T w e n t y S i d e d
As Rutskarn declares at the start of the episode, this week Happiness Is Mandatory. This requirement extends to the audience. You will be required to appreciate this episode cheerfully and without pointing out our numerous mistakes, omissions, errors, and war crimes. Thank you for your cooperation.
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Hosts: Rutskarn, Josh, Chris, and Shamus.
Show notes:
02:20 Shamus saw Dredd, and liked it!
15:30 Shamus is playing Saint’s Row IV and shooting people with the dubstep gun.
Here is the original Dubstep Gun skit.
22:25 Chris is playing Aliens: Colonial Marines.
27:25 Chris is also playing Shelter.
31:30 Chris is also playing Disney Infinity:.
Link (YouTube) |
33:30 Rutskarn is designing a game. No, not that game, another one.
40:30 Josh is playing Total Rome: War 2
Spoiler: This part might slightly diverge from mandatory happiness and spiral into an angry tirade.
1:07:30 Shamus is making a videogame and working in 2D is easy!
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
Skyrim Thieves Guild
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
Dredd was definitely not interested in doing commentary of any kind. It wanted to do an action movie wherein a guy shoots guys – possibly in a pretty fashion. And I think that’s okay. Not every movie has to do insightful commentary, you know? Then again, I love movies like that. See: Shoot’Em Up, which is a favorite of mine.
The alphabet scene Rutskarn mentioned: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68BjP5f0ccE
Also, 4e jokes? Is it 2008 again?
Killing a dude with a carrot while traveling with a lactating hooker never gets old…
Why would they do social commentary? The reported crime rate per capita in Mega-City One is about four times smaller than in the US.
Oh, my! Couldn’t let this go by, I really like Shoot ‘Em Up too. The best thing is that even in the mist of all it’s shameless wallowing it doesn’t get as stupid or absurd as half the action flicks that take themselves seriously.
Have to disagree with you on that. I can’t think of an action movie that had a scene more absurd than stopping a sniper by repeatedly shooting the handles of a merry-go-round.
But I agree that it doesn’t get as stupid.
Watch The Raid: Redemption instead.
Yeah, the Raid is also inexplicably available on Netflix despite it being pretty good.
I’ve noticed this. Hulu, Neflix, Sony’s thing (I think it’s called Crackle) -all of them have either stuff that performed poorly, or is foreign. Now, some of the foreign stuff is pretty good. I’m strangely coming to like K-Dramas (though I was an anime guy, so I suppose there is precedent) and Australian TV. British TV isn’t bad either.
Nonetheless, there is so much of the lousy stuff that sorting through it to find the gems is almost more trouble than it’s worth.
They’ve replicated cable’s 100 channels and nothing to watch -but at least cable currates the list and I can surf through it in 15 minutes.
As an Australian, I’m curious which shows of ours you’re watching and enjoying…
Sea Patrol, The Strip.
As an Australian, I had to Google “The Strip” to find out what you were talking about because it made no impact on me whatsoever when it aired.
The wiki article still isn’t ringing any bells. Must’ve been a short run.
Honestly though I’d struggle to suggest anything better, the best TV we get here is British anyway.
Do you get anything from the Australian Broadcasting Association (our ABC)? “The Doctor Blake Mysteries” and “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” are surprisingly high-quality content for Australian productions. Some of the series of “Underbelly” have been OK. Going back a decade or so there was “SeaChange”, but I’m not sure if that would make any sense outside Australia.
If you’re game to give Australian comedy a go, there’s:
– The Games
– Thank God You’re Here
– Mother and Son
– anything from “The Chaser” (lots of current affairs skits, though, so I’m not sure how well it would work out of place and out of time)
– anything from John Safran
– I feel like this list should be longer so I’m adding another bullet point, but comedy TV isn’t really our strong point
I’m sure I’ve missed some quality TV, but whatever. There’s a fairly good chance that none of the things I’ve just mentioned have wound up on Netflix anyway.
On the drama side of things, and more recently, there’s a show called “The Time of Our Lives”, which seemed pretty good (I only saw snippets of episodes, but my parents said they enjoyed it).
