T w e n t y S i d e d
This week we finally cave to public demand and share our thoughts on organic produce. We also critique an execution and discuss the other uses for Omni-gel.
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
Starcraft 2: Rush Analysis
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
Trashing the Heap
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
Why Batman Can't Kill
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Holy crap. Almost an hour and fifteen minutes has passed and nobody posted a comment. Where’s your dedication people?
On a side note I hate how there is no punctuation to display an exclamatory question. !? just doesn’t work.
On a side note to that side note which is actually going to be on topic this series has really improved. I didn’t like the first few. Now I watch them the whole way through. It’s actually making me want to install Mass Effect again. I still have to finish Dragon Age and start Jade Empire though.
I have to agree…watching this series has caused me to go through a THIRD playthrough of Mass Effect
I just finished watching the video and left as many as 5 comments on it, I’m usually not that talkative.I’m just wondering now if they’re seen correctly by other people, or you can’t tell which comment refers to which moment of the video..?
I think you hit add tag instead of add comment.
What I wrote is listed under the comments, but I can’t see it on the video time line..
late edit: figured out what I was doing wrong..
Oh god damn, that tag cloud is awesome now. No seriously, I don’t know why but there’s just something about it that’s making me smile.
On a side note I hate how there is no punctuation to display an exclamatory question. !? just doesn't work.
There is actually a mark for that, but I forget what it’s called at the moment. It’s basically ! overtop of/inside ?. Unfortunately, most fonts don’t support it and it’s not well known or used. Shame really.
It’s called an Interrobang and looks like this: ‽
Interrobang is about the most awesome name they could have given that symbol.
I have to wonder though, when did the Interrobang become so popular? I had heard no-one else use the term ever, and now it’s popping up all over the place.
Most people just use “?!”… or don’t you?!
On a side note I hate how there is no punctuation to display an exclamatory question. !? just doesn't work.
Are you looking for an interrobang“½
Edit: Gah, beaten… by an hour and 45 minutes… how did that other comment not show up when I hit reply”½
I always get beaten to the punch when I try to interrobang. What’s up with that”½
About the 3 surviving colonists; you punched them. This is the one fight where melee is usefull as you can simply run up to people, punch them in the face and this will exorcise the evil out of them.
Beat me to it, but yep. Meleeing the colonists ‘knocks them out.’ And allows them to recover (?).
Also, on the discussion of it being a plant…there ARE predatory plants that move, of course, but what really throws me off are the “neural nodes” you destroy. Neural node implies a pretty damn sophisticated brain…which would indeed imply animal, not plant.
I know its sci-fi, so I guess almost anything goes, but its still odd, and worthy of more explanation from the creators if they want us to take it seriously. Its a shame, too–it could have been a really cool moment, finding out exactly what this thing is and how it functions.
Another great episode, gents!
In the comments section on the last Spoiler Warning there was something about melee in the comments and Randy said this in reply: “The fact that meleeing them knocks them out rather than killing them explains alot……”
Although I love how the person in the end – that woman from ExoGeni – is sort of sympathetic in this ‘at least you tried’ sort of way.
Anyone remember Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors? Now those were some wicked plants!
Holy nostalgia overload.
Man, I used to watch that every afternoon after school, and wishing they’d put Robotech on instead.
I remember the toys better than the show.
Apparently, the show was developed to support the toys, not the other way around. I assume this is pretty common nowadays, but was less common then. And a French-Japanese-US collaboration? Sounds awkward!
Theme song:
http://www.televisiontunes.com/Jayce_And_The_Wheeled_Warriors.html
The Thorian also doesn’t looks plant-like. There are moving plants but they all look “planty”. The Thorian, however, looks like several bags of meat connected with Slim Jims.
By the way, I would like to mention, having noticed your toubles with the container opening minigame due to using the mouse, that you can use wasd to play that minigame. Its easier.
I had hoped you could, but I never got wasd to actually move it. I will try it again, but when I tried it the first day, it didn’t work.
When i played, WASD typically worked for the game (the mouse which I used at first was rough) but occasionally it would also moved Shepard which was funny but the screen bounce as Shepard went into seizures made the game a more difficult.
if WASD doesn’t work, i’m pretty sure you can use the arrow keys.
although, wow, you did all that with the mouse? impressive, i was thinking you were using the keyboard O_o
While it does work better,sometimes it has an annoying bug of moving your character as well,so you end up having this jittery screen.
And why all that negativity towards mako?It is pretty well explained in the codex.It does make sense for a vehicle that is to be dropped without a parachute,on planets with varying gravity and mountainy terrain to have very little mass.The vehicle itself never annoyed me.The terrain it is being dropped on,however,did.A lot.
