Here we are at the endgame. All of my previous nitpicks were just objections over consistency or demands for more solid justification. It could all be patched in a sequel. But here are the gripes that caused me to write this series in the first place. This is where the story fell apart for me, which is a bad thing to have happen during the climax.
I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that this will be spoilers, so I shouldn’t need to warn you about that.
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.
It’s amazing work. It’s a great collection of Sagan quotes and observations, and it stands on its own as a piece of music.
And because they didn’t work it into the song:
Billions and billions.
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.
Where most people have the little Angel on one shoulder and a Devil on the other, each arguing over what they should do next, I seem to have an optimist and a cynic.
The optimist loves games, loves gamers, loves talking about games, loves stories, and looks forward to seeing where this brave new media goes over the coming years. The cynic hates DRM, is appalled at how much games have homogenized, and most of all is sick to death of lousy, lazy, incomprehensible, self-indulgent stories.
The optimist wrote this week’s Experienced Points article.
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.
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.
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.
A reminder: The goal of this series isn’t to make a comedy laugh riot. We’re not really trying to be MST3k. It’s all unrehearsed, which means sometimes we’ll get things wrong, make mistakes, or fail to say enlightening things. You should view this more as being on the couch with us while we play, and not see it as an extended version of Unskippable.
I liked it better when you couldn’t hear me and everyone assumed I was saying these brilliant, incisive things. Now Josh has fixed my audio levels and you can enjoy witty observations about how red the terrain is. Clever material, that. Stayed up all night writing it.
We debated a lot on whether or not we should include the full Mako sections of the game. I was in favor of cutting the game to remove lengthy sections of driving and / or combat, and distilling the experience down to the story and some representative fights. I was worried the non-story bits would just be twenty minutes of dead air, mumbling, and throat clearing. That turned out to not be a problem, and now I can see there is a certain need to give the viewer the whole game without editing. It’s actually a good rule of thumb: If we can’t fill the time with commentary then we probably shouldn’t be covering the game to begin with. (Which is why we’ve dismissed Borderlands. Too much combat that looks more or less the same from the viewer’s perspective. We’d run out of stuff to say before we left the tutorial.)
But the inclusive approach does lead to episodes like this one, where basically nothing happens.
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.
Last week we were left on the brink,
of an invasion of brigands, I think.
What happens next?
Go read the text!
You can do that by clicking this link.
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.
T w e n t y S i d e d
