Books: I have to say that I felt the Cirque du Freak series could not have ended better than it did. I was very satisfied with how it was wrapped up, though I felt the Lake of Souls subplot was a sort of Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. I liked the interpretations of vampires that Darren Shan put forth in the series, as well. Not really...insulting...as Twilight was, but still interesting to see.
Movies: Fight Club is my favorite movie, but I have a handful of movies that I felt were masterfully done. Requiem For a Dream was one that I found well-told, as the very end leaves you with a sense of crushing despair. "That...that was it? The movie's over? Nothing gets better?" It was a cold shower in comparison to a lot of movies that you see nowadays and refreshingly so. Pulp Fiction and Sin City are assuredly cult classics, and they deserve to be referred to as such.
Shows: This may be somewhat cliche of me, but I feel like the 10th Doctor's tenure in Doctor Who was, well..."Fantastic." I felt emotionally drawn to the characters, the writing was, while somewhat cheesy at times, excellently centered around character development and relationships, and it had a fair number of "oh ****" moments that just kept me watching and wanting more.
Video games: I was rather fond of the plots of Final Fantasy 6 and 7 (just like everyone else, right?). I felt they were just plain great. There are a few other series that aren't quite coming to my mind at this point in time, but I'm sure a lot of RPGs from the PS1/PS2 era deserve to be on this list.
Literature: One Hundred Years of Solitude is my fav literatury book. There isn't many words to describe it but the fact that you're not the same person before and after reading it. It's life changing book for me.
Movies: Funny how I'm not crazy about movies. There isn't one I can say that would match the importance of other stuff for me here.
Shows: Breaking Bad. I had more fun, emotional collapses and laughs with it then any movie i've ever seen.
Eletronic Games: King's Field IV. The narrative is perfect for video game, because it explores the facets only a video game could (interaction). Its by far the most imersive game of all times and although the plot is super confusing and might be meaningless to the average player (because anything is in your face) it's very nice to experience a story from truelly first person perpective (everything already occured and you're just scrapping bits of info, just like real life). In the end it's a very meaningful tale that shows how the will to shakle negative feelings such as anger and envy is in itself a evil as well.
Board Games: Magic's Weatherlight saga as whole. I like most chapters and although part of the ending is very crazy (talking decapted urza head) we all knewn it was coming. And I liked how the invasion remained inevitable to the end (how it was supposed to be) but the hero's efforts weren't vain either.
Recently I'm digging some Warhammer 40K stuff.
Music: Ghost Reverie's from Opeth. It tells the motivation and feelings behind satanism better then anything else. It's truelly satanism inside out and it's kind like chritianity.
The CRPG Planescape: Torment from 1998, hands down. Though I'd be surprised if people these days even know that it exists.
We do have some older people who frequent the forum and have some semblance of taste. I'm one of them.. I still have the game box somewhere in the flat. No idea where the CDs went but I still have the box.
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and start slitting throats.
- H.L Mencken
I Became insane with long Intervals of horrible Sanity
All Religion, my friend is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.
- Edgar Allan Poe
Of the top few, I think a Tale of Two Cities is by far the closest to being a classic roundup of archetypes that summarize humanity while still being a great read and fairly coherent.
Little Prince is close but more narrow, Red Chamber is a bit too focused on one segment of the population IMO (also narrow), LOTR is a fantasy/mythology and IMO less philosophically and psychologically impactful than more relatable and realistic Earth/human stories, the murder mystery is popular more so for being a sudden launch of a genre than for being a mirror onto humanity.
The bible etc. are okay, but don't seem like they count, being hodge podges of half a bazillion stories, not one. Also, many of those stories are just utterly bad in terms of entertainment OR meaningfulness/insightfulness. For example, Genesis, largely a tedious grocery list of names. In my opinion, you can't just cherry pick out the good stories, but have to treat the book as an average, and parts like that in every major religious text drag their average quality way too far down to be competitive as "greatest story ever"
Sometimes a Great Notion (the novel) was by far one of the best stories I've encountered in any medium. Nods go to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (I had dreams about Ravens and Faeries while reading this) and A Confederacy of Dunces.
