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Spoiler Warning returns in semi-grand fashion! We’re still waiting on certain cast members to finish Mass Effect 3. Or perhaps even simply begin the game. And it is entirely possible that key members of the cast have yet to install the game. I don’t know how aggressively passive-aggressive I need to be here, but we can’t start the new season until these events have transpired.
In the meantime, we’ve returned to our old standby. Procrastinating. Also Half-Life 2. This final block of episodes will actually take us to the end of the game. We have five episodes of HL2 coming up, as well as the second half of the 8 By Zombies thing. We’ll have three episodes this week, then three next week. After that? No promises.
Here is the Scotch-Korean Skittles commercial that Chris mentioned.
Charging More for a Worse Product

No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
Programming Language for Games

Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective

This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Resident Evil 4

Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot

Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
Booo to the unnamed for not installing ME3 :D Robbing me of the delightful ragefest that will be the last few episodes for a while longer. As a side note will you be playing with the Extended Cut DLC or the DLC character ( I thought his damn description on Origin was a spoiler in and of itself).
I remember a Tweet a while ago saying they are doing the original ending.
I think that’s a great idea, this show is at it’s best when one of them is ranting at something.
To be fair, the Extended Cut has plenty to rant about.
Well,not really.Most of the rants are still tied into the original endings.There are very few things that the extended cut added wrong(the memorial without your name and the 4th ending).
True.
If given choice between the two myself I’d vote for the original ending on the show but what I think would be real good would be doing the original ending and then a special episode with the extended cut, possibly fast forwarding everything to
the childand picking the same option on the end-o-tron, where the team would cover how it does and doesn’t improve the finale.Though in all fairness I imagine by that point they’ll all have enough of dissecting the game and so it’s probably not going to happen.
There are good arguments for doing either one.
The show is at its best when they’re praising something instead of ranting. Honest to god.
The show it at its best when they’re giving the game its dues and analysing. Or spouting hilarious nonsense. I prefer the hilarious nonsense since analysis tends to work better in text form for me.
Also they’re never cruel enough for my tastes.
Dude, you can get praising from every of those “gaming” “review” “magazines”. Quality ranting is so much rarer.
Honest praise, man. False praise is all around.
“Booo to the unnamed for not installing”
Yeah, Shamus should really get on installing ME3 already.
Well Josh said that they wont start before he moves,because he doesnt want to stop mid season.So theres that.
Yay!
Yays!
Yay?
Yayzels.
Yay to the max!
yayzicus rex
Yayus Ex: Yayman Revolution?
Yayshock.
Yaylo!
Yay of Dutyay.
I still haven’t gotten around to starting Mass Effect 3 either. You see, I decided to finally get it as a birthday present for my sister, but now she’s not letting me play with the gift I got her if you can believe that!
What are you talking about shamus? the box crushing room in Half-life 1 was the most well justified platformer section I’ve ever seen in a fps.
Was he talking about that room, oh, well that one was not the difficult part,there are lot of them through.
Blast door i did not know were opened until i saw a video of it opened and the sealed in guys, i did not know i could use the grenade launcher for a great effect there,i just ran close and killed him with a pistol.
No That was just the first example that came to mind, I remembered that room from Freemans Mind.
I’ll just say that despite everything, I really do appreciate that you guys are set out to actually play and go through the game before SW-ing it. many would not bother and would just parrot out the “popular opinionbits”. So thanks for that.
Oh gosh, I am laughing so hard at how badly Josh is breaking the game. xD
As far as squad commands go, think it’s just “attack” and ” follow me”.
PS: Scots-Korean is the word, methinks.
PPS: Love those commercials. xD
No, you can direct them to a spot. So if you want to save their lives, you send them all away from the action.
Except it’s still pretty worthless since they have the attention span of a two-year old. They’ll stay there maybe 10 sec max and then they come huddling after you, getting themselves killed like it’s their business.
So how long did it take you to figure out that you can grab Manhacks with the Gravity Gun? I don’t remember it clearly but it might have taken me until the Citadel section.
Some Criticism of HL2:
Some of the later sections are much to long. I especially hated the Citadel section.
The suicide puzzle was also extremely annoying. If you get to it I will give you a rant on it.
