I’ve been playing Rage 2 this week. Did the world forget that game exists? I haven’t heard anyone mention it in months. I guess Campster covered it last month, so that counts as a bit of relevance. Still, this game came and went so fast.
It’s so forgettable I forgot to talk about it on my own podcast, even though I’m in the middle of a playthrough!
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #271: EGS Hypocrisy, Broken Games, WoW Classic”
As promised, here is the remainder of the Act II story arc for Chainmail Bikini. It turns out the full end of the story was way, way too long to fit into a single post. (Always count on me to find the size limits for written text. Brevity is a cross-class skill for me.) So the end of the story will be posted in the next entry. Today you get the remainder of Act II. The next post will tell the story of Act III and bring the story to a close.
This isn’t broken up into jokes, but instead functions as a list of joke ideas and hooks. It won’t be funny, but it should give you an idea of how things were supposed to turn out.
When I write the comic I come up with arcs or scenes, and then Shawn and I work to turn those scenes into individual jokes. If you remember in the last few strips before the end of Chainmail Bikini, they’d met a shopkeeper who kept trying to give directions through the swamp but kept being ignored. This was the first half of one such scene. The gist was that they thwarted the attempted railroading more or less without even realizing it. This scene would end with Casey finding some clumsy way to keep the railroad going even with the shopkeeper dead.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “#52 Finale Part 1”
Achilles: I think I’m starting to get the hang of this game.
The Grognard: Are you? How so?
Achilles: I have a full party now, and a couple +1 weapons. I’ve knocked out a few side quests – house full of spiders here, ogre with a stolen magical belt there. Even took a long trek way out to a gnoll fortress to rescue a witch for a guy with a hamster and a head wound.
The Grognard: Most people would be confused by that sentence, but it’s good to know you have Minsc and Dynaheir now.
Achilles: I’ve also learned a few things.
The Grognard: Such as?
Achilles: Give everyone a ranged weapon, and plenty of ammo.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Achilles and the Grognard: Top Hat Guy Finds His Feet”
Wait, ANOTHER birthday? I just had one a couple of… Well, okay. I guess that was about a year ago. That makes sense I guess. Still, it feels like these things are getting closer together.
I’m trying to stay in shape. Someone suggested I should get into cycling. So I’ve been watching Global Cycling Network and Seth’s Bike Hacks. I even watched the exhausting run as Kilian Bron fought for 1st place in a field of 1,400 riders in MEGAVALANCHE 2019. I also watched a couple of guys try to tackle the 1903 Tour de France on period-appropriate bikes, although that one almost did me in.
I haven’t lost any weight yet. Am I watching the wrong videos?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ding 48!”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “#51 Some Friendly Advice”
Earlier this year I released my most recent book. It performed very poorly. I haven’t had the guts to open up the sales figures for the various storefronts and get a final count of copies soldAmazon makes this process so hopelessly convoluted I’m seriously wondering if the obfuscation is deliberate., but I’m willing to bet it’s less than 1,000 copies.
Certainly some of this is due to my half-hearted attempts at marketing. I hate doing it and it’s always tough to see the result. Some of it is no doubt due to the fact that Witch Watch got some free exposure from The EscapistWe did a giveaway and one of their daily quizzes promoted the book. and TOKoL was only promoted through my blog and a few cheap Google / Amazon ads.
Well, there’s no point in crying about it now. I’m reasonably sure the low sales don’t mean the story is terrible. It was reviewed well by the few who bought it and I think it had quite a few fun moments in it. It was a blast to write and it’s still my favorite bit of worldbuilding.
However, I’ll readily admit it’s not a perfect book. Like all fictional works, you can find problems if you pick at it. Since I spend so much of my time picking on flaws in game stories, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to do the same thing to my own work. This isn’t usually done, but there’s no rule saying you can’t do it.
Before we get started, I should repeat what I said a few months ago: I’m a big believer in the idea that the text is the text and everything outside the text is fanfic, even if it was written by me. If something isn’t explained well enough, then making up shit later doesn’t fix that. If part of the book doesn’t work, then this article can’t fix that. This should be viewed as an explanation of what I tried to do, but it doesn’t (and can’t) serve as a post-launch hotfix for plot holes and other nonsense. None of this is canon. It’s just my usual nitpicky analysis with a better-than-usual understanding of what the author was trying to accomplish.
So below is a list of gripes and flaws that I wish I’d handled differently. Total spoilers ahead, obviously…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Other Kind of Analysis”
Here is the first entry in the new video series. This one is more aimed at my mostly-dead YouTube channel, so it’s not going to be terribly interesting to read. For the first few videos I’m going to be playing things safe and sticking to familiar topics. I have some proper episodes planned for when we’re comfortable with the format.
Like I’ve mentioned before, this is a collaboration with my son Issac. He’s going to be doing the editing and animating and I’ll do the scripts and still images. We’ll see how it works.
Anyway, here’s the script for the video:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Introduction”
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
T w e n t y S i d e d
