an alien spaceship. While this premise forms the basis of Carpenter's adaptation, the film shifts into horror-adjacent territories, especially with the abundance of mutating flesh, anthropomorphic body parts, and the atmospheric terror that grips the narrative. Although alien invasion films preceding "The Thing" have veered into horror, the way Carpenter handles the escalating paranoia of the 'other' pretending to be someone you know/trust situates the film into a territory seldom chartered before. It is a film devoid of warmth: here, bonds dissipate under pressure, people turn on each other, and there isn't a single moment of respite.
In the same interview, Russell describes the film as "a classic," remarking that it is "up there in the top echelon of horror movies." And he's absolutely right. Carpenter chooses to open his film with a memorable sequence of a dog leaping across the Antarctic, on the run from a bunch of military dudes on a helicopter hell-bent on killing the creature. Natural instincts compel us to root for the dog, who is promptly taken in by the group of researchers we will be following throughout the film. Through a series of masterful setups, both subtle and overt, Carpenter establishes the deceptive and horrifying nature of The Thing during the transformation scene. As the film progresses, the group feels increasingly on edge and distrustful of one another, which is exactly what the alien wants: to divide and conquer.
At the center of this paranoid haze is MacReady, who seems almost bored in the beginning and becomes aggressively devoted to destroying the Thing to the bitter end. Although everyone reacts negatively to his volatile cynicism, his perpetual mistrust allows them to detect the being at one point, and learn some of its behavioral patterns, which are mostly unpredictable. The creature cleverly utilizes the anticipation of betrayal and the aversion to the loss of identity in its favor, taking down men until there are only two left. Now, the Childs vs MacReady ending debate is a multifaceted one, but it highlights one essential thing: Carpenter chose to end on a note of paranoid uncertainty, a stalemate that prevents both characters (and us) from truly knowing one another.
Ambiguous ending aside, "The Thing" raises pertinent questions about individuality, autonomy, and notions of the other. It merely took the world some time to recognize the film's innate brilliance.
Read this next: The Best Cosmic Horror Movies That Will Make You Hate The Unknown
The post Why The Thing Wasn't A Hit When It Came Out, According to Kurt Russell appeared first on /Film.
Moores Threads, a Chinese GPU maker, recently launched its MTT S80 graphics card designed for general-purpose computing. While gaming isn't the focus of this particular GPU, it is a stepping stone in the development of powerful gaming and AI graphics in the Chinese domestic segment.
The graphics card was never released outside of China, and the only outlets that submitted reviews did not delve deep into the details, including gaming benchmarks. Now Twitter fellow, Löschzwerg (@Loeschzwerg_3DC on Twitter) has posted various benchmarks and gaming tests of the MTT S80 GPU along with a confirmation that it can indeed run Crysis.
The user received his MTT S80 GPU on the 1st of February which was equipped on a test system with Intel's Core i5-10400 CPU and a B560M-HDV motherboard. The card features a single 8-pin connector (EPS 12V) to boot. The Moore Threads MTT S80 is purely focused on gamers. It features 4096 MUSA streaming cores and runs at 1.8 GHz, providing users with 14.4 TFLOPs of compute performance. While gaming is its focus, the graphics card can also be used for 3D rendering and AI processing.
Löschzwerg tweeted that the original Crysis game was being played using the Moore Threads MTT S80 graphics card and DirectX 9 (D3D9) but also pointed out that it was only "for the moment." With Crysis being such a graphically intense game, one of the most notable games, it understands why the comment was made.
OG Crysis is working on MTT S80
D3D9 only, at least for the moment.
I'm tired... Getting a beer now
#moorethreads #mtt #s80 #crysis pic.twitter.com/rFqHjlxSNu
— Löschzwerg (@Loeschzwerg_3DC) February 3, 2023
When the card launched, it only supported 60 games, primarily titles found in the Chinese marketplace, and several of those titles are not graphically intensive. One recent benchmark tested League of Legends, but several other labels the company advertised are several years old, such as Risk of Rain, Dead Cells, and more.
It uses 3DMark03 for benchmarking the MTT S80 graphics card. Compared to the Intel Arc A770 GPU, the graphics card performed less than thirty-five to sixty-four percent. Granted, the Intel Arc A770 utilizes 16GB of VRAM and newer technology than the MTT S80 GPU, so it is not surprising that the Intel graphics card was superior. The reason that the 3DMark03 benchmarking software was used was that it supports the MTT S80's technology. The particular benchmark is not used for gaming, especially newer titles.
