In this episode, I asked how old Civilization VI is. Eighteen months? Two years? Something like that, right? Nope! I looked it up after the recording and discovered it came out in 2016. That makes no dang sense. Where does the time go Despite what the Steve Miller Band claims, I’m pretty sure it goes into the past.?
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #302: Barely Edited”
After the events on Eden Prime, the original Mass Effect sent its players to the Citadel, which serves as their introduction to the broader world of the setting.
This Citadel section isn’t perfect – in particular, there are pacing problems; Shamus covers them and others here in his retrospective on the series – but it accomplishes several goals:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hypothetical ME4: The Moral of the Story”
It’s been three months since I wrote a post asking people to stop asking me to play Dark Souls. It was fun, silly, and – if I’m being totally honest – pretty cathartic to write. In that post, a few people asked why I don’t like Dark Souls. Not because they were trying to get me to play the game, but because they just wanted to understand where I was coming from. I know I’ve alluded to this in the past, but maybe it would be handy to have the whole story in one post…
The thing is: I don’t dislike Dark Souls. I actually think it’s an amazing creation. My problem is that it’s deeply unhealthy for me to play it. So let me set aside the jokes and hyperbole and the ranting about fanboys and joking about YOU DIED and describe where things fall apart for me.
But before we do that, let me tell you about General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “It’s Not Dark Souls, It’s Me”
So I guess we’re doing these things once a month now, even though the series is called “This week I Played”. That makes no damn sense. Who is running this ridiculous website?
On a more positive note, these posts now have a proper category so they aren’t clogging up the category I use for general announcements. So if you wanted to archive binge though these thingsFor some unimaginable reason., you can do that now.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Week I Played… (May 2020)”
This week we end the show on a slightly controversial subject: Raising kids and how to manage their relationship to games / screens. Neither of us had any idea what the other was going to say before we began the discussion. And YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!
Or I guess you probably will. You folks know us pretty well by now.
Link (YouTube) |
My bot is nowWell, not RIGHT now. This series was written after the bot was completed. downloading pages from Metacritic, one at a time, at the rate of a page every couple of seconds. This would be painfully slow if we were trying to read something large-scale, but right now we’re just scraping for PC games that scored above 30 over the last 19 years. That’s well under 1,000 games.
Of course, downloading these pages isn’t useful unless I can pull information out of them. Much earlier in this series I mentioned I’m using the Html Agility pack. This library can parse HTML for me and return the bits I’m interested in.
One of the funny things about this project is that I’m so far out of my comfort zone / area of expertise that I don’t even know what I don’t know. Not only am I likely making lots of hilarious blunders, but I don’t even know that I’m making them.
This is strangely liberating. When I know what I’m doing, then every cut corner makes me feel vaguely guilty. But when you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re free of the obligations to do things the Right Way(tm) because you don’t know what the right way is! As far as I know, I’ve just written the best web scraper in the history of scrapingDespite the lack of proof, I’m fairly confident that I have not actually written the best web scraper in the history of scraping..
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Scraping Part 4: THE FINAL CHAPTER”
I LOVE Cities Skylines. I know it seems like I spend more time complaining about games than I spend enjoying them – and that’s probably true in a lot of cases – but Cities Skylines is one of those games that gets more interesting every time I come back to it.
For the last few weeks I’ve been on a huge Skylines bender. I’m sure you’re familiar with this sort of thing. You start skipping sleep. You stop talking to people. You end up with a game on one monitor and its wiki open on the other. Factorio and Dwarf Fortress players will definitely know what I’m talking about.
It got really bad this time. I’d download a dozen mods and buildings to add to the game, play for a few hours, then slam down some junk food while reading the Skylines subReddit, then watch some YouTube videos about the game, then download more mods and start the whole thing over again.
Link (YouTube) |
I’m mostly recovered at this point. I think. My rehab counselor said I’m making good progress and I’m allowed supervised access to a computer now. My family is adjusting to having me interact with them again. So I’ve decided to pretend like I was actually working this whole time by making a video about the city-building genre and why I love Skylines so much.
In my work, I’m usually whining about how much better things were in the Good Old Days of gaming, but not this time. This is it. Cities Skylines is the zenith of the city-building genre. City simulation has never been this good. In fact, thanks to DLC and mods, this game is better now than it was when it came out in 2015. And it was already a great game back then.
This isn’t a simple clone of the classic city-building games with a new graphical paint job, this is a deeper and more interesting simulation. I tried going back to old Sim City classics after playing Skylines, and the older games felt shallow and repetitive in comparison.
I want to tell you why I think this game is so good, but before I do that we need to go on…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Please Help I Can’t Stop Playing Cities: Skylines”
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
T w e n t y S i d e d
