First I did a Dr. Suess-style rhyme from Overlord. Then I made another for Overlord II. Then I wrote what was probably the first videogame-based villanelle.
Yahtzee raises the bar yet again with a chained attack of limericks:
The Escapist is clearly the premiere site for videogame-based poetry.
My current queue of games:
1) Reviewing: The Path. I have two more posts left to round out the list of girls. I might have one more wrap-up post after that.
2) Reviewing: FUEL. I’m pretty much done with the game, but it has brought a lot to mind on procedural content, how it’s done, and where it can go from here. I’m looking at FUEL the way some might look at the original Doom: Regardless of what you think of the game, this is an important piece of technology. I also have a few comments on racing games in general.
3) Playing: Still playing Team Fortress 2 in fits and starts. I think the new king of the hill kind of watered down the game for me. I can’t point to any specific fault in it. The only thing wrong with KotH is that it isn’t Payload. It’s not that I dislike the other game modes, it’s just that I like Payload so much better. I thought I’d eventually get tired of Payload and want to explore the other modes, but after more than 100 hours of TF2 I still feel a pang of disappointment when a non-payload map pops up.
4) Ahem: Champions Online. Thanks so much to everyone who offered their thoughts in the earlier thread. Clearly the consensus is that the game needs another month to bloom if I want to get the most out of it. So, I signed up last night. Yes, I solicited your advice, and then disregarded it. Wisdom check fail. First thing I did was attempt to re-create Detective Grimm. I was not impressed. No matter what I did, he always looked like a young guy with a fake beard. Sunlight shines through the main part of his hat, but not the brim, casting a shadow that ends up looking like tribal facepaint or something. Boo. Man, it’s almost as if I should have waited a bit before signing up…
5) Playing: Left 4 Dead. I added a could of bonus campaigns to the server, and have been enjoying them on occasion. Soon the new campaign will be out, which will most likely increase the time I spend with the game.
6) Watching: Borderlands looks very, very interesting. Also looking forward to Left 4 Dead 2.
7) Played: Evil Genius: I played the everlovin’ crap out of this last weekend, and pretty much finished it. It’s old and considered a classic, but it was new to me. I might do a single post on it if I have anything interesting to say.
8) Shelved: Velvet Assassin: A shame, really. The game isn’t horrible, it’s just pervasively bland and peppered with poor gameplay decisions. This is another game that could have been much, much better with a few basic changes. For the same investment of time and money, they could have made a much better game.
Open thread: What are you playing these days?
Very much fun to set this one up.
I was actually going to name the band “The Stunsticks”, since some late-night bands have their own name. But then I realized that if they were named that, their logo should be on their gear someplace. So they got the generic name. That actually makes more sense, given the nature of the band members.
John Funk reviews Champions Online. I’d been warned that the team who made Champs was the team who originally worked on City of Heroes, and that CoH wasn’t awesome until those people left. I also have not been inundated with people telling me, “Shamus, you have to play this game!”, which I would have expected if it was any good. On the other hand, John Funk seems to like it without loving it, and I value his opinion pretty highly:
On the other other hand, it looks pretty dang fun. On the other other other hand, none of my usual gaming buddies are playing, and after having such a good time in Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead with net friends and the guys from my gaming group, I’m sort of off the idea of playing with strangers. On the other4 hand, maybe the game is just too new and more sensible gamers are waiting until the first-month shakedown period is over. I’m sure more than a few are staying away until they’re sure Champions isn’t going to be another Tabula Rasa.
It’s been a while since an MMO appeared that captured my interest. I’m not going to care about another one until Old Republic comes out, and that one doesn’t even have a release date yet.
Any comments from those who have played? How does it hold up against CoH? What’s the community like? How is solo play?
Man, I really want to muck about with the character creator.
In my earlier post on art games, Juni asked, “Shamus… you don't have System Shock on your list?”
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| I’m looking at the settings and I can’t find the option to enable trifiltering bump maps. |
My entire perception of the System Shock series is pretty warped, and I get the impression it didn’t resonate with other people the way it did for me. Thief and Deus Ex are worthy titles, but they pale in comparison to System Shock 2. But judging by comments people leave here (and the fact that Thief and Deus Ex live on) I’d guess that this relationship is inverted for most people.