Moore Threads developers are working towards more support in today's technology advancements and a more extensive library of gaming titles. The process is not as fast as larger companies, but the company does try to improve as quickly as possible. The most recent graphics driver, version 200.2, was released three months after the graphics card launch. The most critical issue that reviewers and users find is idle power consumption. Chinese reviewers and Löschzwerg mention that the consumption level is around 110W, which has been present since the graphics card launch.
Once again, this is just a stepping stone and while Chinese GPU makers have a long way to go to catch up with well-known GPU vendors such as NVIDIA, AMD & Intel, the MTT series is a good start.
The post It Can Run Crysis! Chinese MTT S80, The Only PCIe Gen 5 GPU, Runs DX9 & DX10 Games Well by Jason R. Wilson appeared first on Wccftech.
On the surface, "The Legend of Vox Machina" is the perfect fit for an animated series. Take the first season of the hugely successful actual play podcast "Critical Role," translate its fantastical story to the screen, bring in the show's crew of voice actors to play their characters, and pick the talented Studio Grackle (best known for contributing animation to the popular video game "Hades") to handle the opening credits. It's a slam dunk. Then you crunch the numbers. The first "Critical Role" campaign, on which "Vox Machina" is based, is 115 episodes and totals "about 400 hours," per player Travis Willingham in an interview with Inverse. By contrast, each season of "The Legend of Vox Machina" is 12 episodes long. An episode runs roughly 24 minutes.The recent release of the second season brings the runtime of the "Vox Machina" animated series to under 12 hours, less than three percent the total length of the first campaign. In fact, the animated series as it exists today is only as long as two to three full episodes of "Critical Role" added together.
Animated series have run for over 400 hours before. The popular anime "One Piece" is still going strong after 1049 episodes, and other series (like the immortal "Sazae-san") have aired for even longer. But "One Piece" is based on one of the best-selling comics in history. "Vox Machina" started as a Kickstarter project. They aren't playing in the same league. Even after being picked up for two seasons by Amazon Prime, a full-length retelling of "Critical Role" was likely impossible, especially at the level of quality fans would expect. Only one option remained for the cast and crew of "The Legend of Vox Machina." They had to trim it down.
It's enough to crush the heart of any die-hard fan. But to the players of "Critical Role," it was just business. "It came down to all of us sitting in a room with all the major story beats on whiteboard and in long documents..." Dungeon Master Matt Mercer told Inverse. From there, it was simply a matter of "condensing it the best we can within the limits we have." Mercer and his cohort were no longer playing "Dungeons & Dragons." They were taking a bird's eye view of their campaign, something that is impossible at the table no matter how carefully you plan. Instead of dice, they had a team of TV writers drawn (per Inverse) from shows like "Westworld" and "Once Upon a Time." Their goal was to refine the raw essence of that first "Critical Role" campaign into an accessible fantasy narrative that retained the flavor of the source material. According to an interview with Eric Kain, it was important to Mercer that "everything is genuine and honest to what we originally created."
Other members of the team believed that including outside talent could only improve "Vox Machina." In the interview above, Travis Willingham speaks highly of the show's writer's room, saying that "they're coming to it with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective." Actual play series inevitably lead to Stockholm syndrome among their fans, who invest so much time and attention that they're willing to put up with just about anything to spend more time with their favorite people. But the players of "Critical Role" understood that cutting and rearranging their magnum opus was necessary, even if that meant rewriting storylines or removing fan-favorite scenes.
The first "Critical Role" campaign has a particularly fraught relationship with "canonicity" and "faithfulness." Player Marisha Ray (voice of Keyleth the druid) said to Polygon that they "had been playing as a group for two and a half years before we decided to take it to the stream..." The first episode starts in medias res; rather than a true "pilot episode," it comes off as just another installment of a typically indulgent "Dungeons & Dragons" session. As the series continued, a player left the group, the production quality increased and the cast became more comfortable performing on screen. Even then, says Ray, "there were a lot of character building and backstory moments" from earlier in the campaign "that the audience never saw," because they were not recorded or archived. Some of these elements are preserved in "Vox Machina," providing context that many fans of "Critical Role" never had to begin with.
"Critical Role" isn't the first actual play series to endure adaptation. "The Adventure Zone," another very popular podcast where the McElroy family play "Dungeons & Dragons," has become a successful series of graphic novels courtesy of artist Carey Pietsch. Like Willingham and Ray, the McElroys are realistic about squishing each section of "The Balance Arc" into 200 page comics. Said Travis McElroy to Comics Beat in an interview, "the challenges" of translating one medium to another "also come hand-in-hand with opportunities." Funny voices are out, but body language and facial expressions on the page can be just as effective. Travis also spoke to the team's ambitions to "smooth out the original arc." Among other things, this meant fleshing out the first storyline, "Here There Be Gerblins," which was conceived before the McElroys knew just how big "The Adventure Zone" would become.
