I know I’m not the first person to say so, but the Dead Space 2 ad campaign was bathed in the stench of uncreative desperation.
Three days ago I said on Twitter:
Just finished #DeadSpace2. Visceral Games: Guys, love the production values. Call me. I can fix this pacing and atmosphere problem you have.
Visceral Games never called. They probably lost my number. Rather than make them hunt it down, I’ll just post my fixes here:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Stolen Pixels #248: HI MOM!”
 |
So you’re curious about the math involved in graphics programming. Well, someone is. People ask me about this stuff now and again. But a subject like “the math of graphics programming” is large enough to fill one of those great, big reference books that nobody likes to use because they’re so heavy and they take up so much space.
Years ago I had a devil of a time learning this for myself. Most tutorials are dense with Greek symbols and mercilessly heavy on jargon. It’s one of those situations where you have to already understand the subject before you can comprehend the lessons to teach you the subject. So I offer my own explanation here for the curious. This won’t teach you everything you need to know, but it might help give you a frame of reference so the other lessons make sense. Or it might just be a fun way to blow five minutes. Whatever.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Transformation Matrix”
Some people have strongly-held beliefs on this whole Kirk vs. Picard business. Perhaps this will settle things…
Link (YouTube) |
Also, I apologize.
Well, lookie what I found during a Google Image search!
 |
It’s impossible for me to imagine this face having some other voice besides the voice of Commander Shepard. But of course, in reality that voice belongs to another face:
Link (YouTube) |
Reality is confusing. And disappointing.
 |
There’s this scene in Star Trek: Voyager, where the character Neelix realizes that his era of usefulness has come to an end. He was guiding the crew through a section of space, but eventually they reached the edge of his knowledge. Going ahead, he didn’t know any more than they did. (The fact that he was an annoying idiot regardless of his navigational knowledge was not discussed.) I think I have reached the same point.
Up until Half-Life 2, and even as recently as Fallout 3, I would have technological insights on the games that I played. I could spot walls that had been placed, not for the sake of the gameplay, but to cull unwanted details from the scene and give the computer a break. I could identify and explain visual glitches, artifacts, misaligned textures, and other problems. My years of 3D modeling and coding gave me an unusual perspective on what games were showing us. But my knowledge has stagnated in the last five years while the industry has charged forward, and I have almost no understanding of today’s engines and how they do what they do. For me, the Cry Engine 3 is now indistinguishable from magic.
I can still comment on the game from an artistic standpoint, though.
Yes, Stolen Pixels returns! I’ve decided to kick things off with a news story from… last week!
I know some people were looking forward to the rest of my comics on New Vegas, so let me say a bit more about that…
I only had one more joke written, and I’d planned to write more as the series ran. Of course, that was months ago. I haven’t touched New Vegas since then, which means I no longer have funny things to say about it. If you’re that curious, here is the other joke I had written:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Stolen Pixels #247: Her Price is Right”
It’s Spoiler Warning as you’ve never seen it before: In glorious 1D!
Link (YouTube) |
Truly, one is the loneliest dimension.
This was unplanned. We’d already recorded our April Fool’s Day show. It was in the bag. Then I started telling the crew about Trainz 2010: Engineer’s Edition. Everyone insisted that we record another show for April Fool’s, featuring this game.
I want to be clear that while this game is hilariously bad, it’s not as bad as it looks…
Point: The game is not as slow as you see here. Normally, it runs at a nice 50 frames a second on my machine.
Counterpoint: Okay, that’s the same framerate that I get from Crysis 2, which looks about six graphics generations better.
Point: But still, the game is smoother than you see here. The extreme low framerate was an artifact of recording.
Counterpoint: Other games don’t have this problem.
Point: I made no effort to educate myself on the game. I just jumped in and started pushing buttons. The results would be not all that different if you tried the same thing with a flight simulator.
Counterpoint: Flight simulators involve travel in more than one dimension.
Point: It’s probably not fair to pick on games like this one which have niche appeal.
Counterpoint: It’s not fair to allege that this game has “appeal”, niche or not.
Point: Okay, you got me there.
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
T w e n t y S i d e d
