T w e n t y S i d e d
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
In this episode I brought up the subject of the BioShock DRM. While exotic and new at the time, it’s pretty much the order of the day now for a lot of PC games. Josh mentioned it’s getting better, which is also true. It depends on where you draw the line and what games you care about. Ubisoft has taken the idea to new an absurd heights. Other companies are following the example set by Steam and are trying to sugarcoat their phone-home systems by actually offering some features in return. Blizzard is a great example of this. The new Battle.net requires periodically renewing activation (this is based on hearsay) but offers a ton of new features. Evaluating what you’re really getting for your $60 is becoming increasingly complex.
Still, I’ll always remember BioShock as a forerunner is this regard.
Punishing The Internet for Sharing
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
Spec Ops: The Line
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
As of writing this, the video appears to be set on private so no one can watch.
Might want to fix that.
Fixed. Thanks.
Jibar . . . erm, what is your avatar there? It looks like a bran muffin with cat ears.
I believe it’s a catmuffin.
This is a masterful cat tallow biscuit. The ingredients are masterfully minced dwarven flour and finely minced cat tallow.
If only I could tell if it is on fire.
!!X Having inspected it closely, I think it’s not on fire and is completely safe to eat. X!!
The video is set to private. So, switch it so we can watch, hehe. :)
I’m not sure if this is a simple error or some sort of meta-joke on the effects of DRM…
The DRM issue just came up for me this weekend as I was looking to buy Bioshock due to this Let’s Play. I have to say I’m more willing to buy a game with online activation than I used to (but never at full price) but I still draw the line at limited number of activations (which Bioshock 1 has proportedly removed). I also draw the line at GFWL so until it goes under, looks like I will not be playing Bioshock 2.
I just picked up all three chapters of Sam & Max, and had to activate them online because I bought them online. From that and some other things, my opinion on online is that I don’t mind it if:
a) I bought the game online (how else are they going to activate or register it?)
b) The process is simple and easy.
c) Once activated, the online activation goes away and I never have to use it again.
Even this, though, leads to a problem. These games would be ideal to play on my laptop, but I don’t have Internet access on my laptop because I don’t need it. How, then, do I get a working copy onto my laptop, unless I install it on a zip drive and move that back and forth?
(Hmmmmm.)
That’s pretty much how I feel about it. A one-time online activation doesn’t bother me (because I’m lucky enough to have reliable always on interwebs, I guess). It’s actually less annoying than typing in a CD code, especially when it just happens automatically when I click install. Install limits and this new phoning-home nonsense, however, have got to go and I really dislike the idea of SecuRom or whatever.
Now I shall listen to the video.
Massively late response, so you’ll probably never see it, but just for other late readers:
Telltale provide several activation methods — you can activate by logging in (easiest), or by typing in your serial number (which you can get online or by phoning them), and eventually by getting the game on disc. One of the many reasons why I’m not bothered by their system and they’re very successful at getting me to give them money.
I bought the Oblivion-Bioshock combo-pack-thing, which makes me feel old, remembering those things from early gaming. And I can’t get the Bioshock one to connect to the internets to activate my code. So i feel obliged to use the CD case it is in as a coaster.
I’m going to stop watching this. I never had an interest in the game, but thiese episodes has made me want to play it, so I’ll try to avoid spoiling it anymore.
You got Bioshock from the readers, for free Shamus? If I had fans, I would use that scheme all the time. “So Mafia 2 is on Steam for 50 bucks but I refuse to feed Valve’s monopoly on digital distribution so I wont get it. Unless, perhaps, someone, like, gives it to me for free, maybe, I guess”.
Peach Wilkins is creepy, he reminds me of that pedophile grampa from Family Guy. I fear to imagine what he intended to do with those splicer pictures he wanted so much.
There are those of us that try and avoid online activations where we can, even in the Age of Steam.
I find GamersGate to be a happy medium (most of the time), as often it’s just a one-time activation, and you can download/install as many times as you like.
There are certain exceptions of course, but those I just avoid.
Almost never use Steam though, last time was for Batman: AA, which I only played because it was free with my graphics card. I wouldn’t say I was completely anti-steam, but I prefer other distributors and have outlined my arguments elsewhere (often at great length).
Of course, I tend to buy games from Good Old Games too, so there is one outlet for DRM-free gaming. Really hoping they can get Lucasarts and EA on board, they already have Activision.
To end my rather lengthy post, I think the common theme between those old great games that Shamus mentioned is Warren Spector: Ultima 6+7, Ultima Underworld 1+2, Deus Ex 1+2, Thief 1-3, System Shock, Shadowcaster, Wing Commander… That guy has (or perhaps had?) a golden touch.
Yeah, Warren Spector is the man. Too bad he is developing some Mickey Mouse game for Disney instead of Deus Ex 3. Then again, maybe it will be Psychonauts level of great ( the Disney game that is).