It's Pietsch, though, who gets at the root of the show's appeal. Something she enjoyed about the early storylines, she says, is that "you could really hear the players... getting comfortable with their characters, each other, the format..." Rather than rapidly evolving the cast into their most confident selves, she was careful to depict this evolving dynamic while adapting the story with the McElroys. Another common refrain when it comes to actual play is that a show "gets better" after a certain number of episodes, or that starting several episodes in is recommended. But Pietsch understood that "the teamwork that it took... to get to that place where [the cast] are all comfortable with each other" is the actual play secret ingredient. Rather than accuracy of content, pacing is what makes or breaks the story.
Time is a powerful storytelling tool. Magical girl shows like "Sailor Moon" utilize repetition and year-long runtimes to depict the cast's slow maturation from girls into young women. Fantasy series like "The Wheel of Time" engender deep attachment in their readers, even when the text itself is so threadbare it barely holds up to scrutiny without reader buy-in. Similarly, actual play captures over many hours the process by which ordinary people become increasingly confident in their shared roles. Series like "Critical Role" could be said to represent the final evolution of the fantasy genre, following in the footsteps of novels like "Dragonlance" and "Record of Lodoss War" derived from tabletop campaigns. After all, says Dia Lacina in her review of the video game "Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth," "the adaptation of an adaptation of a transcript built of poorly veiled stolen IP is the beating heart of ALL fantasy."
"The Legend of Vox Machina" is both less and more than that. Rather than a 400 hour experimental television series streamed over the internet, it's so far just 24 episodes of an animated series based on somebody else's tabletop campaign. But then, what's more indulgent than paying somebody to transform your table campaign into a twenty-four episode animated series streaming on Amazon Prime? Not much. "Vox Machina" isn't so much a condensed version of "Critical Role" as it is the scat of a dragon grown out of control. (Dragons, according to the animators at Titmouse, are quite difficult to animate.) A dragon that has also spawned comics, tie-in merchandise and countless other actual play shows and podcasts riding its coattails.
Animated series aren't better or worse than actual plays, just different. The uncertainty of dice rolls, player improvisation and the energy in the room at the time cannot be fully translated into a television show. "The Legend of Vox Machina" and "Critical Role" only stand to benefit by diverging from each other. An episode of "Vox Machina" is over and done in just thirty minutes. The series reinterprets the freeform fun of the greater series as conventional narrative, offering images and grand-scale action scenes that would be prohibitively challenging to realize in live action. Some may be satisfied with that. For those willing to dive even deeper, the 400-plus hours of "Critical Role" offer a satisfying world to explore. So long as "Vox Machina" and "Critical Role" continue on their separate tracks, I'll be happy to have both. Although I have to ask, when are we getting a "Friends at the Table" animated series? It's long overdue.
Read this next: The Best TV Shows Of 2022, Ranked
The post Condensing Critical Role For The Legend Of Vox Machina Was As Hard As It Sounds appeared first on /Film.
Making a movie requires a lot of time, effort, and talent. But more importantly, making a movie requires a lot of money. No filmmaker wants their movie to flop, but none more so than studios whose very existence depends on their releases putting butts in seats. While studios have always put their bets on tentpole movies to produce good profit margins, because of the popularity of superheroes and other big-budget franchises, it seems that studios are putting less focus on smaller films that would ensure they wouldn't suffer too much due to their modest budgets (even if they failed). As budgets have gotten bigger, so too has the pressure for these films to not only break even but to break box office records.
Filmmakers face serious career problems when their movies flop with audiences, as a failure or, worse, a string of failures, could lead to a dream project being squashed. For example, it's hard to imagine director Robert Zemeckis -- the man behind such beloved films as the "Back to the Future" trilogy, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," "Forrest Gump," and many others -- getting one of his planned works canceled. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, that's exactly what Disney did to his proposed remake of the Beatles film, "Yellow Submarine," due to the box office failure of his 2009 film, "A Christmas Carol." While Zemeckis is still going strong, many more victims -- namely full studios -- have resulted from movies that flopped.