There’s also Jack Irish, which I can’t actually recall at all apart from it seeming okay.
All the other shows that I watched (which was rare, as I don’t enjoy watching television much) were british.
Seconding that this movie is great. It is however probably the most painful I’ve watched in recent memory. Gritty and ultraviolent is not a pleasant combination.
I have the disk from netflix in my possession right now. Is it streaming yet?
Watched it by myself the first time, I must now share it with the people I know.
It isn’t available for streaming, yet.
I thought I saw “Total War: Shogun 2” and I was really excited for a second :(
There was a video on youtube someone in Shogun 2 who was down to defending a castle with a single samurai against a bunch of spearmen, and the spearman routed right as his samurai got caught in a kill animation so he managed to win the battle with 0 troops remaining.
I think I’ve concluded that the main issue with the hideous faces is that it’s really hard to actually get the camera close enough for the game to show the high resolution models (being a top-down rts and all) and pressing the N button to zoom dosn’t actually update anything.
Other than that I think there might just be an issue with certain textures being bugged and super blurry (a lot of the chainmail textures especially).
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/919021305109114523/076386ABFA816A857A15A4FAB072E0D666E18344/
But but but, Friend Computer, we have no happiness pills! Can we have some sent by ICBM please? Mmmm, happiness pills…. Also, our Happiness Officer seems to have overdosed and is currently foaming at the mouth and mumbling about giant water bugs. Does he have clearance for that?
Remember not to read any blue comments unless you are clearance BLUE or higher.
I honestly have no idea what CA did with Rome 2. I’ve been playing a co-op campaign with a friend and it has been just a mess. End turns phases lasting on average about 4-5 mins. On the main map the AI is cowardly and toothless. In battle the AI is suicidally insane. And for some reason totally beyond me they neglected to fix the desync issue, an issue that has been haunting TW games since I don’t know when.
Oh and on the topic of the random flags in the middle of battles, from what I’ve been hearing they put that in to be an additional penalty to being caught while using forced march and that point is suppose to represent the baggage train. The problem is it’s bugged so that the damn flags are popping up in battles where they don’t belong.
So it’s not so much a bad design as it is incompetent game building.
Where that +40% extra budget when, I’ll never know.
Still enjoying it but, and I don’t say this lightly, it feels like a beta test that I had to pay to get into.
This is very disappointing. I’ve already upgraded my computer…
Perhaps I’ll give Crusader Kings a try.
Though some of this is actually old. Planting spearment behind an open door and wating for the enemy to charge their cavalry into it has been working since at least the first Rome (though modders have managed to fix that a little). I’m playing the Roma Surrectum II mod right now, and it is obnoxious how the AI treats allied cavalry. It’s like charging spearmen is coded into the AI somewhere. I’ve lost 3 allied generals to the magenetic attraction of cavalry and spears.
And while it sounds like they’ve gone too far in the other direction, the campaign AI has usually been suicidally and stupidly over-aggressive. I thought they’d managed to fix some of that in Empire, but I guess not.
I blame Sega. Ever since they bought Creative Assembly they have been pushing the games out with poor QA. Also, I could run Shogun 2 at max settings with a good framerate; Rome 2 chokes on medium. :(
You joke about it, but Parthia genuinely did capture the Roman flags in battle and won a major war between the two powers. Also Augustus got those flags back and it was a major victory for him. Flags are serious business.
So really Rome 2 is utterly realistic.
Of course, they carried the eagles into battle, so they weren’t in random indefensible places. And they would be important even into the Civil War. For that matter, if you stole a regimental flag from a modern army, they’d probably drop everything and come hunt you down.
The flag is the regiment.
While my classical history is pretty rusty, my recollection is that ancient armies preferred to fight in the open. Phalanxes don’t handle streets well. You see this during the Second Punic War -rather than facea siege of Carthage, the Carthaginians came out to fight at Zama. Before that, Hannibal avoided sieging cities and the Romans kept sending out armies to fight at Trebia, Tresamine, Canae… The Gauls couldn’t even do real sieges. Brennus had to sneak up the walls and cliffs at night -others had to rely on bribery or speed to catch the city with the gates open.
