Ready Player One, the film of the book

Yeah but The Iron Giant is really the wrong choice as a replacement. It doesn't fit since the character it is replacing is Japanese and connected to a Japanese person.

Its not like Kodansha would block Tetsujin 28 from being in it seeing how it would promote their statue of it and its been in Super Robot Wars.

Unless Gundam is replacing it then The Iron Giant is seemingly out of place in that first trailer.

edited 10th Dec '17 4:21:26 PM by Memers

Funnily enough, the Gundam is striking ZZ's pose.

PSN ID: FateSeraph | Switch friendcode: SW-0145-8835-0610 Congratulations! She/They

I disagree, but that's mainly because I love the Iron Giant. And he is a giant robot...

edited 10th Dec '17 6:10:22 PM by jjjj2

You can only write so much in your forum signature. It's not fair that I want to write a piece of writing yet it will cut me off in the mid

As Iron Giant is still in the newer trailer, it hasn't been replaced.

... yeah, I can see why keeping the Ultraman scene might not have been a top priority for Spielberg and his crew.

What's precedent ever done for us?

...oh my god, my eyes are burning reading that. I thought reading excerpts from a John Green novel was awful but this is just as bad.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

I also found that some of the 'reveals' were a bit trite. I remember one character, I think it was the main love interest (?), gets revealed as to what her big defining 'No one loves me because I'm hidious' trait is and... its kind of just a small facial birth mark or something. Considering A LOT of people in real life experience video games and make friends out of fear or shame about their disabilities that are significantly more... life-impacting or life-threatening, I feel like a facial birth mark is a bit underwhelming and "Well, of course its something "ugly" that the protagonist can totally just get over to show how great he is.

Eh, the reveal about her was underwhelming but I liked the OTHER reveal that his best friend has been a African American lesbian the entire time. She just liked playing big badass orc characters. Mind you, would it have killed the author to make the love interest an "ordinary" looking girl?

And, yeah, the "I'm so great because I get pop-culture references that everyone gets" was a bit off too... ''

Eh, at some point you have to acknowledge this is wish fulfillment. That all the useless trivia you as a geek know will somehow make you the richest most successful person alive. There's nothing wrong with that.

edited 11th Dec '17 6:56:08 PM by CharlesPhipps

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

The romance could use some work, too.

What's precedent ever done for us?

An interesting point made, that the film has already done something worse than the book. Basically, using pop culture from after the 1980s, resulting in an Unintentional Period Piece because the film can't depict any properties made after 2017.

At the very least this movie will be good for some visual porn.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

That’s it, but then again others are kinder to the book than I am. I consider it garbage with a hypocritical ending.

The book already had post-80s stuff. The protagonist has a Firefly-class transport ship, for instance. (Firefly first aired in 2002.)

Anyway, why are we posting snippets of the novel in order to shit on them in the movie thread? There's a thread for the book, and I'm pretty sure just posting "this is bad and I hate it" is against forum rules anyway.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

It’s more going “Sure there’s a lot of recognizable properties and the trailer has them front and center, but Spielberg is gonna have to work overtime to make the book something watchable.”

It's actually more believable in the book because in the book, all pop culture is the 80s because everyone is obsessed with the childhood nostalgia of Not-Steve Jobs that they've stopped enjoying anything but what he did as a child in hopes of finding clues to his Easter Egg. Here, apparently, it seems Not-Steve Jobbs actually enjoyed a few things into the 21st century.

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

Man I was crazy hyped when I saw this during Thor Ragnarok's showing, but after reading this thread it died way the fuck down.

Hey at least opening it up to more modern stuff”ll make it more palatable to those of us not obsessed with the 80s.

I was interested in the book awhile ago,but I've since been put off

Being optimistic I think the film is bound to be improvement over the book anyway,

New theme music also a box

Honestly, I think the story is better suited to a visual medium than a textual one anyway. There's not a whole lot of internal narration or anything that wouldn't translate well to the screen, and there is a lot of cool stuff that could make an awesome action scene in a movie that gets a paragraph or two in the book.

The trailer was interesting because it's very obviously a mix of things that were in the book almost verbatim (like the zero-g dance party), things that were definitely pulled from the book but changed for the film for whatever reason (like the Iron Giant showing up), and things that appear to be entirely unique to the film (like the race/chase scene, which doesn't have any parallel in the book that I'm aware of).

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Movies are rarely 1:1 with their books. Hopefully this is a case where the the movie turns out better.

edited 12th Dec '17 9:04:24 AM by LordVatek

This song needs more love.

It's pretty close in feel to the Goonies in some respects so I don't think Spielberg will have TOO much difficulty with it.

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

I think that's less 'the story is better set for a movie' and more 'the author is bad at writing'. It doesn't help that thare are a number of lines that read like 'Hey! You know that scene from that one movie? This is that.' There's a trend I've noticed in a lot of newer books that read like a movie rather than, well, actually being a novel. And that's not good writing. The lack of introspection is kind of a problem. Especially how often tension gets near instantly undone within a page or two.

"I thought I'd sold my soul to indentured servitude for nothing!"

"I had the amount of credits to pay my way out of this debt sent to my account days ago."

Literally happens in the book.

Yeesh modern authors are getting lazy then.

Their just banking that their poorly written dreck will get lucky enough to score a movie deal though pop culture references & shit.