Reducing the mass of the vehicle for landings makes a lot of sense, but Mass Effect fields are variable. You could turn off the mass reduction afterwards, or even make it heavier to give you an advantage plowing through barriers and stuff.
The only plausible reason for it to remain light as a feather all the time would be if they put in a really wimpy motor to drive the thing, in which case the only way it could self-propel would be if it weighed almost nothing.
I guess that makes a certain amount of sense considering how tiny the thing is…probably no room in there for a big engine.
This just gave me the mental image of a lawn mower with a cannon attached to it.
Its foremost an exploration vehicle,so it needs speed and agility.Theres your reason for it to remain light.
And why it cannot gain mass when dealing with different obstacles:we know just that element zero changes mass when hit by electrical current,but not how strong that current needs to be.So maybe the vehicle cannot recalibrate itself,but only sustain the mass it gets when on a ship.And to support this,I refer you yo disruptor torpedoes.If changing mass was that easy,why arent they fitted with generators so they can travel fast,and gain mass at the last moment before the impact,instead of being heavy and slow the entire time?
How come we are able to throw people into the air at a moments notice?
people weigh a heck of a lot less. bigger stuff tends not to fly. also, your nervous system generates electricity, which is fed into element-zero nodes rather than the muscles to trigger biotic powers rather than movement.
or something like that. the first point is probably the most significant.
that said, i LOVED driving the mako. though the (very rare) occasions when i got stuck were a little annoying. the thing’s freaking uncrashable, which is Awesome.
i must admit though, i rapidly gave up on trying to shoot stuff while driving. people and geth infantry are much, much easier to just run over, the mid weight stuff you’re usually better off bailing and taking to with a sniper rifle or shotgun… (especially once you get HE rounds. i freaking LOVE HE rounds :D ) … only the biggest geth four legger things (colossus, i think?) and thresher maws are best handled from in the mako with it’s cannon, and they’re nice, BIG, targets. (also, assuming I’m remembering which one is which corectly, it’s secondary fire mode is massively better than the primary once you’re on target <_<)
I never bothered shooting things in the Mako if I could help it because they were all worth significantly more experience if you weren’t in the Mako.
…..They were?
….shoot…
Yes. They are worth much more. My usual tactic was to blast them with the Mako’s cannon until they were very low on health – then hop out and snap a couple of pistol shots into them. You get the xp for killing them while on foot (same amount of xp as if you did all the damage on foot) and it speeds up a lot of fights considerably (especially against the worms).
I think the arrow keys work also. I seem to recall using the arrow keys. False memory of mine?
In the quest for more ranks in Intimidate — dont you have to add ranks in Spectre Training to get Charm/Intimidate to open up to their respective higher levels?
As I recall, you get extra points in both automatically at certain story junctures (when you first become a Spectre, for example, and I think also when you get your specialization). But I think the higher ranks are unlocked by filling the Paragon and Renegade bars, not by leveling Spectre Training. You get an extra 2 (I think) slots unlocked in the appropriate persuasion skill at each of the quarter markers in the Paragon and Renegade meters.
A quick check of GameFaqs seems to indicate you are correct. I did notice that, according to some of the walk-throughs, you get more renegade/paragon points for being, well, charming or intimidating. Those renegade/paragon points then go to opening up — charm and intimidate.
Might have to play through again now.
It’s a bit odd and kind of circular. It devalues persuasion, in a way – you can’t be good at one thing unless you’ve already been good at it? And then, there is no way to max out your persuasion early (since it’s related to plot/level), but at the same time it doesn’t really matter since all the persuasion options are either succeed or fail; there is no chance of success, only a “needs X points” either/or statement. Kind of makes the whole thing seem superficial and really just a waste of points in the end, if it wasn’t for the outcomes of a couple of quests depending on it.
As an aside, what’s up with the conversation options being greyed out? You don’t have enough Intimidate points to… say something to someone? Does Shepard have cold feet? It makes much more sense for you to simply attempt to say the line and then figure out if the NPC is convinced or not based on your skill, not deny you some wisecrack. If your skill is low then it’s actually much better incentive to have the NPC thwart you than it is to just not let you do anything at all.
If you’re going to have persuasion or speech skills in your game, they need to be just as well-implemented as any other skills, and they feel like a tacked-on necessity here (compare to Fallout or Dragon Age where you have to make a real decision about how to allocate those very limited and valuable points).
To me, the Thorian always looked fungal, rather than animal. Thus “plant” would be more valid.
Although it screamed in pain and it very visibly excreted saliva or similar substance..
Are you implying that your lawn doesn’t do that when you mow it?
