I don’t know what I was thinking when I made this. The new (to Stolen Pixels) character is one I’ve had sitting around for ages, and I’ve been waiting for a special occasion to use him. But this wasn’t a very special occasion. Sort of an absurd conversation. Not really the sort of bang he deserves.
Ah well.
A bunch of rambling about Stolen Pixels itself below, for those who are curious why I do what I do…
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.
Man, it’s really cool of EA to put The Escapist’s editor-in-chief Russ Pitts on the cover of Command & Conquer 4. Their rendition is pretty accurate as well. I have it on good authority that he’s always brooding and swiping the free Tiberium out of the dish in the Lobby.
More seriously: The resemblance is kinda uncanny.
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.
Warning: For reasons we still don’t understand, this episode contains Mass Effect’s infamous XXX hard core porno sex simulation*.
We joke about wanting to romance Tali, but I have the sense that this is a pretty common preference among male gamers. Tali seems to be a lot more popular than either Liara or Ashley. And I think she’s more popular because she’s simply more interesting. Liara is smart, Ashley is capable, but Tali is both. Yes, she has a skin-tight body suit, but so does just about everyone else in the game. More importantly, she’s got chicken feet and you never see her face. So I think her popularity is due to her personality far more than sex appeal.
Having said that, there seems to be no end of speculation (and photoshopping) concerning what we would find under the mask:
(The real Tali model is actually pretty ugly under the mask. Her face is just there to hint at the shape with faux-lighting. I can’t find it now, but someone managed to move the camera close enough to look through her helmet using the clipping plane. They showed that her head is low-poly and sort of mannish. EDIT: Found it.)
We’re not ready to announce the next series, but I will say it’s not going to be Mass Effect 2. Not right away, anyway. We don’t want this to turn into “The Mass Effect Show”. We’re going to do one or two other games before we head into Mass Effect 2: Cerberus Goes Bananas.
* And by “XXX porno” we mean, “a side view of a bare female bottom”.
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.
Described as a “reimagining” of the series that was created by MicroProse in the mid-90s, players in the new XCom game (that’s right, XCom, not X-Com) will take on the role of an FBI agent in charge of identifying and eliminating a deadly threat posed by “an unknown and faceless enemy that is violent probing and plotting its way into our world.” The game will maintain the “strategic core” of the original X-Com games, combining it with the natural intensity of a first-person experience.
So, they have decided to honor the legendary turn-based strategy sim by reimagining it as a shooter. Perfect. Perhaps next they can reimagine 12 Angry Men as a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced buddy cop movie with car chases and explosions. Let’s reimagine the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of T-Pain’s pimped-out mansion with an image of T-Pain doing a fist-pound with a deified Vanilla Ice. Citizen Kane can be reimagined as an anime harem comedy about a Newspaper Tycoon / Mech pilot and the bevy of hot young girls who come between him and his robot maid Rosebud. And then let’s reimagine the Audrey Hepburn / Gregory Peck movie Roman Holiday, using Pam Anderson and Ben Afleck.
We had to destroy the franchise in order to save it. Except, it was already destroyed. So, I guess we had to use the wreckage to build cheap, shallow mockery of the original.
Is there anything on this planet you idiots won’t turn into a shooter? I’m a fan of shooters, but isn’t there room in this hobby for something else? You guys have successfully euthanized the turn-based strategy genre, but is it completely necessary for you to rape the corpse?
Dang kids. Get off my lawn.
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.
Here is an account of Lulzy’s adventures in Tuckborough, which is an excellent lesson in why reading the quest text is a bad idea.
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 in the home stretch now. In fact, not to spoil things or anything – perish the thought! – but I have it on good authority that there are exactly three episodes left.
Unfortunately, the Stream was really delayed for me while we were recording this. Normally, Josh and I see things about three seconds after they happen. But this time I had an eight second delay, and it wasn’t until halfway through the show that I even realized it. This creates an amusing temporal distortion where Randy saw things live, Josh saw them on a three-second delay, and I saw them on an eight second delay. But our conversation is concurrent. This can be disorienting if you think about it too much.
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 haven’t actually played the game, so I’m making fun of it by reputation and based on the footage I’ve seen. I hope you’ll allow me this indiscretion. The games I played this weekend (Bob came in Pieces, and Majesty 2) did not present me with any obvious opportunities for humor.
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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