T w e n t y S i d e d
Dear internet:
Please provide something random and amusing.
Link (YouTube) |
Thank you. That will do.
For the fans
A funny thing happened on my way to the internet this morning. And by “funny” I mean, “cruel turn which has inflicted frustration, financial loss, and the inability to continue playing Left 4 Dead”.
A fan in my computer has been struggling lately. I could hear it in there, spinning up and down at regular intervals, wailing like an air raid siren. After making sure the Luftwaffe wasn’t overhead, I went back to playing Left 4 Dead with the nagging realization that the fan noise was something that Should Be Looked Into. But not right now. I mean, soon. Eventually.
Sometimes the wailing would stop, which meant that either the fan had resumed normal operation, or it had stopped moving entirely. It is amazing how quickly I can turn into an optimist when pessimism is a hassle.
A failing fan means something is most likely going to overheat and die. It might be the power supply (whatever) the graphics card (ouch) or the CPU (noooooooooooooo!).
This morning I discovered that one should never set aside one’s pessimism. My PC is now a box of dead electronics. Swapping in a good power supply doesn’t fix it, or even provoke a murmur. It’s deceased. It has passed on. It is an ex-computer.
So a new PC is now on order. (I’m currently using a ten year old machine, which has been imbued with Ubuntu. I can’t believe how well it works, given its age. ) This is all a shame. The dead PC is the first computer I’ve ever owned that still felt perfectly usable after a couple of years. I had no particular need to upgrade until the thing went and bricked itself.
It took a while to find a machine that had the right features (memoryhertz and gigadrives and whatnots) without any of the wrong ones. (Windows Vista.) The machine I found is a “Vista machine with an XP configuration”. Which apparently means it comes with XP pre-installed, along with a complementary Vista-brand coaster.
Which is nice.
Francis Hates Left 4 Dead
Link (YouTube) |
Francis is one of the 4 selectable characters in the game. He’s a 6’5 (very tall, for you metric thinkers) biker with tattoos and a vest. His thing is that he goes around saying how much he hates the various environs you’re obliged to explore in the game. Francis hates everything. While in the single-player game, I got in the habit of always playing as Francis because he blended in with the horde, color-wise. Bill, Louis, and Zoe are much brighter and more colorful, and so I’m less likely to shoot them.
Although this strategy works against me online. Now I’m playing as mister-oh-look-a-zombie-oops-no-it’s-Francis-again.
I love Francis. And vests.
Left 4 Dead – Group Play
Thanks to those who have joined the Twenty Sided Steam group. I hope everyone has found a few good playmates. Thanks in particular to Randy Johnson, Mad Flavius, and the other players who have been nice enough to join me in Left 4 Dead despite my tendency to scarf up all the pipe bombs, cower in the center of the group, and spray teammates with panic fire. (I’ve been playing with the AI teammates for a week, and have come to think of them as expendable resources. This habit is difficult to break, even after repeated gentle reminders from my teammates that my bullets are of no benefit to them.)
The transformation was abrupt. On Monday I was having a fine time with the single-player game. On Tuesday and Wednesday I played online. By Thursday I was ruined for single-player and wanted nothing more to do with it.
Although, I really wish the game allowed you to practice playing as undead in single-player before going on-line. I was useless in my first few rounds of versus because I was completely inept. How far is my attach range? How far can I jump? How much damage can I take? There’s a recharge on this power? It really is unfair to other players to have to drag newbies through those first few painful steps. You can’t practice strategy against the oblivious AI, but you should be able to develop a basic competency with the controls before you’re thrust into the game with people.
I haven’t had this much fun online since my UT99 days. It really is all about who you play with.
Experienced Points: The Price of Fun
Not content with telling developers how to do their jobs, I’m now second-guessing the publishers. Go read the whole thing to see what I’m talking about.
After I wrote the article I realized a couple of points that were likely to attract objections:
1) Digital downloads have actually been following the model I suggest in the article for a while now. Games of yesteryear – even just one or two years old – can be found dirt cheap. It’s retail prices that resist falling, and I think most of the dysfunction is found there. That’s also where most of the sales are.
2) I know the retail market is more complex than I make it out to be, particularly with places like EB Games where it’s in their best interests to keep prices on new games as high as possible. EB Games might simply keep the price high, even if (say) Activision lowered the MSRP. (It is a suggested retail price, after all.) However, I think outfits like Wal-Mart and Target – places where they don’t trade games – would likely lower the prices. This might possibly result in a rewarding scenario where gamers buy new at Target and unload used at EB Games, which could have all sorts of hilariously bad effects on EB Games.
3) I know this is mostly guesswork outside of my assigned area of game design. If I really botched my analysis, I’m sure people will… let me know. At any rate, I’d at least like to see them experiment with prices a bit, instead of trying to come up with tricks to impede second-hand sales. Gamers are not the villains in the second-hand games market, but predictably they are the first target of the publishers.
4) That last line was a good one. I should have put it in the article.
Stolen Pixels #74: The Business Plan
Here is my final comic on Saints Row.
This game, being a roaring cauldron of mayhem and nonsense, left me little room for parody. This is a shame, since the game includes a wonderful system that lets you re-watch any cutscene or re-play any mission, any time you like. This is in contrast to games like Mass Effect, where I’d make new saves regularly as I progressed through the thing, but still found myself an hour away from the required plot point whenever I thought of a joke. I wish I could have put the Saints Row replay feature to more use, but making fun of a game that refuses to take itself seriously is uphill work. I’ve done what I can with the raw materials at hand. Hopefully the droplets of humor I was able to wring from this stone were rewarding enough to justify the time spent clicking on the link.
Because if not, I will be obliged to shoot you in the face and blow up a few city blocks.
See? It’s hard to know where to go for a joke after a setup like that.
4% of You Are Evil
I finally broke down and went into the webstats program. It lists how many times each and every file on my website is requested. Took something like fifteen minutes for it to finish loading all the data and display it on one massive, memory-devouring page. (There was a ton of usage data I didn’t care about mixed in there.) Firefox whined and complained and staggered under the burden, and it took me a while to sort through the mess and find the three files I actually cared about. I wanted to see how much the style.css file was used for each of the site themes. The result:
/TSEvil/style.css: 98,980
/TSGood/style.css: 1,948,447
/TSNeutral/style.css: 132,447
(I think these are requests for the month of February, although I don’t remember and I’m not loading that page again without a gun to my head.)
If I didn’t botch my calculator wrangling, this means that the usage of site themes breaks down like this:
4% Evil
89% Good
6% Neutral
Now, good is the default, and I’m sure a great majority of visitors don’t even notice that they can re-skin the site like that. (If you’re one of those people and you prefer to read white-on-black: check the sidebar.)
I’ve been wondering about this for ages. The theme switcher isn’t used nearly as frequently as the comments might suggest. Still, now we know.
From The Archives:
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
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.
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
What is Piracy?
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
The Mistakes DOOM Didn't Make
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
This is Why We Can’t Have Short Criticism
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
The Biggest Game Ever
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.