Link (YouTube) |
So you might be wondering, “Hey, what took so long?” or “Why is the episode going up in the evening?” or “Why are you so lazy Josh, give me my free entertainment!”
All of which are good questions. I’d like to know the answers too.
But this is what the upload page looks like right now:
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Gee, thanks Youtube. Unknown errors. Those are the best kind.
Now I’ve had single upload fails before, but this is the first time it’s happened four three times in a row. Additionally, these failures happened near the end of the upload process, it wasn’t just something that happened right as I hit upload. And when you’re uploading a file that’s just short of 1 GB in size, even a single upload failure can eat hours. Hopefully this won’t become a habit.
So that’s been my day so far. How about yours?
The Biggest Game Ever

Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
The Dumbest Cutscene

This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
Philosophy of Moderation

The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
This Game is Too Videogame-y

What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
Borderlands Series

A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
Not bad, thanks.
So, uh, about this E3 thingymabob. Anything interest you?
What’s E3?
Yeah, Skyrim gameplay footages were nice.
Also, ME3 info was quite ridiculous and ensured my continued lack of interest in the game.
Edit – Oh, hey, also a reply fail. Meant to be a reply to the first post a bit upways..
i think sony did very well at E3.
MS unveiled yet more kinect “games”
and Nintendo dropped its share price to a 5 year low with the WiiU (seriously the worst console name ever).
oh and there are going to be yet more halo games. my god the horse is dead but they keep beating it. ME3 looked good upto the whole solo killing a reaper thing. that was stupid, Skyrim looks amazing. so this is a dragon fight. now we’ve killed that one. o shit there’s a fucking strong one coming now. and the look i can attack this mammoth (gets ass handed to him).
BF3 look cool. MW3 supervised (WTH? Surprised, how. did. i. what) noone. PSVita will be on AT&T for the unfortunate Americans. i’m sorry guys. but it looks good.
I’m looking forward to Insomniac’s new series. Looks kinda generic, but it seems to have Ratchet and Clank’s charm.
Not to mention the usual inventive weapons in Insomniac’s games.
Hmm. Time to buy some Nintendo stock?
I’D say so. No idea why people are selling, the WiiU, stupid name or not, looks pretty solid… an HD gaming platform with an iPad for a controller?
I’m looking forward to seeing my dad more often through video calls…
Exactly. Nintendo’s stokc is now getting low, which means you can buy it for a good, cheap price. When the WiiU proves to be successful, the stock price will rise and you’ll earn money on it..
So it’s stupid to sell now, but it’s pretty good to buy – if you believe that the WiiU will succeed, of course.
What’s funny is the same thing happened when they announced the Wii. Nintendo has some skittish shareholders.
Probably not – that five year low is still over $200 USD.
This is so pessimistic that it makes me want to beat a clown…
Why would you ever NOT want to beat a clown?
Every time I see “PSVita” in my head it is changed to “Pita.”
So it’s either food or a Pain In The Ass.
(probably the second if it is as hand-crippling as the PSP)
Fruit Ninja Kinect was announced. First game on Kinect that I would actually want to play for even a couple minutes…
“Solo killing a reaper”
Can you explain what you are talking about? The orbital strike DIDN’T WORK!
It shouldn’t even have slowed it down, if it was an actual reaper.
I’m thinking there are multiple levels of Reapers, and Sovereign was one of the bigger ones. Or something.
DNF before HL:E3. The end times are nigh.
Clearly we need a better video hosting service. And a new voice chat client. And a less laggy, spammy streaming service. And new headsets.
The problem is clearly the underlying protocol. We need to switch to the protocol outlined here.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149
Carrier pigeons? Please, that is so 2009. Stone tablets are all the rage these days.
Perhaps a unicorn as well? I’ve heard they have a really snarky take on modern RPGs.
The problem is the distance between the cast members. Everyone should abandon their current lives and rent an apartment in the slums of Cleveland to live in together. It would be a sitcom, and a reality TV show. Whacky hijinx, and serious tension as American viewers try to decipher who will be the first to kill Rutskarn (Mumbles in the ballroom with her cannibalism). Oh yeah… And Spoiler Warning. What was I talking about?
