T w e n t y S i d e d

“I try to imagine what Twenty Sided would be like if Pat was running it. That would be a very different kind of website.” – Shamus, Jul 7, 2016

I don’t know about running it. How about some totally unprofessional hot takes on a beloved franchise, instead?

Shamus was an extreme introvert that could sit in front of a computer for hours, sometimes days. I was an extrovert who could not sit still for  10 minutes. Across the hall, in the basement where our rooms were, it was common for me to blast Public Enemy and drown out his 10k Maniacs.

I played hockey, he played Galaxy Quest.

Shamus didn’t go to bars, drink, smoke or imbibe FDA unapproved personality enhancers. He told me he got “tipsy” once, when he was 19, hated it and never tried it again. I had that beat by age 12, had the opposite reaction and didn’t stop until a few years after I was divorced and lost a gallbladder.

I could do this all day; you get the point. He and I had very little in common,  but what we did have in common was stuff that mattered. We could talk for hours about nothing. And everything. We could have entire conversations using nothing but John Hughes movie quotes. Eventually it would always come back to games. Always video games…

Mom would say the Atari 2600 the best and worst gift she ever bought us. The best because it brought us thousands of hours of entertainment.

The worst because we did nothing but fight, scream, punch, kick, argue and quite literally beat the shit out of each other in the name of “entertainment”. Because brothers.

I chuckle when people wax poetic about Super Smash Bros. or Mario Kart games that got verbally aggressive. Amateurs. I have a scar under my eyebrow from when Shamus slammed my head against the wall during a game of Warlords. Got 5 stitches. Shamus had a similar scar on his forehead from when I hit him in the face with a D-cell battery. I think that was after a round of tanks on Combat? Or was it Maze Craze? I’m not sure. Thanks to Atari we had post-concussion syndrome by 4^th grade, so it’s all a bit fuzzy. That is unfortunately truer than it is grim sardonicism.

The Atari was the foundation for the rest of our brotherhood and made us best friends. The scars, literal and figurative, were emotional adhesive. 30 years after we ripped the box open on Christmas, hooked up that Atari to an 11” black and white TV, we still had inside jokes about who got the left or right controller.

But even in games we were different. Shamus would play several games at once, jumping into Thief II for a few hours, then a few hours of Morrowind. Maybe some GTA. I would play the same game, nonstop, for months. When San Andreas came out I don’t think it left my PS2 for a year.

As a programmer he experienced games differently. Shamus wasn’t just playing, he was judging. Learning. He once spent 30 minutes walking around Vice city just to see how a corona appeared through glass. I was trying to see how long I could survive with 5 stars using a flamethrower.

Shamus would spend at least a few hours on every major game released. I logged well over 1k hours on FFX alone.

But after 6-7 months of shooting Handsome Jack’s handsome face a few hundred times, or storming San Andreas police station wearing boxer shorts and armed with a purple dildo, or collecting 47 sets of power armor, I would visit him and chop up the last game. We would spend hours talking about how broken the Capital wasteland was, or how we should feel about Joel. Eventually I would ask “Dude… What do I play now?”

Last time he told me “Have you played Witcher III? Fuckin’ amazing!”

As usual, he was right. I’ve gone through 8, maybe 9 playthroughs? Every location, every side quest. It still makes me laugh; still find something I missed before. There are no flamethrowers or purple dildos, but I’ll spend an hour (or two) slaughtering a hundred Redanian guards in Oxenfurt because I’m in a bad mood and this fuckwit has the audacity to threaten a Witcher. Don’t even get me started on Gwent.

I did another playthrough last year and it’s still one of the best games ever. Honestly, I would feel comfortable calling it the best game ever made. At least the best game I’ve played, and admittedly there are a lot of really good games I haven’t played. If it were released today, it would be nominated by every meaningful critic for GOTY. Its still relevant graphically and cinematically. Voice acting is still industry leading. For an 11-year-old game? That’s unheard of.

Sure, other games have stayed relevant for that long. Blizzard proved you can stay relevant for decades. But still visually stunning? Still setting the standard for character and voice acting? After 11 years and still better than almost everyone else, in almost every way?

That just does not happen. In any profession, not just video games. Especially not games.

It’s times like this that I miss him the most. To marvel at Witcher III and how much better it was than anything else made in 2015. Probably spend 5 minutes wondering why CDPR can make something so spectacular, yet Todd Howard can’t form a coherent thought with twice the budget. How over a decade later it’s still better than what most studios are putting out. What does that mean, if anything? Have they hit a wall, and the next improvements in appearance, lighting or size will be incremental? He would know these things.

He didn’t know shit else, really. I mean seriously…. I love the guy, but he was the smartest idiot I have ever known. I had to explain to him that diesel trucks use different fuel, he thought they were just larger vehicles. He once tried to wash his dishes with laundry detergent because “soap is soap….. right?”

But he knew games, and he knew the industry. Now, 11 years later, Witcher III is coming out with yet another DLC this spring. At (rumored) $30 its kinda pricey for DLC, especially for a game that was released around the time people were freaking out over a black stormtrooper. Considering what we got from CDPR in previous DLC (Hearts of Stone $10, Blood and wine $20) I think we can trust a solid ROI. Some rumors have it as only an hour and a half long, but I find it hard to believe CDPR would bother doing anything that small, or charge that much for it even if they did. Just not their style.

He would be frothing for Witcher4. He made no secret he thought the industry needed more strong female lead characters, so CDPR moving Ciri to the front of the franchise would have made him happier than a new gallbladder and a lifetime supply of salt & vinegar pringles. Especially since, while he loved Witcher III as a game, he kinda hated Geralt. A lot. If Shamus were still around, he would have something to say and give it a write-up.

Probably? It’s also likely he would wander off and write a steampunk novel about an evil duchess trying to take over the world with ferrets, and the heroic team of librarians who try to stop her with balloons and Shakespearian prose. Or a barber shop quartet using mustache magic…. or some shit. Also something he would totally try to do.

But he isn’t here to do either, and since I don’t know anything about mustache magic, I’ll try to write about the new Witcher III DLC in a way that would make him laugh.

Or piss him off. I haven’t decided.

Patrick Young I once picked a fight with a Chevy Blazer. And won.