Welcome! Please enjoy this hour and twelve minutes of two guys talking about a series of topics that are often tangentally related to video games. Thank you.
Two things happened last weekCorrection: More than two things happened last week. However, I only care about two of them right now.. First, I published that chart dump of video game data. Second, I got another delivery. Late last night someone threw a brick through my window. Once I finished sweeping up the glass, I noticed it wasn’t actually a brick. It was a MySql database, wrapped in a note that said, “Don Data sends his regards.”
This data is a lot more complete than the last batch. It has information on publishers / developers, which might be useful if I knew what to do with it. But whatever. Let’s make a new version of the charts from last week:
Here I’ve limited the chart to the twenty years from 2000 to 2019, since the data outside of that range is too sparse to use. Also, this chart just shows the range between 60 (worst game ever) and 80 (best game possible).
Last week some people expressed concern that my methodology was off. Specifically, what happens if Shoot Guy 4: Shoot ’em All gets a 100% from one thousand critics, and if the slightly obscure Punch Guy 3: Knuckles of Doom only gets one review of 0%. If those are the only two games that year, then won’t that result in an average of 99.9% for the year?
Short answer: No. Long answer: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Video Game Chart Party 2: Chart Harder”
Like I said in the introduction, this series is going to focus on advice more than straight critique. This is basically an expansion on the How I’d Have Done it sections in my Mass Effect Andromeda series. Also, I’m going to be focusing on a minimalist approach. The goal here isn’t to create a massive story-world full of complex intrigue and fill the game with hours of cutscenes. The goal is to create a story of surgical efficiency where we can create tension, stakes, and emotional investment in the shortest possible time. This is an action shooter, and the fanbase is not going to be filled with people hungry for ambitious worldbuilding and miles of backstory. Statistically, these players are not fans of classic BioWare, and we need to respect their expectations.
Which means these first few entries are going to be rough. The opening scenes of Rage 2 are easily the worst part of the game. As I said in my Escapist column back in May: There are about 3.5 minutes of gameplay in the first 23 minutes of the game. Having bad cutscenes is one thing, but having overlong bad cutscenes is worse and having them at the start of an action title is suicidal. Players are going to start skipping cutscenes, and if they skip the intro then they’ll probably skip everything else and all our expensive animation and voice acting will go to waste.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rage 2 Part 2: Shut Up and Let Me Shoot Stuff”
Bethesda NEVER understood Fallout. Yes, I know this is a really popular franchise and I’m risking furious nerd wrath by criticizing it, but I used up all my positivity in the last video. If you want to hear me love a game you could always go back and watch that one again.
See, the problem with Bethesda’s Fallout is that…
Link (YouTube) |
Hang on. I think we need to do a little refresher on this particular IP. I know a lot of people already know this, but if we don’t cover this now then the discussion will get hopelessly sidetracked. So to avoid confusion, let’s talk about how this crazy franchise got started.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout”
I have a bit of a sore throat so I wasn’t up for doing a Diecast. But as a way of giving your your usual dose of content, I thought I’d share a strange meeting I had the other day on the internet…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Video Game Chart Party”
Right up front, I admit that this is a terrible idea for a series. Judging by the comments, the audience of this blog typically majors in RPGs with a minor in Dark Souls. In terms of audience priorities, action shooters fall somewhere below “2D side-scrolling pixel art indie games” and random complaints about keyboards.
Moreover, this game is fairly new, and my Spider-Man series demonstrated that the audience prefers to read retrospectives about games that are a couple of years old. Even in the wider gaming culture, this game didn’t seem to resonate with people. It vanished shortly after release and nobody had much to say about it.
So why am I doing a retrospective on a poorly-reviewed game that people don’t care about that my audience cares about even less and would be too new to be of interest even if they were interested? I don’t know. I think this must be self-sabotage on my part. The years of imposter syndrome have taken their toll and now I’m trying to get rid of my audience so I can go back to working fast food.
Actually, I’m probably writing about this for the same reason I wrote about all those other games: I just can’t help myself. Rage 2 is filled with really interesting problems that compel me to look closer. I want to discuss these flaws (and complain about them, obviously) and talk about why they matter. In my Spider-Man series, I said the story was mostly good and occasionally brilliant, but with a couple of moments of perplexing awfulness. Rage 2 is the inverse of this. The story is mostly dross, occasionally awful, but with a few brief moments of perplexing excellence. How can a setup like that not make you a little curious about the development process?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rage 2 Part 1: I’m Not Even Angry”
For the last few months, I’ve been doing this dual-production thing where I publish my columns as a YouTube video and as a blog post. That’s sort of like making a game cross-platform by releasing it as a Steam VR title and an MS-DOS text adventure. The two mediums are so different that there are very few assets you can meaningfully reuse.
(Also, if it’s not obvious already: This post is a bunch of navel gazing. This is going to be really boring. I’ve even got graphs and charts later. I’d tell you not to bother reading this, but we both know that’s not how things work around here.)
Stuff that works well in one medium might not have a good equivalent in the other. My beloved footnotesFootnotes like this one, except more funny. don’t have a good analogue in the video world. And of course linking to other sites is trivial in text and obnoxious / impossibleYou can either put the link in the description where absolutely no one will see it, or you can display the URL as text in the video and absolutely no one will bother typing it. in a video. Likewise, video footage can convey a lot of information that would take several paragraphs to convey in text. One example is in my column on in-game economies. In the video version, I cut away to some Final Fantasy X for a humorous conversation that lampshades the economic problem I’m talking about. There was no way to capture that joke in the text version except to explain it, so it got left out.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A Bunch of Stupid Charts”
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
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?
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.
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
T w e n t y S i d e d
