This is what the show is all about: Serious, in-depth commentary. My fear is that someone will mistake our exhaustively researched review for Rutskarn and I ignoring Josh and acting like jackasses for twenty minutes.

Also: Pbbbth. Pbbbth. Pbbbth.

Having said all that: Am I the only one who wanted to punch out the dancer? Were we supposed to think he was awesome? I dunno. He’s technically got rhythm and athleticism on his side, but for whatever reason I thought “poser” every time I saw him.

He really is well-guarded. Aside from the crowd of inexplicably applauding onlookers, there are a couple of cops patrolling the area. I wanted to take him down without having to fight everyone in the Detroit subway system, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it.

Tagged:deus ex, spoiler warning

68 comments. Quick! Add another to see if this message changes!

The inventory system really got to me in this game. I was using Skyrim-style item hoarding in a cover-shooter with some light inventory elements. There was no way that was going to work out for me. I maxed out the inventory capacity as soon as I could, and even that wasn’t enough.

In the section where you have to deal with the gangers, I was compelled to sell off ALL of their gear.Of course, if you pick up a shotgun and you already HAVE a shotgun, it simply poofs the firearm out of existence and gives you the bullets. So, I had to… carry the guns to the shop one at a time. I did that. It was boring. It took forever. It wasn’t necessary. And it wasn’t something the developers intended the player to do.

And if I played through again? I’d probably do the same thing.

There is no cure for compulsive looting.

Tagged:deus ex, spoiler warning

There are more than 168 comments. But less than 170

Weeks before this series began – almost as soon as we announced we’d be covering Deus Ex: Human Revolution – people were already listing all the things they wanted to see in a DEHR play-through. As the series has gone on, the number and specificity of these demands has grown. A great deal of the comment threads are dedicated to expressing outrage over items we missed or listing things we MUST do in future episodes. It has now officially gotten out of hand.

So: Relax. If there’s some particular way you want to see things done, feel free to boot up the game and have a go at it. If we overlook something that you enjoyed, feel free to talk about it in the comments without passive-aggressive (or even explicit) insinuations that we’re playing the game wrong.

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Tagged:deus ex, spoiler warning

I bet you won't even read all 112 comments before leaving your own.

And now for your entertainment: The Adventures of Munenari, the Ninja-Man!

In a stroke of luck, on his way through Kai province to scout for further Murakami incursions, our valiant protagonist catches sight of an enemy ninja – no doubt about to engage in some nefarious mission of sabotage or subterfuge against us! Munenari knows what he must do.

With a display of great guile and skill, he subtly sneaks into the ninja’s massive army camp and slips past his numerous, heavily armed guards. Clearly, this enemy ninja must be a master of the art to hide such a large and obvious camp so close to our forces.

Once inside, he sights his target:

The enemy ninja sits unmasked, at the center of his camp, in meditation. Munenari throws a knife, dead center at his opponent’s back, but the enemy knew he was here! He blocks it with his fan and draws his blade!

They clash!

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42 comments. (Insert played-out "meaning of life, the universe and everything" joke here.)

If you can, you’ll want to watch this one full-screen and in high-res. It starts off as an incredibly faithful Left 4 Dead fan film, and then expands into… Well, I shouldn’t spoil it. You’ll see.

Awesome, but it’s also very instructive in light of the recent SOPA debate. There’s a lot of copyrighted characters in this thing. Midway Games, Warner Bros. Interactive, Epic Games, Microsoft Game Studios, and Valve could all claim that this movie uses their copyrighted stuff. Sure, this is non-profit and obviously every bit as legal as fanfiction, but companies have opposed this sort of thing in the past.

But even if none of those companies would take action, would people really risk sharing it? Would I want to share this video on my website if doing so could result in a takedown? I mean, a SOPA takedown would mean this site would vanish and I’d have to fight to have it restored, during which time I wouldn’t be able to promote my various projects. I can’t perform due diligence on this video and make sure the producers have permission to use those characters, sounds, and music.

But most importantly: Who would bother making a video like this? This cost a great deal of time and money to produce. Who would take that risk in a world where everyone would be afraid to share it??

This is the fiendish heart of it. Beyond the lack of due process, the damage to free speech, the potential for abuse, the security hazards, and the dangerous precedent created by SOPA, we wouldn’t even know just how much we’d lost. There’s no way of measuring the things that don’t get made.

Anyway, that was a pretty hilarious movie. I’ve never been a fan of Master Chief, but even I cracked a smile when he showed up and started kicking ass. I am simply amazed at the sheer volume of clever, interesting, high-quality content that the internet produces for me every day.

Tagged:left 4 dead

I bet you won't even read all 103 comments before leaving your own.

So, my column this week is mostly preaching to the choir, but there’s always this mad, delusional hope that some of it will sink in. I can understand (but not condone) when a company acts with contempt for their customers in service of their bottom line. But I find it maddening when a company does so to their own ruin. In short, Origin needs to get its act together, quickly.

The time and money put into Origin are considerable. It could be a great opportunity for EA and gamers. I say this as someone who isn’t even all that keen on digital distribution and would prefer a market based on physical copies. However, I can see this is the way things are going, and I can see EA is squandering this opportunity.

A good litmus test is this: Given the behavior of the competition, would Valve need to change Steam in any way in order to avoid losing sales or market share? If anything, Origin just makes Steam look that much more attractive.

How can so many people be so flagrantly clueless and dysfunctional for so long? They must have unbelievable internal inertia to be this slow and unresponsive to market expectations.