….great. Thats what I get for buying the cheap grass seed sold by that run down shop next to the nuclear plant…
Carnivorous plants all have some secretion they use to digest their prey, similar to saliva.
They don’t scream agonizingly though, do they? :)
You’ve got to suspend your disbelief somewhere. Otherwise, why bother with Sci-Fi?
they also don’t control minds, but so what?
That’s exactly what a mind-controlling plant would want us to think…
Fungi are neither plants nor animals.And I too would rather clasify it as a fungus than a plant.
fungii aren’t exactly plants, though
To laymen, and colloquially, fungi are plants, even if you and I know they are technically something else altogether.
fair enough, fair enough.
it would also sorta make sense if it was a fungus of some sort, as they’re more the spore emitting type.
Of course there’s also the fact that we’re applying earth-based terminology to an alien being. gah its all so confusing!
DX
It’s mostly semantics.
It’s all organics anyway.
Only that plants are (usually) photosynthesis based on nourishment though carnivorous exist too. Plants also spreads through pollen or similar means.
Now humans, humans are carbon life forms. (but so are plans on earth as well, so…)
Plants are basically non-migratory, and rely on external forces to spread. Mammals (and various non-mammal species) are capable of migration.
Hmm, any… what’s it called, the “term for study of life” students or graduates, anyone here that is? Would be interesting to hear a brief explanation of basic species distinguishing features.
Given that the technical definition of a plant has nothing to do with lacking or having a complex nervous system, I don’t see any reason why the Thorian can’t be a plant. Just because there aren’t a whole lot of mobile plants (there are some, though), and no, to our knowledge, self-aware ones, doesn’t mean that it is a violation of the taxonomic (or even the more informal, popular) descriptor.
A plant is most broadly defined, more or less (though I realize the technical definition is more complex), as being multi-cellular, having cellulose in its cell walls, and, usually, utilizing photosynthesis to generate energy. There’s nothing about what we see of the Thorian to violate any of those–it is obviously multi-cellular, one can presume it has cellulose in its cells, and infer that it has some sort of extensions that breach the surface for purposes of photosynthesis, though we never see any direct evidence of them.
That it also has a complex nervous system, an apparently centralized brain, and is capable of limited movement, just makes it a weird plant, by Earth standards–as if the whole emitting spores that give it telepathic control of nearby fauna thing wasn’t already weird enough.
– Ironically, I switch from the shotgun to the pistol when dealing with the Thorian creepers in Zhu’s Hope. Less chance of collateral damage. Once underground, back to the shotgun.
– Renegade points at the end: Oddly, you get the Paragon points right away. At least, you do if you save everyone.
– Shiala: If she’s dead, someone else shows up to give you the sidequest. Even if you wiped the colony out. She looked a bit like Lizbeth Baynham, only plus 40 years, and I’m sure the game would have identified her as Lizbeth if it was supposed to be her.
– Shiala, Part 2: Hey, she wants revenge on Saren for feeding her to the Thorian, and you just rescued her from the Thorian. Seems to me like you’re a good candidate to be the instrument.
– Sha’ira (Asari Consort): I don’t remember her eyes going black during the cutscene. Which makes sense, given the number of people she sees; melding with all or most or half would probably drive her crazy after a while.
Of course, if she is the Shadow Broker, it would be a good way to learn stuff.
– Shiala, Part 3: If you kill her before she can give you the Cipher, you and Liara won’t be able to make enough sense of the vision from the beacons to recognize Ilos. You don’t get to Ilos, Vigil doesn’t give you the programs to retake control of the Citadel from Saren and Sovereign, Sovereign opens the Citadel relay, the Reapers come back without you spending Mass Effects 2-3 getting ready to fight them when they do, everything dies.
So, yeah, I suppose you could do that. Wouldn’t matter much, in the long run.
right when i was about to mention how organic also means plant life, josh goes and says something.
but yeah the thorian is an odd plant.
and its carnivorous, apparently, because the asari mentions that it sees you as meat.
meat.
is a funny word.
Referring to something as meat doesn’t indicate carnivorism.
http://baetzler.de/humor/meat_beings.html
They certainly aren’t carnivores
The asari does mention that it consumed the Protheans though. Pretty suspicious behavior for a non-carnivore if you ask me. Unless it was only consuming them metaphorically. In which case it’s a metaphorical carnivore.
Okay, I’m going to veer off on a tangent to your tangent about organic food. I know that you’re just riffing off the name, and commenting about organic in terms of the distinction made in organic chemistry (i.e. has carbon in it) but this subject is near and dear to my heart so I can’t resist.
