T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
Seven Springs
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
Shamus’ post about Jade Empire made me realize it’s been close to 20 years since that game was released. Gods, I feel old. D:
I’m amuse that he was so excited for Final Fantasy XII.
Over a decade later, he’d be hosting the Rocketeer’s series describing it as a junk sculpture…
Right.
That’s ironic, but such is life. Sometimes the next big thing just… isn’t.
I mean… that breaks the context of that qoute
…
`If I had to describe Final Fantasy XII in two words, I would pick “fascinatingly flawed.” The game is like a junk sculpture: a grand amalgam of pieces that, individually, are often nothing special, and are often, well, junk. But sometimes, in the right light, from the right angle, these parts form a whole that pushes back all of your expectations, and, for a moment, appears to take a new form, alien and intriguing, moving as though alive. And in that next moment, a hunk shudders and falls away, and the illusion is broken again. I’d be very hesitant to call it a great game, and at times I’d balk at calling it a good game. But nonetheless, I found myself circling it, time and again, stalking that one special angle, hoping to get one more glimpse of a mystique I was certain it hid.
Then a character would open their stupid damn mouth, and the spell was shattered with my controller.`
…
There’s something worth playing in FFXII, it’s just ephermal and transient as your heads crests over the murky sewer water and you see the grand caverns, decorated with breath-taking and striking crystal formations grown over millenia… and then suddenly it’s shit again as your head drops back beneath the waves..