130 COMMENTS? What are you people talking about?!?

I apologize in advance for how this devolves into a mess. We probably would have called a do-over on this episode if not for the fact that we needed to wrap up the session because I needed to get going.

Fun fact: I had no idea that the game re-rolled conversations until this week. I thought the solution to a conversation would be the same for all playthroughs.

I count four ways into the alley behind the police station:

1. The lightning alley, which requires the lightning-proof aug. (EMP shielding, I think?)
2. The chain-link fence, which requires the Mario Jump aug to get over, because it’s impossible for Jenson to climb a chain-link fence. I consider this to be an egregious oversight. You can also use the super-strength mod to stack up dumpsters and crates, although the stacking physics are, like most videogames, horrible fiddly.
3. Sewer. Sigh. The sewers are filled with armed foes and traps because hey, videogame.
4. Speech-check (or murder) your way into the police station, and then exit through the side door.

It’s pretty screwy, but the thing that bugs me is that there are quest-relevant people back in that alley. How did they get there?

Tagged:deus ex, spoiler warning

202 comments. Sure. Just keeping adding more. It's not like my server has finite HD space.

So the story over the past few days is that today is the one-month point for Star Wars: The Old Republic. If people decide they don’t want to pay another $15 for another month, then they need to unsubscribe right away. Except, according to Joystiq, the “unsubscribe” button vanished from the account screen yesterday. Some users posted a workaround link, but those users “[...] received a warning and seen their threads shut down by moderators as violating the Rules of Conduct.”

The disappearing unsubscribe button you can sort of explain. I mean, it’s possible for bits of a page to go missing if you muck up the CSS. The timing is highly suspect, but fine. We can let this slide. But there is no way to explain or justify the locking of threads that instruct users how to get around this.

Then there was the story about people being banned from the game for looting containers in an end-game area with low-level characters.

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Tagged:the old republic, tor

2⁷ comments. Suck it, base ten!

I have no comment, other than the fact that I’m really enjoying this season. This game is good enough to be fun to watch, but flawed enough to make for interesting discussion.

Tagged:deus ex, spoiler warning

I bet you won't even read all 115 comments before leaving your own.

I like that a few of your abilities were already acquired on the level up menu. At the very start of the game, Jensen has apparently already “spent points” on the HUD and other things. It connected the gameplay mechanics and contrivances with the leveling mechanics. It also showed that Jensen had been gradually easing into his augmentations on his own during the 6-month recovery time.

In this episode I talk about how cities are tough to do. This is one of the reasons I make such a big deal about Grand Theft Auto IV. That’s pretty much your worst-case scenario for environment design. It’s hard to manage that much texture data at so many different resolutions, it’s hard to manage all those buildings at so many different detail levels, all changing in real-time, it’s hard designing a tool set that will let multiple artists all work in the same open world without getting in each other’s way, it’s hard having all those interior spaces available without loading screens, it’s hard with so many cars, people, sound effects, global actors (like the train) and getting AI to drive around in that mess without making a fool of itself. I don’t really hold it against other games for failing to live up to that standard.

However, you can see the technology gap here. In Human Revolution we’ve got a very limited section of the city, no traffic, few pedestrians, and there are still loading screens all over the place. I don’t fault the game too much for it. This isn’t an id Software game and I’m not here to gawk at graphics spectacle and coding prowess. However, there will be one point later on when the game will really, really be undermined by the technology to an embarrassing degree. Josh is apparently displeased with my habit of looking ahead, so we’ll save that discussion for when the time comes.

Tagged:deus ex, spoiler warning

181 comments? What, did somebody start a flame war or something?

I still think that the choice of letting Zeke go was a bit odd. For one thing, I thought, “Let Zeke go” sort of implied “in exchange for the hostage”. I thought that was the option for everyone to walk away, and the option on the right was if you wanted to capture Zeke AND free the hostage. Letting him go WITH the hostage? Why would Adam pursue that? It was strange leaving the room and finding the hostage dead, cops all around, Zeke gone, and no clear indication for how that set of circumstances came about. How did Zeke extricate himself from that many foes with itchy trigger fingers, escape unharmed, AND shoot the hostage? I mean, we can contrive our own scenarios to explain it, but I think extremely unlikely outcomes deserve some kind of explanation.

If nothing else, we need to know what happened so we know what to think of Zeke. Did he really shoot her, or did the cops do it as Rutskarn joked? Did he shoot the hostage once he no longer needed her, or was the shooting done when he was cornered?I don’t mind having a bad or sub-optimal option. I agree that dumb choices should have appropriately non-victorious outcomes, it’s just that this one didn’t feel like a failure, it felt like we skipped a page.

We’re not going to have a do-over every time we have one of these conversations, but I’m glad we did in this case.

Tagged:deus ex, spoiler warning

There are more than 166 comments. But less than 168

A lot of sites are doing a blackout today as a protest to SOPA. I don’t feel right about doing that. However, I will partly, cautiously lift my ban on political talk to tackle this subject, because a few people have asked for my thoughts on the matter. I doubt I’ll say anything new, but I’m willing to say it all the same. Also, don’t miss Michael Goodfellow’s thoughts on the cultural and business aspect of this thing and what led us here.

I’m hoping that opposition to this thing is universal enough that we can sidestep the usual Red Team vs. Blue Team political football that makes me so crazy. First, here is a video that outlines the details:

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393 comments. Keep commenting and you're liable to break the internet.