T w e n t y S i d e d
We’re getting down to the end of the Shire now. It will be a photo-finish to see if Lulzy runs out of quests or sanity first.
We win, either way.
Spoiler Warning Fallout 3 #1:
The Birth of Reginald Cuftbert
It’s the 1st episode. Of Spoiler Warning season 2. Playing Fallout 3.
This one ran long, the audio sucks, etc. The usual pleas for leniency apply. I’m sure we’ll get the hang of this sooner or later.
Stolen Pixels #191: Max Blame, Part 2
I was right that the game was doing something really screwy at load time. I searched around and found that if you add -disable3dpreloads to the command line like so:
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…the game will stop stalling on the loading screen. The load times went from two minutes to about eight seconds.
Max Payne always had horrendous load times. I wonder if this “feature” was the problem all along? Would this have sped things up in 2001? I no longer have a machine of that vintage so I can’t test.
On Sunday I plowed through the whole game using cheats, just taking in the story and trying to get a feel for the writing style. (Since I needed to mimic it for this series.) I wish I’d done so before I began the series. Part 1 was written in present tense. I could have sworn the game was written in present tense. But it wasn’t. Hopefully the shift isn’t too off-putting. It will probably be more noticeable to people doing an archive binge than to people who are just reading them as they come out.
I will say this series is really fun to work on.
“Max Payne” 3
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This is Max Payne 3? This is bald musclebound redneck is supposed to be John Woo-inspired bullet-time specialist Max Payne?
A beefy slob in a dirty wifebeater, gunning down terrorists in a sun-drenched ghetto. Has anyone related with this project ever familiarized themselves with the concept of noir?
Hats? Ties? Jackets? Cities at night? Moody lighting? Mobsters? Down on his luck detective? Neon? A protagonist who is NOT a hulking badass? Snappy dialog with clever dames and world-weary cops? Does any of this sound familiar?
You don’t need all of these things to make a noir story. In fact, it’s common to change a couple on purpose. But if you drop all if them, then it sort of defeats the purpose of calling it “noir”. If I made a superhero movie about a guy who doesn’t have any powers, doesn’t dress up, and makes no effort to fight crime or be heroic, then I didn’t actually make a superhero movie, did I? I just made some other movie and then mis-categorized it. Even if it turns out to be a great movie, I shouldn’t call it Spider-Man 4.
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It’s not like noir is this overcrowded genre where they needed to break away so they could stand out. They took a game which was thematically unique – the one active noir franchise – and made it into something else. Now it looks like Kane & Lynch, the poster child for bland and unlikeable.
The usual explanation when something like this happens (as with Xcom) is that they’re just harvesting the brand name to garner a few sales, but, it’s not like Max Payne is this obscure, struggling series that needed an overhaul to make it more “mainstream”. Metacritic scores:
Max Payne: 89
Max Payne 2: 86
Kane & Lynch: 65
Changing a unique series so that it can be more like other, less interesting, less successful titles makes no sense. Rockstar, I will be happy – delighted even – to eat these words if this game isn’t a soup of mindless battles, perfunctory boilerplate dialog, and sticky-cover based combat. But from where I sit you’re turning gold into lead.
Gun Trade
This has been bugging me for a couple of weeks now. There’s a person that comments at the Escapist who uses the image below as their avatar. The Escapist is pretty lenient when it comes to image sizes (this one is just shy of 500kb, while most forums I’ve been on seem to limit you to about 80k or so) and so there are a lot of really elaborate animations and some of them are genuinely amusing or interesting. This one caught my eye for some reason, and every time it shows up I find myself wondering where it’s from. This morning I thought…
Ah heck, I should look it up. Er. Actually, how do you look up something like this? It’s an image! Screw it, I’ll just crowd source it.
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So… Movie? TV show? YouTube meme? Can anyone say where this is from?
EDIT: 1 hour, 31 minutes later, and we have a winner.
Nice work E.
Law Abiding Engineer
If you’ve never seen the trailer for Law Abiding Citizen, you should watch that first.
Link (YouTube) |
“Tell us what we’re dealing with. A spy?”
“Spies are a dime a dozen.”
It makes me want to see the movie. But if I did, I’d just be disappointed when it was Gerard Butler instead of the Engineer.
Experienced Points: Arty Games
In this week’s column, I suggest five games that I think make the “Games as Art” case fairly well. (Assuming, as Yahtzee points out, that both sides are even working with the same definition of “art”.) My list is actually, “Five arty games that could be approached by a newcomer.”
And this leads to the main reason that this debate is boring to me. An Ebert says games aren’t art. A gamer offers up some examples as I have. Then the Ebert will dismiss them. The Gamer will protest. Eventually they realize they are talking about two different things when they say “art”. And then the rest of the debate is an attempt to define art, which is a fool’s errand.
Art or not, it’s a pretty fun way to spend the time.
I should play some more Max Payne this weekend.
From The Archives:
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
What is Vulkan?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
The Best of 2018
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
id Software Coding Style
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.