In this latest episode of our innovative and groundbreaking podcast, two guys talk about some videogames. But unlike those other podcasts, we don’t waste time talking about popular games that are relevant to your experience. Instead we focus on obscure indies or older titles. You’re welcome.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #240: AGDQ, Elite Dangerous, Road Redemption, Procgen Cities”
In an effort to get people interested in my book, I thought I’d post the first section. Technically Amazon does this for you, but Amazon’s system is broken and goofy. It only shows the first seven pages if you’re trying to preview the paperback version. It gives you more if you’re looking at the kindle version, but then it cuts off at a dumb spot.
I know I promised we’d do a spoiler thread on the book, but apparently a lot of people are still working their way through it. So let’s save the spoilers for later. This week I’ll post the opening. Next week I’ll post a section from later in the book. Then we can do spoilers.
Here is the introduction: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Other Kind of Life – Sunday”
I didn’t play a lot of bad games this year, so my “worst of 2018” list wound up being pretty short. I suppose that’s yet another thing that makes this the year of good news. In fact, even this “worst of” list is pretty tame compared to years past.
I guess I should give some sort of honorable mention to Mass Effect: Andromeda. It didn’t come out this year, but I played it this year, and it easily qualifies as the most frustrating waste of potential I’ve seen in ages. Bioware spent five years and a fortune to make this half-baked unfocused mess of jank and cringe.
Here are my big disappointments, in no particular order:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2018: The Losers”
My column was on hiatus over the holidays, but now it’s back with a discussion of why esports generally make for lousy spectator sports. I say this as someone who has probably watched a hundred games of Starcraft 2 over the last month. I love watching these games, but only because I’ve clocked enough hours with the game to make sense of the gameplay. I don’t watch many other esports, but they all have more or less the same problem. Read the column if you want to hear why I think it doesn’t work and what a more approachable esport might look like.
So let’s talk about watching Starcraft 2 games… Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experienced Points: Building a Better Esport”
Once the Eos colony is founded, we’re off to the next planet. Along the way we run into the Kett flagship. Figuratively, but also nearly literally. We drop out of warp just a few meters short of them.
Imagine two big game hunters roaming around a vast wilderness, completely unaware of one another. Each of them sees a target, and each of them aims their weapon and fires it. By accident, their bullets collide in mid-air. That sounds unlikely, doesn’t it? And yet that’s orders of magnitude more likely than two interstellar spaceships ending up a hundred meters apart by random chance.
If this is a chance encounter, then that’s ridiculous. But if this isn’t – if the Kett somehow saw where we were going and headed us off – then why don’t they ever pull this trick again?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Andromeda Part 12: The Bad Guise”
Happy 2019! We start off the year with positivity and praise. It lasts almost half an hour before we spiral back into complaining and snark. We tried.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #239: Into the Spoiler-Verse, Activision’s CFOs”
Have you read my book yet? Based on what people are telling me, it’s not bad. The impression I’m getting is that it’s the best book I’ve written so far.
Marketing wisdom teaches that you should always put a good spin on sales. People are more likely to be interested in a product if other people are also buying it. Partly because following the herd can help you sort the good from the bad, but also because of the network effect. I’m more likely to see a movie if people I know have seen it, because we can talk about it later. If nobody else has seen a movie, then nobody else will care about my reaction and nobody else will have alternate viewpoints to share with me.
So you’re supposed to avoid admitting that sales are low while a work is still selling. I’m going to break this rule and admit that The Other Kind of Life is not selling as well as my previous book. Maybe I just don’t have the reach now that I did in 2012The Escapist was a bigger deal back then, and I was a major contributor rather than just a weekly columnist., or maybe the indie book market is more crowded. Maybe it’s the cover. Or the title. Or my half-assed approach to marketing. I don’t know. It’s a shame, but that’s how it goes.
Sales aren’t great, but some of you have read it. I think next week we’ll have the all-spoiler thread where everyone can discuss the book and nitpick / praise it as needed. In the meantime, let me talk about some of the thinking that went into it:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Other Kind of Post”
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
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.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
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?
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
T w e n t y S i d e d
