Hosts: Josh, Rutskarn, Shamus, Campster.
Episode edited by Issac.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #161: Death Road to Canada, FTL, Starbound”
Six years later, I’m happy to see that LOTRO is still with us. It seems like the move to a free-to-play model was a good one.
Also, how about that Leeroy Jenkins reference in the header, huh? That meme was already way past its sell-by date when I wrote this, and that was six years ago.
Ellie Cutleaf is sending me to Chetwood to attack the bandit hideout. I promised (lied) that I’d bring some friends along. I don’t actually have any friends, but I’m pretty sure I can take care of the bandits anyway. The place is also guarded by killer guard dogs. I have a bottle of poison that I collected at great painsThe pains were actually experienced by the bears and wolves I had to kill to get it and not by me, but the point stands., which Ellie tells me I’ll be able to drop into the dog’s food supply so I don’t have to fight them all.
To get to their base, I just need to go to…
Chetwood. AGAIN.
And now that I’m on the doorstep of the bandit base, I realize a fatal flaw with Ellie’s plan which we both should have realized right before coming up with a new plan and right after slapping ourselves in the forehead: The food is inside the base. I have to go in there to poison the food, but to get to the food I have to fight the dogs.
Well, the only thing worse than having a stupid and self-defeating plan is doing it halfway. Let’s make with the puppycide.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Shamus Plays LOTRO #22: Welcome to Chetwood – Again!”
Link (YouTube) |
Mumbles commented that the blood mechanics in this game are crazy. This seems to be a thing with late-period Bethesda games: Ragdolls act like balloons full of strawberry jam. Which makes it all the more inexplicable to me that “high-definition blood splatters” is always among the most popular mods. There are a lot of things visually wrong with how people die in this game, but “the blood decals are too low-res” isn’t one of them. If anything, the extra detail would draw attention to the problem.
I dunno. It’s just strange, is what I’m saying.
Link (YouTube) |
Here’s a spoiler for Josh: I watched the episode and I SEE WHAT YOU DID.
I never teamed up with former mayor MacCready, so I can’t really comment on what they’ve done with him. I hear people say that he’s actually a pretty good companion, but I favor stealth gameplay and companions do not mix well with stealth. I thought it was surprising that he was in the game, but it doesn’t even make my list of top 100 Fallout 4 gripes. I mean, if I was given the choice between:
I will take #1 every time.
Link (YouTube) |
“Does this game look good?” is the question. I had a bunch of nice things to say about it when the game was new:
But that’s praising the game by pointing out how awful Fallout 3 looked. A more fair question would be, “Does Fallout 4 look good for a game in this time period, with these system requirements?”
I don’t know. I’m just glad that wretched green filter is gone.
So after last week’s fun, painless, and intuitive teleportation process, I’m now standing in the “Shade Perilous.” So far every other place I’ve gone has been named for how much it’s going to kill me, so maybe I’m not as scurred as I ought to be.
Time for an in-game story update! Gather the wee ones and cuddle around Grandma Cahmel’s rocking chair as I regale you with another classic tale of actual rather than assumptive narrative. You can tell which is which because one’s broken and the other one’s just complicated.
As you may dimly recall, the one living humanoid still in the mix is a woman named Vatasha Trenelle. She’s left various notes indicating she’s shadowing the invading party and seeing what happens. Anyway, this is what happens.
It’ll be a bit of a shame to see her go, because she was a novice who was, like us, putting it all on the line in a desperate situation. And she probably had pants when she showed up today, so that puts her one above us on professionalism. If she was a little bit better at exploiting bugs she’d probably be the main character.
Whoop, gotta go, the level’s greeter is on fire.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts vs. Battlespire CH19: Hot, Cold, and Hott”
There’s almost nothing in the way of story in the game, although it’s not for lack of ideas.
My original idea – which you can still sort of see scraps of here and there – was for an insane world. Since “robots go haywire and kill humans” is such an ever-present trope in fiction, I wanted to create a silly world where the reality was just as common as the trope. A world where homicidal robots were just a fact of life. A world where the solution to killer robots is to build more robots to protect you from the killer robots, and then when those go haywire you get more to protect you from them, and so on, until the air is thick with robo-warfare. The companies that make the robots are terrible at engineering, and the people are all mindless consumers with no sense of self-preservation.
This wasn’t intended to be some heavy-handed social commentary on consumerism or anything. It was really just an excuse to make “crazy robot” jokes and gently poke fun at well-worn genre tropes.
It’s a bit like Saints Row The Third, where the player is encouraged to not feel bad for the idiot civilians they run over, since they’re all shallow and stupid. In Saints Row, people vapidly worship the endlessly destructive, mass-murdering gang. So when they die it’s not an injustice, but comeuppance. Maybe throw in a dash of “Everyone is insane” from Borderlands.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot Postmortem #3: Story”
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
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.
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
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.
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
T w e n t y S i d e d
