On Friday I sat down with some of the guys at Middle Earth Network and talked a bit about the Witch Watch, Project Frontier, DM of the Rings, and other assorted topics.
You can hear an archived version of the interview here.
It was fun. Thanks again to the MeNet guys for having me on.
Link (YouTube) |
In case you didn’t already have enough vertical lifting devices in your life.
I meant to have this up earlier this week, but a combination of technical problems (i.e., Adobe Premiere memory leaks) and mild illness thwarted that plan. That’s also why there wasn’t a Shogun 2 post this week either. Fortunately, I’m feeling much better now, which is good, considering PAX is next week.
On that topic, next week is probably going to be pretty weird. I’m not sure what sort of content Shamus has planned for PAX, or if he has anything planned at all, for that matter. But you can probably expect at least a Shogun 2 post sometime early next week, to make up for the missing one this week.
Now what are you doing still reading this? Go watch us fight the elevator gods!
In talking about the recent Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, Daithi Farley asked:
The weirdest thing about this debacle is the almost complete disparity between game journalists and fans. I mean you'd think it vary from site to site but it all seems so oddly consistent. Does any one know why this is?
My article this week is my answer.
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A recent headline caught my eye: Silicon Knights Boss Says Used Games Drive Up Prices
I would title this article “Silicon Knights Boss fails to Grasp Supply & Demand”. The thrust of the article is that they’re only making “burst” sales at the launch of a game, so they’re trying to make all their money in those first few weeks. This is in contrast to Ye Olden Days, when games would have “long tail” sales, having sales figures that slowly tapered off over time.
This is a horrible and suicidal way to do business. You’re going to spend $50 million to make a game and then hope you can make more than $50 million in a few weeks, which you can only do if it has great reviews and it flies off the shelves? What if a really big surprise hit releases next to your game? What if your game gets dinged in reviews down to (oh no!) 75%? Or what if it’s just too dang similar to a game that came out few months earlier and even if your game is better consumers just aren’t ready for ANOTHER one?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Supplying Demands for More Demand”
If you’re missing Spoiler Warning this week, then allow me to hook you up with some auxiliary Chris. His take on violence in videogames is really interesting and he even touches on the Football: Total War concept I enjoy so much. (A post I wrote when this site was less than three months old.)
Link (YouTube) |
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Now that I’ve tossed a few stones through the windows of Mass Effect and BioWare, I need to get back inside my glass house and get back to work on my sci-fi story. I have no doubt that all of my shoot-from-the-hip literary criticisms will probably come back to bite me in the ass someday. My only comfort is that the ass-biting day isn’t today.
Any author who hopes to write a story about interstellar space travel must eventually deal with the fact that interstellar space travel is impossible. Or if not impossible, then so shockingly impractical that it’s probably not worth the trouble. We can’t go to the stars in real life, but we hunger to see them and discover what secrets are hidden behind all of those shimmering white dots. So we write stories about outer space. However, in our stories we can’t travel through space for all the same reasons we can’t travel through space in the real world. The only saving grace of fiction is that we can cheat.
I suppose you can write a story about a guy who decides to find out how a remote planet colony is doing, and so he spends most of his adult life travelling there. Then his daughter spends her life bringing back the reply, “We’re mostly okay here, but we’re fresh out of that orange cheese dust they put on chips and cheese doodles, and we don’t know how to synthesize it ourselves.” Then the man’s grandson takes them a shipment of cheese dust and his great-granddaughter brings back their reply of, “Thanks!” I’m not saying it can’t be done, but there are certain limits on what kind of story you can tell if it takes decades to go somewhere and your characters keep dropping dead of old age. It’s going to be murder on pacing.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Science Fiction… in SPACE!”
Link (YouTube) |
And so we have come to the end of Human Revolution. So naturally, Adobe Premiere threw a fit and I had to re-encode the video and upload it super late. Because nothing can go off without a hitch when Reginald Cuftbert’s at the helm!
It does really seem strange when I look back at this season. As I mentioned in the video, most of the time, when we’re approaching the end of a season, I just can’t wait until it’s over. There’s always a palpable urge in the back of my mind to just get on with it, because we’ve all worn ourselves out by fixating on the same flaws ad nauseum. It’s easy to stay level headed while talking about a game’s flaws for an hour or two; Try analyzing a game for twenty hours and you’ll probably want to hit someone before the end. Do that all while recording yourself on camera and you might just become marginally famous on the internet for being a massive meta-troll that shoves lit dynamite down people’s pants.
But that didn’t really happen in Human Revolution. Not just the pants dynamite, but also that we never really got to the point where the game had worn out its welcome with us. Well, except at the very end when everything went completely insane. Maybe it’s because the game was short enough that we didn’t end up spending as much time on it as with other games; this season is a good 25% shorter than our Fallout: New Vegas run. But, at least for me, I think there’s something more to it.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Deus Ex Human Revolution EP41: Did We Ask For This?”
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
T w e n t y S i d e d
