Stuff That is Happening

By Shamus Posted Friday Apr 7, 2017

Filed under: Personal 37 comments

My daughter Bay (who you probably know from the podcast / Spoiler Warning, if you’re into those) is visiting the family this week. You might remember I visited her last December. (The header image on this post is from that visit.) Now she’s here for a week and we’re catching up.

The girlsMy wife Heather and our daughters Bay and Esther. are going to Tekko this weekend. They’ve made themselves some cosplay costumesIs “cosplay costumes” redundant? Can cosplay be used to refer to the costume itself? As in: “She’s wearing cosplay.” That sounds wrong, but I dunno. and will be doing whatever it is otaku do at these things. Probably going to panels where anime voice actors joke around and sign stuff. If you’re curious: Bay is going as Deadpool in a wedding dress. Heather is going as Kiki. They have other costumes they’re doing on other days, but I’m not familiar with the characters in question. All I know is they’re pretty happy with how it all turned out.

I actually had a bunch of content I wanted to post, but, see…


I just finished playing through all three Borderlands games for the big write-up I’m doing on the series. It looks like it’s going to be about the same size as the Arkham City writeup. (About half the size of Mass Effect.) So then I figured I should take another stab at finally doing my big write-up on Fallout 4. To make that happen, I figured I should play through the game again. And to get into the proper mindset, I figured I should play the vanilla game with no mods. You might remember that I tend to play with a lot of mods.

Just as I was about to purge the mods and start fresh, I ran into this article: The Sim Settlements mod for Fallout 4 is so good it should be an official part of the game. I figured I should take that for a spin before I returned to vanilla Fallout 4.

That was a little over a week ago, and it’s all I’ve accomplished since then. With the mod installed, it feels like there’s another entire game inside of Fallout 4. You lay down Sim City style plots of residential, industrial, commercial, and agricultural space. Settlers move in, take jobs, and build homes for themselves. They upgrade their homes over time. I’ll roll back into town after a days-long trek across the CommonwealthI usually don’t use fast travel. to find new buildings and faces in town. I spend a lot of time gathering up resources to keep the town going.

Everyone has a designated house. No more random communal beds.
Everyone has a designated house. No more random communal beds.

The game is eating a ton of productivity. In a good way. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed Fallout 4 this much. Sadly, I’m barely engaging with the vanilla content, so very little of this time will be useful for my eventual write-up.

The mod works really well when combined with the mod “Don’t Call Me Settler”, which is one of those “Why isn’t this part of the base game?” kinda mods. It automatically gives settlers unique names and lets you clean up dead bodies from your settlements.

Warning: I just noticed that the author of “Don’t Call Me Settler” has taken down the mod. Apparently it’s bugged and will kill your settlement. Eventually settlers will stall and stop taking action, and will just stand around forever. Hasn’t happened to me yet, but it’s a serious bug and there’s no known fix. (If you uninstall the mod, the game will likely crash.)

Fallout 4 is a deeply flawed and conflicted game, but it’s an amazing framework for building other, better games that are far more interesting but no less buggy.

Anyway.

I’m planning on doing one more public test of Pseudoku before putting the game on Steam. Hopefully that will happen next week.

Between the Fallout 4 relapse and Bay’s visit, content might be a little thin next week. We’ll see.

 

Footnotes:

[1] My wife Heather and our daughters Bay and Esther.

[2] Is “cosplay costumes” redundant? Can cosplay be used to refer to the costume itself? As in: “She’s wearing cosplay.” That sounds wrong, but I dunno.

[3] I usually don’t use fast travel.



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37 thoughts on “Stuff That is Happening

  1. Droid says:

    Somehow, I read the “warning” paragraph in about the tone that would be appropriate if you switched out ‘bug(ged)’ for ‘(got) cancer’.

    1. Sharnuo says:

      You should have read it as “Warning, old men. Warning, warning, old men.”

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxi7JRJrod4

      “We’ve had to endure much, you and I, but within the week there will be old men- Running the world: A NEW AGE!

  2. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Heather is going as Kiki.

    Did she make a jiji costume for you as well?So you can finally get in touch with your inner spirit animal.