It’ll probably be pretty damn good, if only because he approached Disney to do this game, rather than Disney approaching him, and it’s fairly obvious from the media I’ve seen that he’s got a lot of respect and admiration for the Mouse.
I still think mumbles’ is totally hot. Just saying.
She does sound cute. But voices can be decieving…
(Not saying you’re not, Mumbles. I just had a bad experience meeting a girl I’d only talked to on the phone.)
Then again, maybe I wasn’t all she’d hoped for either… hmm.
DRMs.. Sigh. Hate to be that person who annoyingly points out yet another thing nobody seems to have heard of, but.. Yeah, the X space sim dev Egosoft is releasing all the X series games (5 of them) in one package without any drm at all. With all the latest dlc (patches + missions, always have been free, btw). In light of that, viewing these on-line authorization etc. drms, even the ones that seem on the lighter side, looks quite ridiculous.
ALL of them? Really? I am so there, see y’all in few years!
Yeah Peach Wilkins makes no sense. Actually why is the camera in the game at all sure system shock had it (I think I’ve never played the game) but that hardly means that it’s a good idea in every game and it makes no sense in Bioshock. It saps a lot of the action, tension and speed every time you use it, it makes no sense in story since image analysis doesn’t exist in Rapture and nothing gets improved by its existence.
Anyway to get back to dear old Wilkins. He doesn’t really seem like the picture of mental health so I always assumed that he had no idea of who you were before you actually came into his little mad house. The game never seems to imply that this was his plan all along so I’m not awarding the game any points for it but it’s what I’m telling myself ^^.
Well when you first get it, it says it can analyze images and genetic codes and “a bunch of other five dollar words”.
But yeah, every time I got mobbed by splicers I’d be taking as many pictures as I could, utterly negating any form of tension by turning the murderous savages into an amusing mini-game.
I actually wrote an essay for one of my university classes about the use of photography in BioShock. I got an A+ on it. Just thought I’d throw that out there.
This is a -much- better Let’s Play than the Fallout one was. You guys are a lot more focused on making jokes than complaints and I think it definitely improves the viewing experience.
When you guys focus on being funny, or even just entertaining, you nail it. It makes me want to watch you do a Let’s Play of a game you all really love; I think that’d be excellent.
I don´t know. Hearing them point out the absurdity of the game in every single aspect was fun in its own way. In this one they sound more relaxed, though.
it was fun, yes.
but it kinda
grated after a while. the last few episodes were a breath of fresh air.
but a couple of episodes before broken steel i was pretty much calling it quits
Awesome stuff. I really enjoyed playing BioShock, can’t wait to see more!
This one was slightly easier to watch; thanks for listening to those of us who complained. :)
I’ll agree that Peach makes no sense. The only possible explanation I can come up with for his sudden decision to kill you is that Ryan somehow fed him a line while you were off fetching the camera, but I didn’t think of it until pretty much just now.
I never used the ice plasmid. Electricity and the wrench were my main weapons for the entire game. I never even touched the crossbow or the chemical thrower until my second run (electric gel + upgrade to usage rate = easiest big daddy kill). Why is it that in shooters the melee weapon often seems to be the most powerful?
Well it has to be powerful to instantly (or in maybe two hits) smash a wooden crate and that’s no easy task, especially if swung one handed.
The real reason is that melee inherently loses pretty hard to ranged, so they compensate by making melee awesome, and then people figure out a really easy way to get into melee range by sneaking, or they forget that modern game engines can handle free lines of fire greater than ten feet. This seems to be an example of the second type.
Also, your enemies are melee too, for the most part.
Personally I blamed it to the fact that melee is often the “weapon of last resort” when the player runs out of ammo so the designers assume that if the player is left with only this they should still have a fighting chance.
On the “realism” note, a heavy object, like a sledgehammer, or even a relatively heavy blunt object used with enough strength and decently aimed does possibly more actual damage to the body than a clean gun wound, the main problems are that such weapons are slow (the weight greatly adds to the damage done but makes the weapon hard to lift and gives it an awful inertia), unreliable (the wrench can really be deadly if applied to the head, not so much when it misses and brushes on an arm, then again so is the gun), unwieldy (again, inertia) and don’t have range.
Rhetorical question, guys, but thanks. ;)
It’s basically because if you took the time to get that close to an enemy that’s using ranged attacks, you deserve to do massive damage. Melee weapons need to have something going for them, or they get relegated to low ammo emergencies and use by people like me who just don’t like guns.
I think that Peach was convinced by Ryan to kill Jack before he arrives there, and Atlas is under the impression that he’s still an ally (listen to Peach’s audio logs, they shed more light on it). Getting Jack to take the pictures was probably just taking advantage of the situation. Who knows, maybe Peach wanted those photos but didn’t want to risk his own ass – why not call it in as a favour from the person you’re about to kill? Of course, it also gives him more time to prepare.
