Have you found out about Minecraft yet?
Link (YouTube) |
It’s sort of like a first-person Dwarf Fortress. Procedurally generated world, which can be altered through digging and building. Minecraft is (I’m told) the work of a single individual. A multiplayer version is in testing now.
If you like, you could blow a few hours playing the free version of the game game or reading the development blog. I mean, it’s Saturday. That’s what Saturday is for.
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Last week was grim truths. This week my column is obvious advice that will be ignored, to the ruination of millions of dollars and many jobs.
Ah well. At least all the other industries are just as screwed up as this one.
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I’m afraid I can’t explain today’s comic. This is unfortunate, because this is something people are likely to ask me to do. I don’t know where it came from. It just sort of happened.
In my defense, I found it funny. But then I watched the Guild Wars 2 trailer like seven times so I might not be the best person to ask.
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Last episode, I claimed that the site No Mutants Allowed had a pronounced elitist bent, and that it was hostile or arrogant towards certain types of players and playstyles. Firstly, this is incorrect: the editorial staff of No Mutants Allowed demonstrates a level tone, and the community, while it has its bad patches, isn’t any worse than you’d find on neutral sites such as The Escapist. In part, my statements were a result of a few outside links to forum threads coloring my judgment; upon reviewing the recording, however, I think the biggest problem was that I accidentally referred to the wrong damn site.
As my track record suggests (Enclave!=Brotherhood), I have a habit of occasionally referring to one thing while talking about another, especially if they occupy the same spot on my brain’s mental map (morally questionable dudes in power armor trying to turn on a water purifier and get Reginald killed). In this case, the site I intended to refer to was RPG Codex, a site whose forum was (in the weeks leading up to Fallout 3’s release) a hive of grognard elitism that frequently engaged in ship-to-ship combat with Bethesda’s forums. Frankly, the staff aspect of that site isn’t much better; they would sit around waiting for news to come down the pipe, then ambush it with a suitably snarky editorial, even when the news was positive or inconsequential. I swear, if another game site had posted an article like, “Pete Hines really enjoys peaches,” they’d have posted a front-page snippet saying, “Reknowned Donkey Molester Pete Hines enjoys peaches, ruining gaming.”
But that’s besides the point, which is that NMA doesn’t deserve the payload I’d intended for a totally different site. I’d like to formally apologize to the staff and community over at NMA. Please don’t nuke my house.
Sincerely,
Rutskarn
AKA Dogmeat Genocide Device
AKA Stimpack Magnate
AKA Richard Nixon
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The original Guild Wars did not really work for me. When I complained, people said that the game “isn’t really about leveling”. Which is like offering me a sandwich and suggesting that I not judge it by the taste. I was then told that the real heart of the game was PvP, which is like saying that the thing that makes the sandwich good is the live scorpions. So I walked away from Guild Wars with the impression that this was a game for Other People.
Guild Wars is a strange creature. It’s an MMO, but there’s no monthly fee. You just buy the game and play it. The towns are shared space, but the adventuring areas of the game are all instanced. There is no “open public gameworld”.
Say what you want about the game, but it’s not just another second generation WoW clone, which was an Everquest clone, which was an Ultima clone, which was spawned in the primordial soup of some pre-graphical MUD on a dial-up BBS in the early 90’s. People use the word “clone” in these conversations to imply that the game is somehow bereft of new ideas. But I think we can trace a line from those early MUDs to current-gen MMORPGs and see a pretty clear evolutionary progression. And I’m not talking about the graphics. Smartass. But Guild Wars doesn’t seem to fit into that lineage. (No pun intended.) It’s as if they made an MMORPG without having played one before, and thus came up with all of these different ideas about how these games should work. It’s like some alternate-universe MMORPG.
Anyway. The game seemed to do well. I wouldn’t blame them for making a sequel that took these core ideas and just gave us more of the same but with better bling mapping and more fishnet armor. Better to keep your existing fans happy than to go chasing after folks like me. It’s not like there’s some sort of leveling & exploration drought in the MMORPG genre. But instead of making a nice, safe game, ArenaNet has gone loco and decided to reinvent the wheel… again?
Consider me intrigued.
And it really does take great physical effort to not comment on those graphics. I’m trying to be grown up about this, but… wow. That’s like, amazing and stuff.
Here it is. The end of Fallout 3. This episode weighs in at just under 50 minutes. Sorry about that. But it was better to do the whole thing in one go than to break and do another episode. It’s like pulling off a band-aid. It’s going to hurt you either way, so we might as well do it in a way that doesn’t waste too much of my time.
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
We give a shout-out to the folks at No Mutants Allowed. Hit up their site for a bit about who the voice actors are in New Vegas. (Hint: One of them is 1,000 times more famous than me.)
Now that Fallout 3 is done, we’re ready to talk about the next game:
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But not yet. We’re going to take a bit of time off before we begin BioShock. I’ll announce the launch date once we have one.
I know this was a rough series. Hope you were able to enjoy it anyway. Thanks for watching.
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This is the only way the show could ever be improved.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t watch TV. At least, not on purpose. My one weakness is Mythbusters. Here is how the drama plays out:
I’m sitting in my office writing a post or a comic, when I realize I’m out of water. I head for the kitchen through the living room, where my son is watching Mythbusters. Adam will be strapped to the nosecone of a scale replica of a Saturn V rocket. Jamie will be at the base, testing to see if you can light the solid fuel with various household devices. A terrified fire crew will be cowering behind their trucks. Adam will have on a bike helmet and some knee pads for protection, and he’ll be yelling down to everyone, “Hey! This is awesome, isn’t it?”
I’ll stop, water bottle in hand. Oh, I gotta see how this one turns out.
Then they cut away to Grant, Tory and Kari.
Dang. I wanted to see if Adam perished on the landing pad or if he died in the upper atmosphere.
Grant is building a robot to fling bricks at Tory at barely-subsonic speeds. Carrie is describing what happens to human bones when struck with high velocity bricks for the benefit of the slow people in the audience.
Geeze. What the hell myth are they testing? Who cares? It’s robots and danger. Let’s see what happens.
Eventually the end-of-show explosion shakes me out of my stupor.
Ow. My legs are tired. I’m thirsty. Oh. I’ve been standing in the middle of the living room holding this empty water bottle for half an hour.
I leave the room, fill up on water, and pass back through the living room on my way to the office. Son has let Netflix roll right on to the next episode. “In this episode… Adam is set on fire and strapped to the nose of one of Japan’s famous high-speed ‘Shinkansen’ bullet trains. Will the extreme speed be enough to blow out the flames?”
Hm. I’ll just watch the first couple of minutes.
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
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.
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
T w e n t y S i d e d