    1. Phantos says:

      I didn’t check out that movie until I found out Phil Hartman played the cat in the dub.

      Then I saw it and quite liked it, but then I got sad because Phil Hartman’s not around anymore. D:

      1. SKD says:

        He’s dead? He died in 1998? Man I am out of touch. The date startled me more than the fact that he was dead since I could swear I had seen/heard him in something made since then (as in the last decade). I have no problem calling his voice to mind.

  3. mac says:

    Did Baychel used to be Rachel, or is my memory really that bad?

    Also, solid choices on the costumes.

    1. Joe says:

      Yep, this was discussed on one of the recent Diecasts. She got fed up with Rachel, as it’s an overly common name. I can understand that attitude.

      1. baud001 says:

        I was surprised too, thank you for that info, since I don’t listen to the Diecast.
        On the other hand, a uncommon name will be very often mangled/misheard/badly written by other people (for example in your work email address…), like in my case (I have a variation of an uncommon name). Still it’s not too bad.

        1. Droid says:

          Her new name is Bay, Shamus just calls her Baychel because he’s a dad and dads are like that sometimes.

  4. Phantos says:

    Fallout 4 is a deeply flawed and conflicted game, but it's an amazing framework for building other, better games that are far more interesting but no less buggy.

    This is exactly why I was hoping that Obsidian or another dev team would get a crack at a Fallout game with this engine. It seems like a good foundation to build something better on(as the mods can attest). It’d be a shame for it to only be used for that stupid synth BS.

  5. Sunshine says:

    Man, Captain America’s not looking so athletic these days.

    Sorry, I did have more: I think cosplay is the act of dressing up in costumes, which makes “wearing cosplay” like “driving a trucking”, so that’s why it sounds wrong. She’s cosplaying.

    Also, the Don’t Call Me Settler bug sounds like a great setup for unsettling creepiness, as your neighbours grind to a halt and stand rooted to the spot, night and day, rain or shine, their only movements turning as one to follow your movements, like a field of sunflowers tracking the sun.

    1. MrGuy says:

      Also, the Don't Call Me Settler bug sounds like a great setup for unsettling creepiness, as your neighbours grind to a halt and stand rooted to the spot, night and day, rain or shine, their only movements turning as one to follow your movements, like a field of sunflowers tracking the sun.

      I think it would make an awesome scifi short story. Imagine a few “real” humans trapped in a matrix-style simulation. They don’t realize it’s a simulation. Then, one day, the 2,147,483,647th person is born in the simulation, causing an integer overflow, and all the simulated individuals freeze/bug out. The “real” humans must escape the simulation before the world crashes…

      1. Da Mage says:

        There was a creepypasta written about morrowind that had that same sort of premise. Was a good read on the Bethesda Forums over a decade ago.

    2. Cilvre says:

      Your comment reminded me of the mannequin issues in skyrim. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvUOmV5h_xU

      1. Izicata says:

        This happens because mannequins are just regular NPCs with a different name and race, that are scripted to stand in a particular spot. Sometimes the script that makes them stay in their spot lags a bit, so they can move around until it properly runs.

        1. Cilvre says:

          still lead to creepy spots where you’d enter a room and they would be standing at your bed and thats when the script would fire off. how about creepy watson instead for creepy features in a game:
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13YlEPwOfmk

          1. Christopher says:

            I adore that video. I feel like I heard once that Creepy Watson was the inspiration for slenderman, but that’s just hearsay I can’t even remember where I picked up.

  6. Duoae says:

    I’m just wondering whether Bethesda will ever just release a framework of a game with lots of base content (I guess a la second life? Never played that game) stick a store on it and let people make their own games/mods and sell stuff on the store and give the user created stuff that’s sold a small cut. Kinda like valve but purely for the bethesda ‘game’…

    1. Galad says:

      After the paid mods fiasco, I feel like any ideas whose pitch is “like Valve does, but for Bethesda”, are a Very Bad Idea for gamers.

      1. Duoae says:

        That’s a fair comment! :D

        I’d forgotten about that… though it doesn’t sound like Valve is the greatest (looking at recent events around DOTA).