Shamus, hitting your front page is asking me for my twitter credentials? (IE8)
It’s all of twitter (or was when I was at work at have to use IE8 which is better than 2 months ago when I was using IE6).
You know, I played the 360 version of BioShock, and I didn’t notice either of the two main glitches you guys have experienced–sound cutting out and hands in flashbacks. I played it, like, three days ago, in about half a dozen sittings. And none of those glitches, no weird magic doors either. Bizarre.
Xbox 360 version, silly. PCs have differing hardware and software combinations that can cause any manner of problems.
I believe the issue is that BioShock likes to use lots of stereo sounds, reverbs, ambient noises, etc. and has a relatively limited number of channels set by default, 32 if I remember correctly. With an X-Fi card you can get the game to use a full 128, which gets rid of all those problems and generally makes the game sound better due to the extra environment effects. Still, that’s not much of an excuse for doing a half-assed job on the software sound implementation, considering that about 90% or more of gamers are going to be using that. I have to wonder if Creative pays off developers to purposely leave out certain software-based features (like audio effects, i.e. reverb, occlusion, reflections) in exchange for using their own proprietary stuff.
Wait… why would it default to 32? And how do you fix it?
Defaults to 32 because it’s a fairly good compromise. Most processors and on-board audio are fine for most people when it comes to sound in games, and 32 channels is about the right value to not severely impact performance. Without a proper hardware processor, though, more channels could potentially impact performance and compatibility.
I think the problem with missing sounds occurs when there are lots of weapons firing, especially machine guns like turrets. I would imagine that the game uses a different sound effect for each bullet fired, and thus that can hog the available audio channels, leaving other (potentially more important sounds) unheard.
You should be able to change this in the BioShock config file (BioShock.ini, I think, located in your documents folder). There’s an audio option called MaxChannels or some similar. Change it to whatever your sound hardware supports (probably between 32 and 128 depending on your card). If you have a Creative X-Fi card then I also suggest enabling EAX in the game’s options menu and playing with your sound card set to Game Mode.
Great episode. Shamus hits the nail on the head regarding earlier episodes. From someone that never played the game beyond the demo and would like to see a walkthrough, there was very little bearing or understanding what was going on when it was hurridly shuffling from one scene to the next.
Unrelated; Why is there ammo in the equivalent of a cigarette vending machine?
The only possible reason I can think of is if we go with the pure unregulated capitalism.
When Rapture is fine and dandy, the machines sell cigarettes, booze and condoms, because that’s what people want to buy when it’s party time!
However, when Rapture became a splice-em-up, suddenly the market is begging for bullets, bombs and bubble-gum… and they’re all outta gum!
Of course I don’t think it ever comes up with a decent explanation in-universe, which is annoying really.
About the vita-chambers.. Ryan got paranoid and installed them, locked them to his DNA (like bathyspheres) in case someone managed to kill him. He disables the one in his room before the main character meets him.
I forget…
why don’t they work for him later? It could have made that encounter quite funny if you constantly killed each other and regenerated each timeIt has been quite some time since I played that section, so I bet there is some exposition on the matter…
It´s never said. We could speculate that his convictions about “A man choses, a slave obeys!” made him have a stupid attack and decided to disable the thing as a “show of faith” in what he believed.
He disables the chamber in his room because he knows the player is coming, he has seen Rapture fall, and feels that choosing his death makes him the master of his fate.Josh’s (or Reginald’s) drinking and constant double vision had me thinking this was a continuation of the 3D topic from earlier.
The red/blue glasses didn’t help.
Here’s a question; why does Atlas keep up his charade about his family? I mean, he knows the keywords, he can just have you do whatever and you’d have little to no control over it, so why bother with a sob story at all when he could have just as easily used you like a tool? Why does he need your sympathy in order to use you?
My guess is that your character maintains some freewill if it ultimately leads to whatever was asked of you getting done. Allowing you to improvise but still holds you to a goal that Atlas wanted. Having the “Family” guise he could keep you from trying to break your chains.
It’s shown later in the game that it is possible through some sort of conditioning to break the hold Fontaine has. Such deliberate attempts on Ryan’s life would come off as too blunt and would be more likely to lead to failure, or even reprogramming by Fontaine’s enemies, so instead he tries to keep up the appearance that Jack has free will, to thwart suspicion. A mindless drone hellbent on killing Ryan would likely end up dead really fast; Fontaine is a master of manipulation, and he was taking advantage of his enemies wanting to use Jack for their own ends.When you died in the ice room and ran back, why couldn’t you just get your weapons back from the bucket and go in?
