Dénouement 2018: The No-Show List

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jan 3, 2019

Filed under: Industry Events 166 comments

This blog is not a tentpole site with a suite of writers working in different genres. I can only cover games I play. I’m just one guyAlthough it really was nice having Bob Case around this year to do his long-form analysis of Witcher 3. and I tend to seek out games that can keep me going for weeks rather than promiscuously hopping from one game to the next like big-name reviewers do. Which means that I tend to miss a lot of games.

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.

But before I begin hurling rotten tomatoes at the games that had the audacity to disappoint me, let me talk about a few games I missed…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2018: The No-Show List”

 


 

Dénouement 2018: The Year of Good News

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Jan 1, 2019

Filed under: Industry Events 162 comments

Is it 2019 already? We’re getting pretty far into the future now, aren’t we? In fact, we’re so far into the future that even futuristic dates like 2010 and 2012 are somehow in the past. That’s crazy.

I’m worried we maybe went a little too far. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying this high-speed voyage through a fantastic future world of electric cars and pocket phones. I just get a little freaked out every time I look in the mirror and see how absurdly old I am.

But here we are. I guess this is really happening. All I can do is mark the time as it passes and try to make sense of it all. Maybe if we look at trends in enough detail and with sufficient hindsight we can discern the currents of history and understand the decisions that brought us to this moment. Or barring that, maybe we can use the turn of the year as an excuse to complain about videogames.

Actually, let’s just do the latter. That sounds a lot easier.

Every year I try to find (or contrive) some sort of connective theme. 2012 was the year of illusionary binary choices. 2013 was the year of the indies. 2014 was the year of “meh”. 2015 was the year about making games about making games about making games. 2016 was the year of waiting for VR to take off or die. (We’re still waiting, BTW.) 2017 was the year of the loot box.

Obviously these are pretty arbitrary, but I like assigning meaning to the chaos.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2018: The Year of Good News”

 


 

Diecast #238: Farewell 2018!

By Shamus Posted Monday Dec 31, 2018

Filed under: Diecast 46 comments

This is it. In this extra-long Diecast we’re cleaning out the mailbag. All questions are answered. I can’t promise that they’ll be answered correctly or even coherently, but you will get some form of mouth-noises in response to your inquiries.

Also note that we spend the first half of the show looking back on 2018, which means I’m sort of spoiling my end-of-the-year retrospective a tiny bit. That series begins tomorrow!



Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #238: Farewell 2018!”

 


 

Andromeda Part 11: The Vault in Our Stars

By Shamus Posted Thursday Dec 27, 2018

Filed under: Mass Effect 148 comments

So the team is here on the planet Eos to fix the climate by fiddling with the inexplicably intuitive and user-friendly alien vaults.

Once we get the Nomad and do a little tutorial stuff, we settle into the rut the game designer has planned for us: Drive to three different monolith towers, shoot the inhabitants, do the puzzle, and then go to the alien vault to reset the global climate.

The Monoliths

SAM is the worst. He's constantly explaining everything without actually TELLING you anything. It's really weird.
SAM is the worst. He's constantly explaining everything without actually TELLING you anything. It's really weird.

The three Monolith towers work something like this: Once you’ve murdered whoever is guarding itThe Kett, ancient guardian robots, or (very occasionally) local pirates or other assorted jerks., you’ll find a console. The aliens who built this thing may be from another galaxy, but by a strange coincidence they just happened to use computer consoles that are the right size for a human being. You’ll need to hop around the environments and do some light platforming to reach hidden glyphs on the tower. Once you scan those, SAM can hack the alien computer or whatever. You do a sudoku puzzle, the tower lights up, and you drive to the next one.

It’s not bad by the standards of BioWare puzzles. Or at least, the first couple are okay. But when you realize you’ve got to do three of these on every planet the whole thing starts to feel very Ubisoft-ish. It wouldn’t be so bad if each tower had a different gimmick, but the designer runs out of ideas very quickly and from there you’re just repeating the same task again and again.

Once you do three towers, a secret vault will open up somewhere on the map.

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Christmas Elves vs. Fantasy Elves

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Dec 25, 2018

Filed under: Random 41 comments

It’s Christmas! What are you doing on my blog? Why don’t you go watch that one Christmas movie you love? Or eat some food? No? Socialize a bit maybe? You’ve done all that? That’s not your thing?

Okay then. I guess I can share this YouTube video with you. After all, the nature of snooty fantasy elves is a topic near and dear to my heart.


Link (YouTube)

Anyway. No matter what you do with the day, have a good one. Later in the week we’ll have another Andromeda post, and then next week we’ll be doing my end-of-year retrospective.

Merry Christmas, you big crazy internet.

 


 

Diecast #237: The Secret Show

By Shamus Posted Monday Dec 24, 2018

Filed under: Diecast 83 comments

Here it is. Our rambling, goofy, leave-in-all-the-mistakes Christmas Eve show. As hard as it might be to believe, I was sober during this. The whole time. I don’t know what was wrong with my brain. Sure, I made some questionable gaffs, but since nobody will listen to this episode I guess that’s fine.

Next episode will be the last of the year, so if you have any end-of-year questions, please send them in. Email is in the title image.



Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #237: The Secret Show”

 


 

Happy Holidays

By Shamus Posted Sunday Dec 23, 2018

Filed under: Notices 118 comments

Statistically speaking, you’re not reading this. I suppose that’s technically true for most writing. Given the ratio of available reading material to the amount of time people spend reading, the vast majority of all writing is only read by a tiny sliver of the population. Harry Potter is the best selling book series of all time, yet the first book has sold a pathetic 120 million copies. Which means that JK Rowling’s culture-wide smash hit has been read by less than 2% of the world’s population.

Which means that, on average, nobody reads anythingIf you disagree, please attempt to prove me wrong by buying my book..

I suppose it’s not fair to say that nobody reads this site. I mean, someone must be leaving all these comments. But even if we’re comparing the readership of this site to the readership of this site as of last week, it’s still pretty low. Odds are, you’re on break from school. Or you’ve taken some days off of work. Or you’re traveling to visit relatives. On the off chance you are still working, you’re probably too busy to check on my site because everyone else went on holiday and left you with all the work. The jerks. Whatever the reason, you’re not following your usual routine and thus you’re not here.

On Saturday December 22, 2018, there were exactly two comments. All day. On the entire site. That’s crazy. The site usually gets more than that an hour. When a popular post goes up, we’ll get about that many a minute.

As a result, I’m not eager to put up a ton of content right now. There’s no point in posting something if nobody’s around to discuss itBut then why am I writing this post?. I think I’m going to change up the publishing schedule for the next couple of weeks. If something goes up a bit late or appears on a different day from what you’re used to, that’s why.

If it helps, this week you’ll get an extra-long, super-informal Christmas Eve Diecast. I know that nothing gets me into the Christmas spirit like a couple of nerds talking about BattleTech, Rimworld, Hitman, and Starcraft.