        To be honest, I don’t trust any company unreservedly. I just could see them releasing the toolkit and the assets and not bothering to make all the core gameplay stuff themselves and instead allow people to make paid-for mods/total conversions (as we used to call them!).

  7. Elemental Alchemist says:

    Is “cosplay costumes” redundant? Can cosplay be used to refer to the costume itself? As in: “She's wearing cosplay.” That sounds wrong, but I dunno.

    Cosplay is a contraction of “costume play”. Typically you say someone is “cosplaying as x”.

    1. MrGuy says:

      Right. But what do you call an outfit someone makes to cosplay in? Do you simply call it a costume? A cosplay outfit? Something else?

      1. Syal says:

        Cosplay clothes.

      2. Amstrad says:

        I’ve generally seen it referred to as an/the ‘outfit’ the person will be cosplaying in. IE: “I have 4 different outfits I’ll be cosplaying in during the event!”

  8. Hal says:

    “content might be a little thin next week”

    Kind of ironic. I’m catching up on Diecasts, so to my mind, you just complained that you’ve got too much pipeline content, with posts that will ship out through June.

    Oh, I get that upending scheduled posts is crazy and not really a solution to this issue. It’s just amusing that you’ve got a dozen or more posts waiting to debut but you can still say, “I’ve got no content!” Water, water, everywhere, etc.

  9. Steve C says:

    This site and the forums are both down for me unless I use a proxy. I sent you an email about it. It will probably get eaten by a spam filter so I’m mentioning it here.

  10. Da Mage says:

    The settlement building adds so much to Fallout 4. In my opinion, it drags the game from mediocre up to good.

    1. Phantos says:

      I cared so much more for maintaining dirt towns, for a bunch of nameless NPCs than I did for anything the main quest WANTED me to care about.

  11. Des says:

    I have some friends going to Tekko (I don’t have enough interest in anime to make it worth going with them) I’ll tell them to keep an eye out.

    So we’re getting a big Borderlands series? Looking forward to that, it’s a weird series that is both super fun and super annoying. Mostly around the fact that the game’s system all seem designed for multiplayer and everything is terrible when you approach it solo.

    1. Matt K says:

      I’m currently playing BL2 as a Mechromancer and the solo experience has been pretty good (that said, I had tried other classes and did not enjoy the experience as much).

      I’d love it if Shamus also includes the Tales from Borderlands (the only other BL game I played, and I played it first) in this write up, at least as an addendum. It’s interesting seeing the setting in a completely different light/game type and would make a neat comparison to the base games.

      1. Des says:

        Oh yeah, that’d be interesting. I thought it was actually really good and captured the tone of the setting amazingly well. Plus, with some of the stuff that happens to the characters from the main series there, it’ll likely end up being important to the story in Borderlands 3.

  12. Sjonnar says:

    Fallout 4 is a deeply flawed and conflicted game, but it's an amazing framework for building other, better games that are far more interesting but no less buggy.

    Bethesda.txt right here, boss. Seems like their great skill really is in making interesting worlds and systems for someone else to come along and make good games in.

  13. Groboclown says:

    Frankly, I’m surprised that Shamus has time for all of this, considering that Netflix now has season 7 of Archer available.

    1. Blue_Pie_Ninja says:

      and here I am still going through season 3 :/

  14. Son of Valhalla says:

    You’re doing a Fallout 4 write-up? Oh man! Get ready… for… nitpicking. I am prepared. The Altered Scrolls was my second favorite games write-up on here (sorry Shamus), and the next Bethesda game to have my attention through the entire analysis Fallout 4.

    Borderlands is cool too. I played Borderlands 2 and liked the loot and boss system, though I played with my brother, so I had most of my gaming time hogged when I had it.

  15. “Fallout 4 is a deeply flawed and conflicted game, but it's an amazing framework for building other, better games that are far more interesting but no less buggy.”

    This made me laugh so hard. SO true.

  16. Narida says:

    Shamus, did you see that the unlocking mini-game in Andromeda is basically Pseudoku, right down to the symbols instead of numbers and the non-rectangular subgroups?

    Looks like the team wanted to make sure there was at least one thing you couldn’t complain about XD

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