While I think about other mediums when it comes to Video Games it's Silent Hill 2 . It's not the most complicated or necessarily "original" but the way it plays out and unfolds is just great and unforgettable in my opinion .
The first narrative is still the best: the Epic of Gilgamesh. No subsequent story has really added anything to what Gilgamesh says about the human condition. Friendship, ambition, mortality... it's just all there. And that blows my mind. It's not like Sumerian art in other media was all that. But I think, maybe, while sculpture and architecture and the like were all comparatively new pursuits in this new thing called "civilization", human beings have been telling each other stories since before we were human beings. So while Gilgamesh seems like the first story to us, that's just an illusion of archaeology. It is actually the product of a tradition stretching back so far that the four thousand years between Uruk and Hollywood are like the blink of an eye.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
The first narrative is still the best: the Epic of Gilgamesh. No subsequent story has really added anything to what Gilgamesh says about the human condition. Friendship, ambition, mortality... it's just all there. And that blows my mind. It's not like Sumerian art in other media was all that. But I think, maybe, while sculpture and architecture and the like were all comparatively new pursuits in this new thing called "civilization", human beings have been telling each other stories since before we were human beings. So while Gilgamesh seems like the first story to us, that's just an illusion of archaeology. It is actually the product of a tradition stretching back so far that the four thousand years between Uruk and Hollywood are like the blink of an eye.
Literary Novels: Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind and its successor, The Wise Man's Fear, are in my opinion the greatest pieces of fiction ever penned.
Wait, what, seriously? They're good reads, but you either have to be pretty freaking hard on, or never have read, the classics of the literary canon to proclaim Rothfuss surpassing all of them in timeless greatness. Hell, set aside the Cervanteses and Shakespeares and Dostoevskys and Twains. Just in the circumscribed field of contemporary SF and fantasy, you've got Robert Silverberg, Kim Stanley Robinson, Dan Simmons, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, and Lev Grossman all producing stuff much more literary than the Kingkiller Chronicles. Again, I'm not dissing Rothfuss' books. They're good. They've got strong character development and an excellent, believable love story. I like 'em a lot more than A Song of Ice and Fire. But the superlative is... difficult to fathom.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Anime : Deathnote is still a great thriller with a perfectly written "choose your own hero/villian" motive. It is very hard to not be emotionally attached to ether protagonist.
Video Game : Max Payne 2. A well written story with a well designed game that simply drags you into the film noir aspect and keeps you entwined with it til the end.
Movie : Lots of great movies, but i still think Guardian's of the Galaxy is the best complete stand-alone movie to be released since the golden age of film, Casablanca and such. You can know absolutely nothing about the movie, setting, history, even that it is a comic book that exists. It perfectly takes you from start to finish, establishes good solid characters, shows you the plot and always makes sure you know exactly why everything is happening and not assuming at all your knoweldge of the universe. You do not need to know who Thanos is, he is perfectly explained and implied of his power without over exposition. Much in the same way the emperor from Star Wars was in the first 2 films.
Anime : Deathnote is still a great thriller with a perfectly written "choose your own hero/villian" motive. It is very hard to not be emotionally attached to ether protagonist.
Had forgotten about this thread but to be honest regarding Death Note: It is only good if you consider it to end with the Death of "L", because the way it develops from there... wel lets just say it leaves a foul taste on my mouth.
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Quote from »
Call me old fashioned, but an evil ascension to power just isn't the same without someone chanting faux Latin in the background.
Oreo, Glazing people better than Dunkin' Donuts since 2009
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange eons even death may die.
With alot of these old books are they good because they're the first to write about xyz, or are they actually entertaining? I know I've read Don Quixote which everyone says its one of the greatest fiction books ever written and I could barely get through it, I was not hooked at all. I preferred Game of Throne a lot more.
People like to make proclamations, and try to get the punch line by saying XYZ is the most monumental blahblah... it's like people saying for ages now that Citizen Kane is the best movie ever. Just got to take off the rose-tinted glasses for a second.
I read a lot. I've read pretty much every piece of popular fiction, and a lot of the unpopular ones as well. There are a few exceptions, of course (such as me not wanting to read 40 Discworld novels). By and large, my favorite type of story is medieval fantasy (castles, knights, magic, etc), and that being said, I wouldn't even rank ASOIAF in the top 5 in that category - there's just so much filler and entirely uninteresting characters in it. Also, the entirety of book 4 can be summed up as 'ponderous'.
