Issac was still on the road this week. So we didn’t have anyone to edit our podcast. So we didn’t record one. So you get this instead. He’s on his way home as I write this, so we should be back to our usual schedule next week.
The mailbag is getting a bit out of hand, so I’m going to dig through the questions and see if there are any that I can answer alone.
But first let’s talk about what I did this week…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast Unplugged #8: Playing the Long Game”
The weird thing about Prey is that it has almost no story, but it has absolutely tons of backstory. Most of the game consists of Morgan just trying to get from A to B and running into an endless series of hazards and complications because the space station is in such disarray. Morgan’s adventure is primarily a series of door-opening exercises, but there’s a ton of worldbuilding and history leading up to that adventure.
The author shows a lot of respect for the intelligence and curiosity of the player. There’s never a scene where someone grabs the player’s camera for a brute-force info dump. Very little of the history is revealed through direct dialog, and the little bit we do get is provided out-of-order. If you want to understand the world of Prey, then you need to read bits of in-game lore, listen to optional audiologs, pay attention to environmental cues, and extrapolate the whole based on these various hints.
I love it. The knowledge is there if you care about it, and the gameworld rewards serious inspection. At the same time, the game never force-feeds you and you’re free to run around and shoot shit in blissful ignorance if that’s more your speed.Although, if that’s the case then I can’t help but think you’d be better served by some other genre.
For the sake of this retrospective, I’m going to present the important bits of historical context in order.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 3: The Story is Mostly Backstory”
My editor is on the road this weekend, which means I don’t have anyone to take our weekly podcast and wrangle the audio into something presentable. So no podcast. We might not get one next weekend either. The young people are making the plans around here lately, which means everything is disorganized last-minute chaos.
I really envy them sometimes.
At any rate, let’s talk about…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast Unplugged #7: The Steam Machine Reboot”
In Prey you play as Morgan Yu, who can be either male or female. Both are equally valid. Both voice actors give solid performances and neither option feels tacked-on. I never noticed any conversations where people used male pronouns for female Morgan. I did notice a few awkwardly worded email messages where people went out of their way to avoid using pronouns for Morgan, but it wasn’t a big deal. To avoid having to perform similar grammatical contortions, I’m going to pick a gender for this series.
I’m going to spend a lot of time talking about Morgan, and Morgan’s older brother Alex. It’s actually super-handy if I make Morgan a female, because then I can use “she” and “he” for the siblings and you’ll know which one I mean. So I’ll be playing as female Morgan for this series.
The game begins with Morgan waking up in her penthouse apartment on the morning of March 15, 2032. From there she heads to the roof and takes a private helicopter to the nearby TranStar building where she meets up with her brother Alex. Apparently the Yu siblings are executives in the TranStar corporation. Morgan is about to travel to the TranStar space station in orbit around the moon, but first she needs to run through a battery of tests.
The helicopter ride here reminds me a bit of the…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 2: Tram Legacy”
We’re reached another big round number of Diecasts, so I feel like I should… do… something. Or say something. So here’s a fun fact…
There are 79 episodes of the original Star Trek, 178 episodes of TNG, 176 of DS9, 172 of Voyager, and 98 episodes of Enterprise. An hour-long TV program in the USA is typically ~41 minutes. Which means there are, roughly, 480 hours of Star Trek television to watch. And no, we’re not counting the appalling new stuff like Discovery and Picard, which are action dramas with science words in them and not science fiction. Yes, there’s a difference, even if the dunderheads at CBS don’t know about it.
Anyway. 480 hours of trek. Diecast episodes these days are just a smidge over an hour. But back in the day when the cast was bigger, episodes regularly ran for an hour and a half. For the sake of laziness, let’s just assume the average is around an hour twenty. That means there is somewhere in the neighborhood of 460 hours of Diecast. So there’s almost as much Diecast as there is Star Trek.
None of that means anything. I just thought it was interesting.
Link (YouTube) |
I love this game. I loved it back in 2017 when I made it my GOTY. I loved it even more the following year when the Mooncrash DLC turned the game into a roguelike. Every time I come back to the game I appreciate it more.
No, this game has nothing to do with the 2006 videogame of the same name. The “Prey” branding doesn’t make a ton of sense here. The behavior of the antagonists is less predatory and more “viral infection”. Yes, they’re space-monsters who kill people so it kind of works, but we don’t usually talk about infectious agents / alien invasions in terms of predation. It’s not that the name is invalid, it’s just not a great fit. The game was still untitled when the publisher came to the developers and suggested they use the name “Prey”, since they owned the trademark for it. And we all know how much Zenimax LOVES their trademarks.
Chris Franklin has suggested that the game could have been / should have been titled “PsycoShock”, which would have been thematically appropriateIt certainly would have fit better than “Prey”. and would make it part of the informal System Shock / BioShock lineage. There’s no evidence to support this, but it’s a really interesting ideaNeuroShock would also work, IMO..
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 1: The 451 Genre”
I think I did okay with the Steam Summer Sale this year. I picked up a reasonable handful of games, but I didn’t add a bunch of crap to the Backlog of Shamefully Un-played Impulse Buys like I used to in the old days. I actually took this time to cull some stuff from my wishlist. I figure if it’s 75% off and I’m still not buying it, then I’m probably never gonna buy it.
Link (YouTube) |
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
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