On the plus side, the rent will probably be about ten bucks fifty per bedroom a month…
I’d watch that.
and a game with an original-sense-making story so you guys can talk about the mise-en-scene (spell?) and the paradigm shifting magnitude of the twists etc. rather than just being utterly dumbfounded every time you actually pay any attention.
Dead Money makes perfect sense, but no one (including Josh) has been paying even remote attention to the story on this playthrough.
Well, they paid a lot of attention to the story in this episode. And guess what, so far two out of two companions turn out to be bastards, Christine with her lobotomized aggressive-nature and anti-vocalist stance, and dean with being a massive jackass.
I wonder how they will turn dog/god into a jerk in the next episode.. Maybe he is a mutant breeder or something?
Well, they’re pissed at Cuftbert because he lacks the capabilities/skill points to actually be anything other than a raging jackass towards them. Otherwise they’re much more helpful. Even Dean goes from “Have fun with the Holograms” to “Oh hey buddy! Listen, I wanna help you but I’m kinda stuck so if you get me here I’ll just hand you the key to progress and tell you what you need to know.”
Dog/God at this point is suicidal and wants to blow up the casino to kill himself. Since dealing with him peacefully requires speech, which Cuftbert lacks, he’ll go down as well.
Cuftbert currently has 70 speech (68 +2 from constant alcohol), yet that still apparently makes him a raging jackass. That makes a lot of sense.
The DLC suggests level 20 not because of combat difficulty, but because of skill checks. The vast majority of skill checks in Dead Money are in the 75-90 range; if it’s not your major skill and you’re not well-levelled, you will fail most of them.
Yeah, Dean’s so stuck behind a chest-high wall and a ten foot drop, or a staircase and curtain — or maybe just his crippling jack-assery.
Well, Christine’s reaction is pretty much the sane way to react to Reginald Cuftbert.
Especially after she was threatened with being put BACK in the auto-doc… I’d be freaking pissed too…
Do you expect a story to make sense if you pick it up in the middle?
Even if the story is good when you pay attention you’ve got to do pretty damn well to recover from a deus ex machina knockout as an intro and if you follow it with one in the interlude then you dun goofed. I found it very difficult to enjoy the pit for the same reason (that and I was energy weps), haven’t played dead money.
@Fists
That’s simple railroading in order to get the player somewhere you want. And we like to shake our fists (no pun intended) against railroading, but in and of itself it isn’t a bad thing.
It’s only when you’re being railroaded into doing somethung dumb/stupid and/or when the pay off when I can get of the rails is bad.
For me neither of those was the case with Dead Money.
Though I’ll grant you that the execution of said railroading is also important. *still frowns at the thought of getting his power armoured ass beaten into unconciousness by a couple of scrawny guys withs sticks*
My day’s been good. Finished up Honest Hearts.
By the way, you guys should play it. If only for that one reference.
If New Vegas would just work for me! The worst error is the type that show up without you seamingly changing anything and no google search seems to find.
By “that one reference” do you mean that one reference to that one mod?
Because if so I agree
I mean that one reference to high-fiving.
Too bad that was the only good thing in that DLC.
I’d love a game that takes place inside an MMORPG, and a group of players that are your enemies catch up to you in the middle of a dungeon that you’re not supposed to be hard to get into. You ask them how they got there, and they jsut say “Oh, we did the quest.”
No, John. YOU are the boss battle.
And then John was a dragon.
the depressing bit about this part is that our commentators main complain about the casino-story is actually explained. I won’t spoil it one episode before the reveal, but there are reasons for the murderous security, the secured locks everywhere, the slighest failure -> set everything to murder.
And did Dog move Christina, Dean and Reginald around the casino once they made it in? I’ve only played Dead Money once, 6 months ago, and I think I missed out on a lot now…
Yeah, it’s is rather annoying when they complain about things that were explained pretty up front in the DLC.
Maybe it’s just because I played Dead Money again a few days ago, eh.
It was designed by the umbrella corporation?
Well, as far as this episode goes, I wouldn’t call it complaining so much as finding it funny. Because it is.
Vera/Christine’s voice actress is Laura Bailey. Her most prominent non-anime voice acting job was the voice of Rayne in the Bloodrayne games.