I agree with one Chris’ main points. HL2 is a FPS so it can’t be the best game ever. It only is the best FPS. Doesn’t even make my top 5 list.
13:00 You know, there is the legend of the LPer’s curse. Using this as a measuring stick, Josh is — without a doubt — the Avatar of the Spirit of LPing.
I discovered it quickly because I had the habit of throwing EVERYTHING I snared with the Gravity Gun.
“I agree with one Chris' main points. HL2 is a FPS so it can't be the best game ever. It only is the best FPS. Doesn't even make my top 5 list.”
Since when are fps inferior games?
I think he was trying to be more specific. “Best game ever” implies EVERY game, as opposed to just the FPS genre.
Myeah, and we all know that the top 5 best games ever are invariably some kind of zelda, some kind of mario, tetris, and two other games from 90’s because old-timer elitism.
Well tetris is what we will be playing to the death in the future,so of course it is the greatest game ever.That is,until someone gets to be a smart guy,and chooses to use a fusion bomb as his preferred method to kill the loser.
Yes it is a matter of taste. Your favorite game ever will be from your favorite genre. So it makes no sense to declare one single game the best one ever.
Unless it’s so good, it gets you into to a genre you’d normally never touch :D
Of course its a matter of taste.But,your favourite game doesnt have to be from your favourite genre.I love strategies,preferably turn based ones,but Ive still enjoyed the line a lot,and half life is in the top of my best games ever list.In fact,if it werent for starcraft and planeTscape,half life would be my best game ever.
I disagree. My favorite game ever is Grim Fandango. My favorite genre is First Person Looking Glass Studios.
Would the suicide puzzle be the horrible first-person jumping puzzle with insta-fail lasers that caused me to ragequit the game for seven years?
See, now, I disagree about the Citadel. The first part may drag on a bit, but the second part… you can PICK PEOPLE UP and VAPORIZE THEM. There is nothing that can be criticized about that. Nothing at all.
I freakin’ love the Citadel level!
The Citadel section was in all ways and all manners one of the best parts of the game, and I will brook no criticism of it.
If this is what happens when Josh plays a Source engine game, I dread to think what kind of demonic pact he had to make just to get Fallout 3 and New Vegas to run.
We saw the results of said daemonic pact during the gameplay… what else did you think Cuftbert was killing all those people for? The Digital computer daemons are worshipped with digital computer sacrifices!
I’d venture to say that Josh bought his computer from an alternate dimension where Fallout 3 and New Vegas are relatively stable while games like Human Revolution and Half Life are nigh unplayable glitch fests.
I think he had to swear to dark forces to troll the rest of the cast relentlessly. Probably prayed to the dark god of the incinerator. He also bound bug-demons into Shamus’ audio card.
If you guys are looking for a filler game after HL2 is done I would highly suggest The Walking Dead. It would be really neat to get everyones opinion on it.
+1
You’ll get caught up in the… Crossfire.
Oh wow, I remember that. I remember watching that on TV.
Man I feel old now…
Wow I never thought I counted as a key member of the team.
In all seriousness though I’m quite keen for you guys to take your time before hitting mass effect 3 I probably won’t have the time to play it till mid September ;)
Perfect Dark on the N64 had a “Counter-operative” mode where player 2 would play as the enemy. I don’t know what other games did something like that.
Mindjack had players invade another player’s campaign session and play as one of the mooks but that game was god-awful so don’t bother.
The Souls series does the whole invasion aspect well though. Invade a player’s session and steal their souls/money.
There was the “alien tag”, or whatever it was called, mode in AVP. The way it worked was all but one players started as commandos and one player was a respawning xenomorph. Now the xenomorph is relatively easy to kill but respawns and whenever one of the commandos dies they start respawning as a xenomorph too, the goal for morphs is to kill the commandos, the goal for the commandos is to be the last man standing.
While I do enjoy the multiplayer (both jolly cooperation and invasion) in Dark souls I will say there is nothing more annoying than being level 7 on your first game and being invaded by some griefer with a lightning katana right after restoring humanity.
There was a game where you played as a boss at the end of a shoot ’em up level (the computer plays the space ship trying to kill you, with extra lives and everything).
It is about as close as I can think of what they describe in the video.
edit: it’s called Boss Rush
http://bossrushgame.com/bossrush/
I was also going to mention Perfect Dark. True, it used another player rather than AI, but given the fairly primitive nature of AI even today, such a change is probably necessary.
