T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I felt like I couldn’t do a normal Diecast episode. I’ll have a post about that tomorrow. In the meantime, Paul decided to record an episode with a special guest. I won’t spoil it except to say I really enjoyed it and I hope you’ll give it a listen.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
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Link (YouTube) |
Show notes:
00:00 Intro
00:16 Minecraft
04:28 Townscaper
06:10 Voltron
08:05 Everspace 2 Demo
13:22 Hyperbolica
15:20 VR Games
16:43 Nandgame
22:55 Scribblenauts Unlimited
25:00 Minecraft Again
27:02 Mailbag: Question for Paul
Door Dipcast,
Hi Paul. Of all your experiences as a freelance 3D modeler (if that description is accurate?), what is the most interesting/unusual request you have been commissioned to produce? or the most interesting/unusual intent for your finished product?
Yours geometrically,
Nick
Here’s the 3d stuff Paul has made.
35:58 Outro
Outro Music is Metroid “Kraidzy Dance” OC ReMix by Dirty Delay
Borderlands Series
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
The Game That Ruined Me
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
NandGame! In practice, we don’t actually build most chips out of NAND (or the other functionally-complete operator, NOR) so as a building block it’s mostly used in memory, but it’s kind of fun knowing that hypothetically we could. And it’s a great refresher of what I learned in my 100-level Electrical Eng & Comp Sci courses so many decades ago.
Ah, Minecraft history… I remember when hunger/saturation wasn’t a thing.
Come to think of it, I also remember the first time I saw squid and was wary of the unknown water monsters. Good times.
Ha, yes! I started playing in 1.2, and my first world started me in the middle of a jungle, and I was terrified of everything I saw, including squids. I made a lovely set of treehouses in the canopy of the large jungle trees to keep away from things spawning below.
Then a good friend of mine got into Minecraft and we started playing multiplayer, and haven’t looked back. We had to take a break for four years while I did my PhD, but we actually got back into it just last month. We played a ton of 1.7 (because of mods), so the jump to 1.16 has been pretty interesting with all the new vanilla content to discover.
I vividly remember sailing around, exploring the new version of Minecraft. I came to a sandy beach that had a strange green cube. The cube was covered in black spots. I got close and I started taking damage, so then I ran back to my boat and sailed away.
(It was a 1-block tall cactus.)
I found the game in the early alpha days, back when bows just fired instantly at random deviation, wolves were new and crazy rare, you could divide beds with pistons and crash the game, and other good stuff.
Had the same wariness of squids, it was hard to know back then if they weren’t just going to attack you suddenly. These days I like to try and put them into aquariums.
Man, I love the Scribblenauts series, except for Scribblenauts Unmasked. I was so excited for it after Unlimited. You’d think that marrying together one of my favorite game series with one of my favorite fantasy universes (DC Comics) would be a slam dunk, but I just cannot get into the game. It completely screws with the formula. Usually these games come with perfectly handcrafted puzzles, but in Unmasked they’re mostly randomized, which means they’re trading creativity and well-executed ideas for replayability, and it doesn’t really work, because all this does is make the puzzles feel more repetitive, so you really won’t feel like replaying it.
Worse, the game has story missions that literally tell you what to do, entirely defeating the whole purpose, and they have the gall of coming filled with unskippable cutscenes. I just don’t get how they screwed up so badly such a simple yet genius concept. It’s like adding mayonnaise to your ice cream cake. It’s a single ingredient, but ruins the whole thing.
Could be worse, could be unpausable as well.
Really fun podcast! I just hope Shamus is alright, and he couldn’t record because something amazingly awesome happened, and he was too overcome with joy…
Paul, I salute you for finding a way to create content with your daughter. I can hardly get mine to play-test the mini-games I make. I played all her games. It would be only fair of her to reciprocate!
Well, that was a fun episode. Leah (Leia? Some other spelling?) sounds like a natural. :)
Paul, just FYI, on your page linked there clicking on any of the thumbnails brings up an error page, which I surmise is not the intended outcome.
Yeah, the gallery is running on a super old PHP, so it breaks occasionally on PHP updates.
I’m working with my host to get it fixed.
And yes, it’s Leah, though that is a contraction.
Very wholesome episode of the Diecast today, makes me miss the intern work I did in the local school systems. It can be very fun to hear kids’ perspectives on games and media these days.
A bit late to comment, but I just wanted to say thanks to Paul for answering my question.
Leah was impressively eloquent, and the episode was very enjoyable. I hope we hear from her again some time!
Hey, thanks for asking! I’m never above talking about myself.
Yes, she’s a good kid, and fairly well adjusted for a 12 year old, considering her parentage. She enjoyed it, so I think there are good odds of a return if Shamus needs a break again in the future.