T w e n t y S i d e d
This is an interesting music video.
Link (YouTube) |
I can’t believe how many dice are used for these images. Why, there’s probably very nearly enough for a round of Battletech.
I kid. I’m sure it was all CGI. Still, it appealed to my dice fetish.
Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy
This is a brilliant article. It talks about Nintendo’s success, and why other companies fail when they try to do what Nintendo does. It talks about the current wrong-headed approach to “casual” games, and in doing so it hits many of the same notes as Reset Button.
It’s very long and detailed, but makes for enjoyable reading if you’re into armchair game design like I am. Sean Malstrom argues, as I did, that gaming is getting too insular and hard for newcomers to break into. Malstrom seems to argue – among other things – that we need more entry level titles. (My words, not his.) I’d prefer to see more titles simply offer an easy / casual / accessible mode in perhaps like I suggested with Prince of Persia. Games are already heavily balkanized by platform and genre, and I don’t know that I’d want to see them fragment even further for all the possible skill levels. A videogame world is a world where anything is possible. Making less things possible – by not offering enough challenge or (more commonly) omitting easy mode – simply shrinks the market available to you.
Stolen Pixels #54: Dead or More Dead 4
This Stolen Pixels is about Dead or Alive 4. Well, it’s more about fighting games in general than about DOA4 itself, but DOA4 is the vehicle.
I do not recommend this game unless you are a hardcore fan of online fighting. I might have a post about it later. The short version is: A large portion of the game is locked away from you at the start, and you need a double helping of skill and a tolerance for blatant CPU cheating if you want to get at any of it. I think I need to find a new franchise to get my Kung-Fu fix.
Mass Effect:
First Impressions
Mass Effect is the worst game BioWare has put out in over a decade.
…but it’s still a great game.
I guess that says a lot about BioWare, that they can slide this far and still have a quality product. The elements that I love in BioWare games are still there, just watered down a bit.
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| Aderson: What about Shepherd? He’s a mildly retarded boy who spends all day staring out the window.
Udina: Is that the kind of person we want protecting the galaxy? Anderson: That’s the only kind of person who can protect the galaxy. |
The premise is that humanity is the new race on the block. We’ve just recently dragged our sapient butts into space and found it was already populated by a half-dozen other races. So much for the final frontier.
One of the crucial locations in the game is the Citadel – a huge space station built by a long-dead alien race. Nobody really knows how the Citadel works, but it’s huge and powerful and the perfect place for the galactic oligarchy council to make their home. The council employs the Specters – a small group of covert specialists who are beholden to nobody but the council. Think of them like CIA spies with diplomatic immunity, working for a small group of aliens who live in an unassailable fortress and who aren’t accountable to anyone. Given this power structure, it’s actually really impressive that the galaxy is only usually torn apart by warfare.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect:
First Impressions”
Roundtable: Books as Games
This month at Man Bytes Blog, the roundtable discussion is:
Putting the Game Before the Book What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first?
I don’t participate in the roundtable as often as I would like, but I think I can make up for it with this one. I have the longest and most detailed response in the history of the roundtable. It’s 155 posts long and took a year to produce.
But my first webcomic – while true to the premise offered – is probably a bit too much to qualify as an “entry” in the roundtable. Let me check the bookshelf and see what else might be good: God Game? Er. That would be sort of meta, making a game about a book about a game. I guess you’d just end up with a game within a game. Or just making the game described in the book. Either way, that’s not very interesting. How about Cryptonomicon? Nah. WWII shooters are too passé. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? Already been done. A Brief History of Time? Er. No. Snow Crash? Yeah. That can work.
I will do better than simply imagine what that book would be like as a game. I will imagine Snow Crash as a game (made with today’s technology and design techniques), and then review it.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Roundtable: Books as Games”
Stolen Pixels #53: Hidden Treasures
On the charge of this installment of Stolen Pixels being childish:
I plead guilty.
Unskippable: Eternal Sonata
I mentioned Unskippable a few weeks ago. The feature officially launched yesterday:
Like MST3K, they do have to work with what they’re given. And I think their hit / miss ratio is about the same as the crew from the Satellite of Love. (I suppose it helps that the one who made the “Archduke Ferdinand” joke (who I’m pretty sure is Graham Stark) sounds like Mike Nelson in both voice and delivery. (And I know I’m risking a flamewar here, but I always liked Mike best. (Not that I’m criticizing Joel, he thought of the series and all, it’s just that Mike makes me laugh more.))) I don’t know if Eternal Sonata itself is any good, but the cutscene here looks insufferable. I would not want to watch it without Stark and Saunders along to ease the pain.
One thing I do wonder is how they plan to feed this thing. It can’t be a weekly feature. I don’t think there are 52 cutscene-heavy games per year. And ideally you want more than that, because you need to pick & choose what you’ll take on in order to exploit only the richest lodes of stupidity and auteur self-indulgence.
From The Archives:
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.
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Deus Ex and The Treachery of Labels
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
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.
The Truth About Piracy
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
Crysis 2
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?