In essence, I think that you’re basically right – most non-organic produce (the stuff grown by agribusiness) should in fact be called ‘inorganic food’. Not because it’s made of material that doesn’t have carbon, but because it’s made of petroleum. To quote my favorite expert on the subject, Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma:
Every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it””or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every calorie of energy invested. From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it's too bad we can't simply drink the petroleum directly.
Bah. I’ll step down from my soapbox. As great a soapbox as it may be, I know that this really isn’t the place, I just failed my will save to resist.
First up, petroleum is organic. It’s made of dinosaurs, which were certainly organic.
Second up, if you’re going to take it that far, most food is made of sunlight. Which is silly and pointless so you don’t look at the inputs to determine what the food is, you look at the outputs.
the calorie in/out ratio’s still kinda significant though <_<
It is made out of dinosaurs, if by dinosaurs, you mean mostly dead plants which may or may not be mindcontrolling but we have no way of knowing but still were organic.
As to sunlight, it is kinda cool to think about where we get almost all of our energy: from nuclear explosions in space!
I had some pizza today; it was ultimately a result of nuclear fusion.
Even the human body absorbs some of the sunlight into the skin and turns it into vitamins (I think it’s Vitamin D something, not sure)
Plus, his quote is badly worded. Not all that oil is consumed by the plants in some way, included in that number is the oil used to run the tractors and harvesting equipment and such.
I’m willing to bet that most of that oil in those figures you quote go into the crop duster, the harvesting machine and the diesel generator that activates the irrigation pump, so they never go into the produce proper… Thinking about it, the oil that runs the chemical plant that makes the fertiliser (which is mostly phosphorus and nitrogen, so very little in the way of hydrocarbons there) and the pesticides, as well.
Now, the pesticides can take hydrocarbons as a component, rather than just an energy source, but at the end of the day they’re a thin film on top of the plant and don’t contribute significantly to the mass of the produce — and are generally washed off after harvesting, thank God. Non-organic produce is still mostly regular plant matter, with some traces of the pesticides used.
In fact, the name organic comes from a description of how the farmer considers the agricultural process as a whole, rather than each step separately. In this sense, it is synonymous to that other code-word, holistic…
I personall prefer non-organic food because of this. Go to a farmers market and buy a bunch of organic corn, and a bunch of non-organic corn. You will end up throwing a large portion of the organic corn away because it will have already been eaten by bugs before you take the husks off.
A few sci-fi novelists (notably Frederick Pohl) imagined a day when we’d convert hydrocarbons directly to food materials. The protagonist of his “Gateway” series started out in one of the mining facilities.
Well, glad that people were interested in my quote. I’m a little ashamed to have derailed the discussion here on this very non-political site. I would enjoy debating this in greater depth with the excellent people around here, but I just don’t think that this is the place for it, sadly. If anyone would like to continue a discussion, we could exchange e-mails or something along those lines.
But for clarity’s sake, neither Mr. Pollan or I were really suggesting that you’re eating petroleum directly (though the herbicides etc. do get into the food). Rather the point is that the agribusiness farming model takes more energy input to make the food (in the form of petroleum) than energy output from the system. That does not include the cost of shipping it 3,000 miles to your grocery store either.
Anyway, enough. If anyone wants to continue, let me know and I’ll post my e-mail. Or we could set up a group or something.
Cheers!
Hmm, only a short one from me tonight!
On killing the infected colonists: Well, the decision to wipe out the entire colony does make sense from a certain point of view. The Thorian is an unknown species. Nobody knows how this infection will play out; for all we know, the infection is incurable and all the colonists will eventually end up like the Creepers. Furthermore, the Exogeni VI said the Thorian releases spores as a means of reproduction, right? And the colonists have inhaled the spores? What’s to say that the colonists WON’T eventually die and sprout into new Thorians after they die? If we really want to wipe out the Thorian, the only safe, sure way to eliminate everything. As somebody mentioned in the video comments, “Let’s nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
In Mass Effect 2, you learn that any surviving colonists are suffering aftereffects from their exposure to the Thorian. Notably, Shiala has turned green and lost control of her biotics. So, you may have something there.
Once when I was doing a Mass Effect play-through trying to be 100% ruthless/jerk renegade, I got to the killing the colonist part and decided to melee ALL of the zombies (colonists included) because they came right up to me and I had two of the “moterized gears” enhancements in my armour…
Since I didn’t know melees saved them, I ended up accidentally saving more colonists than I did on my earlier honourable paragon play-through!
(Forgive my spelling, I’m Canadian)
Hey guys, just for the record, if you replay that segment to properly kill the colonists, I don’t think anyone will complain so long as you give full disclosure in the next episode. It can be done pretty quickly, and you’re being cheated out of a good 32 renegade points or something, since it doesn’t look like you get any if you don’t kill them all.