On the anime front, she did KEIKO from Yu Yu Hakusho… Which I know Shamus liked.
Also, I think Rise Kujikawa in Persona 4…
She also does plenty of NPCs in the main game as well as the pained grunts of the Female Courier.
She also was Chun-Li in Street Fighter 4 and is Jaina Proudmoore in WoW. I knew I heard her voice somewhere before.
I pretend WoW doesn’t exist. It’s the only thing that keeps me sane.
My day has been pretty damn good, thanks for asking. :)
Ah, well.. Problems happen, nobody thinks worse of you because of it.
But as for your question, my day’s been great. Right now I’m watching this show, Spoiler Warning? It’s pretty cool, but you probably haven’t heard of it.
Shamus have you tried using the Java uploader? There’s a link in the sidebar. It’s supposed to support resume on upload failure.
**Josh, small quible
“Youve unlocked m second form!And its even snazzier!”
Oh,by the way,Rutskarn,christine seems to have worse short term memory than the woman in your hitman stream.
There was a woman in his hitman stream?
More than one in fact, and he didn’t even kill them all.
Also Josh: “four three” should be “for three” I’m guessing?
Uh that was a joke actually. I forget how it was supposed to work though.
Very stressful. I’ve got me a 2500 word essay (admittedly not that much work) due tomorrow, and I don’t even have a thesis, let alone secondary sources (which are required).
“Yay.”
Truth be told, I thought you uploaded all the videos for the week on Monday or Tuesday and then just set them public when you wrote the post, so I didn’t think you could run in to problems when the Tuesday episode worked fine. I guess the episodes take longer than that to produce, don’t they?
We record the four episodes for a week on Sunday night and the first one goes up on Tuesday morning, and at an hour to an hour and a half editing, forty-five minutes of encoding, and two hours for an upload – if the uploader sees fit to cooperate – it would take probably all of Monday to edit and upload the videos all at once.
All the more reason for you to make a one day break between every two episodes.So you can upload them a day in advance.
I see, four to six hours for editing at once can be draining. I would say you could leave the videos uploading overnight, but since the whole discussion started because the upload failed, leaving it unnattended wouldn’t do much good, would it? A true conundrum.
Anyway, it (sort of) works, so no changing a winning team.
In case anyone out there doesn’t know what Rutskarn’s quip, “Do not talk about The Event, remain indoors,” at 09:27 was about, it’s from the hilarious BBC series, “That Mitchell & Webb Look,” specifically:
Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.
And just because we’re on the subject, before Mitchell & Webb got their TV show, their sketch comedy was on the radio, which featured this bit of Harry Potter hilarity.
I am a lot more familiar with British Radio than Tv, particularly where comedy is concerned. I LOVED that show and was so sad that it moved to TV.
At least we still get David Mitchell on “The Unbelievable Truth.” :)
Having a very similar “problem very late in the progress bar” issue. I just bought The Sims 3, and I discovered at about 90% through the installation (which took more than an hour) that one of the files (fullbuild1) was corrupt. Searching around the less scrupulous parts of the net, I only managed to find one site with even a mention of downloading just that one file. 2 problems though: The site is in Portuguese or something, and it’s above the file size limit for free users on Megaupload.
So yeah, that’s my day. I’ve now got to decide whether I want to bother torrenting more than 5 GB to get a working ISO, or whether I just want to return the game (bought it from the only used entertainment store that I know of which resells PC games, and they have a 7 day return policy).
I say you do both. It a way that defies some forms of logic you aren’t stealing anything. You bought the game, the game is still running on your computer, and now someone else is playing it too because of you. I see doing both as a kindness to the world.
Btw, the casino never REALLY makes sense, but paying attention to the lore and getting info out of the characters makes it so the plot holes aren’t so huge…
One thing about the plotholes is that they are almost all related how some of the technology actually works. If you start thinking about it, a very little of it really makes sense when it starts going from “SCIENCE!” to basically pure sci-fi magic. While it mostly gets attributed to the idea that the
security measures are just so advanced and that the casino basically works as its own entity and is just stuck doing what it was programmed to do, there’s no real explanation that what exactly makes it all tick.It does though give a good perspective on why Elijah is so obsessed about learning the secrets of Sierra Madre.