Regardless, my favorite story isn't even a published work - it's a web-serial called Worm. It has the best characters, plot, setting, and worldbuilding of any story I've ever read. I've never felt so empty inside after finishing a story, knowing that it's done, not even when I finished the 7th Harry Potter book. It's a couple million words long, so even the speediest of readers will struggle to read it in under a week.
Don Quixote is praised because it's become generally agreed upon as the start of the modern novel (whoever coined that usage of "modern" was an idiot by the way, because now that age is over and it sounds stupid) and is simultaneously one of the more well-done satires of one of the genres of the age just before it (chivalric novel). There are a lot of other very important early modern novels (I love Jacques the Fatalist) but it's been put on a pedestal, and not really undeservedly. But if you don't understand chivalric novels and a lot of other context it might not seem that good to you.
Citizen Kane is similar in that it's academically praised for its importance to the era that nearly all subsequent film, or at least the golden age of film, is a part of. But it's also pretty damn boring (and has other related, more technical arguable flaws), so it shouldn't really be watched by someone not interested in the history and innovation of film.
As to "can old books be good", of course they can. As long as a medium has artists willing and capable of creating good art, good art will be made regardless of things that might dilute it. And literature has been a prodigious and practiced artform for very long now. If you read an isolated old book like Don Quixote and dislike it, my guess would be that you lack a lot of context (doubly so as it's a translation) and/or aren't expecting or understanding the right things from it.
And yea, I agree that ASOIAF is overrated. It's passed the tipping point. I can see why people like it, and I don't hate it myself, but I think it's pretty mediocre all in all and it's plain as day that there are many people who love it without even having much understanding of fantasy. I mean, I've had a couple people tell me that ASOIAF has the best characters in fantasy. Not even "of fantasy I've read", but even if that's what someone means they probably haven't read much good fantasy. That's pretty much the hallmark of an accessible work passing the tipping point and garnering enough general praise that those who really love it become overly outspoken. Very few people are going to disagree with a statement like "it has the best/amazing/[other hyperbole] X!" just because very few people don't like it.
Not that I'm trying to say anyone should stop liking it. Liking things is always good.
Citizen Kane is similar in that it's academically praised for its importance to the era that nearly all subsequent film, or at least the golden age of film, is a part of. But it's also pretty damn boring (and has other related, more technical arguable flaws), so it shouldn't really be watched by someone not interested in the history and innovation of film.
Yeah, the problem with titles like "best movie ever" is that they tend to get handed out by movie geeks. Although the film generally given the runner-up spot, Casablanca, actually bucks that trend. It's not particularly innovative technically - it's simply exciting, adventurous, suspenseful, romantic, bromantic, and witty enough for everyone to love.
As to "can old books be good", of course they can. As long as a medium has artists willing and capable of creating good art, good art will be made regardless of things that might dilute it. And literature has been a prodigious and practiced artform for very long now. If you read an isolated old book like Don Quixote and dislike it, my guess would be that you lack a lot of context (doubly so as it's a translation) and/or aren't expecting or understanding the right things from it.
There's a simple matter of style differences, too. Writers (in the European tradition anyway) tend to get more and more verbose the further you go in the past. Don Quixote is over four hundred thousand words. Readers in the 20th and 21st Centuries are used to a much sparer, faster-paced style - you very seldom find two-page descriptions of the window dressings anymore.
Which is why the thread question, "what is the greatest story/plot?", is well worded. It separates the style from the substance. So I can say it's the Gilgamesh story even though the actual Epic of Gilgamesh is such a huge style mismatch for modern readers it's a chore.
Yea, I didn't explicitly mention stylistic differences by time period but was kinda hoping the vague "expecting the right things from [older literature]" would cover it. I really like a lot of facets of more archaic literary style but most modern people definitely don't.
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"Virtue, Jacques, is an excellent thing. Both good people and wicked people speak highly of it..."
