I liked the Original Empire Strikes back, before Lucas got his hands on the series and ruined the whole thing with his fancy special effects and technicolor glitz:
And I can’t believe he cast Harrison Ford as Han Solo! WTF? I mean, did he even SEE the original?!? And don’t get me started on how Princess Leia’s costume looked NOTHING like a stewardess.
Kidding aside, this is a very interesting arrangement of clips. The author has a whole series of these “premake” trailers, and it’s amazing how well he’s made them fit. The Ghostbusters one (starring Bob Hope, Dean Martin, and Jerry Lewis!) is also good for a grin.
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.
In this week’s column I bring some words of caution to a few of the hyped games at E3, although I’m not sure they’re needed. I think a lot of people were already skeptical of these games, not to mention the new motion controls.
There are some games I’m looking forward to, but almost all of them are aiming for 2011. (And I’m sure some of those will slip to 2012.) Portal, DC Universe Online, Star Wars The Old Republic, Mass Effect 3. Usually E3 feels like a preview for the holiday season, but this year it feels like a preview for next year. Although, I haven’t run the numbers. It’s entirely possible the distribution of release dates is the same, but my interest level isn’t.
About the only thing I care about right now – and I’m aware of how strange this sounds coming from me – is Fallout Vegas. It goes something like this:
New Vegas will be a disaster, just like Fallout 3.
But this game is by Obsidian.
But Obsidian has a reputation for shoddy work and bad endings.
But they seem to be saying all the right things in interviews.
But the trailer was an insult to the series.
But the trailer is just for FPS fans and not for RPG fans.
But Alpha Protocol seems to suffer from a lot of classic Obsidian problems.
But since both games were under development at the same time, this game must be coming from a different group of people.
This can’t save it from the prevailing console-itis.
But it will be using the established PC-focused Bethesda tools.
Which always seem to produce buggy games.
But this is a refinement of existing tech, not an overhaul, so they’re building on established tech, which you are always saying is the key to success!
…and so on. This could go either way. It’s simply too close to know how it will turn out. It’s like the pod race in Phantom Menace, except I care.
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.
I need to keep playing this game before I can review it. One minute I’ll be thinking, “This game is okay. I don’t know what people are complaining about.” Ten minutes later, “This game sucks. I don’t know what people see in it.”
The most distressing problem is the save system. It’s checkpoint based, even when you’re at your hideout. I get back to the safe house and it checkpoint saves. Then I do some leveling up, buy some equipment, and arrange my gear. Then I want to quit. The only save option is “save last checkpoint”, which – if I’m understanding it – means I’d be saving the game state of when I arrived at my base. If I want to save all that fussing about, I have to start a new mission.
The other problem is that I can’t make any sense of how the save slots work. I finished the first act of the game, and then I needed to start a new game to make the previous comic. Just to make sure, I saved my game in two different slots. Later I wanted to return to that save, but both slots were overwritten with autosaves or something. They were gone, and I ended up losing about an hour and a half of progress. You don’t name your character or anything, so if you’ve got two different play-throughs going you can’t tell their saves apart, even if you can keep them from somehow overwriting each other. This is a significant flaw in a game designed around the idea of multiple replays.
Pretty classic Obsidian craftsmanship so far.
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.
The plan for this evening: I’ll be upgrading this site to WordPress 3.0, which is the software that runs this blog. The site may break, go down, show up with the wrong theme, give off a foul odor, or otherwise fail to properly dispense entertainment.
EDIT: All done. I’m sure you’ll let me know if you see anything amiss.
EDIT 2: You can’t see it, but the administration interface is kind of nice in a “oooh, slightly different shade of gray!” sort of way. The WP site claims there are tons of new features and 1,200 bugfixes. It all feels exactly the same to me. I don’t think I could even tell you a single new feature they’ve added in the last two years that I’ve used or even noticed.
That sounds like a complaint, but it’s actually praise from an engineering standpoint. It means they’re adding features without obfuscating existing features and cluttering up the interface. They’re growing the system without falling into the MS Office school of overbearing kitchen-sink featurism.
EDIT 3: Okay, I just spotted an outstanding feature. I read all comments in one big moderation queue, because if I manually visited each thread I’d never be able to keep up. The disadvantage is that I would just see all comments in chronological order without any indication of how they might be threaded. I’d see a comment like, “I can’t see how that could ever happen”, and have NO IDEA what they were talking about. I’d have to visit the post and scroll down to see the structure of the conversation. Now replies indicate when they are replies, and even have links to the parent.
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.
We’re actually getting to some of the more fun stuff now, and the next few episodes should contain 33% less bile! Also, I’d like to remind viewers that you shouldn’t try to extrapolate the severity of a complaint by how long we spend talking about it. Sometimes we’ll barely mention something major. Sometimes we’ll blow seven minutes talking about something really trivial. We don’t plan these conversations out ahead of time. We just go where they take us.