Most of that’s not really a plothole though. If that would be the case then the existance of plasmaguns and microfusion cells would also be plotholes.
That’s the setting not getting real world science getting right. Some people trip over this, but personally I’m okay with it as long as the differences are established, consistant and the logic in the sory following that is solid. If that latter part is not the case, then you do have a plot hole.
An example:
Fallout 3’s “Either water itself has become radioactive or the radioactive particles are very hard to remove from water”-thing isn’t a plothole.
Fallout 3’s “Our tech works on a small scale. But that’s not enough! No we cannot build a pump-purifyer-bottling-plant combination. We must purify the entire basin all at once. Because that is science!
Now all I need is a piece of magic tech (one that can be used for a myriad of other purposes – some even far more usefull then this) to augment my allready working tech”-thing on the other hand is a plothole.
It is a plothole if the narrative fails to give some explanation why something is actually happening in the story or world, and in this case there just happens to be some technology involved. Even if there is an explanation, but one misses the chance to learn any better, then it will remain a plothole to him.
Most of the tech in the Fallout world is actually fairly self-explanatory.
Let’s take a look at the Micro-fusion cell.
Fact: A fusion reaction requires some form of fissionable material as fuel. Conclusion: It must contain some form of fissionable fuel, most probably radioactive, to create a miniature sized fusion reaction in the device that uses it.
Plasma rifle
Fact: Plasma rifle is a gun that shoots hot plasma bolts. Fact 2: Plasma rifle uses micro-fusion cells as ammo. Conclusion: The energy created by the micro-fusion reaction must be what is used by the plasma rifle to produce the plasma bolt.
It might not all work in real life, but it’s a logical conclusion when we’re in a universe where physics work a little different from ours.
Some of the more specific plotholes I’m referring to are
A) People getting magically moved from point A to point B
B) Everyone passing out when entering the casino the first time
There are some explanations for most of them, but they don’t really explain what the working force behind them is. The point I’m trying to make here is that they aren’t really that satisfactory plothole fixes. For all we know it could be just freaking magic, but it’s just waived off as some wondrous technology, end of story.
They might not ruin the whole story, but they will still be there to bug those who care about such things. It doesn’t usually bother me personally that much, but I can understand why some people get annoyed by things like that.
Well, there are explanations for those two points. They just aren’t shown in this LP.
A better argument would then be the question of whether or not said explanations are satisfactory.
Why would a fusion cell require something fissionable?
Weeeeellll that IS a good question. Chances are I may have messed up with the terminology when trying to look for the right adjective (I’m tired as hell atm).. What I meant was, ehm, fusionable? Fusional? Whatever that opposite is supposed to be.
4:32 AM Edit: Or nevermind.
Fusion bombs actually need a fission bomb to set them off, or so I’m told. Fusion reactors, I think, don’t, but those also don’t manage to produce more power than it takes to keep them going so far. Basically, fusion only works at incredible temperatures. To achieve such temperatures quickly and easily is most easily done with fission reactions.
So depending on which approach microfusion cells take, they may well require fissionable materials as starters.
Well, the ITER in France is betting that their close to getting more power out than they put in to contain it, and that they can sustain a reaction for longer than a second before having to shut it down.
Reactors usually use a ton of lasers to super-heat a small bit of fusile material. The hydrogen bomb used a fission bomb as a starter because that’s alot easier and more compact.
There was one weird project where someone tried to initiate fusion with sonic shock waves by basically hitting the containment vessel from all directions with pistons. I think they also wanted to use that effect as containment instead of the usual massive electromagnetic field containment method…
Anyway, ITER — fusion reactor being built in France. We can’t scale down fusion yet because we can’t even get it to work at all. Yay, science!
For one thing the losses in fusion power mostly scale with the surface area of the reactor chamber and the produced power scales with the volume. So making the reactor the size of a common battery would be a bad idea indeed.
As far as I know, magnetic confinement is more common than inertial (like lasers) or at least developed further. ITER is magnetic; that’s where you get the cool donut-shaped tokamak chamber from.
Inertial confinement seems to be mostly an American thing. No wonder they would be the ones to try to make it work by shooting cool lasers at it. ;)
Of course, nature knows gravitational confinement is the coolest of all.