Go back even further, and Alexander made a doctrine out of massed open field battles at places like Gaugamela. Alexander could even do sieges. And earlier still -Marathon, Platea, Thermopylae, Mantinea.
Siege is warfare is more a medieval thing.
Very much depends on your definition of “siege”. The biggest problem foes fighting Rome had was, quite simply, that they had no weapons to take the Roman walls down. Fighting “in the open” had more to do with known strategies and a lack of willingness to experiment.
Alexander had quite a few sieges, and the Greek city-states practically made a sport out of catapulting each others’ walls down.
Heck, even chemical warfare has been around since those times – throwing pox-ridden corpses into cities and such.
For Rome, fighting in the open also had to do with being a Manly Roman Man. The message history takes away from Hannibal’s campaign in Italy was “Hannibal insulting your Roman Peen is not a good enough reason to abandon a walled city”.
So, if “The flag is the regiment.” then how can the regiment hunt you down? Don’t you just become the regiment if you take the flag? How do they even get organized without their flag?
I can Imagine an Avatar:TLA Crossover with Total War: Rome.
However the style would be much more inline with a Book Series I’ve read.
If the Modders put in as the other teams: a horde civ with various monsters mixed in; An army of Wolfmen with some kind of magic; and for complete fun, an army that plays like the zerg from Starcraft then that would make my day.
Good old Codex Alera.
I suppose you could reskin fire siphons for the fire nation. Earth nation could probably have a lot of re-skinned slingers and invisible catapults. Don’t know what you’d do for water or air though.
At the end, was that a joke/reference to where the word barbarian came from??
I sincerely hope so.
Speaking of Dwarf Fortress I have a Dwarf Fortress with all you guys in it.
Josh is a master Blacksmith who ended up being the Baron
Chris is the bookkeeper
Shamus was sadly shot by goblins D:
Reginald Cuftbert was kidnapped by goblins as a child, I feel sorry for the goblins.
Jarenth is a good miner
Mumbles is still a child
I have no idea what happened to Ruts, I assume he realized what unimaginable yet certain death awaited us all and left. I cant find a tomb with him in and I cant find him on the list of citizens.
Speaking of Dwarf Fortress, this was the first thing that came to mind, when Josh mentioned the retarded horse archers.
It’s goblin christmas and some dozen goblins invade to bring you some nice iron and clothes after being slaughtered by your warriors. Then one goblin dies and drops his socks as loot and suddenly all the idling dwarves in the dining hall RUSH outside into the enemy army to Get. That. Sock.
Thankfully Toady One implemented burrow to restrict the civilian movement, but you still have to remember to place the burrows.
There’s an option to forbid dropped clothing. It’s advised that you turn it on, lest everything go full Boatmurdered.
Actually even a burrow isn’t enough to stay the hand of my idiots. My military dwarves leave their watch tower and run out into certain death even with the burrow. I always have to forbid the front doors AND use a burrow AND give my guys a move order to the tower.
Friggin determined idiots. Sometimes they throw a big sulk at not being able to find a way to die and simply refuse to equip anything at all and stand perfectly still somewhere. Millitary in DF is maddening I find its easier to make traps. Traps dont run away for a snooze half way through helms deep.l
“Shamus is making a viedogame and working in 2D is easy!”
Unfortunately, even 2D has to deal with the typo dimension.
In Supreme Commander, one of the factions had a naval destroyer that could sprout legs and walk on land. Based on this, I choose to believe ships on land is a totally legit combat maneuver, and Josh needs to make use of this more.
Ah yes, the Cybran Salem-class destroyer. One of my favorite non-experimental units in the game. Also, in SupCom 2, This was changed to an upgrade for all Cybran ships, and it gave them jump jets to boot. Enjoy the sight of a dozen battleships jumping straight into your base!
Unless I recall incorrectly, Red Alert 3 had those as well. Obviously that makes them a legitimate thing.
I loved those too. The first Supreme Commander game I ever played was a big LAN battle, and I built a fleet consisting entirely of those. One of the other players had a ton of submarines defending his base, and he was rather surprised when my armada hit his beach and kept going.
