Tag: postmodern retro

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The uncompromising Alien: Isolation just got uncompromising-er

There are two things to know about Alien: Isolation, the Creative Assembly horror game from earlier this year based on the long-running Alien series of films. The first thing to know is that it is really, really, really good-looking. The gone-to-shit space station you explore is bafflingly dense and lived-in, and the set designers keep finding ways to transform it, from the familiar corridors of a cockpit and mess-hall to wider business and shopping plazas—riffs on Ridely Scott’s aesthetic, confidently played. All retain an ironclad sense of late-70s retrofuturism; if that whole space<—>no one hearing you scream thing weren’t already such a…
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This thread devoted to videogame scanlines is a reason to wake up in the morning

“Scanline screenshot thread. Because 240p is all the p’s I need.” Thus begins NeoGAFfer Peltz’s thread devoted to capturing pre-HD games using pre-HD equipment. Now at 6 pages and over 250 posts, scanning through is a coffee-break-long crash course in the ongoing defetishization of high-definition equipment and resolution. Like learning German to read Nietzsche’s pure, unfiltered thoughts, this can all seem a bit ridiculous: finding beefy old cathode-ray-tube TVs and RGB cables in order to play games at a significantly less crisp image quality. But—like, say, learning German to read Nietzsche’s pure, unfiltered thoughts—it’s hard to argue with the logic…