Twenty Sided

By Rutskarn Posted Wednesday Jun 28, 2017

Filed under: Lets Play 21 comments

 Nan o' War CH14: Dealer is BustedPrevious Post

Next PostNan o' War CH16: Woodes Rogers' Neighborhood 

One of B&G: Caribbean!‘s most transparent influences is Captain Blood, a character made famous by an Errol Flynn film that still sets the standard for half-assed Irish accents. Captain Blood is the classic tale of a doctor branded traitor by a kangaroo court and dispatched to Port Royal as slave and political prisoner. Before long he and some former revolutionaries escape in a boat, steal a ship from the conveniently attacking Spaniards, and are so successful in carrying out acts of noble piracy across the New World that the now-famous Blood is pardoned by the English usurper, William of Orange, and appointed the new governor of Port Royal. And under his righteous administration, no-one was ever unjustly enslaved in Jamaica again, probably.

It’s a classic movie, and when they get around to re-making it I’ll probably go re-see it. But you know what I’d rather watch? The movie where a grandma is indentured for forty seconds, falls in with a bad crowd, breaks some kneecaps, scores some headshots, wins a horse racing championship with a pocketful of hand grenades, and then parlays a literally undefeated career of gambling into an entire island’s worth of thriving rum distilleries and miscellaneous business enterprises.

And if that’s too much trouble, I’ll settle for thirty seconds of Diana Rigg wearing this costume.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Nan o’ War CH15: Free Shipping”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.

 Nan o' War CH14: Dealer is BustedPrevious Post

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This Dumb Industry: Steam Summer Blues

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Jun 27, 2017

Filed under: Column 161 comments

 This Dumb Industry: Denuvo and the Death of PiracyPrevious Post

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The Steam Summer Sale is going on, and yet somehow I can’t find any games to buy. Even at these giveaway prices, I don’t see anything that strikes me as interesting. I’m sure there are games that would interest me, but finding them means going through the hassle of finding the gems amid the swirling garbage pile that is the Steam storefront.

A Library of Neglect

I really dislike that you can't see the summary of a game in your library. If you want to know what it is, you have to visit the store page.

It’s not that I need more games. I have 604 games in my Steam library. Of those, 185 of them are completely unplayed. Almost a third of my library consists of games I have never even launched. This is in addition to a couple of dozen games that I’ve played for less than five minutes.

I suppose I need to give some context for these numbers.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: Steam Summer Blues”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 This Dumb Industry: Denuvo and the Death of PiracyPrevious Post

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New Album: NEON

By Shamus Posted Sunday Jun 25, 2017

Filed under: Music 27 comments

 Bad and Wrong Music Lessons: Key ChangesPrevious Post

Next PostBad and Wrong Music Lessons: Getting Closer 

It’s that time of the year again when I pretend I can write music. I’ve been tinkering away, making a new song every few months or so. Three years ago I took a dozen or so songs and called them an “album”, and I guess I’ve produced enough content to do that again. My new pile of loosely related tracks is called NEON.

Whether you’re Skrillex or a nobody like me, to make electronic music you need a Digital Audio Workstation, which the kids call a DAW. It’s a program that lets you map out all the notes and instruments, allowing you to make music even if you don’t play an instrument. For a couple of years I used MAGIX Music Maker. I was not a fan. Last year someone donated enough for me to switch to Studio One, which I love.

In this album, the tracks are in roughly chronological order. The tracks produced in Studio One begin at “Hi!”.

Fair warning: A lot of this work is very amateurish. If it wasn’t for my existing audience as a writer, nobody would listen to this stuff. If I promote a track here on the blog or on Twitter, it gets a few hundred listens. If I don’t promote it, the song gets less than 10. (And I suspect most of those are from spambots. SoundCloud has a pretty bad bot problem.) So my list of musical fans is in the single-digits. This is not a complaint. I suspect I have exactly the audience I deserve. Just like with writing, if I want more fans then I need to make better content.

I’ve been climbing this learning curve for three years now, working on-and-off as the mood strikes me. It’s interesting to see my progression. Sure, my work has improved, but that advancement has not kept up with my expectations. Three years ago I was tickled to simply be able to make music. But now that I’ve absorbed literally hundreds of videos and tutorials on mixing techniques and music theory, I have a much better understanding of how things should work and I’m more keenly aware of my shortcomings.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “New Album: NEON”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Bad and Wrong Music Lessons: Key ChangesPrevious Post

Next PostBad and Wrong Music Lessons: Getting Closer 

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Site Move

By Shamus Posted Friday Jun 23, 2017

Filed under: Notices 43 comments

 The Site is Shaping UpPrevious Post

Next PostSite Update 

Due to overwhelming public demandUpwards of five people bugged me about it. I’m setting up this domain to work with SSL, which means that https://www.shamusyoung.com will be a thing. This will make the forums more secure, fix the domain currently squatting on the https version of this site, and may also help out the alarming number of people who are reporting that this site has recently been blocked by their employer.

However, this means the site is going to be disrupted. shamusyoung.com will be moved to a unique IP address, which means we’ll need to wait for the new DNS to shake out. If all goes well, then at some point this weekend the site will (from your point of view) vanish, and then reappear shortly after.

Also, I’m going to need to move the forums. They’re currently hosted at forums.shamusyoung.com, but they’re going to move to https://www.shamusyoung.com/forums so they can benefit from the added security.

I’ll post a notice here once the move is over. See you on the other side.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 The Site is Shaping UpPrevious Post

Next PostSite Update 

43 comments

Game of Thrones Griping 11: Arya Gets Hit With A Stick Over and Over Again

By Bob Case Posted Friday Jun 23, 2017

Filed under: Game of Thrones 58 comments

 Game of Thrones Griping 10: The Lindeloffian MethodPrevious Post

Next PostGame of Thrones Griping 12: More Like Lady PAIN 

This series analyzes the show, but sometimes references the books as well. If you read it, expect spoilers for both.