2007's "The Golden Compass" is an adaptation of Philip Pullman's novel, "Northern Lights." It's set in an alternate version of our universe, wherein the souls of humans take the form of animal partners referred to as daemons. A young girl named Lyra Belacqua lives a boring life at Oxford's Jordan College but is soon called to adventure when her closest friends have been kidnapped, and she sets out to find them with her daemon, a witch, an armored bear, and more.
According to the Independent, the film had a massive budget -- about as much as the entirety of Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy -- and was intended to be the first of a blockbuster series of movies. It had many of the elements to make it a surefire hit: The film was based on a popular and well-known property; it had an impressive cast that included Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Sam Elliott, and others; and was being produced by New Line Cinema, the same risk-taking studio that struck box office and critical gold with the "Lord of the Rings" series. Unfortunately, "The Golden Compass" was a huge flop, grossing only $70 million domestically -- roughly a third of its budget. Because of the monumental failure of the film, New Line Cinema could no longer operate as an independent studio and was absorbed into Warner Bros. in order to survive. While they've continued producing films since then, the output of their movies and their budgets have shrunk considerably.
"Cleopatra" tells the story of the eponymous queen and her years-long lust for power. While she at first rules over Egypt with her brother, she carries out a scheme to wrench control from him that results in her being the sole ruler of her country. Julius Caesar arrives from Rome, resulting in an opportunity for her to expand her influence; the two become romantically entwined, she gives birth to his son, and the plan is for them to form an alliance between Rome and Egypt. However, Caesar is assassinated before that pact can be finalized. Cleopatra gets another chance to join forces with Rome years later when Marc Anthony arrives in her life, now a high-ranking official.
As stated in Den of Geek, the production of the film was fraught with so countless problems, and "Cleopatra" nearly ruined 20th Century Fox. The budget was one of those problems; while its production cost of $44 million may not seem like a lot by today's standards, adjusted for inflation it totals around $370 million, which is massive, even in the modern age of Marvel movies. The studio was forced to cut the budgets of its other films in production at the time to stay afloat while making the movie. "Cleopatra" ended up being somewhat profitable, but it was five years before that happened, leaving Fox on the brink of shutting down until the success of "The Sound of Music" saved it two years later.
Jack Frost is the embodiment of winter, spending his existence bringing snow to kids the world over. He enjoys his job but doesn't enjoy the fact that nobody knows who he is. Pitch Black, more well known as the Boogeyman, is bedeviling young children around the globe with nightmares, and so an alliance is formed between the greatest Guardians of all time -- Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Sandman, and the Tooth Fairy -- to stop him. Together, they are a force to be reckoned with, but they're still not strong enough to stop Pitch Black. Jack Frost must step up to prove that he has what it takes to be the next Guardian.
"Rise of the Guardians" got respectable reviews from critics but was far from the box office smash that DreamWorks Animation was hoping it would be, especially considering it was a family-friendly movie released during the holiday season. According to Deadline, the studio's CEO Jeff Katzenberg said that the film "was the first movie of ours in 17 in a row that didn't work. And when that happens it makes you rethink everything ... We've done a reset and we've done it across the board." Katzenberg wasn't kidding about the "reset," as it consisted of DreamWorks Animation laying off 350 employees, forcing the studio to find new ways to make films more quickly and for less money. This is not the sort of move a business would make if it had money to spare.
"It's A Wonderful Life" is one of the greatest feel-good movies of all time, due in large part to James Stewart's charming performance as George Bailey. Bailey is one of the nicest people in the small town of Bedford Falls, never missing an opportunity to help those around him. He's got a nice quiet life with a wife and kids, and runs the local building and loan company, doing everything he can from preventing the greedy Mr. Potter from buying him out. However, Bailey's business suffers a terrible setback on Christmas Eve, and so he is contemplating suicide, believing his life to be ruined. He's saved by his guardian angel, though, who shows him how much worse the lives of those he cares for would be without him.
While "It's A Wonderful Life" is a classic now, it took some time before that happened. Time states that the film, which cost $2.3 million, only earned back $2 million for the studio, Liberty Films. Considering it was founded by three top directors -- Frank Capra, William Wyler, and George Stevens -- as well as former Columbia Pictures executive Samuel Briskin, Liberty Films was considered to be one of the few independent studios to be able to take on other, more established companies. Unfortunately, the box office failure of "It's A Wonderful Life" led to Liberty Films being sold to Paramount Pictures. However, Capra, Wyler, and Stevens all signed deals with Paramount, so not all was lost.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 or by calling 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
After World War II, the U.S. military began to focus its efforts on flight, with the goal of breaking the sound barrier, which was finally achieved by Chuck Yeager. This inspires a competition among other risk-taking pilots determined to prove who's fastest. However, 1959 sees the Soviet Union launch their Sputnik satellite, kicking off a space race between them and the U.S. NASA then starts Project Mercury, and goes on the search for seven brave pilots to test the first spacecraft and become the first astronauts. The pilots are chosen and immediately become heroes to the public. But when Russia becomes the first country to send a man into space, the pilots of Project Mercury have their sights set on beating the record set by their rival.