Not that this necessarily excuses anything, but I’d figured the capture points in Rome 2 were trying to represent supply camps or something similar – since the capture and/or destruction of the line of supply in conflicts all throughout history have at various times resulted in routed armies.
(and, incidentally, and randomly, I’d have loved to hear Rutskarn dubbing many of the voices in the game, particularly if they used him instead of the guys they got for all the diplomacy talks – ugh, so many pseudo-gravelly voices going on about honeyed words)
It was disappointing that it’s confirmed that there’s no voice acting in Unrest. I mean, why else would you hire Rutskarn if not voice acting? And I do mean *all* the voice acting.
Sounds like a Writer’s Cut waiting to happen.
I am cheerfully and excitedly looking forward to seeing this episode at The Hague!
Do people not really get why Netflix sucks for selection?
Okay, back in the day when Netflix was a streaming bonanza of awesome TV shows and movies, there was a reason: Big studios were stupid and thought nobody would ever want to watch streaming movies for a limited time (probably after the disastrous DIVX disc player) rather than buying a DVD or going to the theaters. Therefore, they thought Netflix was crazy for even wanting to start the service they were proposing and sold the rights (for several years) to their movies/shows at dirt cheap prices.
To their surprise, Netflix started making buckets of money. The studios saw the profitability of streaming, and when Netflix went to renew the rights on their catalogs, the studios laughed in their faces and started trying to make their own exclusive streaming services. This left Netflix with low-budget, bad, or forgotten movies/shows for the most part to take the place of the previous offerings.
On the flip side, Netflix is going to be the exclusive stream outlet for Disney and Star Wars, so maybe their fortunes will turn around in the near future.
This is happening with every medium. Everyone else remembers how the music industry failed to see which way the wind was blowing and let Apple utterly dominate their whole industry’s distribution model. No other content industry wants a third-party iTunes to have that much control over their content. The movie studios don’t want Netflix to become the iTunes of movies, the big book publishers don’t want Amazon to become the iTunes of ebooks (so ironically they made a shady deal with Apple to try and circumvent Amazon), EA doesn’t want Steam to become the iTunes of PC gaming, etc., etc.
I’d argue that steam is already there.
I’d argue that Steam was already the iTunes of gaming before EA even tried to get its mitts on the digital distribution platform bandwagon.
The primary difference I see between iTunes and Steam is that iTunes tries to own all of your music, whereas Steam doesn’t care. Because iTunes also plays your music, you don’t ever need to launch anything else, but Steam just kind of has hyperlinks to launch your games.
It is actually impossible to run a game that uses steamworks without also running steam at the same time. So I’d argue this is exactly like itunes.
Yes, but at the same time I feel like that’s different.
It isn’t really, but I don’t feel like I’m being controlled by a company when I use steam, but when I use iTunes, I always feel like I’m being controlled and limited.
Probably because iTunes is not a particularly great music player, whereas steam only needs to launch the .exe file.
I’m Pretty sure The Avengers is on netflix. also all the lead up marvel movies.
Medieval 2: Total Subversion — that’s when both France and England decided to put their entire population under source control, right?
And they didn’t even distribute the repository!
Gits!
(yes, we’re doing software puns now)
HAPPINESS IS MANDATORY.
BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE
UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES.
HAPPINESS WILL PREVAIL
If you are trying to publish an indie board or card game, might I recommend the Game Salute service. While I have never used it, I hear good things about it. It seems exactly tailored to this sort of thing.
RE: Netflix:
SHAMUS! Have you and you family seen The Secret of Kells yet? That one’s on Netflix. Have everybody sit down and watch it! :D
It’s so good… ;_;
At first I read that as secret of kelly and went “Wait,what?”.
Huh; I may have to look into this; I remember noticing it when it came out, simply because I’ve actually seen the physical Book of Kells when I was in Ireland, and was tempted to see it just for nostalgia, but didn’t think it’d be any good.
It’s one of my favorite movies of all time.
I did a presentation on it in the same mythology class in which I was introduced to it.
It makes me teary eyed.
