T w e n t y S i d e d

The talk about Deadspace was a reference to this: EA Says Dead Space 3 Has To Sell 5 Million To Survive. As a thoughtful commentator I would like to invite the captains of this particular industry to go out of business as soon as possible. How stupid do you have to be to continue to spend more and more, to make games that can’t possibly hope to meet their ever-increasing sales projections? I had many gripes with Dead Space 2, and none of them had anything to do with how much was spent on the game. In fact, my own wishlist of changes (getting rid of the quicktime-event driven spectacle, cutting way back on the total number of encounters, and cutting back on the NPC conversations) would have made it cheaper.

So now Mumbles has explained to me that I liked Jack and forgot. Actually, looking back: I loved her loyalty mission, but I still think her boobstraps were juvenile pandering. In any case, I’m wondering if my idea holds true: I have been thinking that the ME1 cast were far and away the most popular companions, but maybe ME2 wins in that department. (If not, it’s not for lack of trying. If you go for all the DLC then ME2 Shepard has enough people to form a baseball team.)

It’s true that I argue that BioWare might have used shared models to save money, and I even offer an example of how I used a similar technique myself. To rebut my own argument, I’ll point out that I was ONE GUY with a budget of weeks.

When Mumbles and Chris start singing “We’ve got dead chick”, they’re singing to the tune of Ice Hair, which you should not listen to under any circumstances.

Here is Digital Gumballs, the blog where Mrs. Mumbles and Mr. Gumballs write about videogames. This is the post about girlfriend mode, which you are encouraged to discuss over there and not here because… basically because I see where that thread is going and I don’t want to get on that particular ride right now.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Welcome to the next installment of, “Shamus complains for twenty minutes, starring Shamus and other people who might be trying to get a word in edgewise.”.

So now for commentary on the commentary…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect 3 EP2: Now I Have A Machine Gun”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This is the 300th episode of Spoiler Warning. Seriously. We’ve made three hundred of these things. That is a lot of spoiled stuff. This seems like a great time to begin our long-delayed Mass Effect 3 season.

I should probably apologize for this start to the series. Often people accuse us of “just looking for stuff to nitpick”, which isn’t really fair or true. We’re usually looking for stuff to talk about, and sometimes those things are positive and sometimes they’re negative. But in our first block of episodes, I seem to remember spending about two hours hating the game and whinging on about Every Damn Little Thing.

What happened is this:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect 3 Part 1: We Fight or We Doy”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.