"The Right Stuff" was produced by the Ladd Company, which had previously scored such hits as "Body Heat" and the Oscar-winning "Chariots of Fire." However, the box office success of these movies was offset by a string of flops, culminating in the failure of "The Right Stuff" to turn a profit. In fact, according to the New York Times, it was that film's disappointing box office receipts that contributed to the dissolution of the Ladd Company. While the studio's "Police Academy" was a big hit for them, it was too late to save them. Warner Bros., which was financing and distributing the Ladd Company's films, ended its partnership with the young studio, leading to its slow and quiet end.
"Battlefield Earth" is set in the year 3000, when Earth has been dominated by a humanoid alien species called the Psychlos. Much of the human population has been decimated, with most of the survivors enslaved by the Psychlos and forced to mine the planet of its resources for their overlords. However, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, one of the few humans living outside of the tyranny of the Psycholos, deserts the safety of his hidden community, only to be captured by the aliens and forced to oversee a mining mission for them due to his resourcefulness. Jonnie is subjected to a rapid-learning machine that quickly teaches him the history of humanity, but this only makes him more dangerous to the Psychlos, as he concocts a plan to take back Earth.
"Battlefield Earth" is not only considered to be one of the worst sci-fi movies ever made but one of the worst movies ever made, period. What makes the film's existence especially tragic is that it played a large part in the demise of its studio, Franchise Pictures. As stated in the Hollywood Reporter, Franchise picked up "Battlefield Earth," which John Travolta had been trying to make for years. The film flopped big time, earning $29 million against its $73 million budget. Making things worse was the fact that Intertainment, the German distributor of the film, filed a lawsuit against Franchise for inflating the budget, and Franchise was forced to fork over more than $120 million, resulting in their bankruptcy soon after.
It's believed that the Titanic, before it tragically hit an iceberg and sank in 1912, housed a large quantity of a rare and valuable mineral. Several Americans want to retrieve that mineral cache, as it can be used to fuel a powerful anti-nuke defense system. However, the Soviet Union is also on the trail of this mineral, asserting that it was originally stolen from them decades earlier. The Titanic is too far deep for divers to reach, and so it's decided that the only way forward is to raise the Titanic and bring it to where it was supposed to arrive: New York City. But this proves to be easier said than done, forcing the salvage team to great lengths to give America the edge over Russia.
Den of Geek doesn't shy away from the details of how badly "Raise the Titanic," well, sank with audiences and critics when it was first released in 1980. Based on Clive Cussler's bestselling novel, it was widely believed that the film would be a surefire hit. However, it only made $7 million, a paltry amount compared to its budget, reported to be between $30 million and $40 million. One of the film's producers, Lord Grade, stated that "it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic." The film's failure was so bad that it almost forced its production company, ITC Entertainment, to shut down forever, a move that was prevented when Grade made a deal with Universal Pictures.
After her father, Black Harry, dies, Morgan Adams inherits his ship, the Morning Star, as well as a piece of a map that leads to buried treasure, with the other pieces in the hands of Richard and Mordechai, Harry's brothers. However, Harry's other brother, the malevolent Dawg Brown, gets possession of Richard's portion of the map and is on a quest to get the rest of it to acquire the treasure for himself. On top of that, Morgan must contend with British Governor Ainslee, who's after her to take revenge for a past slight. Luckily, Morgan has a companion on her side, physician-slash-thief-slash-slave William Shaw, who's able to interpret the mystery of the map.
Other than the fact pirate movies were practically nonexistent in the 1990s, "Cutthroat Island" had much going for it, making its part in Carolco Pictures' demise all the more surprising. It was helmed by experienced action movie director Renny Harlin (who directed "Die Hard 2" and "Cliffhanger"); had A-lister Geena Davis in the lead; and was produced by the studio responsible for such hits as "Total Recall," "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," and "Basic Instinct." Unfortunately, it flopped hard. According to Forbes, MGM, which was distributing the movie, didn't give it the marketing push it needed as the studio was being sold. Also, the movie's production went way over budget, and when it only made back $10 million against the $100 million spent on the film, Carolco had no choice but to declare bankruptcy.
"Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" takes place decades in the future in the fallout of a massive meteor that has crashed on Earth, bringing with it countless alien creatures called Phantoms. With so much of the population consumed by Phantoms, humanity is on the brink of extinction. However, the resourceful young scientist Dr. Aki Ross teams up with her mentor Dr. Sid and a motley crew of soldiers to take one last shot at destroying the Phantoms. Their plan involves bringing together the eight Spirits, which, when combined, create a powerful force that can kill the Phantoms. However, General Hein is planning to use a more destructive weapon against the Phantoms, one that is capable of decimating the planet along with them.
"Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" was considered groundbreaking at the time due to the creators' attempt to make the completely CGI world look as realistic as possible. However, this endeavor required a big budget that only got bigger throughout its four years in production, as stated in MovieWeb. Considering it was (loosely) based on the popular "Final Fantasy" video game series and the innovative technology involved in creating lifelike characters, the pressure was on for it to perform well at the box office. Unfortunately, it was a massive failure, only bringing in a little over $80 million against its $137 million budget. In fact, the loss was so great that it led to the collapse of its production studio, Square Pictures, as well as its parent video game company.
In the 1980s, Robert "Fish" Fishman was the talented drummer for the rock band Vesuvius, who's on the cusp of stardom with a potential offer from a major label. However, before a contract can be signed, the label recommends the band fire Fish so that the label president's nephew can take his spot. The band is reluctant, as they've all been friends for years, but they take the offer, and Fish is kicked out of the band, effectively ending his music career. However, Fish gets another shot to play drums for a rock band. The only catch is that it's his teenage nephew Matt's high school band. Nevertheless, Fish sees this as an opportunity to relive his old rock 'n' roll dreams.
Perhaps because the film was so similar to the Jack Black rock 'n' roll comedy "School of Rock," released only five years earlier, "The Rocker" was quite a flop for Fox Atomic, the production company founded by 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Pictures. Even with a relatively small budget of $15 million, the movie only brought back $8 million. Its failure to break even with the modest production cost is pretty dismal, and also surprising considering it had Rainn Wilson of the popular series "The Office" as its lead. As stated in The Hollywood Reporter, Fox Atomic was established to produce movies that were aimed at the teenage demographic. The loss greatly contributed to Fox shutting down the label after only three years in existence.
Read this next: Sci-Fi Box Office Bombs That Deserve A Second Chance
The post Movies that flopped so hard they practically put studios out of business appeared first on /Film.
As Ben Affleck’s portrayal of the world’s greatest detective in Zack Snyder’s Justice League run fades into memory, fans look ahead at who the new Batman will be and we explain why Jensen Ackles may be in with a shot.
When it comes to live-action projects, DC will have two Batmen on the go, with one new variant existing in the DCU and the other being Robert Pattinson’s variant in the Elseworlds sequel with Matt Reeves at the helm.
The new movies and shows include Creature Commandos, Waller, Lanterns, Superman Legacy, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Swamp Thing, The Brave and the Bold, Booster Gold, The Authority, and Paradise Lost.
Non-comic-book aficionados may only recognize Jensen Ackles as Dean Winchester from the hit The CW show, Supernatural, or more recently as Soldier Boy in Amazon Prime’s The Boys – but Ackles has a number of receipts from DC.
Ackles previously supplied the voice of Bruce Wayne and Jason Todd in different animated projects, beginning back in 2010’s Batman: Under the Red Hood when he voiced the titular Red Hood and his alias.
Fast forward to 2021 when Ackles voiced Bruce Wayne in Batman: The Long Halloween Part One and Part Two – an animated adaptation of the popular comic arc by Jeff Loeb and Tim Sale.
Ackles then went on to voice Batman in the 2022 animation, Legion of Super-Heroes, proving his popularity with the studio and becoming a resident name to follow in the footsteps of the late, great Kevin Conroy.
Aside from his natural ability to provide Batman’s nuanced voice, many DC fans believe the actor has the physical chops to portray both the billionaire alias and the crime-fighter.
Since the dcu Batman will more experienced, give me jensen ackles. He’s done a great job voicing him and has the look and acting for it pic.twitter.com/p1jLT3f9zR
— J.Y18 (@Superherotalk18) January 31, 2023
Gunn announced The Brave and the Bold starring Bruce Wayne as the Caped Crusader and his estranged son, Damian Wayne, which is considered to be a reboot of the character’s live-action story.