It’s a pneumatic tube – the weapons get transported inside Peach’s hideout, right on the far side from the vita chamber, halfway down some stairs.
Ah I see.
Still seems rather silly though.
A gameplay contrivance in BioShock? You must be joking!
This is also a stealthy way to increase the difficulty in the next level, as Peach steals most of your ammo.
Dear Shamus and Crew,
I apologize for excessive whining about the above video. I also have forgotten what else I am sorry for, but if something weird happens to you in the next few days, I’m sorry, i tried to stop it. hehehe
MrWhales
HOW DID YOU FIX THE MOUSE ACCELERATION
AGHHHHH
Even though I haven’t played the game, I’d guess it’s probably in the options menu. There’s usually a “controls” or “keyboard/mouse” section.
No, it is definitely not. I don’t know if you missed the ranting a week or two ago, but this game has horrible mouse controls, and even editing the INI files doesn’t fix it from what I have been able to find. BioShock is based on Unreal Engine 2.5, but it seems to use a different way of handling the mouse that is seen in other console ports like Far Cry 2, and it’s pretty awful for anyone who is used to playing more responsive PC games with 1:1 mouse control.
In Borderlands, turning off the mouse acceleration in game doesn’t actually turn it off. (This is a serious issue as the game is literally unplayable with the mouse acceleration turned on–the input code is an atrocity.)
You have to go hack some files and maybe download an .exe hack to get it turned off for real.
And of course, let’s hope you didn’t want more than 60 degree FOV…
The FOV is more a limitation of the Unreal Engine. I think the way it works is something like this: Unreal Engine 3 was designed for Gears of War, and Gears of War was built as a 16:9 game. Rather than potentially cause problems by reducing horizontal field of view in 4:3, Epic decided to make the engine handle non-widescreen ratios as “vert+”; essentially, you see more of the game when playing on a non-widescreen monitor. Think of it as treating 4:3 as “tallscreen”.
Unfortunately, this carries over to all games that use Unreal Engine 3 unless the developer sorts it out themselves. This is why BioShock, Mass Effect, etc. all have the same issue. And, unfortunately, for most of these games there isn’t an easy way to fix it. Most of these games are designed with consoles in mind, where a low field of view – probably a cheap way to save on how many polygons you render – isn’t as big a deal because you’re expected to be sitting back from a TV (looking out a window), but up close with a monitor it’s much worse (like staring at a wall). I’m not sure how many developers just don’t think the PC is a big enough priority, and how many are just totally clueless.
“The photographer just happened to have his flaming fist about two feet in front of the camera.”
“…in color.”
I lost it when Rutskarn said that line. For him being the Archbishop of Puns and all, he’s holding his on with classic situational comedy.
Although, I’ve been told, my sense of humor is slightly off, so it may not have been comedic gold to everyone else.
Yeah that got a good chuckle from me.
Strangely, the photographer must have also set up some little gear symbols, health bar, and various other UI elements to make the photo look just like a videogame.
I don’t get how Mumbles has never seen a Big Daddy call a Little Sister from a vent before. That happens ALL the time. Whenever a Big Daddy is without one, or if you already saved one, and another Daddy comes along, they bang on the vent looking for her.
Actually, in my 1st playthrough, a sister came out where I’d already saved one. There were only supposed to be three on the level, and I got four. It was pretty sweet.
Anyway, Mumbles said she was a big fan. How could she miss something so omnipresent?
The funny part is that I saw that 20 minute demo they put up waaaaaay back in 05-06, one of the first pieces of media to really get me excited about the game, and the first minute or so is spent simply observing how the Big Daddy and Little Sister interact with the world, so literally one of the first things I ever saw from this game was the Big Daddy pounding on a vent so a Little Sister would come out.
In an earlier episode I talked about how I always felt guilty about killing the Big Daddies, so for the most part I didn’t follow them around or wait for them to call a little sister. Obviously I knew that’s how the sisters were summoned, but I wouldn’t call that action omnipresent. Especially with my particular play style.
I had a Big Daddy put a Little Sister back into a vent once when I started to attack him. I guess I didn’t wait long enough for her to get on the ground or something (it was in the level where you make the EMP). Then I had to finish killing him for no reason because I’d already made him angry. That was annoying!
@Mumbles
Maybe “omnipresent” was too strong, but still. I didn’t exactly follow them around either, but I saw it often enough for it to go from, “Wow, that’s cool” to not even noticing like halfway through the game.
Whatever. I guess different people focus on different things.
(They do it in Bioshock 2, as well. Did you play that?)
I think Obsidion was listening since they made changes to tons of the stuff you guys complained about. I think it’s goingto turn out a lot better, and it has a main plot THAT MAKES SENSE!
We can´t be sure until they release it and we finish it. And we may have suffered severe brain damage by then!
Of course, it can´t be worse. I HOPE.