Or the hottest, as it were.
Unfortunately, PV hasn’t really come so far that we can make effective use of gravitationally contained fusion for a significant portion of our energy needs. There have been some neat findings in material science that have led to ~20% increase in PV efficiency though, so that’s promising.
No, the coolest, as amazing as it sounds. There’s just so much fuel for fusion in the Sun, for example, that the pitiable 10^7 K -scale core temperature is enough for a powerful reaction. Our reactors require something like 10 times as much, ITER aims at 150 million Kelvins.
Not sure about PV efficiency… as far as I know, the problem with those crazy high numbers is that the material itself is usually a lot more expensive, compared to the common ~15% stuff. Now when you get that increase by concentrating light or something, that’s sweet.
Okay, since we can’t go any deeper, I’ll reply to my own post with my response to Sekundaari.
Oh, did not realize that our fusion reactors were operating at temperatures greater than the sun’s core. I guess that hammers home how freaking huge the coils have to be for the electromagnets on a tokamak — and why ten years ago experts were saying we were still 50 years out from a working fusion reactor.
Affordable PV is 15-20% efficient right now and the high-end stuff is 40%. But a few months ago, some professor studying material science figured out that if you resurface one of the semiconductor layers into something like a rough sine wave that traps the light so that when it reflects off the PV wafer and tries to escape it doesn’t just go straight back out. That got a ~20% boost in efficiency, which probably applies to both types of cells since the high-end cells are really three PV cells layered in a single package and each absorbs a different bit of the spectrum.
Oh, that’s actually neat. Do you have a link to the paper?
Man, this was further back than I thought. I scrolled through months of the NSF’s Facebook updates…
http://www.futurity.org/science-technology/coated-solar-cells-soak-up-more-light/
Two-stage thermonuclear weapons, the only (known!) design for fusion-based bombs are pretty complicated, but you’ve got the gist of it right. Wikipedia says it’s more based on the pressure from the X-Ray radiation of the fission bomb than the temperature, but what do they know?
(begin wank mode)
I can’t imagine any realistic design for something called ‘fusion cells’ to actually have a hot fusion reaction: Thermonuclear weapons can create fusion only by crushing tritium at extreme pressures in the middle of a fission chain reaction, so the only possible result at that point is an explosion – not too useful for your car battery. I’m not familiar with the mechanics of fusion generators, but I’d guess they just try to get a magnetically contained loop of plasma hot enough that you could just keep feeding in hydrogen or whatever and it would keep itself hot – but magnetic containment of sufficient quantities of million degree celcius hydrogen is just about the exact opposite definition of ‘micro’ as you can get. I’d guess that the most likely way we’ll get microfusion would be using engineered protien chains to phyically mash atoms together at room temperatures, or a similar system (I remember seeing a theory that collapsing micro-bubbles or something could also work).
(end wank mode)
Fallout 3″²s “Either water itself has become radioactive or the radioactive particles are very hard to remove from water”-thing isn't a plothole.
It’s not a plothole, it’s a blatantly obvious sign the writer for a science-fiction story has absolutely no clue about science and should never have been put in charge of the plot.
What really bothers me about the Sierra Madre technology are the vending machines. Everyone talks about the money and the bars, but I think those are the real treasure of the casino, and they just get glanced over by all the characters.
I mean it’s basically a compact replicator that can create a wide range of consumer goods within a blink of an eye! Food, ammo, medicine, with only a jolt of energy needed as a resource! And the potentially game-changing implications of something like this in a post-nuclear world are never acknowledged within the story. Screw the gold bars, if you could just bring one of those machines back into the Mojave and hook it up to Hoover Dam, it would be a tremendous boon to whichever faction it ends up with.
No need to set up sharecropper farms or bring food from distant regions, you can just feed everyone for free, with fresh packaged snacks, no less! Even without the power balance issues of the Mojave, something like this would be a massive leap forward for the post-war restoration of mankind, and nobody even thinks about using them, or trying to examine them and figure out how they work. Well, maybe except Elijah, but he’s the bad guy.
Which is why the chips require Fission Batteries to work most likely…
Regardless, that’s also a plot point and one of the secrets of the Sierra Madre that Elijah wants…
But once Elijah is dealt with, everyone just forgets about them and goes on their merry way.
