T w e n t y S i d e d
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
A lot of people have been asking us to move the show to Blip.tv. We gave it a try. It didn’t work out. Blip can handle HD video. It can handle half-hour shows. But it can’t handle a half hour HD show. There is an encode that happens on the server side, and it always fails out because it takes too long. So it looks like we’re stuck with Viddler for now.
Oh, and the episode ending the way it did? Totally not related to my comic earlier this week. Just an odd coincidence.
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
Please Help I Can’t Stop Playing Cities: Skylines
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Starcraft 2: Rush Analysis
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
I was going to make fun of Mumbles’ English failure but now I’m scared she would use me as wall decoration.
It’s my birthday today. I’ll let it slide.
Oh, happy birthday! Hope you have/had a good one and didn’t impale too many people today.
Many happy returns, Mumbles!
Happy Birthday! I got you Not a Pun.
Best Gift Ever.
If I read it quickly, it almost sounds like “another pun”…
Wait a minute!
You cynic you.
Also, happy birthday Mumbles!
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday! Please accept this non-corporeal internet cake.
The cake is a lie!
But only literally! Figuratively, it´s not!
Happy birthday! I bought you a cake! And I ate it! Just for you. It was made of kittens. And booze.
Aw i missed it, Happy late Birthday Mumbles!!!
Mà¸à¸se bites can be quite deadly, you know!
The man responsible for this has been sacked. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Winter Blast is a very interesting weapon from a gameplay perspective: it has insane power, and it can be used repeatedly, but it grants no resources (cash, items, XP) when used like other weapons. It’s the equivalent of paying a maintenance fee – note that Josh is regularly broke and/or out of ammo, where a normal player would be rolling in cash, eager to load up on another dozen Electric Buck shots.
That’s why I never used the freezing power ever (except that one bit where you can’t control the plasmids). I’d also try to buy stuff every time I hit the money cap because it annoys me to have to leave loot behind. I’m just weird that way.
To be fair, he’s also buying out a lot of safes and turrets to spare us the hacking mini-game. That eats up resources quickly.
As hysterically funny as always. I especially enjoyed the Monty Python bit towards the end.
Hmm…. Moose….. Moooooooooose…. Yes, got a nice “woody” sound to it, doesn’t it?
Caribooooouuuuuu…. gooonnne.
What is it that people dont’ like about viddler? Seems like a decent player to me. The comment system is kind of cool.
Have you tried applying to be a Youtube partner? I’m not sure they would allow a LetsPlay because of their copyright ownership policies, but it’s worth a shot. Then you’d be able to upload full length shows.
Considering how many Let’s Play videos are on Youtube, I’d be surprised if they were denied it. I watched a full MGS4 playthrough (lack of a PS3 *cries*) on Youtube and I know there’s many, many more. I doubt it’s that big of a deal.
I think the reason why was because of the length of the videos, and their unwillingness to split things into parts.
That said, YouTube would be way, way better. Encode your video in 720p or whatever using x264 and you’ve got some very smooth and nice-looking stuff. See here for an example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPTp04G4HlM
Mumbles stumbles over words just like me! :D
Me too! They say it’s a sign of true genius. Even though it makes you look stupider.
Yeah.
Hey Josh, here’s a big tip. During the break between games, go through the bathosphere back to get any missed big daddies. While there, take as many photos of every splicer possible. Another reason he’s not as powerful as most is that he didn’t abuse photographs early on. I would literally take 3 photos (usually A then B then C), and max out each of the basic splicers. This gives you a +++ damage against them, making those high health splicers, not so much of a threat. Also taking photos of the little sisters would have given you extra health and eve, no matter how creepy you seem when you show up with your photo album of “My time in Rapture.”
Strangely, I don’t remember ever using as many medkits as you do, on hard mode. Maybe because I took the armor tonics combined with increased health and all those other combination of tonics.
