Our days in the Shire are coming to an end. Not yet, but soon.
A long time ago I whined about the problem of trying to advance the plot while also telling jokes. That’s even a bit of a challenge here, although with 2,000 words I still have lots of room to work in some jokes here and there. The main problem I’m facing is that the main plot just isn’t quite as silly as the sidequests (which is usually a good thing) and so making fun of the game is no longer shooting fish in a barrel.
First, the episode:
And now, the tirade:
Livestream sucks.
We want it to stream the video footage to Rutskarn and I so that we can view and comment on the game. But the feed dies frequently. Then when we hit refresh on the page to try and kick-start the feed again, it will play an ad. But not just any ad. It will repeat the last ad we saw. There are many ads in the rotation, but it relentlessly shows me the same one, over and over. It will show Rutskarn the same ad as well. There are four Slim-Fast ads (that we know of) in the system. I’ve seen ad A dozens of times, B a half dozen times, C once, and D never. Rutskarn has seen D dozens of times. Maybe this is a marketing technique? But then why go to all the trouble of making all these spots?
Then the ads will stutter and lag badly. The ads are all in HD, and sometimes they just don’t come in fast enough, so the ad keeps pausing. Not skipping, pausing. This makes the ad really annoying to watch. Worse, it makes the ad take longer. A twenty second spot will eat up a whole minute.
And then the ad will end, but Livestream won’t return us to Josh’s feed. It just dumps us at a black screen. So we hit refresh…
I can’t describe how infuriating it is to record twenty minutes of a half hour show and then have Livestream ad-bomb our recording session so that we have to restart. (Josh has to stop the feed and restart his Livestream client to get it going again, which means exiting the game.)
After a few takes everything gets all disjointed because we’re trying to continue conversations that Livestream ruined and want to refer to events that are no longer part of the continuity. In the end it took us over three hours to record an hour of worthwhile content.
Livestream doesn’t even offer any sort of “premium” or ad-free viewing options. I understand that bandwidth costs money and I’d be willing to pay to be able to watch ad free. Maybe a flat yearly fee? Or pay a small fee for a few hours? Or just let me watch a whole bunch of ads in one go and get them out of the way? But no. The system will force-feed you ads which don’t work and which break the service. Livestream is broken. We can’t do our show. And we hate Slim-Fast and hope everyone in the company dies in a plague pit. Everyone loses.
Josh did a really good job of editing out all the Livestream-based nonsense and confusion. Hopefully Livestream gets their act together. I don’t even think there is a rival we can turn to at this point.
This was a fun series to write. And I got to play through the original Max Payne again. So it’s a double win for me.
Thanks to the reader who sent me the link to this:
Link (YouTube) |
According to the comments with the video, they spent 1,500 hours building and taking photos to make this thing.
I’ve often thought about the fact that you could set up a Lego scene in Blender. The smooth plastic of the pieces and lack of complex reflective interactions means that you could make something look almost indistinguishable from reality. (Or at least, it would be far, far easier to pull off than trying to make perfect-realism shots of (for example) flatware on a wooden kitchen table next to a glass of water.)
If you made some tools you could automate a lot of work, particularly when using legos to replicate 8-bit displays as they did in the latter part of this video. I think it would be an interesting exercise, although it would sort of defeat the entire purpose of the video. These things are as much a demonstration of tenacity as they are of skill, and automating it would take away that aspect of it.
I didn’t write a column this week. But I do have this Fallout 3 screenshot to amuse you:
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This requires some explanation:
No cheats were used. Yes, my character is dead at this point. Yes, she’s missing three limbs. Her shotgun is positioned so that it looks like a prosthetic leg, but it’s really just floating in the air beside her. She and the shotgun are tumbling through the air together.
Cars in this game explode if shot. When they go off, they leave an eight meter mushroom cloud and irradiate the area. I was standing amongst a 200 year old traffic jam and happened to set off one of the cars, which caused a chain reaction, which is what launched me into orbit.
I was still gaining altitude when I took this shot. But the game auto-reloads your last save after a few seconds, so I wasn’t able to enjoy the entire ride. This shot was taken about a second before the game reset me.
I’m currently playing two characters: The above stealth / sniper, and melee brute guy. I have to say it takes several levels before the stealth and small weapons investments pay off, but the melee points pay off right away. The (early) game is easier in melee, which I wasn’t expecting.
Max Payne continues his adventure. The conspirators are unveiled.
They’re not very interesting.
The call for subtitles, less grouchy banter, and less Josh talking have been heard. Unfortunately, we have two more episodes before those suggestions will come into effect.
But I’m glad we did so many episodes in advance, since Josh recently had a series of personal computing disasters that ended in him ordering a new machine. If we didn’t have the episodes done ahead of time, we would have nothing for you next week. But thanks to our foresight and planning ahead, we’ll be able to give you two more episodes of rambling, crosstalk, and no subtitles.
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