I get that you guys were having a hard time coming up with insights during this section of the game, but still, this was a very amusing episode. I laughed a bunch of times.
Josh, y u so glitchy?
He glitched Human Revolution. At this point, I’m not surprised.
his bugs are augmented?
HL2 is more stable than Human Revolution.
I remember all the speculation over the Indoctrination Theory. I believed it at first, but stopped believing it as I thought more and more about it,
Besides, the ending was so awesome that the IT was unnecessary. I loved
watching the final climactic battle against the Reapers where every asset is taken into account and Shepard directs the war to either victory or defeat.That’s the way it had to be. Anything else would be stupid, and Bioware can’t possibly be that stupid.I see what you did there…
Also, I have to say I’m beginning to get a little bit annoyed by the IT. I mean, at first I thought it was a bit of pretty interesting intellectual fun. A sort of wink at the Bioware “look, even with the same assets (as in: graphical, textual) we could make something pretty smart out of it” but then a lot of fanboys started pushing it as the real thing basically claiming that if you don’t see the IT in the endings you’re simply to stupid to appreciate the game because Bioware can do no wrong… and even now, with the Extended Cut, which has nothing to do with IT, they are still trying to push it through or claim that the EC had to be done “for the masses”.
Hmm, now that I think about it I don’t have the problem with IT but with people who go around preaching it, funny how this is often the case…
“Hmm, now that I think about it I don't have the problem with IT but with people who go around preaching it, funny how this is often the case…”
As a great man once said:Guns dont kill people,physics kills people!
Josh,the glitchmaster.Also yay Chris.And who is this Rutskarn guy theyve added?He sounds like a girl.
*grinds this episode up and snorts it* MMmmmm…..needed my fix….thanks guys!
The Scotch-Korean thing is a *Starburst* commercial.
And scotch is a drink!
Scotch?Bah!Real believers drink only bourbon!
Bourbonism for everyone!
You are now addicted to Scotch;
It’s also an adjective meaning Scottish. It’s a poor Anglophone mispronunciation, but is still a legitimate term (Scotch Mist, for instance). If the Japanese can’t complain about their English name, which is basically gibberish, Scots shouldn’t complain about a term that’s one phoneme off.
But scots are very contentious people.
But Japanese is an ENTIRELY different language. This is like… giving the greenlight for bad grammar…
Oh yeah, you’re right!
It’s apparently not a very good commercial then.
Fine, I’ll make my own Mass Effect 3 Let’s Play!
Wait, no I won’t – it stopped working so I uninstalled both it and Origin, hopefully never to see their stupid faces on my hard drive ever again.
Seriously though, I’d do a Mass Effect 3 LP – I have a LOT to say about that game.
“Fine, I'll make my own Mass Effect 3 Let's Play!”
You forgot to add that it will have blackjack and hookers.
In fact, forget the LP!
Psst: Hai!
If you want you can be a guest host for a couple weeks at least during my current (just started.. episode 2 uploaded later today) ME2 LP, and see how it goes for ME3, which I should get to in a few months. Message me on Steam or Twitter or something.
That goes for most/all of the rest of the regulars here, too :)
Dude, link your name to it or your blogspot, like some of the others around here. You can’t just produce _daily_ Lets Plays and not let us know about it :D I had no idea
Well, they’re SUPPOSED to be daily. I have… issues with reliability and consistency. I’m WORKING ON IT.
Considering ME1 finished in April or May or something and I’m just getting around to ME2.
I added the youtube to the website so now clicking on my name should work :)
My favorite way to kill those snipers is using the rocket launcher.
Since the game gives you infinite rockets at every fight where they are needed (stalkers, gunships) I use them during the level.
It’s very weird and different from my usual ammo hoarding habits.
Hoooooooly shit, I had no idea you could climb down to that lambda cache at the six-minute mark. I’ve played through the game plenty of times, and every time I painstakingly hauled the crates up with the gravity gun because I didn’t see the ladder there. You still get the achievement progress from lambda caches as long as you grab the loot, so it never occurred to me that wasn’t how you were meant to do it.
Actually grabbing, throwing and breaking everything with the gravity gun is the correct way to play Half-Life 2, but you know what I mean.