Another tip if difficulty looms is to destroy health stations for free medkits, which since he never uses them for their intended purpose is all upside.
He hasn’t bought any health/eve upgrades that I’ve noticed or unlocked any gene tonic slots so he’s probably somewhat squishier than the average player. I know the SW group feels all that was mostly useless, but even a little bit helps when you’re being swarmed by splicers; right?
Meh,vita chambers are pretty good at replacing those.
He bought one hp and Eve upgrade this episode, actually :P Also got his first level of creepy picture skills.
Dying does make the audience drink (even more), though. I guess that counts for something.
Kitten Moose is adorable!
Take a seat,right here,take a seat.So,why did you come here?You were planing to kill this girls big daddy and then fondle her,is that right?And these pictures youre carrying in your pants,what are they?
I was just playing man! I was just playing. I was just walking across the bottom of the ocean when she asked if I could play with her, you know?
All these premature ends reminds me of that damn candlejack meme. Kind of annoying if you ask m
You’re right. First All Points Bu, now This Ends Prematu…
Oh noes, apparently post-pun-overdose trauma, has turned Shamus into psychopathically maniacal title-chopping word-cutting psychopathical maniac!!! (Good golly.) Everyone, lock your nouns, stuck your adjectives in the fridge and soak your verbs in mustard. No maniac wants to attack verbs soaking with mustard because they’re soo CUUUUTul’hu.
…
Man, I really shouldn’t post anything after 10 pm.
Eh, its not worse than the stuff I post at 1AM on other websites. When I re-read what I post I have to do double-takes, sometimes they’re far better than anything I’ve written, sometimes they look like they were written by a 5 year old.
Ugh, I know what you mean, Irridium, and it’s such a childish one too. Honestly, who would believe that saying Candlejack would let him come and ta
Oh, by the way, a while back it was wondered what the ADAM difference was between saving and killing the Little Sisters. A harvest yields 160 ADAM, while a rescue yields 80 + 200 per 3. This comes out to a net profit on harvesting of 40 ADAM per 3 Little Sisters. Since I believe there are 15 Little Sisters in the game, harvesting yields 200 more ADAM.
True, but don’t you also get a few plasmids and tonics (Hypnotise Big Daddy being one of them) along with a bunch of ammo from the gift packages? I can see how that might even them out to being basically ‘the same’.
IIRC, yes.
Plus you, know, you’re not perpetuating the stereotype of the crazy video gamer with child murder :)
Wait,doesnt that mean you actually get better stuff with playing it good?I mean,how many plasmids can you buy for 200 adam?
Depending on which ones they are. If the gifts consist of two or three free plasmids costing between 80 and 20, it’s quite possible that being good is, in fact, the better route. Especially when you factor in the cost of the ammo.
This actually fits with what I think is a more perfect design of good vs. evil (and what Yoda expresses in TESB): evil is a quicker path, but the rewards are greater, in the end, for good.
The stuff you get for playing nice is exclusive, I think. You can’t buy it in vending machines (at least until the endgame, where it’s kinda worthless). Whether that’s worth it for you is up to you. Personally I’m not sure I’m a big fan of the game calling me a raving jackass for saying the ends justify the means.
So,the only reason to go the evil path is if youve played fallout 3 just before bioshock and have the urge to kill some children.
I have some experience that could confirm this if we made a rigorous scientific study. When I showed my friends this game, most went the evil route. I warned them that they´d get free extra stuff every three sisters they saved, but they prefered the instant-buck choice. The only thing in common between them was that they had played Fallout 3 just before!
Well, if the ends are “you survive,” then yes, you are a raving jackass*. At best, you’re initially using the Little Sisters to save Atlas’s family, in which case a.) you’re killing a bunch of little girls to save two people and b.)that motivation vanishes, while your sororicide probably does not.
*Er. Your character is, anyway. I mean, you yourself are very probably not.
Nice save, there.
