Tonight! Josh will be playing Civilization 6, and the rest of us will help him through relentless distraction, questions, second-guessing, and criticism. When the show goes live you can see it at https://www.twitch.tv/spoilerwarningshow
LATER:
Well, that was fun. Josh had a rough start, hanicapped himself for purposes of fanservice, and then managed to conquer Rome just before the stream ended. Thanks for watching everyone.
Link (YouTube) |
Confession time: when I originally played this game, the final cutscene worked a little differently. (Or maybe it bugged out?) I stood by Shaun’s bedside, watched him die, and dinged a level right there without it cutting away for the final cutscene. It was a hilariously dissonant moment. I was hoping that would happen here. Actually, I was secretly hoping that that would happen, and Idiot SavantDur-huh ha HA! would proc, which seemed to be a fitting way to say goodbye to this questline.
But it worked more or less as intended, so that didn’t happen. This is far better than the way I experienced the ending, and if Bethesda fixed it then I’m grateful, even if it meant I had one less thing to laugh at. It all balanced out anyway, since we got the fog that obscured the big set-piece explosion at the end.
Mumbles said at the end that she wanted to play Fallout 4. I felt the same way. In fact, last night I re-installed my favorite Fallout 4 mods and started a new playthrough. I really did have fun with this game. It has some wonderful environments, the base-building is great, the combat is fun in certain situations, and I loved modding weapons. The companions range from forgettable to excellent, and there are a couple of quests that really work. But the main story is such a disaster that its failings infect the rest of the experience.
Earlier in the week Josh pointed me to this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 4 EP51: Fog of War Never Changes”
Link (YouTube) |
Father says we have to kill the Railroad because “they have shown no regard for human life”. This, coming from the faction that’s been playing robo-bodysnatchers with settlements, dumping squads of killbots into the wasteland, and employed a remorseless amoral killer for the better part of a century. It’s said by a guy who turned his own pre-war father loose in a desperate violent wasteland with no expectation that he would survive. The guy who left his own father to die just so he could what would happen is pissed at the Railroad for having insufficient respect for human life.
The worst part is, I can’t even tell if this is deliberate on the part of the writers, because our character isn’t allowed to notice these things. Did the person who wrote this not know about how the Institute was behaving in the context of the larger story? Are we supposed to recognize this as hypocrisy? Or is our character expected to be ignorant of these things? I… I have no idea.
This series ends tomorrow. Also don’t forget that we’re doing a stream tomorrow.
Earlier in the week I ran a poll to see what kind of content people enjoyed / were looking forFrom me. I didn’t put Rutskarn into the poll, because I know better than to rate my work against his Battlespire series, which is basically a work of real-world heroism. here on the blog. Although, the real, actual purpose of the post was to mess around with polling data. In the process, I found yet another polling platform that didn’t work. Strawpoll seemed pretty functional, at the cost of being unforgivably ugly and oversized.
In the end I went with Google Forms. That worked really well. Google even automatically attaches the poll to a spreadsheet of results, which updates in realtime. Some people pointed out that it’s trivial to vote again and again. That’s easy to fix, although it would mean you’d need a Google account to participate. I wonder what percentage of people have Google accounts? I suppose if I wanted to find out I could run a poll and make sure you couldn’t vote more than once, but… oh.
So anyway. The results…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “More Content: Poll Results”
Lady Yunalesca breaks the bad news to Yuna by explaining that she needs to choose one of her friends to die with her. She tries to soften the blow by explaining that death is the final release from pain. We know that’s nonsense in this world, but more importantly this isn’t the first time we’ve heard someone talking about ending pain through death. I think Yunalesca’s creepy speech is the last puzzle-piece needed to explain Seymour, because he stood in this same spot and got the same sales pitch.
Sure, Seymour is a crazy, creepy, goofy-haired, omnicidal cult leader, but we can actually see how he got this way.
His father was a Guado who married a human, hoping to bring the two races together. This didn’t seem to work very well. Even among his own people, Seymour was an outcast. Then mom – who the story hinted was dying – pushed Seymour through summoner training.
Summoners are trained that it’s their job to ease the suffering of Spira. It’s a job for people bursting at the seams with empathy and compassion. It’s a terrible job for traumatized, isolated pre-teens with identity issues and animosity towards the world. Mom dragged little Seymour to Zanarkand so the two of them could kill themselves for the good of the world that had rejected Seymour.
The only person Seymour cared about was his mother, and she was turned into a Fayth so that he could summon her and defeat Sin. Remember the disturbing thing Seymour summoned back in part 6?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Final Fantasy X Part 18: Breaking the Cycle”
Link (YouTube) |
And so we complete the reactor, thus solving a problem with no build-up to fulfill a need that’s never depicted. Then we take control of the Institute, an organization over which we have no power. Then we’re sent to destroy the other factions, for no good reason. Someone worked very hard to make sure the upcoming explosions and chaos would be as un-engaging and underwhelming as possible.
So this could probably be better, is what I’m saying.
Nick is still cool though.
After the Siege of Rube Goldberg, I find myself standing in a courtyard so massive I can’t hold more than a quarter of it in my view distance. My first order of business is to establish a precise and accurate survey of the area’s operative features, which is as follows:
The good news is that the lizards can be apprised of the situation RE: I’ve killed a big bad hunt man with my rad sick spell spear, and will in consequence devote their resources to killing the other eighteen thousand enemies in the room. An epic battle ensues, two factions flailing and roaring like starving lions; if only they could free themselves from the level geometry, I imagine we’d see some real bloodshed.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts vs. Battlespire CH31: Count Schlockula”
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
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.
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
T w e n t y S i d e d