I’ll be skipping this upcoming season as I did with ME2, since I don’t enjoy listening to people complain about something I love, as I’m sure most of us don’t. Still, I just want to say that I love all of you guys, and I’ll certainly be watching everything else you do, like this, so I hope you keep doing side things every so often throughout the season. I love your one-off episodes the most.
I think I’ll take this season to re-watch a previous season, myself.
For the record.
I fucking love Mass Effect 3. I know Shamus likes most of it, too. Yeah, it’s going to be tough battling through some hate for it, but for the most part I’m going to try to keep it positive.
And there is a lot to like about it. It’s just some of the missteps make you wonder what exactly were the writers thinking. It had the (as-of-now) typical problem Bioware has where many of the side stories are well-done, but parts of the main plot are pretty dumb and your choices don’t really matter (except for the first side story, that was awesome).
IMO both
Tuchanka and the geth/quarian missions were pretty nice. Overall Tuchanka was better, but the final choice for the geth/quarian subplot was… easily the hardest in the entire series. Of course it can be sidestepped if you fit the requirements.Also loved playing ME3 in many, many ways.
I feel like it’s a very fun game, but its a game that you’ve got to let be fun. It’s hard to analyse Mass Effect (any of them :D ) positiviley because the good stuff is really big and vague. Like they’re these fantastic epic sci-fi space games with huge scope and world building and visuals, trying to take a really big serious unique approach to game, focused on an idea they want to make, rather than hashing things out in popular genres because they’re popular.
It’s just on the small scale there’s lots of flaws. It’s like a painting that has a lot of things wrong with the individual elements but looks good in the broad perspective. It’s just when you’re analysing something it’s hard to take a broad perspective and if you didn’t spend most of the time on the details, the analysis would be really repetitive or really short
Isn’t that what you said about Bioshock?
Oh Mumbles,you still havent learned.
+1
Although I don’t think she’s alone this time.
Personally I love them rip things I like the new one, because they do that in very enjoyable way, plus, if something I like is faulty, I have no problems admitting it and it doesn’t stop me from liking it anyway.
Not saying I like that insipid, pompous tribute to michaelbayness that is ME3. Because I obviously don’t.
How do you break Source engine so much?! I’ve run into maybe… one bug with this game that I noticed, but you… you find them all over the place! You’re cursed!
Josh is actually a Chaos Elemental, referred to in certain texts as the Player. He’s only able to peer into our world for one day every year, but His gaze distorts the flow of time such that they can record an entire year of SW in that 24 hr span.
His ultimate goal is to incite the rest of the SW cast into murdering a game developer so He can fuse said developer’s mind, soul, and body into the instruction manual, disc, and box of a game they made, scatter those pieces equidistantly throughout the ages, and have them be destroyed by idiots. This will create a bridge to our world so that He can fully enter our dimension. At which point, Daikatana will become the only playable game in existence, and all shall know the Name of the Player.
it breaks
I’ve always assumed it must have something to do with the setup
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=9696
The incredible amount of crap that Josh’s computer has to be doing at any one time might make it perform more poorly on tasks that should not be difficult
Agree with this.
I just started my ME2 LP, and I had 3 crashes in half an hour (supposedly my video drivers? That doesn’t make any sense) doing pretty much the same thing. I don’t think ME2 has ever crashed like that before, and certainly not that repeatedly.
(I use Skype not Vent, but I doubt that makes a huge difference. And Xsplit/Twitch instead of Livestream, so not so many ads. Also Xsplit is actually really easy.)
I know little about grenades, but I thought the maxim was “once you pull the pin from Mr. Grenade, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.”
Did it ever bug and/or alarm anyone else how Freeman just yanks the pin out of his readied grenade, momentarily making you worry you’re about to lose a hand?
Well, if you go by Halo logic, Mr. Grenade is never your friend as he tends to explode while lying on the ground (pin still in place) from stray bullets or random explosions nearby. Which can be fun to do if you get enough in a line and just create a line of exploding plasma or frag grenades and end up killing something.