I would much rather play a game that balanced Good and Evil by having the evil path strewn with insanely tempting goodies + crippling disadvantages. Disadvantages could be more hostiles, loss of access to other things… VtM:B had the humanity loss and associated increased frenzy risk (which could be crippling at times) but no real goodies to balance it (the only “incentive” would be the new dialogue options).
But basically: who said good and evil paths are required in games? (Other than Star Wars game; those get them automatically.) So if on top of this the difference between the two is “Meh”, then why bother.
(I know, some people just have the ingrained need to play the jerkass whenever it’s an option. I never understood that.)
Personally,Id love to see another game where you can play an evil guy that is not just a dumb jerk,but a manipulator.Last time I saw that was in hordes of the underdark,where you could become the ruler of hell or pmp.
Though,to be fair,singularity has kind of this in the end,but it doesnt really qualify because it is decided only by a single choice.
But..
Sweden really is very nice this time of year. Well, I’ve only been here for a month, so I can’t say anything about other times of year, but.. It’s nice.
But not for long. October and November in this country should be banned outright.
I believe you got Sweden mixed up with Finland, it’s Finland that has a ton of lakes. We have some, but not nearly as many. (We do have Moose though)
Im sure we can spare some of our lakes for our swedish friends in exchange for moose-lamas :)
Wow, Mumbles went a whole 8 episodes before finally breaking down. For an alleged fangirl that is pretty impressive.
Viddler runs much better on my pc than Blip does, im glad you’re not switching.
I’ve never played Bioshock, but do you really need to avoid those “cross-sections” (?) in the hacking minigame?
The alarms and bombs you mean?They are nasty if you hit them.
Anything that isn’t a pipe needs to be avoided. You get squiggly pipes and thin pipes as well which makes the Flow go slower and faster respectively, but if you hit anything that’s not a pipe you will either a) get a short circuit dealing damage to you or b) get an alarm which summons flying steam powered turrets with sophisticated targetting systems.
Not only is Winter Blast depriving you of loot, like Robyrt said, but I was noticing that it appears to be making some of your battles harder, or at least longer. Look at the Leadhead with the Tommy at 23:45 and after. Mr. Viel freezes the Splicer four times over, and each time he has to work back through the now full frozen health bar to shatter the Splicer. Each time the splicer becomes unfrozen, he only takes a fraction of the damage that was dealt to him while frozen. It wasn’t that the slicer had a lot of HP, just that he was repeatedly being frozen, but not shattered. You have essentially three options: you can not freeze the target and kill it as normal, you can freeze it and reduce the “frozen health bar” to 0 to shatter it, or you can freeze it and deal the right amount of damage that you don’t reduce the frozen health bar to zero but that when it unfreezes the damage will kill the target.
Winter Blaster is good, but it has some serious disadvantages. And Frozen Field, IMO, does more harm than good.
Also, I’d like to agree with Tzeneth, going back and maxing out your research and Adam would make this play-through a whole lot easier. Even on Hard I didn’t have the degree of trouble Mr. Viel seems to be having.
The research alone would allow him to actually shatter foes again, making Winter Blast superior once more except for the whole no-loot thing.
Something that the people are missing here,as they have missed in fallout 3 as well,is that spoiler warning is not about minmaxing your character and then breezing through the game.In fact,the easiest way to go through these games would be to just turn on god mode and then waltz to the end.But that wouldnt be very fun to watch.And I know how boring my style of play can be to observers,even if they dont watch the tiresome grinding.Its much more fun to see someone going through the game with an unoptimized character and facing some hardships you wouldnt face if you were minmaxing from the beginning.
There’s also the fact that Josh is trying to play and comment at the same time, which tends to impact both. I have a vague impression that he tends to be talking more before he bites it.
Really? They picked up the stealth armor, metal blaster, and some other horribly overpowered stuff relatively early on in their run. Not exactly totally min-maxed, but pretty powerful.