I think we’re starting to feel a little Fallout 3 fatigue. Not dire by any means, but it’s clear this series isn’t going to remain entertaining through the rest of the plot and all four remaining DLC packs. I know I don’t want to spend the next three months dumping on this game [even more].
We’ve been kicking around ideas of what to do next. It’s got to be a PC title, and it has to be something we’ve all played. I think we’ve taken Dragon Age off the table, simply due to the length and combat density. Dragon Age would probably take over 30 hours to beat, even without sidequests. That’s almost eight months of episodes, and most of them would be nothing but fighting Darkspawn. That’s fun when you’re playing, but less so when you’re watching, and much less so when you’re trying to fill the time with commentary. I think we’d basically devolve into a generalized gaming podcast with an unrelated video feed in the background.
Mass Effect 2 is obviously on our list, but I’m against doing it next. I’d like to do one more game between Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2.
I also thought it might be interesting to do something old and beloved. We had to dismiss Deus Ex because not all of us have played it, but I’d like to do a game like that at some point. I love that game, but I’m sure I’d nitpick it just as much as poor Fallout 3 here. It’s just in my nature.
There are actually a lot of requirements for picking a good game for this series:
1) Needs to be PC, due to our setup.
2) Needs to run reasonably well. So crappy unstable ports likes GTA IV and Saint’s Row 2 are right out.
3) Needs to have a good story / conversation density. Anything that regularly gives you a half hour of unbroken combat is right out. (Special exceptions could be made for games with lots of varied exploration or puzzles.)
4) Needs to be fully voiced or come in a LARGE PRINT EDITION, because small text and video compression go together like swimming and cinderblocks.
5) Needs to be lit well enough to survive video compression without turning to mush. Which means dark corridor shooters like Quake 4 and Doom 3 are out. I’d have a ton to say about those games tech-wise, but it would probably be better to save that for some sort of standalone video.
6) Needs to be something we’ve all played.
Ideas we’ve kicked around:
* Half-Life 2
* Oblivion
* Jade Empire
* Deus Ex
* KOTOR
* Dragon Age
* Mass Effect 2
* Alpha Protocol
* BioShock (And you think I’m hard on Fallout? System Shock is my sacred cow. BioShock is to me what Fallout 3 is to Krellen. People say we’ve been petty and unfair to FO3? I promise I would be relentlessly petty, unfair, and unreasonable with this game.)
* Assassin’s Creed
Go ahead and nominate games if you like. It will have no bearing whatsoever on our decision, but it’s a fun way to fill the time.
EDIT: Added a couple of games that we’d discussed.
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.
The second item is this exclusive interview with Nigel Droolbucket, one of the developers at Obsidian currently working on Fallout: New Vegas.
Twenty Sided: Nigel, thanks so much for granting the interview. First off, I’d like to know how New Vegas plans to court fans of the franchise who thought that Fallout 3 was lacking in story?
Nigel Droolbucket: Did you see the new GRENADE GUN? BOOM BOOM BOOM! Blow up your foes!
TS: Yes, the weapons do look exciting. What about the skill point system? Any plans to restore the number-crunchy complexity of the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system that made the earlier titles so deep?
ND: Vegas, baby! VEGAS! Huge robots to explode! KABOOM! Blow it up! Blow it ALL UP!
TS: Hm. What about the dialog? Will you be putting in meaningful conversations that reveal the world as well as give players a way to solve problems in non-violent means?
ND: Speaking of violence, this time you’ll have companions to follow you around and blow up more guys… EVEN MORE!
TS: Amazing. What about multiple ways to solve quests? Will the players have a lot of freedom, and an incentive to replay the game again and again?
ND: Orbital cannon! Blow up tons of dudes at once! Mushroom cloud! PSssshkkkrrrrrrwwwwwooooooom!
TS: (Wiping spittle off face.) Interesting. What about the visuals? Is the game still going to be pervasively, monotonously brown, so brown that the player will wish to be struck blind?
ND: Yes.
TS: Thanks so much for your time.
ND: BOOM! POW POW POW! BLAMO!
TS: Please let go. You’re making me uncomfortable.
(EDIT: Counterpoint: The trailer maybe a hundred pounds of big, loud, and dumb, but this is very, very encouraging.)
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.
Even if you’re not following the LOTRO series, you might want to take a gander at page one of this week’s installment for my comments on Lord of the Rings Online going free-to-play this fall. And if you do follow this series, then I guess you were going to read page one anyway. But I’ll give you your own special link so you don’t have to share one with all the Lulzy haters.
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.
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