Elijah’s a messiah of technology; once he’s gone, there’s no one smart enough (no, not even your Courier with 10 Intelligence and 100 Science) to figure them out.
And for those wondering, the intermission music is Acid Trumpet, from the usual source. You’re welcome.
In response to Rutskarn’s comment at 22:54:
When talking “on topic”, it really helps when you can actually do that. It has the appearance as if none of you have any real clue what happened and what’s going.
So when you then mock things for not having an explanation it becomes somewhat annoying to listen to, because… well, frankly you guys sound dumb. It would be better if you mocked the explanation instead.
It’s true. This whole dlc has been entertaining, but also infuriating, because almost all of their questions have been explained, and it all ties together to make Dead Money a coherent and interesting plot. Instead, we just get complaints about things they don’t understand, and we are robbed of actual conversations on the real issues, like we had in the ME2 series.
Fun Fact: Christine’s previous experience with Elijah gets covered in Old World Blues. Apparently if you play that before Dead Money you get to see it in action, or at least see Ulysses bust her out.
Wait what? So Old World Blues is in THE PAST? And it’s getting released in THE FUTURE?
I am very annoyed in THE PRESENT.
I was wondering how that was going to work, too. For those of us that have played Dead Money, is Christine still going to appear in Old World Blues and act as though she hasn’t met the Courier before? Maybe OWB will be one giant flashback (hopefully one in which we cannot move or do anything at all; I’d love to spend my money on that..)?
Maybe its an audio log?
Or video log. That’d be a nice change of pace. In the form of a cutscene, maybe.
From what I gather, Old World Blues takes place in the same place as the whole Christine ordeal, but happens afterwards.
It’s because you can play the DLCs in any order.
If you play OWB before DM, then that happens. If not then I guess you’ll find something about it and maybe a message from Ulysses.
Drink!
The moment I head Shamus say “he’s right by stairs” I instantly thought “Oh it’s better than that”.
A question how did Christine live 2 weeks without water?
well i guess she´s been less than a week only seems to be longer.
and will Dean be cut of by a bear Trap :)
The autodoc probably fed her nutrients and stuff to keep her alive.
Like poiumty said, the autodoc kept her alive. All she said about it was that it ran out of pain-killers, and made her claustrophobic and a little crazy.
So Christine only trusted Reginald after she tried to kill him and he survived. I’m surprised she didn’t get the standard boomer treatment.
I think she’s just smarter than she’s being given credit for. (“Hmm. I’ve shot this guy over a hundred times while he just walks around, looting bookcases, drinking from a sink, feeding cigarettes into a vending machine… this ‘killing’ thing isn’t working out, and I’ve seen what happens when he tries to kill someone, so… Hey! Cuthbert! I, uh, I trust you now, ok? We’re all cool, right?”)
Mumbles, no disrespect, but I flinched when you used “Weeaboo”. I have never ever heard that word used as an insult in a fashion that wasn’t a synonym for “Race Traitor”.
Then again – maybe I’m more aware of more racist connotations in speech after having worked tech support. You’d be amazed of all the new racist terms you can learn from customers when you work in a call center.
Weeaboo is a racist word? I’ve only heard it used in the context of “Japanophile”.
Issues thanks to IPv6 Day, I bet. Not really YouTube’s fault, not that I’m a huge fan.
Er, but then here’s the thing: IPv6 day is intended to help work out any kinks in the system.
We can understand that they’d have issues, but why “Unknown error”? Every language I know, when an error is caught, allows you print out the error and/or trace, and while one could say it’s not consumer friendly to put that out there, it would give Google’s testers a way to figure out WHAT went wrong…
It reminds me of that one game Shamus reviewed simulating a city (Wasn’t Sim City, something else), and all of a sudden, it stated “Something is wrong.”
“So…could you elaborate? I can see that…”
Shamus, I’ve encountered this problem recently as well, but I’ve found a method that so far seems to bypass these annoying errors. On the Upload page, scroll to the bottom and click the “Upload problems? Try the basic uploader (works on older computers and web browsers)” link. It takes you to near-identical page, only without the Drag & Drop box, and it’s worked 100% for me so far!