When we ask this question, are we looking at the plot in a vacuum, or are we looking at the story as a whole (taking into consideration setting, ideologies, historical context, innovations, ect...)?
Each medium also has its limitations.
Film is limited by the available technology to generate certain effects, and the strength of the weakest member of the production team. If any aspect of it is deficient, it can drag the whole thing down with it.
Literature is limited by language barriers mostly, and translation is very far from a perfect art. There are also historical and social aspects to literature that are often lost on other generations.
Music is perhaps one of the least intrinsically limited, and at the same time limited greatly by the viewers opinions and biases.
Movies: Fight Club is my favorite movie, but I have a handful of movies that I felt were masterfully done. Requiem For a Dream was one that I found well-told, as the very end leaves you with a sense of crushing despair. "That...that was it? The movie's over? Nothing gets better?" It was a cold shower in comparison to a lot of movies that you see nowadays and refreshingly so. Pulp Fiction and Sin City are assuredly cult classics, and they deserve to be referred to as such.
Shows: This may be somewhat cliche of me, but I feel like the 10th Doctor's tenure in Doctor Who was, well..."Fantastic." I felt emotionally drawn to the characters, the writing was, while somewhat cheesy at times, excellently centered around character development and relationships, and it had a fair number of "oh ****" moments that just kept me watching and wanting more.
Video games: I was rather fond of the plots of Final Fantasy 6 and 7 (just like everyone else, right?). I felt they were just plain great. There are a few other series that aren't quite coming to my mind at this point in time, but I'm sure a lot of RPGs from the PS1/PS2 era deserve to be on this list.
Just my 2 cents' worth.
Movies: Funny how I'm not crazy about movies. There isn't one I can say that would match the importance of other stuff for me here.
Shows: Breaking Bad. I had more fun, emotional collapses and laughs with it then any movie i've ever seen.
Eletronic Games: King's Field IV. The narrative is perfect for video game, because it explores the facets only a video game could (interaction). Its by far the most imersive game of all times and although the plot is super confusing and might be meaningless to the average player (because anything is in your face) it's very nice to experience a story from truelly first person perpective (everything already occured and you're just scrapping bits of info, just like real life). In the end it's a very meaningful tale that shows how the will to shakle negative feelings such as anger and envy is in itself a evil as well.
Board Games: Magic's Weatherlight saga as whole. I like most chapters and although part of the ending is very crazy (talking decapted urza head) we all knewn it was coming. And I liked how the invasion remained inevitable to the end (how it was supposed to be) but the hero's efforts weren't vain either.
Recently I'm digging some Warhammer 40K stuff.
Music: Ghost Reverie's from Opeth. It tells the motivation and feelings behind satanism better then anything else. It's truelly satanism inside out and it's kind like chritianity.
BGU Control
R Aggro
Standard - For Fun
BG Auras
We do have some older people who frequent the forum and have some semblance of taste. I'm one of them.. I still have the game box somewhere in the flat. No idea where the CDs went but I still have the box.
- H.L Mencken
I Became insane with long Intervals of horrible Sanity
All Religion, my friend is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.
- Edgar Allan Poe
The Crafters' Rules Guru
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books
Of the top few, I think a Tale of Two Cities is by far the closest to being a classic roundup of archetypes that summarize humanity while still being a great read and fairly coherent.
Little Prince is close but more narrow, Red Chamber is a bit too focused on one segment of the population IMO (also narrow), LOTR is a fantasy/mythology and IMO less philosophically and psychologically impactful than more relatable and realistic Earth/human stories, the murder mystery is popular more so for being a sudden launch of a genre than for being a mirror onto humanity.
The bible etc. are okay, but don't seem like they count, being hodge podges of half a bazillion stories, not one. Also, many of those stories are just utterly bad in terms of entertainment OR meaningfulness/insightfulness. For example, Genesis, largely a tedious grocery list of names. In my opinion, you can't just cherry pick out the good stories, but have to treat the book as an average, and parts like that in every major religious text drag their average quality way too far down to be competitive as "greatest story ever"
Casual reading: The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson
Television: How I Met Your Mother...Sorry, only kidding. NOTHING compares to Mork & Mindy!!
Movies: Kind of hard to top Lord of the Rings for sheer story arc.