Very sad, very sad, especially from an amateur writer such as myself. .

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

I also get, ironically, the impression that the writer has no idea what actually makes a game function. User-Interface, basic gameplay mechanics, understandable rules, some level of restrictions.

OASIS would quickly become incomprehensible and overwhelming to pretty much anyone who touched it and I doubt THE ENTIRE WORLD would get invested in it. Like, hell, games like Skyrim and Fallout can feel overwhelming to some gamers.

A video game that incorperates EVERY SINGLE POP CULTURE ANYTHING EVER would just end up a mess. The rules would be all over the place because the rules of an Anime world were never meant to function in relation to the rules of, say, Dragon Age. At face value, there's no real understanding of how these properties would interact. And things would fall out of balance pretty quickly if I can slay a dragon by ramming my Firefly-Class ship into it. And if there's any sense of a plot, even if contained to worlds/servers/whatever, things could still get messy. First of all, oh god that's going to be overwhelming. Just looking at my steam library wigs me out of starting a new game. That sounds like a nightmare. The book tries to break things between 'tech' and 'magic' and some worlds/servers/etc will be relegated as one or the other (occasionally both), but how does that work if I take my wand from Harry Potter into Lord of the Rings? Wouldn't that upset some of the internal logic of that franchise to the point of instantly resolving plots (i.e. Avada Kadavra would be used as a gameplay mechanic by everyone and would be OP as hell in a game context, but removing it would limit the nostalgia and 'be anything' theme)? Or, if I bring a Lightsaber into Marvel and start hacking up the villains with that, won't that cause problems that would have to be reconciled? And god help us with comic book based anything considering the continuity snarl that comes with the territory.

Or I could tame a dragon and just go to the noob-land and SLAY EVERYONE THERE for shits and giggles. The book explains that you'd just recreate your avatar from level 1 and lose all your items, but griefers and assholes would make things a nightmare. That's just asking for the depths of humanity to do terrible things to each other.

Not to mention the realities of having a school and public education mixed in with the same program that is MOSTLY and MMO seems... that sounds like a bad idea.

I imagine it would be much more simple if you went for an MMO with universal mechanics but near-infinite visual customisation. So, say, a Mazinger and a Gundam would look very different, but would both have the same ‘giant robot’ abilities and playstyle, just with maybe different animations for doing the same stuff. Or if you wanted to include some kind of show-appropriate balance, you could make a Gundam an optional skin for the basic, starter giant robots, and a Mazinger an optional one for the more advanced shit. Maybe add in stuff that isn’t a giant robot but could conceivably play similarly as well, like Ultraman or some of the more humanoid kaiju.

You’d probably end up with a game that looks a lot like a superhero MMO like City of Heroes - extremely visually diverse characters who have fairly diverse abilities, but all play according to a few broad archetypes. In fact, given how old COH was, we’re probably kind of close to being able to pull off a semi-credible (though non-VR) Oasis anyway - it’d just be a licensing nightmare.

What's precedent ever done for us?

Whoo boy, couple things here. Let's unpack a bit.

No, it just means that different types of media are better at depicting different types of stories. Spending just a couple paragraphs on fighting his way free of a small army and escaping is fine, because the focus on the novel is "they tried to stop me, but I escaped" and that's all that's important in the story. Turning the same scene into a major action scene in a movie is also fine, because there the focus is on "look at this awesome action scene". That's not bad writing — bad writing would be trying to treat the novel like a movie and slavishly narrating a lot of narratively unimportant but visually impressive details of a running gun battle.

Newer books? Have you ever read Michael Crichton? The guy basically spent his entire career writing screenplays disguised as novels, starting in the The '60s. It's hardly a new thing.

No, it actually doesn't. He sets it up so that he'll automatically have his debt cancelled like a week after he gets picked up, but can't use it because he needs to bail earlier than expected. So he takes the backdoor access he's been using to root around in their system to set himself free and give himself security access to leave the building, then walks out — it's actually one of the more tense scenes in the novel, as it's an open question whether they'll notice him fucking around in their system, and if anyone catches him, he has no recourse for dealing with being in their physical custody — and we already know that they're willing to murder people, so he's very likely dead if he gets caught.

If you want to discuss the book, though, you should do it in the book thread.

This is actually explicitly addressed. Different areas of the game have different rules. Some areas allow magic but not technology, some vice versa, some allow both. Hell, your specific example is mentioned directly — if you fly a spaceship into a magic-only zone, it just stops working — and then you need to either use magic to move the ship back into a tech zone, pay someone else to do it for you, or abandon the ship. Yeah, it makes for a bit of a shock in terms of entering different zones — but that's kind of the point. Pretty much all the characters we see use a mix of different abilities in order to deal with different zones, and randomly wandering around Oasis without knowing the territory is supposed to be dangerous.

Oasis is networked VR, and it can be used for anything that that entails. It's mentioned that a lot of people never use the "game" aspects at all — they stay in non-combat zones and use it like a super-internet (shopping, staying in touch with friends, etc). Some people host their own private zones that don't exist in the public "world" and can't be entered except by invitation, much like a private Facebook group or Discord server. There's no reason why you couldn't have a public school on the same network — and indeed, VR schools have a lot of advantages over physical ones, since teachers don't have to do any "babysitting" (students are locked into their seats and muted, so they can't move or speak without permission) and VR has a lot of obvious application for visual aids to lessons.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.