A visual medium – like television – has certain advantages over the printed word. For example, an actor who makes savvy performance choices can convey more about a character with their poise and their voice than entire paragraphs of text can. The way actors move within the frame, the choices of the cinematographer, the director, the costumers, the set designers… all of these are ways to communicate meaning to the audience.

It also faces certain disadvantages. It’s trickier to deliver exposition in a natural-seeming way, for instance. However, for my money, the single biggest challenge in adapting a book to a TV show is length.

In practical terms, books are way longer than shows – and that’s just normal books. GRRM’s works are your classic twenty-stone fantasy doorstoppers. To give you an idea, A Storm of Swords, which is the longest of the series, is 424,000 words. The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy? 481,000.These word counts vary according to the counting method. But the point is, GRRM’s books are very long. If you were to attempt a completely faithful, scene-by-scene, line-by-line reproduction of the books, you’d have to have fifty episodes a season.

The practical limitations of the form make that impossible, so the act of adapting A Song of Ice and Fire into a TV show is an act of severe abridgment. Every scene has to be pared down to the bone, entire storylines have to be cut, multiple characters have to be merged together into one, and so forth.

It’s why I always check myself whenever I get grumpy that one of my favorite things from the books isn’t in the show. I have to remind myself that they really just don’t have time to include everything. I try to be as understanding as possible.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game of Thrones Griping 11: Arya Gets Hit With A Stick Over and Over Again”

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.

 Game of Thrones Griping 10: The Lindeloffian MethodPrevious Post

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58 comments

Diablo III Part 1: The Legacy of Diablo

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jun 22, 2017

Filed under: Retrospectives 126 comments

 Final Fantasy X Part 20: Finale FantasyPrevious Post

Next PostDiablo III Part 2: The Gameplay 

The launch of Diablo III was marred by controversy and technical problems, but those have long since blown over. It’s been five years. After an expansion and innumerable patches, the game seems to have settled comfortably into its final form. So now is probably a good time to pick this thing apart and see what Blizzard decided to do with the sequel to one of the greatest PC games of all time.

Note: The games are properly titled Diablo, Diablo II, and Diablo III, but after one too many typos where I used the wrong number of ‘I’s and mangled the point I was trying to make, I’ve decided to use standard numerals for clarity and readability.

In this three-part series I’m going to look at Diablo 3 on both a cinematic and gameplay level. But first let’s talk about…

The Legacy of Diablo

The original Diablo. Swiped from Youtube, because my disk copy is long gone and Blizzard no longer sells the game.

The original Diablo came out in 1996. It was so influential that it was seen as the father of a genre. I don’t know if it was actually the first game in this particular style, but it was recognized as such to the point where the others were called “Diablo clones”. I think we’re over that now. Instead the culture has decided that the genre is named ARPG. (See, it’s not like all those other RPG titles. It’s an ACTION RPG.) While I hate to see the already-muddled term “RPG” stretched even further, I suppose this is better than “Diablo clone”.

In any case, Diablo looked almost like isometric survival horror. With its macabre scenery, haunting ambient sounds, smothering darkness, and grim endingThe hero sacrificed themselves to contain the titular demon., it was a tense experience focused on creating a sense of dread. You could argue that maybe the foreboding tone was at odds with the treasure-hunting gameplay loop, but the experience seemed to work for the folks in 1996.

Four years later, Blizzard followed up with the sequel. Diablo 2 was of similar tone to the original, although the visuals weren’t quite as pervasively dark. The scope was larger, the gameplay was more varied, and it seemed to have more of the ingredients that made the first title such a hit.

Diablo 2 was not instantly recognized as a classic when it hit the market in June of 2000. Gamespot gave it 8.5/10, IGN gave it 8.3, and Gamespy gave it 86/100. That’s amazingly consistent by the standards of review scores, and yet surprisingly low given its reputation today.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diablo III Part 1: The Legacy of Diablo”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Final Fantasy X Part 20: Finale FantasyPrevious Post

Next PostDiablo III Part 2: The Gameplay 

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This Dumb Industry: Denuvo and the Death of Piracy

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Jun 20, 2017

Filed under: Column 178 comments

 Zenimax vs. Facebook Part 5: The VerdictPrevious Post

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For over a year people have been requesting that I weigh in on Denuvo, the fancy new DRM that has all the publishers excited. What is it? How does it work? How effective is it?

DRM used to be a major part of my writing. I still care about the issue, but I eventually stopped talking about it because I ran out of things to say. You can only write the “Inconveniencing your customers in an attempt to harm people who are not your customers is a stupid idea” rant so many times. I made my case. Nothing changed. End of story.

I wanted to wait to comment on Denuvo until I had something concrete to say. I figured sooner or later we’d have answers to some of the questions I posed above. But even after all this time there doesn’t seem to be much of a consensus.

What is it?

Why make a better padlock when we can just make it EXTRA illegal to open crappy ones?

The term “Digital Rights Management” is such a deviously constructed bit of PR. It sounds like a good thing. “Digital Rights”. Those are good, right? But calling anti-copying software “Digital Rights Management” is like calling prison “Freedom Management”. It’s technically true, while also being a pretty good example of real-world doublespeak.

In the case of videogames, DRM is any system intended to “manage” (limit) what you can do (your rights) with the software through various software tricks. The argument usually goes something like this:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: Denuvo and the Death of Piracy”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Zenimax vs. Facebook Part 5: The VerdictPrevious Post

Next PostThis Dumb Industry: Steam Summer Blues 

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