Happy New Year! Reminder: Next week I’ll have SoldierHawk on the show. If you have any questions for her, the show email is in the header image.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #285: Guitar, Rimworld, Saints Row the Third”
Enough time has passed, and the wild and woolly post-Game of Thrones fantasy drama has been spotted loping across the misty moors of Eastern Europe. Or at least Hungary, which is where principal photography started, according to the new Witcher show’s wikipedia page. From there it moved on to the Canary Islands, of all places, before settling down in a castle in Poland to film the finale.
Link (YouTube) |
Yes, Netflix is making a play for all that tits-and-dragons money, and driving pretty strong to the basket too: in the first season of The Witcher, there were two dragons and probably around 20-30 tits (I didn’t keep an exact count). Lest you think it’s not inclusive, there’s also Henry Cavill’s Geralt: throaty, instinctively protective, periodically shirtless, and built like an entire complex of brick shithouses. I’m like 70% sure the guy lifts.
I’m not even really being critical. Servicing the audience’s horniness has always been a reliable commercial winner, and if I were a TV executive, I would certainly be tempted to use it like a safety net here. This show is, if you don’t already know, based off the written works of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski – written works that you shouldn’t even try to adapt unless you’re willing to get weird with it. At the writer’s table, I imagine at least once someone had to say a sentence like “so, are we really going to do the thing where the Princess falls in love with the porcupine guy?” or “are we really going to do the thing with the terrifying incest monster?”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Netflix’s [Toss A Coin To Your] Witcher”
It’s pretty common for critics – movie critics in particular – to end the year with twin best / worst lists. That’s a good way to organize things, but it doesn’t really suit my habits. I’m not obligated to cover particular games by an editor. I pay for the vast majority of my games, and I’m not keen on spending $60 and a week of my life on something I know I’ll hate. Which means I rarely play games that could qualify as “terrible”. So instead of WORST games of 2019 we get “disappointments of 2019”.
I realize that’s not nearly as fun or enticing, but feisty hyperbole isn’t really my style.
Now that your expectations for excitement have been sufficiently lowered, let’s talk about what I didn’t dig…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2019 Part 3: The Disappointments”
It seems some folks are taking an interest in my old adventures. Someone left the following comment over the weekend:
Hey Shamus, sorry for the unrelated comment but I can’t find your twitter anywhere and I’m not sure where else to put this.
I seem to recall in some of your older posts you mentioned that at one point in the late 90s you worked on an MMO called Worlds Online. I recently saw this video here about some creepy things going in that game, which is apparently still online. Just thought you might find it interesting.
The linked video is this one:
Link (YouTube) |
That video looks to be an internet spook story about there being some cult operating within the inexplicably still-operational Worlds.com MMO. I have nothing to say about the cult stuff, and I haven’t even watched the entire video. I skipped through and saw it saying something about pedophiles, which – shit man. That’s scary stuff and I can’t even think about that topic without getting really upset. For reasons of mental health, I can’t watch the video and I’m not going to discuss the topic.
But for the curious, I want to make it clear that I never had anything to do with Worlds.Com. I never used the software, I was never employed by the company, and I only heard about those people through second-hand gossip. I worked for a competing product called Activeworlds. Actually, I worked on AlphaWorld. Actually, I was a cub-contractor. Actually, it’s… complicated.
This is messy, so let’s rewind to the early 90s.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Worlds Dot Com?”
Whenever I make up my end-of-year best / worst lists, I inevitably get people asking why I didn’t review X, Y, or Z. I played less than half of the games that were nominated for industry awards this year, and it’s natural for people to wonder how I could have missed groundbreaking game X or indie darling Y or AAA juggernaut Z. Questions about why I missed these games are common enough that it’s become a tradition to preemptively answer them before I talk about what I did and didn’t like.
This isn’t a complete list of all the games I didn’t play this year. That would be silly. Instead, this is a list of all the games that either:
A) Fall in a genre where you’d expect me to play through them.
Or:
B) Were popular enough and intriguing enough that people have asked me what I thought of them.
Or:
C) I seriously considered playing – and perhaps even announced my intention to play – before changing my mind.
So stuff like FIFA doesn’t make this list because it’s not part of a genre I care about, I never considered playing it, and nobody cares what I think about it.
So here are the games that I didn’t play, but could / should have…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2019 Part 2: The No-Show List”
This post isn’t relevant right now. This post is for the benefit of people in the future. Whenever I complain about the difficulty of getting screenshots or footage from a game, I often get asked perfectly reasonable questions like these:
I get asked a question like this every few months by earnest and well-meaning people. I also get asked these questions by pushy and self-important recording platforms that assume they’re the first program to ever offer this feature and they just can’t IMAGINE how I survived before they came along.
So here is the complete answer to all of these questions, in a conveniently-linkable location…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I Don’t Need Your Stupid Game Bar”
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or whatever is appropriate in your culture. If you’re not celebrating anything right now, then have a great Monday!
Also, say goodbye to the familiar header image. We’re getting a new one for the new year. In fact, I planned on having a new image every year, but I forgot in 2019 and so the 2018 header lingered for an extra year.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #284: The Last Mailbag of 2019”
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
T w e n t y S i d e d