The pin is not the mechanism that actually ignites the fuse. That job is left to the safety spoon, which in turn springs the firing pin. When you pull the pun, your hand/thumb is still holding down the spoon, so the fuse hasn’t ignited yet. You can let the spoon go early to “cook” the grenade before throwing to prevent throwbacks, but you aren’t supposed to do that because of variances in fuse length. One thing that does get on my nerves though, is that you can switch weapons after Gordon pulls the pin. He presumably replaces the pin, but no sane person would do that because pins, by their very design, aren’t meant for replacement.
Right. I didn’t mean to imply that it would blow up because the pin was out. It was more of a “Good going, Freeman. We have to duct-tape that handle down now or throw it, don’t we?”
I’m wondering if that was done so you could have it readied and still use your flashlight?
I think I saw something on the Steam forums about this years ago. Apparently the grenade used in HL2 is a specific model that doesn’t use the pin to light the fuse; it’s actually a safety feature that prevents the fuse from being lit as long as it’s in there, and you have to press that switch/button on top of it to activate it. You pull the pin, THEN press the button, THEN throw it. There were pictures of a real world example of these grenades, but I’m not gonna bother digging around for it.
EDIT: Klay beat me to it, and he explains it better I did.
It is nice to see some more Half-Life 2, I try to play it at least once a year and it’s still holding up.
On a more random note, I just finished installing Visual C++ 2010 Express.
No small task considering I also had to install Service Pack 3, the last computer I tried that on broke its interwebz…broke as in TCP/IP stopped working completely until I uninstalled SP3.
Reading your programming projects got me to thinking to try my hand at learning these mysterious computer jibber-jabbers.
I’ve got a compiler, the cprogramming.com C++ tutorial, a jug of blue to fuel me and boundless fount of hubris.
So I’m more or less doomed to fail, but lets get this nightmare rolling and see if I can’t get “Hello World!” by sunup!
Best of luck! Hope you enjoy it.
While not wishing to discount your taste, that looks like the most chemical concoction ever to pass human testing. If you’d told me it was industrial pipe cleaner, I would’ve believed that without a second thought.
Where can I get some?
Queue stream of “as a beginner you should use ‘X’* instead of c++! it’s far more intuitive!”
*replace X with whatever language applies.
Seriously, I was about to do exactly that before catching myself. Good luck!
Let me fix that for you. Comment out the second line and replace it with:
X = random.choice([“Java”, “Python”, “HTML”, “Ruby”, “PHP”, “Pearl”, “Scheme”, “MatLab”, “Cobol”])
I finally finished HL2 recently, so I can now allow myself to watch these. There are some games like Fallout which I intend to play but still watched the Spoiler Warning because I knew that it was open world enough for me to do something completely different.
With Half Life, I didn’t want to do that because it is much more scripted and has things spoiled.
Now join that elite club of people who have played it.
W00t!
Ironically, the room where Chris mentioned that he had little recollection of this part of the game was one of the bits of this section I remembered best. I think it’s the first appearance of the white-armored elites, actually.
Nope, we see some of ’em before beaming away with the “slow teleport” and we fight ’em at the end of the previous SW episode.
It’s their first significant appearance, though, I’m pretty sure. It’s also where I discovered how much better the AI is at aiming the pulse rifle’s secondary fire than I am, which may have helped me remember them.
Wait,didnt they have that fight in front of the first building?The in the fountain?I think thats the first significant appearance of the snowmen.
Wow, that Skittles ad is racist. The S-word is a vile slur which should never be used to refer to us Scots, especially by Americans.
S-word?
Skittles? Starburst? Scotch?
Are you talking about Scotch? And are you really sure it’s a “vile” slur and not just, you know, technically incorrect? I’m 40 years old, I’ve been on the internet a long time, and I’ve never even heard of the word being offensive before now.
And why “especially” Americans? It’s not like we were on opposing sides of a war. There’s no deep-set hatred between the two countries that I’m aware of.
I don’t mind a bit of correction if someone is using a word improperly, but if you’re going to throw the word “racist” at people because they come from a particular country and innocently use the wrong word, then the problem is on your end.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m saying that you could have spent that same space actually explaining the mistake rather than being incongruously angry. I say this because I can’t even tell, based on your comment, if I am also a “racist” in your view or if I used the wrong word.
Now you see why I ridicule every use of “F-word”, “S-word” or variants with stars. Either you write down “shit”, or you use another word. But “sh*t” is just immature AND cowardice.