My favorite of these....The Wheel of Time.
BG/x BG
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
—Karn, silver golem
Now I'm going to have to read that.
And a proper translation of The Iliad too.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Video Game : Max Payne 2. A well written story with a well designed game that simply drags you into the film noir aspect and keeps you entwined with it til the end.
Movie : Lots of great movies, but i still think Guardian's of the Galaxy is the best complete stand-alone movie to be released since the golden age of film, Casablanca and such. You can know absolutely nothing about the movie, setting, history, even that it is a comic book that exists. It perfectly takes you from start to finish, establishes good solid characters, shows you the plot and always makes sure you know exactly why everything is happening and not assuming at all your knoweldge of the universe. You do not need to know who Thanos is, he is perfectly explained and implied of his power without over exposition. Much in the same way the emperor from Star Wars was in the first 2 films.
My wife was on MTV with this video.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUutIZg2EpU
This man is correct and he is the only one who passes the test. These are books about ideas; about concepts.
Close second: Vacuum Diagrams. Amazing read, somewhat more dense and less focused than Asimov.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I read a lot. I've read pretty much every piece of popular fiction, and a lot of the unpopular ones as well. There are a few exceptions, of course (such as me not wanting to read 40 Discworld novels). By and large, my favorite type of story is medieval fantasy (castles, knights, magic, etc), and that being said, I wouldn't even rank ASOIAF in the top 5 in that category - there's just so much filler and entirely uninteresting characters in it. Also, the entirety of book 4 can be summed up as 'ponderous'.
Regardless, my favorite story isn't even a published work - it's a web-serial called Worm. It has the best characters, plot, setting, and worldbuilding of any story I've ever read. I've never felt so empty inside after finishing a story, knowing that it's done, not even when I finished the 7th Harry Potter book. It's a couple million words long, so even the speediest of readers will struggle to read it in under a week.
Citizen Kane is similar in that it's academically praised for its importance to the era that nearly all subsequent film, or at least the golden age of film, is a part of. But it's also pretty damn boring (and has other related, more technical arguable flaws), so it shouldn't really be watched by someone not interested in the history and innovation of film.
As to "can old books be good", of course they can. As long as a medium has artists willing and capable of creating good art, good art will be made regardless of things that might dilute it. And literature has been a prodigious and practiced artform for very long now. If you read an isolated old book like Don Quixote and dislike it, my guess would be that you lack a lot of context (doubly so as it's a translation) and/or aren't expecting or understanding the right things from it.
And yea, I agree that ASOIAF is overrated. It's passed the tipping point. I can see why people like it, and I don't hate it myself, but I think it's pretty mediocre all in all and it's plain as day that there are many people who love it without even having much understanding of fantasy. I mean, I've had a couple people tell me that ASOIAF has the best characters in fantasy. Not even "of fantasy I've read", but even if that's what someone means they probably haven't read much good fantasy. That's pretty much the hallmark of an accessible work passing the tipping point and garnering enough general praise that those who really love it become overly outspoken. Very few people are going to disagree with a statement like "it has the best/amazing/[other hyperbole] X!" just because very few people don't like it.
Not that I'm trying to say anyone should stop liking it. Liking things is always good.
There's a simple matter of style differences, too. Writers (in the European tradition anyway) tend to get more and more verbose the further you go in the past. Don Quixote is over four hundred thousand words. Readers in the 20th and 21st Centuries are used to a much sparer, faster-paced style - you very seldom find two-page descriptions of the window dressings anymore.
Which is why the thread question, "what is the greatest story/plot?", is well worded. It separates the style from the substance. So I can say it's the Gilgamesh story even though the actual Epic of Gilgamesh is such a huge style mismatch for modern readers it's a chore.
Unless you're a zombie and you like brains. That's not good.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Each medium also has its limitations.
Film is limited by the available technology to generate certain effects, and the strength of the weakest member of the production team. If any aspect of it is deficient, it can drag the whole thing down with it.
Literature is limited by language barriers mostly, and translation is very far from a perfect art. There are also historical and social aspects to literature that are often lost on other generations.
Music is perhaps one of the least intrinsically limited, and at the same time limited greatly by the viewers opinions and biases.