The story of our time-manipulating prince has now been extended via a sequel. In a perfect world I would have made this a three-parter, but it worked best as two strips. Director’s commentary (punchline spoilers) follow:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Stolen Pixels #35:
Total Rewind 2″
We rejoin trucker Travis Grady as he continues his journey to transcend stupidity itself. Last time he was wandering around the sanitarium, bashing monsters and developing his repertoire of dumb looks. Let’s see how it goes…
There are two new monsters to face here, and the differences between them are instructive:
The first is a remnant. It looks like a not-particularly-comfortable restraining device. It seems to float through the air as if the wearer was invisible, but when you sweep the flashlight beam over it the thing casts a humanoid shadow on the wall and you can see its crazed movements and flailing limbs. Naturally the closer you get the larger the projected shadow will appear. And naturally this will freak you the hell out if you’re not ready for it.
The other monster is the carrion, a big lumpy… monster thing. Online guides say it looks like roadkill, but given how you need to fight the sucker at a distance and your flashlight beam has the coverage of a dinner plate, I’ve never actually gotten a good look at it. But this seems to be an exception to the rule that obscuring the monster makes it more frightening. I’ve never been all that scared of it. It just looks like a big lump to me. A big, mean lump with a cheap-ass lunge attack that can knock off half your health before you can say, “When was the last time I saved, anyway?”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Silent Hill Origins Part 4: Dang Kids”
(Sorry about the post title.)
XKCD had wisdom for us a few weeks ago, and I’ve been remiss in not linking it:
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-Hunter S. Thompson
I don’t know what I was thinking last week. I somehow imagined I’d be able to cram all of my survival horror / Halloween content into a single week? The Silent Hill: Origins series alone turned out to be six posts long, which wouldn’t fit in a single week even if I skipped the Wednesday GM Advice and even if that business with EA and DRM hadn’t come up. And this doesn’t even take into account all the other survival horror stuff I wanted to post about.
Some of this is my own fault for going overboard with the Origins series. Really, I could have posted my final thoughts, a couple of funny screenshots, and called it a day. But lack of restraint in writing about a game in which its chief flaw is lack of restraint seems fitting.
We have a quote around here (which I’m pretty sure is lifted from MST3K) that is appropriate for the writing this week:
From the people who brought you that last stuff, it’s… more of the same!
This is the original video of the song “Smile” by Lily Allen . It reveals a story of a girl who was dumped by an unfaithful boyfriend and who then takes revenge on him through proxies so that he doesn’t realize that she’s the one behind his various miseries. Seeing him get his comeuppance is what makes her “smile”.
And this is a video of the same, using Sims 2:
Link (YouTube) |
What’s interesting to me is that vocals are convincingly delivered in “Simlish”, that goofy pseudo-language spoken by Sims. I’ve never been a fan of it. It’s always sounded like an English speaker trying to speak another language, which makes it sound too much like baby talk. It has all the sounds and rhythms of English. There are better techniques for imitating language.
But in any case, Lily Allen recorded the version linked above, singing her own song in that nonsense-speak. It was done as a promotion for one of The Sims 2 expansion packs, and someone actually used Sims 2 to make the video. My hat is off to whoever got that job. As someone who mucked about with Sims 2 taking screenshots and videos, I can attest to the fact that this must have taken bloody ages.
A follow-up to the earlier post about EA taking away your toys if you don’t play nice, they have issued a clarification.
They’ve basically admitted that they have unparalleled power to take from their customers with impunity but… they have no immediate plans to do so. This does not comfort me the way they seem to think it should. The point remains that they reserve the right and the power to take from you, without issuing a refund. That power is inherent in online activation, which is one reason why I’ve opposed it from the start.
Still, this might be good news for some of you who who saw this as the last straw. I still wouldn’t trust these guys with my money. I mean, they don’t trust me with their software, and this is a two-way street. But if you were willing to do business with them before, then don’t let the previous post change your stance. They’ve backed off from that.
So… Happy Halloween, I guess.
(And this just killed an upcoming Stolen Pixels. Dangit. Just when I count on them to be evil. Maybe I’ll post it here or something.)
Susan Arendt, my editor at The Escapist, has authored Phantom of the Arcade. It’s an old-school text adventure for their Halloween event, and it was written using Inform.
The creators of Inform call it, “A Design System for Interactive Fiction Based on Natural Language”. I wrote about it two years ago after giving it a try, and I pegged it for what it is: A programming language. At the time I said that trying to pretend that Inform wasn’t a programming language was misleading and likely to lead to frustration, and I also said that it can’t work. I have been proven both right and wrong. I asked Susan about her experience using Inform and she had this to say: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Phantom of the Arcade”
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
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T w e n t y S i d e d
