This week I felt like I couldn’t do a normal Diecast episode. I’ll have a post about that tomorrow. In the meantime, Paul decided to record an episode with a special guest. I won’t spoil it except to say I really enjoyed it and I hope you’ll give it a listen.
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast Special: The Shameless Cast”
This week The Rocketeer takes us through some cutscenes where that scamp Vayne murders his father the Emperor and mischievously dissolves the senate, thus making himself the autocratic ruler of an expansionist military empire. What a rascal.
In this series I’ve been trying to make the case that this writer is maybe not as incompetent as they seem. This is hard to prove. Maybe impossible.Other people have pointed out that the author has done good work elsewhere. That’s nice, but that’s not really how we discuss “the author” around here. At some point we have to give the author the benefit of the doubt that the good parts are good on purpose, and the bad parts are bad due to problems other than the writing, like cut content that leaves holes in the story, shifting scope and direction that necessitates 11th hour rewrites, fluctuating team composition that pulls writers away from jobs before the work is done and polished, or large-scale coordination problems where individual ideas work in isolation but are incompatible with each other. But then a reasonable reader might ask me: What has this writer done to deserve this benefit of the doubt? Why don’t I just declare them incompetent and have done with it? It’s not like I’ve shied away from that sort of condemnation in the past.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “FF12 Sightseeing Tour Part 10: The Chess Match”
Emerging from the jungle, we enter directly into… a glacial mountain range? Yeah, the geography in this game makes no sense. It’s time for the ice level and goddammit an ice level is what we’re gonna get. Bur-Omisace, known the world over as a holy place and an enclave of peace, has attracted a great number of refugees with the war building up, and even as we pass through the mountains a great number of them are on their way. Balthier blames the Empire for their suffering, but Larsa is quick to point out that he’s trying to head the war off, and is certain his father shares his views. But Balthier merely tells him that he can never truly know another, not even your own father.
Well, let’s just check in on the old man, eh? In Gramis’ study, Vayne is meeting with his father. The Senate has determined that Vayne needs to be sent away, but Vayne pleads that whether he stays or goes the Empire’s problems will be just the same. Moreover, he has become convinced that the Senate hates House Solidor unconditionally, and will never stop their games of seizing whatever concessions they can until they can do away with them entirely. To this end, Vayne suggests finding some pretext to have the Senate gotten rid of, just as they use the disaster over Jagd Yensa to get rid of Vayne.
Gramis is tongue-in-cheek about how fast Vayne is to suggest the most ruthless course of action, but, as Vayne points out, it was Gramis himself who established this as standard procedure for the Solidors many years ago. Furthermore, he insists that it isn’t for his sake, but Larsa’s; Larsa can’t contend with the Senate the way he and Gramis can, and they must take action on his behalf so that Larsa doesn’t have to learn the hard way and become as jaded and callous as they are. Gramis is skeptical indeed that Vayne would care about his brother’s innocence, but Vayne, morbidly candid, admits that his hands are already stained with blood, and he has no innocence left to preserve.
The Emperor knows the future is no longer his to guide. His last words are thus: “And so House Solidor lives on.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A Travelog of Ivalice, Part 10: Pour Some Slaughter on Me”
And so we come to the end of Resident Evil 5. Chris posted his final thoughts on the game on his site. He puts Resident Evil 5 in historical context and talks about the trajectory of the Resident Evil franchise. This is obviously his wheelhouse more than mine, so give his post a look if you’d rather hear from someone who knows what they’re talking about.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Resident Evil 5 #6: This is Borderline Experimental!”
It’s time for our twice-yearly ritual of clock-fiddling. Which means I once again have to go around the house and remember how each clock works. This usually involves holding down two or three needlessly stiff buttons, labeled in tiny print, using black-on-black color scheme, to manipulate the clock one hour in either direction. The analog clocks are generally easier to adjust but harder to reach.
At least I don’t lose an hour of sleep like most people. What a dumb system. Anyway, here’s a podcast about videogames…
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #375: Mailbag Desk Job”
This week The Rocketeer takes us through the weird cul-de-sac that is the Eruyt Village. Rocky suggested that it’s two parts Ewok village and one part Lothlorian. To me it feels more like a mashup of Lothlorian and the Playboy Mansion. Like the Playboy Mansion, the person in charge is an ancient creep that doesn’t want to talk to you if you’re not a supernaturally gorgeous underwear model.
This place is a mixed bag. I like that we have a little side-story about Fran. On the other hand, it sort of comes out of nowhere. And once it’s over she goes back to being a dull exposition dispenser with no agency. It’s a bit like the scene between Vaan and Ashe we talked about last week. Our characters don’t seem to have any arcs, or personal goals. Then out of nowhere we’ll get a little self-contained vignette to pique our interest. And then the moment ends and the characters go back to being static and stoic. In an ideal world, these moments would be spread out over the course of the game so that we can gradually get to know these people and cheer for them, and their arcs would unfold in tandem with the main plot.
Once again, it feels like this writer knows how to tell a story. The ideas are there. These little moments show they know how to make characters that aren’t Basch interesting and likable. They know how to write a dialog scene. All of the big problems seem to be structural.
While the party travels to Henne Mines and back, let’s talk about the…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “FF12 Sightseeing Tour Part 9: Vocal Performances”
I sort of skipped a bunch of steps at the end of the last entry, because I was in a hurry to get to the point where we could see ships shooting at each other. But now that we’ve made it, let’s back up and talk about how we got here. Specifically, I’d like to respond to this comment…
I really enjoy this kind of content – programming, explaining complex IDE type objects (I’ll probably never try Unity – I’m a back end natural language processing type guy – but it is fun to see someone else struggle with it). Looking at the GIF I’m sad there wasn’t a paragraph or two about how the lasers were added: was that hard? Does Unity have an “Add laser” button? I feel like it might. I also think that each ship must track some sort of hit points value, because I saw one of them get hit (oh to have a discussion about hit boxes, and how to determine if a laser is inside one or not – I remember two decades ago trying to code up hit detection code and there are lots of optimizations in that area) and then flame out and explode. Lots of complexity hiding behind that I suspect!
Unity doesn’t have an “add laser” button, but we can re-use the trick from last time to save ourselves a bit of work.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Let’s Make a Spaceship Part 3: Back Up”
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
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