This week my site has been nothing but links to other sites. This place is rapidly deteriorating into a Shamus-branded version of FARK.
Anyway, the conclusion to the Rorschach saga is now available for viewing.
Come back later in the day, when I’ll post another link to the Escapist, but this time for my weekly column.
I swear I’ll put some content on this site soon. Really.
Sorry. I know most of the posts this week have been “Hey, go to another site for something I made!” I really did write a slate of posts this week, but… the dog ate them. No. Actually, I had posts written this week but then got wrapped in the the deluge of feedback from Quaking of WarCrysis 3, which was a lot larger than I anticipated. We’ll get things back on track around here Real Soon Now.
In the meantime, my new MMO series has begun!
I recently appeared on the Big Freaking Podcast to talk with hosts Shamrock and Ivan about old game franchises that deserve new life. It was a fun conversation, and we went pretty far back to find some long-long treasures.
We were talking about space sim games at one point, and I said I couldn’t think of any that had come out since Battlecruiser 3000AD. And then later I remembered Freelancer, which everyone insists on putting in the same genre. But I have a hard time seeing that. In my own view, Freelancer is to Elite as Fable is to Fallout. It gets shoehorned into the same category, and it can still be fun, but it trades looks and production values for a game which is smaller, shallower, and more linear.
You can read about Starflight on Wikipedia or this fansite. It’s a game from 1986. I was 17 when I played it, although it came out when I was 15. In my memories I have this idealized, perfect experience, and if that’s simply nostalgic whitewash then I really rather not know the truth.
Thanks to the Big Freaks for having me on. It was a fun discussion. You might want to give it a listen if you’re into the whole podcast thing.
If you’re not running a joke into the ground, you’re doing it wrong. The Rorschach series continues here.
This is the first comic where you can see the audience. I do not think I want to use that camera angle very often, because populating the stands was pure tedium. I only did the first few rows of one section (probably had twenty people in all) and it was already a bit hard on my framerate. I’m not even sure it would be possible to fill all the seats. I think somewhere around the halfway point my computer would give up.
Some months ago I started noodling around with Inform, a “natural language” programming language for making interactive fiction. (That’s text adventures to you old timers.) My impressions of the language have gone through the following stages:
1) Bullcrap. You can’t code without writing code.
2) Hmph. Okay, so it works. Kind of an interesting novelty.
3) You know, it’s actually kind of useful and unique.
4) Unbelievable. This thing is amazingly powerful!
As a programmer, learning to code with prose is like a mathematician learning to do math with his feelings. I think I would have found it easier if I hadn’t known how to program in the first place. But even so, the complexity and functionality you can compress into a few simple sentences is boggling.
I managed to make a game with it. I’ve been sitting on this for a while, trying to get up the enthusiasm to finish the thing while at the same time worrying that I’ve wasted all the time I’ve already spent. I’ve never written puzzles before. Heck, I’ve never written interactive fiction before. Is this any good? Is it too hard? Too easy? Are there spots where the game just stops being fun?
And then I realized the best way to answer these questions is to let other people play it and ask them what they think. Genius, I know.
Below is the game. It needs some Javascript applet dealie to run. If it doesn’t work in your browser or you don’t trust it, then I can’t really do much to help. The thing is also stone-age simple. You can’t even use the up arrow to recall previous commands. Sorry. I’d fix that if I could. That’s all handled by the applet, and is out of my hands. If anyone has a better web-based Z Machine interpreter I’d be happy to use it. If you have your own Z machine interpreter, you can get the .z8 file and run it yourself.)
I want to stress that the game isn’t done. It ends at about the 90% complete mark. The game needs a good day or so of work on my part to finish it up, and what I do with it from here will depend a lot on the feedback I get. If you want to play something polished, then it’s probably best to hold off for now.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Quaking of WarCrysis 3:
Resistance of Black Doom”
Back in March of 2009 I took a look at OnLive and said that while it was a great notion, the technology was most likely infeasible, impractical, or only useful to a very narrow audience.
Now here is a talk from Steve Perlman at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, making the case that the idea works:
Link (YouTube) |
As an early critic, I have to make the following observations:
1) While the name Steve Perlman is new to me, I think it’s safe to say that he’s not a snake oil salesman.
2) If he was a snake oil salesman, he’d be giving these talks to investors and staying clear of roomfuls of engineers.
3) He points strike me as fairly persuasive.
Some of the points are still a bit hazy for me, but I am open – and perhaps even eager – to believe that I was wrong and that this is a thing that could be done in our universe.
I’m very curious about how the licensing would work. Initially it sounded like you would just purchase the rights to play a particular game. In this talk it seems more like a GameTap or Netflix type service, where you can just pay a flat fee and eat all the games you like, buffet style. I’d still rather treat games as books, but treating them like cable TV would be preferable to how it works now, where publishers try to sell you the rights to be hassled by a game until they get sick of your whining and shut down the authentication servers.
I still have a lot of objections, questions, and misgivings, but I’m no longer inclined to denounce it as crazy talk. However this plays out, it looks like smart people have an idea they think will work, and it sounds like it would be a welcome refuge for PC gamers.
Whether it ultimately works or not, I’m really curious how it will play out. I’m going to be following this one eagerly.
My tirade against terrible writing in games. Probably should have made this a multi-part series. I’ll ask the same question here that I asked over there:
What game has such horrible writing that it angers you with its stupidity?
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
T w e n t y S i d e d
