Fallout 3 EP22: President Evil

By Shamus Posted Friday Mar 15, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 96 comments

The story so far: A water purifier that has no reason to exist was overloaded by a man to prevent it from falling into the hands of people trying to fix it and released radiation it shouldn't have, thus killing Colonel Autumn, who had no reason to be there. Then later we got through a village of children who fdso gah frrzlmpr blaaa huygggnl asdf;lj so we could enter vault 87 and recover a GECK, a device which would be better put to use in virtually any possible manner besides the one for which we had acquired it. Then Colonel Autumn, who shouldn't be alive, captured us with a flash grenade that shouldn't have worked and thrown by soldiers who had no way to reach us.


Link (YouTube)

The true madness is that the plot is this mangled, despite the repeated railroading and plot hacks used by the writers. I can understand that a freeform or branching story can get pretty complex and possibly tangled. As someone who has run D&D games I know that no plan survives contact with the enemy. (Your players.) And I've had some gaps in my stories. But When the main plot is set in stone and the player has no power over it, there is no excuse for not simply writing something that makes sense. In most cases I'd pummel a game over things like pacing, characterization, maintaining tension and interest, and all of those other challenges that good writers must overcome. But here we're talking about basic coherence. We're talking about simply relaying a fixed set of events that don't contradict one another. For example: Don't have multiple characters come back from the dead without offering anything in the way of acknowledgment or explanation.

Still. Fallout 4, right? Who’s excited? You excited? I know I’m excited.

 


 

The Diecast #4: Max Payne, SimCity, and Blip.tv

By Shamus Posted Thursday Mar 14, 2013

Filed under: Diecast 171 comments

splash_diecast.jpg

We should probably title these things or something. I mean, if we’re going to keep making episodes then at some point we’ll be like, “Wait. Which one did we discuss playing through Half-Life 2: Episode 3? Was that Diecast #230? No, 230 was when we discussed Sony’s inexplicable decision to design the Playstation 5 with a cotton-candy pink case.”

Then again, I have no idea how to title long multi-topic discussions in a memorable way. Screw it. We’ll just kick this problem on down the road and let future-us deal with it.

Download MP3 File
Download Ogg Vorbis File

Show notes:

00:15 Intro. What’s everyone doing? Shamus is playing Max Payne 3. (I suppose I might as well link to that one Max Payne video before someone beats me to it.) Rutskarn is playing KOTOR2. Chris is playing Perspective. Josh is playing…

17:00 Tomb Raider. The new one. Like, the reboot. This one.

40:00 SimCity. Man, does this story have legs or what? We recorded this on Sunday night, and here on Thursday the follies continue. Sadly, this means a lot of the stuff we discussed or speculated about has now been resolved or rendered moot, only to be replaced by new failures. The latest? Maxis Insider Tells RPS: SimCity Servers Not Necessary.

This reminds me so much of the ages-old BioShock controversy: A polite spokeswoman is way out of her technical depth and saying things that the tech-savvy users prove to be untrue, thus making inflaming the people they were trying to pacify. Those who do not learn from history, etc. (They are also repeating the mistakes of the Diablo III launch and the Assassin’s Creed 2 launch. So, nice going EA. You are the very last idiot to make this particular blunder.)

1:03:30 The Blip.tv story. Here is what Chris posted about it. And here is the original post where I hurled bricks at the company after too many trips through the same advertisement: Blip.tv Sucks. Stay classy, Shamus.

 


 

Fallout 3 EP21: Guy Fawkes Day

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Mar 13, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 145 comments


Link (YouTube)

We talked a bit about the Bethesda art style, which is kind of like discussing the flavor of a glass of room-temperature water. For comparison, here is the art style of the original supermutants:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 3 EP21: Guy Fawkes Day”

 


 

Sim Sickly

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Mar 13, 2013

Filed under: Rants 175 comments

splash_mighty_woman.jpg

We have reached the point in the crisis where the gaming media is dangerously close to running out of lede paragraph puns and jokey article titles. Sham City? Sim Shitty? Sim Sleazy? SinCity? There’s only so much we can do with the phonics we’re given. If this crisis continues we’ll run out of lame-ass jokes entirely and be forced to come up with proper headlines.

The SimCity story continues to be a mess. Just to outline the basics for those of you who get your gaming news by jogging past people discussing old IGN threads, the story so far is thus: The new SimCity “reboot” released with this always-online stuff that was either DRM or social networking and multiplayer, depending on who you asked and how cynical they were. The servers couldn’t keep up with the player demand, nobody could connect, the game was broken and crashed a lot, cities would revert to some hours-old state without warning, blah blah blah. It’s the same stupid crap that happened when Diablo III released as a multiplayer-only title, only much worse.

We got a few patches, and then more, and eventually Maxis disabled a lot of the multiplayer features just to give the servers a break. Most painfully, they disabled “cheetah” speed, meaning players that run out of money need to spend more time doing nothing while waiting for the next in-game hourly payment to roll in. All of this brought stability at the expense of making the entire online system completely pointless. (But still mandatory!)

But let’s look at some public statements. Keep in mind that this stuff is a couple of days old at this point. If you need up-to-the-minute news then you should know better than to read my blog. I just got around to playing Max Payne 3 this week, for crying out loud.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Sim Sickly”

 


 

Fallout 3 EP20: Anger Management

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Mar 12, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 54 comments


Link (YouTube)

Since I played as a good character, I always cleaned out Paradise Falls. Because that’s what virtuous people do: They murder dozens of evil people and loot their corpses for money. While tripping on drugs. It’s how we make the world a better place.

I like how the slaves can just wander off once their owners are dead even though they have bomb-collars that oh who cares. It’s all written on drool-soaked construction paper and there’s no point in enumerating all its faults.

 


 

Experienced Points: Not Greedy, Just Clueless

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Mar 12, 2013

Filed under: Column 114 comments

I know I’m guilty of bouts of hyperbole. Activision, EA, and Ubisoft are capable of some truly infuriating behaviors, and it’s really tempting to just throw around words like “evil” and “greedy”. EA is a huge, dysfunctional organization that takes in billions of dollars and employs thousands of people. But I think it’s worth noting that their desire to make money isn’t what makes them a bad company. Their problem isn’t greed, but shocking ineptitude.

 


 

Thinking About Forums

By Shamus Posted Sunday Mar 10, 2013

Filed under: Notices 249 comments

splash_frustrated.jpg

This blog is a very unusual beast. I don’t say this to brag. It’s unusually big for a WordPress blog. (Once sites get this busy, they often move away from blogging software.) There’s an unusual level of “engagement” for a personality-driven blog. (If you’ve got a big blog based around a single person, it’s common to have the comments aimed not at the subject matter of the post itself, but at the author.) But here we’ve got long, detailed discussions between people on all sorts of topics. The comments are busy enough to be interesting but not so busy that you feel like you’re shouting into a hurricane. On top of all this, the whole thing is shockingly civil for an open-comment discussion thread where anyone can join without creating an account.

The point is: We have some sort of delicately balanced ideal here, and I’ve been slow to change things because I don’t want to disturb the mysterious alchemy we have. For years people have been asking me to create forums, and I’ve resisted because I don’t want to harm the blog or make it less fun. This blog has been a big part of my routine for 7.5 years now. It works well and I’m very reluctant to mess with it in a way that might make the thing less fun.

But Shamus, why can’t we have some optional side-forum, just for people who want to talk about other stuff?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Thinking About Forums”