What does seem to be missing, other than episode specific credits, is specific critiques of the game. The chatter in Fallout was mostly bitching about the game, but it was bitching about a lot of specific elements of the game, and what could have been done differently. I’m hearing less of that in this series.
1)They did pick those,but those were dlc specific weapons,and they were simply showing off dlcs.Metal blaster and maybe shishkebab are the only things they went out of their way to get.And metal blaster one was because Josh wanted to show us how hilariously overpowered it is.
2)Yes,but that is because bioshock is a better game.Its flaws are easy to point out,and theres not much to say about them.The illusion of choice is poorly done,it has too many superfluous elements,it doesnt have enough justification for you initial choices,and thats about it.
So why aren’t they showing off the POWERFUL blast OF FORCE power dlc? It certainly is ridiculous, yet they don’t seem to even mention it.
31min a brown cat is seen and you got me laughing with tears what with 1 frame per second.
Also Funny (Rushing Beat Shura 16) on Youtube by Rpgenie
You know what? I’m gonna make my own custom titles!
Josh: Booze hound
Shamus: Old telephone
Rutskarn: Lives in a Pineapple
Mumbles: Still has hope
Are they perfect? No. But dammit at least I’m trying.
On the topic of “old telephones”, I have a cool story, bro. My Father actually bought a faux-dial telephone. For all intents and purposes it looked like a dial telephone with the old-fashioned reciever and the circular set of numbers, but instead of dialing, you simply pressed them in. The reciever would still do the click-click-click-click-click noise as if you had turned them on an old dial phone, but no, it was just buttons to press.
It was actually kind of novel, if a bit annoying whenever you needed to call anyone. I wouldn’t have minded nabbing it just to have around the house even if it wasn’t plugged in.
I have my own cool story about telephones, bro. I actually have one of the really, really old ones.
One of these: http://www.trainweb.org/oldtimetrains/CPR_Toronto/magneto_phone.jpg
Only more ancient-looking. And it works too. I can make calls on it and everything.
All I have to say about this episode is that I hate premature endings.
Nobody? Really? *sigh* Fine, then I’ll do it.
Erhum.
“That’s what she said.”
Oh great. Now you made me spill it all over the keyboard.
(That’s what he said)
Moose kitty :O
I dislike Viddler’s tendency to not play the video because it got stuck on an ad, or loses the video stream but still plays the audio…
On the other hand, I like the ability to place comments at certain points in the video. That is really cool and can be hilarious as the posters join in on the discussion.
So speaking of Bioshock, have you seen the “gameplay” video of Bioshock Infinite?
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/trailers/2028-BioShock-Infinite-Gameplay
Clearly very scripted, very on rails, and very awesome.
The next day they released some tidbit about the actual game being less scripted… Making the ‘gameplay trailer’ completely meaningless as an actual gameplay trailer. *sigh*
Viddler isn’t HD, it just doesn’t have a file size limit, the difference being that it will downsize any HD files you upload to it, and it doesn’t do a good job of it at all, so people watching full screen (like myself) will get blurry screen artifacts up the wahzoo. (I’ve never been able to read subtitles in this game or Fallout 3, and most fights are unwatchable due to artifacts, for example)
Blip is HD, but it has a file size limit, so going over that limit with HD files results in the file being dropped cause it’s too big.
The answer to both those problems is to encode the source file with MediaCoder into something a slightly smaller resolution and a considerately smaller file size (something like a tenth the size of the source file), not 640×480 or something tiny like that, but dropping down from 1440×900 or whatever you’re at is recommended, as it will result in a better looking upload to both services.
So… I was playing the Minerva’s Den DLC for Bioshock 2 earlier today, and I noticed I could get the insect swarm plasmid…
…and all I could hear in my head was Mumbles’ voice going “BEES! BEES! BEES!” every time I used it…
Best episode ending ever.
Totally got the Serious Sam reference. ;)