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| In 1994, these sloped surfaces BLEW MY MIND. |
The original System Shock has not aged well at all. The interface is grotesque by modern standards, and its eccentricities really detract from the experience. The story appealed to me on some deep personal level, but was it really all that great? Rogue AI gets loose, kills everyone. Lone survivor must fight the evil AI. It was certainly the right story at the right time. It constructed so as to not need dialog trees, or in-game cutscenes, or any of the other things games did poorly (if at all) in 1994. But the story itself isn’t exactly radical. I’ve begun to suspect that the best parts of the plot were the bits I was filling in myself as I played.
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| The ending cutscene / montage of the original game. This is your reward for 60 hours of death and struggle. Savor it. |
The franchise is in perpetual legal limbo, and given the success of BioShock I don’t see why anyone would go to the expense and trouble of rounding up the rights to the thing and bringing it back. And even if someone did, the story would suffer even more as Shodan becomes the Jason Voorhees of software bugs. Plot contrivances would make her unstoppable in the most dull and predictable way: Sequel fiat.
If the game did somehow emerge from the abyss, I’d hope for several things:
1) Keep the depth of System Shock 2. Resident Evil 4 proved you could have decent space-driven inventory management on a console. People even liked it. Stop assuming console gamers are drooling morons. They’re pretty much like PC gamers, except they have less buttons. Keep the leveling, the looting, the researching of items.
2) Reboot the story. Don’t cheapen the tale by gluing another extension onto System Shock 2.
3) Show Citadel station pre-disaster. Much like the start of Half-Life 2, let the player wander around and get to know the world and the controls before the shooting starts. Make Hacker silent like Gordon Freeman, so that the player is free to fill in their character as they see fit. The original story calls for Hacker to be a prisoner at this point, so going where you’re told and not speaking are perfectly appropriate. During this time have the player meet five or six key characters, and get a glimpse of a few others. That way the messages they find will have meaning. It will be more shocking to see the station ruined if they have seen it whole.
4) Big. Non-linear. Or don’t bother.
I know it seems like I’m incapable of shutting up about this game. I am afraid this is probably true. Really, I’d still be playing System Shock 2 right now if I could get the sucker to run.
Still, if you played the Great Three: Is System Shock the runt of the litter? Which one do you favor?
Scarlet is the oldest of the girls. Her bio from the website:
Not that Scarlet doesn’t wish to share the burden. Or a moment of silence. A moment of quiet understanding with a soulmate. A moment of true togetherness. Her loneliness is a secret she will take to the grave. Sooner than she may expect.
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| You can’t? What’s the alternative? |
Scarlet is serious, neat, and tight-laced. Most of her interactions and comments on the world around her reflect a need for order. Her personality seems very likely to clash with Ginger and Carmen. But she also has a lot of unfulfilled needs. She’s lonely (probably for a man) burdened, overworked, and under-appreciated.
Scarlet is a personality I’ve met before and I’ve always found her impact on the people around her to be really interesting. Imagine everyone has a couple of Sims-style sliders: One is their desire for order, and the other is their initiative and ability to do work without external prompting. A Scarlet has both of those sliders near the top. Her need for neatness and organization forms an interesting pattern of behavior. (If you’re down with the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, a Scarlet is a massive SJ.) In college, she’s the roommate who keeps doing the dishes and cleaning every day when everyone else can’t be bothered. But she’ll naturally start to resent how everyone else will leave their messes for her to clean up. But the sloppier roommates might not be actually taking advantage of her. They just don’t have the same standards of cleanliness. They can go to bed at the end of the day with dirty dishes in the sink and they don’t think about doing the dishes until they start to run out. But a Scarlet can’t bear to leave something like this go. She does the dishes, and then grumbles to herself that they ALWAYS leave her to do the dishes. She feels used and unappreciated, and becomes prickly with her roommates. She thinks they’re lazy jerks. They think she’s a rude bitch.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Path: Scarlet”
I’m upgrading to the new version of WordPress, which invariably means a new version will come out in about two days.
Things may be a little wonky until I get everything sorted out. Please bear with me.
UPDATE: And done. That sucked in several interesting ways. The “automatic upgrade” worked as well as it always does, which means I had to do it manually. There were files for which I could not change permissions, and could not overwrite despite having permissions to do so. I could have blown away the entire tree structure and re-uploaded clean, but my images directory is (hang on let me look) 80MB. My upstream bandwidth is such that it would take a good 20 mins just for that one directory, at least. Eventually I had to re-name some directories, then delete them, then upload new ones. Hopefully I didn’t miss anything.
Now I’ve got to upgrade a bunch of plugins. Your continued patience is appreciated.
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
T w e n t y S i d e d