It’s so good. ;_;
Im
disappointedsurprised no one has mentioned this yet:There is a way in saints row 4 to get unlimited ammo:reach level 50.Level 50 and get the perk for unlimited special ammo. I did that and I could go from no notoriety to fighting a warden in like 2 minutes or less. It is crazy powerful with unlimited ammo.
All in favor for having this episode reposted at double speed say HZH!
Hzuhadslgkhaslkdbglawwwaaaa?
Vampire’s Kiss has always been my favorite vampire movie.
Made all the better by the fact that technically, there’s not a single vampire in it.
Dredd is an awesome movie. So is #DirtyLaundry. I’m really looking forwards to Adi Shankar’s next movie – an ensemble action movie starring Gina Carano.
Hey,Josh has a link finally.Huzzah!
So… stomach butterflies in a callipygian orgy huh? How does that… work… exactly? I mean, butterflies don’t exactly have buttocks. Is there a mammal involved in this metaphpor?
Campster talks about Aliens, which reminds me of the how would you make an Aliens game, which reminds me that I never got around to posting my idea… Ah well.
I think my problem with most games based off of a movie is they never get the right mix. I mean Aliens has aliens in it but it isn’t really a movie about aliens. It’s like making a FPS where all you so is shoot replicants and calling it Blade Runner. Or making 2001: A Space Odyssey where you shoot monoliths to make cover so you can hide while shooting more monoliths until the boss fight with HAL.
Side note: Papers, Please with a Voight-Kampff machine? Someone get Lucas Pope the license to do this.
Anyway, my suggestion follows. I’m going to use a different IP with this example because it fits better but you should get the gist.
You sit down to play Tomb Raider 2: The Entombening, which from the reviews you know is great. Pop in the disk and wait while the launch day patch grabs a few gigs of why-the-heck-didn’t-they-catch-this-before-RTM and wait for the game to launch.
Buried in the opening…credits? I don’t know what the roll call of everyone who gave time/money/software/whatever is called. At any rate 20th Century Fox is listed but you probably clicked passed that whole mess to get to the menu.
You play a few hours. Raiding tombs, shooting dudes, murdering animals, all the fun stuff. Life is good until you get to “that” cut scene. Blah blah blah, people are talking maybe this has something to do with the plot but whatev…is that…what’s that on his forehead? Three red dots in a triangle, I’ve seen that somewhere befo…*BOOM* ….Was that a Predator gun?! There’s a Predator in this game? Lets see, I have a bow and a couple of gun parts. And there is a Predator waiting for me out in the jungle…
Surprise. Yes kids, hidden in that launch patch was a predator safely out of the reach of spoiler revealing review sites. Unfortunately the ESRB really, really doesn’t like surprises so it probably wouldn’t fly but a guy can dream right?
PS a Blade Runner shooter where you play as a replicant shooting other replicants? Say, at the Tannhauser gate? With c-beams glittering in the dark? I would totally play that game.
Chris mentioned AvP2 when he actually meant Alien vs Predator (2010).
Those in the know, will remember that AvP2 is the shortform for Alien vs Predator (2001) by Monolith.
Which is possible the best example on how to make a game with 3 separate but overlapping storylines (with a few humourous ovelaps) te graphics are damn dated by now but the story is is good.
The expansion Primal Hunt managed to improve this even further, by telling a prequel story that ties perfectly into the main game.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve played this one. And consider it the best AvP game so far.
I rank it with Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines on my impact scale (others being Deus Ex, and Jedi Outcast/Jedi Academy, and KoTOR/KoToR2, etc).
Shelter looks like a really interesting game.
Importantly, it dares to be different. It has an art style that is unique – not the typical photo-realism of the AAA titles and not the typically retro style of indie games (which is a plague that is vary rarely discussed).
It’s game play also seems to be unique. In fact, any game that’s not centered around violence is pretty unique.
I should play it.
Edit: Woops, didn’t mean to reply, sorry about that.
Well I can say for ya Ruts that someone did make an attempt to do an Avatar: The Last Airbender conversion mod and even got as far as an alpha build…back in ’08.
2tal War: Rome
(Also, the next Saints Row game will be called 5aints Row. Just to keep wreaking havoc using alphabetical order.)