Damian’s mother, Talia al Ghul, is a classic Batman villain and daughter of Ra’s al Ghul, who passes him over to his father, Bruce Wayne, after assassin training and he eventually evolves into Robin.
The DC fandom is alight with Batman fan casts for the movie, including The Haunting of Hill House’s, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, alongside Ackles.
By Jo Craig – jo.craig@grv.media
The post Exploring if Jensen Ackles could play the DCU’s new Batman appeared first on ForeverGeek.
There’s something for everyone this week in the world of young people culture, whether you like post-apocalyptic drama, shaming creepy dudes at the gym, or pretending to be a wizard in one of them damn vidja games.
In May 2022, we announced the general availability of Security Settings Management for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. This release empowered security teams to configure devices with their desired antivirus, EDR and firewall settings without needing to deploy and implement additional tools or infrastructure.
As we continue our momentum around Security Settings Management, we are excited to announce that we are expanding this capability to help cover more scenarios with support for Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rules, now in public preview. This release will allow all Defender for Endpoint managed devices to receive ASR rules via Microsoft Intune.
NOTE: If you already have Defender for Endpoint managed devices in scope of an ASR rule, this rule will start applying automatically. For more details, see Expanding support for Attack surface reduction rules with Microsoft Intune.
How does it work?
For testing purposes, we recommend you create a dedicated Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) group for all Defender for Endpoint managed devices. This can be done by leveraging dynamic grouping capabilities.
ASR Rules
In the Intune admin center, create an ASR rule following the usual flow.
When prompted to target the rule, select the Azure AD group you’ve created for testing purposes, and which includes only Defender for Endpoint managed devices.
Confirm the creation process and wait for a success indication in the Intune admin center.
Note that policies are typically enforced within an hour after configuration. On the client, run the Get-MpPreference command utility to validate these settings have effectively been assigned.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q/ Can I use this to target MDE managed servers with ASR rules?
A/ Yes, Windows servers that are in scope for MDE settings management (2012 R2 and up) will be able to receive ASR rules via this feature.
Q/ I have Azure AD groups that include devices managed by Intune as well as devices managed by Defender for Endpoint – do I need to recreate or review my entire grouping construct in Azure AD?
A/ As Microsoft Intune’s policy distribution mechanism is agnostic to the device’s management channel, using Security Settings Management in Defender for Endpoint does not require thoroughly reviewing your existing Azure AD grouping construct.
However, if you have attempted to target Defender for Endpoint managed devices with ASR rules prior to this preview announcement, you will have noticed that the settings failed to apply on the devices. With this feature now available, these devices will start successfully enforcing ASR policies.
Publisher Perp Games just keeps announcing intriguing looking games and today it’s developer Saona Studios' 2D action roguelite game Death or Treat, which is launching sometime this Spring on PC and consoles.
In Death or Treat, you play as a cute little ghost named Scary, who must defend HallowTown from various ghouls in order to save Halloween. The game feature hand-painted environments alongside detailed animation work, but Saona Studios CEO Juan José Olivares said in a release that combat is king in Death or Treat:
“We put so much effort to create a dynamic combat system where you can choose between a bunch of weapons, each one with a different mechanic. There are also skills and passives that will help you defeat hordes of enemies, which makes every run a unique journey. Working with Perp is a great opportunity to polish and share Death or Treat with the world”.
Check out a teaser trailer for the game below:
A few months have passed since we released ScummVM 2.6.1. It's time to prepare for a new release!
Our lovely developers added support, yet again, for a bunch of new ancient games that require testing:
Besides these games, we’d appreciate it if you could check our release testing list. Maybe you’ll even find your favorite game on there that has been sitting on that shelf for way too long - otherwise, there are some demos of these games available on our website.
And since ScummVM is about playing games in general, we’ve seen notable changes across many, many engines - so this is the perfect time for giving your favorites another go.
As usual, we are not just adding support for new games. We are constantly working on improving the engines we already support and, in particular, we’ve seen some incredible work being done on the SCUMM engine. Yes, there are the usual bug fixes, but this time we are also adding a feature that helps playing the SCUMM games in a truly original fashion: Support for the original loading and saving dialogs within the GUI!
Speaking of truly original: Remember those old CRT displays we had back in the day? With ScummVM 2.7.0 you’ll be able to replicate this experience on certain platforms thanks to our new shader-based scalers. Go ahead and give it a try!
All testing must be done with stable builds, not development ones. Please report any bugs or oddities on our issue tracker.
A detailed list of all exciting new features and fixes is available in our NEWS file.
Thank you very much for your support! Let’s make ScummVM 2.7.0 a great release - together!
