[Grimper]

M. Night Russel

I don't get it 

[Dilmah G]

You're a disgrace to Bollywood *hint, check the picture I embedded in my previous post*

[Ransom]

Haha! Thanks, Goober.

We can only hope I'll never make a The Happening.

[Grimper]

I still don't get it 
Something to do with the creator of Derelict (Blaise Russel) and south park?

[Jake2447]

M. Night Shyamalan, is a two-time Academy Award nominated Indian-born American filmmaker and script writer of major studio films, known for making movies with contemporary supernatural plots that usually climax with a twist ending.

I think it fits well.

[Goober5000]

Haha! Thanks, Goober.

We can only hope I'll never make a The Happening.

You're welcome.

Instead of The Happening, how about Project 03?

the creator of Derelict (Blaise Russel)

Blaise Russel did not create Derelict.

[chief1983]

Now I'm wondering if colored text is a symptom, or a cause...

[Grimper]

But the Derelict SCP thread in this forum was started by a Blaise Russel...

EDIT: Now that I look closer he was only one of the creators, another member of the team being Ransom. But I still don't get it.
EDIT2: Now that I look even closer it seems he just organised the voice acting...this makes Ransom's title even more confusing

[chief1983]

Just because Blaise didn't create Derelict doesn't mean there weren't plenty of other contributions from him...

[Droid803]

EDIT2: Now that I look even closer it seems he just organised the voice acting...this makes Ransom's title even more confusing

It's a reference to M. Night Shyamalan, a horror movie director, combined with Blaise Russel, a good FS2 campaign writer. Because Ransom made Sync and Transend - two (and the only two) horror campaigns for FS2.

[General Battuta]

It doesn't have anything to do with Blaise Russel except for that it's got Russel's name in it.

[Droid803]

Fixxored post. I wasn't misreading and accusing people of not reading, no, never!...

[General Battuta]

Heheh, now I look dumb.

[NGTM-1R]

Seriously... the only thing that i am disappointed in is that you seem to take such badly thought out critcism to heart. So it's not "Harpoon in Space" ? or "realistic GTVA Officer Training" ? ...  either notion is absurd for anyone who went at it with an open mind and really thought about it - or even just read your introduction post.

I haven't been following this thread. But I take exception to this. I went in with an open mind.

It's simple. It's immersion. It's the fourth wall. It's the framing device. I never spelled this out because I considered it relatively elementary, but clearly it's not.

We were presented with a scenario; now we have to justify it (those of us who want our stories coherent, anyways). Give me another mental justification that will work for this scenario.

You don't have one.

That's where it all started to fall apart. Yes, it was very good gaming. But it wasn't up to Ransom's usual standards of storytelling, and that was a big shock and an even bigger disappointment from the man who brought us Transcend.

[General Battuta]

Go back to all the stuff I posted earlier, NGTM-1R -- the framing device fits fine. And it's unsettling because it seems so un-military.

[NGTM-1R]

Go back to all the stuff I posted earlier, NGTM-1R -- the framing device fits fine. And it's unsettling because it seems so un-military.

But then, the framing device failed, because this is a military story. Yes, it's a good story, in much the same way the Prequels were good movies...but it's not a good military story, in much the same way the Prequels were not good Star Wars movies.

[FoxtrotTango]

Are we still arguing about these Epileptic Trees again? I'd just be glad if I could get a copy of FS2 that doesn't throw a fit with every other campaign I download. I don't worry about this metacanon stuff that may or may not really matter in the long run. Drawing my own conclusions is fine enough, but I don't shove them into other people's faces and say "that's the law."

[Mikes]

Go back to all the stuff I posted earlier, NGTM-1R -- the framing device fits fine. And it's unsettling because it seems so un-military.

But then, the framing device failed, because this is a military story. Yes, it's a good story, in much the same way the Prequels were good movies...but it's not a good military story, in much the same way the Prequels were not good Star Wars movies.

Thinking outside the box.

You can think outside the box as much as you want, but it will not make the Star-Wars Prequels any better. It's a completely different issue.

If, on the other hand, you put every story that you come across into a preceonceived box  (i.e. "because this is a military story"), then it's no wonder really that you couldn't enjoy Windmills. That however, isn't Ransom's fault.

As said before, Windmills leaves a lot up to interpretation... but as i understood it, it was a story about grief, guilt and intense self-recrimination...  that was only told in a military context and in a very particular way.

I'd just be glad if I could get a copy of FS2 that doesn't throw a fit with every other campaign I download.

Copy from http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/ works just fine for me.

[Jake2447]

IMO, you are missiong the point of the campaign if you are looking for any story in it at all.  The idea of this campaign is to remove the story, to place the battles in no context.  In that way the player's emotions are evoked when he must make decisions with little to no context.  Without the context, who knows what is right?  However, at the end, it is shown that making decisions solely based on strategic value in battle/war can be dangerous, as the context matters.

In other words, this campaign's story is the emotions it evokes in the player, not the plot written into it.

[Mikes]

IMO, you are missiong the point of the campaign if you are looking for any story in it at all.  The idea of this campaign is to remove the story, to place the battles in no context.  In that way the player's emotions are evoked when he must make decisions with little to no context.  Without the context, who knows what is right?  However, at the end, it is shown that making decisions solely based on strategic value in battle/war can be dangerous, as the context matters.

In other words, this campaign's story is the emotions it evokes in the player, not the plot written into it.

Spoiler:

It's a way of looking at it. But i would argue that in Windmills "story", the decisions already have been made and the worst already has happened. What you as the player get presented with... is how the (unnamed) protagonists deals with all these horrible things that have happened. When you begin playing... you are at the beginning of his thought process... how he imagines people at command may make decisions. When you are at the end (of the game/his thought process) you discover what actually happened and that the protagonist is still (unsuccessfully) trying to come to terms with it and that this attempt at "coming to terms with"/"working it through" is what you just have obvserved as you played through the campaign. The implication of course being that what happened was so horrible that the protagonist will carry that guilt with him forever (even years later as an admiral etc).

The second component would be what you observed, that the player first plays through basic missions - like any other game - and then suddenly gets presented with a quite emotional context that focuses grief and guilt at exactly the decision(s) that the player just made. But this second component is not the story in my eyes,  rather it's a device to emphasize and intensify the story that is being told. This "device" takes up a lot of the total playtime and encompasses practically all of the gameplay found in Windmills, true enough, but it's just that, a device to deliver the story. On the other hand the use of this "device" is a large part of what makes Windmills so great... as this level of "audience" involvement really wouldn't be possible in any other medium, which kind of shows the potential that computer games could have at expanding the ways that stories can be told.

In any case, to me it's a story first and a game only second, although the gameplay is of course an essential device to deliver the story.

Again, as i understood it anyways

The campaign can certainly evoke emotions, even more so if you let it draw you in and really think about it for a moment,... i would strongly disagree with the notion that there "is no story" in it however... there is, brilliant and thought provoking at that,... it just is not presented in the usual way and it's quite different than the kind of story that is usually featured in a Freespace campaign as well .

I also can just emphasize that anyone who hasn't played it yet, better not read any spoilers. It really is something that you need to first enjoy with an open mind and then think about in order to really appreciate it.