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Special episode this week. There’s no news we care to talk about, so we’re answering mailbag questions. Note that I’ve paraphrased the questions in the show notes because I don’t want to transcribe the originals.
Hosts: Chris, Josh, Rutskarn and Shamus.
Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #24: The Mailbag”
Link (YouTube) |
Short version: I’m busy programming. Mumbles wasn’t around this week and we didn’t want to complete Tomb Raider without her. So you get BioShock. I don’t have anything to say about this episode because I haven’t watched it since 2010. So the entertainment value of this post ought to be directly proportional to how bad your memory of 2010 is. (Or maybe you’re lucky and you’re a new viewer?) Either way: BioShock this week. Here’s the text that went with the original post:
A lot of people have been asking us to move the show to Blip.tv. We gave it a try. It didn’t work out. Blip can handle HD video. It can handle half-hour shows. But it can’t handle a half hour HD show. There is an encode that happens on the server side, and it always fails out because it takes too long. So it looks like we’re stuck with Viddler for now.
Oh, and the episode ending the way it did? Totally not related to my comic earlier this week. Just an odd coincidence.
My column this week compares the situation today with the Great Game Market Fail of 1983. As I said on Twitter, I can’t think of a historical example where a business this big ($3.2 billion) fell this far (97%) in such a short time (less than two years) outside of war.
On a personal note, I notice I don’t really have nostalgia for those Atari games the way Nintendo fans love their Famicom games. They were novel, but they weren’t really all that good or interesting, gameplay-wise. When I pine for the good old days of videogames, I’m usually thinking of the stuff in the 1998-2002 range and not my childhood.
Link (YouTube) |
My analysis and annotation of Quakecon 2013 keynote continues. As before, I want to caution you that I’m sometimes out of my depth as much as anyone. My graphics knowledge is years out of date by now, and even when it was springtime fresh I never got as close to the hardware as Carmack does. I’ll probably make small errors or omissions in my notes.
Times are approximate.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated: Part 2”
Link (YouTube) |
As in years past, I thought I’d step through John Carmack’s keynote and translate some of it into non-programmer talk, because I think there’s a lot here that’s worth talking about. Note that I am not an expert on all these things. I’m just drawing from my increasingly dusty experience as a programmer who long ago specialized in graphics.
The above embed is from IGN. It was the best, most reliable version I could find on YouTube as of this writing. The times given below are approximate.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated: Part 1”
Link (YouTube) |
And now we reach the part of the season where I begin to run out of things to say. The puzzle here was good. (I liked it, anyway.) The climbing is great. The combat is too much. The mooks are preposterously numerous and aggressive. Sam is a useless sack of dumb who gets kidnapped from inside the camp by nerdy sleazeball Whittman.
And yet, I really hope they’re making another one. Even better if they’re making one with less mooks, more spooks. Less shooting, more looting! Less rescuing-Sam-because-she’s-a-boring-dunce and more platforming.
We’re in the home stretch now. This season will probably wrap up after another week.
Link (YouTube) |
For the record, the parts where I seem to be talking over myself are instances where Josh lagged out. If I lag out, my messages arrive broken up, late, and far apart. If Josh (as the person making the recording) lags, then the audio piles up on the server and when he recovers they all arrive at once. I’ve had instances where I lagged out in Vent and had half a minute of everyone else talking mashed into ten seconds.
What I was saying about Prince of Persia:
The Sands of Time sequels are pretty much a textbook case of why games shouldn’t get so dang hung up on continuity. The first game was a beautiful, simple, and self-contained tale. The second game took all the character development of the first game and threw it away. The third game had to re-write Fara. Over time, characters get less interesting because their arcs end and leave them with nowhere to go. The setting gets less interesting because all the really great secrets have already been revealed and we have more things to explain to the newcomers.
Retconning things and stapling new ideas onto an existing lore is often messy and ugly. Leaving every story open-ended for a sequel is unsatisfying, since the audience never gets the closure they’re looking for. (Sands of Time would have been hurt immensely if they had hacked in a “BUT IT’S NOT REALLY OVER!” moment at the end.)
In a Prince of Persia game we need three things:
It’s not like there’s a shortage of Arabian-themed stories and tropes to draw from. They should just let each game stand on its own. In one game you play as a prince. In another you play as a street rat who meets the prince. In another you’re a commoner who looks like the prince, etc.
Warrior Within would have been so much less offensive to me if this was a new prince with a new story. And besides…
Wait. What are we talking about again? Tomb Raider? Right. Anyway, I hope Tomb Raider won’t blunder into this same trap of plot convolution, character stagnation, and lore cruft. They left things open for a sequel, but they didn’t set up a sequel, if you can see the distinction. We don’t have a really strong, likable character to be Lara’s sidekick.
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.
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
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?
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
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