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It may have been ten years, but the classic FromSoftware mecha and robot game series is back with Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, and a producer at the studio has talked about how the experience of making soulslike games, from Dark Souls to Sekiro and Elden Ring, has “changed” the team and its level of experience, making this Armored Core game the best it can be.
The latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and AMD Radeon RX 7900 series GPUs have started showing up on Steam Hardware Survey and it looks like the green side once again leads in popularity amongst gamers.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 GPUs have been amongst the best-sellers list at various retailers ever since they launched. There have been reports that the cards are not selling well but despite what rumors are saying, even cards with poor value such as the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080 continue to sell more than their Radeon RX 7900 series competition.
Before talking about the Steam Hardware Survey statistics, we have numbers from MindFactory shared by TechEpiphany which includes the results for the 4th week of 2023. The charts show that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti sold 450 units versus the 390 units that the RX 7900 XT managed to sell. The RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 sold over 200 units in the same week whereas the RX 7900 XTX was only sold to 70 consumers. That's just about 1000 GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards sold versus 460 Radeon RX 7900 graphics cards sold at the retailer and this is Germany's largest retailer where consumers are more inclined towards AMD hardware.
GPU Retail Sales Week 4 (mf)
Total: 3940 (-4.83%)
AMD:
Units: 1530, 40.8% (-1.46%), ASP: 639
Revenue: 978'384, 34.51%Nvidia:
2190, 58.4% (+1.17%), ASP: 845
1'850'006, 65.26%Intel:
30, 0.8% (+0.29%), ASP: 210
6'275, 0.22%#AMD #Radeon #Nvidia #Intel #NvidiaGeForce pic.twitter.com/6r4ANNPd0i— TechEpiphany (@TechEpiphany) January 29, 2023
Now coming back to the Steam Hardware Survey, we have the results from the DirectX API where the RTX 4090 now commands 0.24% share, the RTX 4080 with 0.14% share, the RTX 4070 Ti with a 0.05% share, and the Radeon RX 7900 series GPUs yet to show up despite having launched earlier than the RTX 4070 Ti. For comparison, the RTX 3090 Ti has a 0.13% share, the RTX 3090 has a 0.55% share, the 3080 Ti has a 0.77% share, the 3080 has a 1.89% share and the RTX 3070 Ti has a 1.25% share.
| GPU Name | Share (Percentage) | Users (Estimated base on 30 Million Concurrent Users) |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 | 3.67% | 110,1000 |
| RTX 3060 Ti | 2.68% | 804,000 |
| RTX 3070 | 2.66% | 798,000 |
| RTX 3050 | 2.42% | 726,000 |
| RTX 3080 | 1.89% | 567,000 |
| RTX 3070 Ti | 1.25% | 375,000 |
| RTX 3080 Ti | 0.77% | 231,000 |
| RTX 3090 | 0.55% | 165,000 |
| RX 6700 XT | 0.47% | 141,1000 |
| RX 6600 | 0.43% | 129,000 |
| RX 6600 XT | 0.37% | 111,000 |
| RTX 4090 | 0.24% | 72,000 |
| RX 6900 XT | 0.23% | 69,000 |
| RX 6800 XT | 0.20% | 60,000 |
| RX 6500 XT | 0.20% | 60,000 |
| RTX 4080 | 0.14% | 42,000 |
| RTX 3090 Ti | 0.13% | 39,000 |
| RX 6650 XT | 0.12% | 36,000 |
| RX 6750 XT | 0.11% | 33,000 |
| RX 6800 | 0.09% | 27,000 |
| RTX 4070 Ti | 0.05% | 15,000 |
| RX 6950 XT | 0.04% | 12,000 |
| RX 6400 | 0.04% | 12,000 |
NVIDIA dominates the Steam charts with a share of 75.03% whereas AMD falls in second place with a 15.31% share and Intel gets the third spot with a 9.42% share which mostly includes integrated GPUs.
Steam can have concurrent online users of around 30 million at any given time which is a fraction of its entire 130+ Million userbases. If we take those 30 million, active users, that's a total of 72,000 RTX 4090 owners on Steam, around 40,000 RTX 4080 owners, and 15,000 RTX 4070 Ti owners. Once again, the Steam Hardware Survey numbers are not representative of global market share but they do provide a good insight into what hardware is more popular amongst gamers & it looks like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series leads the AMD Radeon RX 7900 series by miles on the top PC gaming platform.
The post NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 GPUs More Popular Than AMD Radeon RX 7900 On Steam Hardware Survey by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.