Just had to mention this.
I find it amusing to hear people complain a game doesn’t work or works badly on their machine while on my machine the same game works ok, despite my machine being far from a “gamer machine.
That is not to say I haven’t had games with bad performance or other issues, I’ve had at least one game that refused to run.
I’m just saying that a “state of the art gamer PC” may be unable to run a game that I am able to on my “mediocre” PC *laughs*
Well, it makes “me” laugh anyway.
As long as the hardware is behaving as designed, the issue is always the software, be it the drivers, the OS or the program (game), and what game engine or what middleware is being used.
I hate BINK video with a passion, so whenever I see in-game cutscenes rather than BINK ones I rejoice. Impressively enough though BioWare manage to use BINK video without any issues,
no idea what they are doing different but I’ve always had issues with bink.
Things like crashing the game, no video, no sound, stuttering, lagged audio. You name it and I’ve seen it when it comes to BINK video cutscenes.
So even a mediocre PC can perform well if maintained properly. I may not get superb framerates, nor may I be able to crank all to max. Which is not an issue with Mass Effect series, as I played with all maxed, and with 1920×1080 the lack of anti-aliasing is hardly missed at all, in fact 1920×1080 while more to render is more processing friendly than a lower resolution + anti-aliasing.
Maybe I’m putting BioWare on a slight pedestal here but…
All game makers should try at “minimum” to reach the BioWare “average”,
aim for anything less and a game will most likely suck.
I can’t recall BioWare making a bad game, have they always made great games? Maybe not, but they’ve never made bad games. So in a way they do have a midas touch.
Anyone else wondering how Bioware’s going to write ME3 for people that had everyone but Shepard die? There’s a quote from the project director saying they “won’t have to worry about continuity”, but I don’t understand how they can accommodate for all of the possible endings of ME2.
Also they need another reason for Shepard to change his/her face and lose the old abilities.
I’ve sort of gotten the impression that the companions from ME2 will play a limited role in ME3, or at least most of them will. For half of them, it makes sense; Thane will almost certainly be dead by then, and Mordin may well be. Samara, Zaeed, Jack, and
Morinthreally don’t have any reason to hang around once the mission is over and would likely return to being a justiciar, mercenary, psychopath, andserial killer, respectively, and Kasumi is probably going to be in the same category.Meanwhile, one stated reason why Ashley, Kaidan, and Liara were unavailable as potential crew members for ME2 was because the developers wanted to make sure they’d be around (well, two of them would, anyway) for ME3.
It’s impossible to have an ending where only Shepard survives. At least 2 other party members must survive for Shepard to survive the final battle.
Joker doesn’t have the strength to pull Shepard into the ship by himself.And Bioware has stated that any ‘ending’ in which Shepard dies will result in an invalid save file when importing it to ME3.My guess is that any squadmate who was a potential love interest in ME2 will make a comeback in ME3 (although not necessarily as a ME3 squadmate), and Liara and
whoever survived Virmirewill show up in ME3 as well. The rest? It’s a 50/50 chance.Hey what if you only saved the DLC characters? That would make an interesting save to import.
After all those warnings in the comments of the previous Spoiler Warning and YOU STILL MELEED THREE COLONISTS.
YOU HAVE SHAMED US.
NOW MY LIFE IS RUINED. THAT, OR I’LL HAVE TO GO AND KILL THEM ALL MYSELF. WHICH MEANS PLAYING MASS EFFECT THROUGH THE FOURTH TIME.
Actually we recorded this before last week’s video went up, so at the time we didn’t actually know that punching the colonists in the face would somehow save them.
Honest.
I might be wrong on this, but wasn’t there some sort of information about that in the in-game journal? And that’s not Randy’s first playthrough of ME, now is it? I’m pretty sure the first time I played Mass Effect (which was no more than 2 months ago, I admit) my Paragon Shepard did his best not to kill any of the colonists so he kept getting in close to punch them all – I had a hard time making the disabling grenades work the way they were intended. (and gulping more medikits than I used for any of the fights too).
Seriously, I thought he accidentally punched those three colonies, didn’t notice, then thought he missed them hence the comments from you and Shamus about whether it’s worth going back to kill them. I’m confused now o.0
I don’t think any of us knew that punching colonists saved them instead of killing them in a hilarious manner. I barely ever looked at the quest journal in Mass Effect, let alone read every entry in it.
you know missing that first shot isn’t so bad. I had an engie miss 5 point blank crit shots at the ebnd of a TF2 match. and i was a heavy. and standing still.