T w e n t y S i d e d

Seven years of this nonsense! What am I doing with my life?

This episode contains everything you’d expect from a quality Spoiler Warning video: Josh demonstrating pro strategies and techniques that most players never discover, Rutskarn discussing the literary symbolism at play, Chris analyzing the core ludic systems, and me taking the whole thing very seriously and offering nothing but incisive commentary on the game as it unfolds in okay I lied it’s just the four of us dicking around for an hour what did you expect?

This was actually a lot of fun. I haven’t enjoyed recording an episode this much in a long time. Don’t forget that Josh has a Patreon for the show itself to help pay for the equipment and hours he dumps into recording and editing the show.

Thanks for watching.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This is the final segment of the show we did for new year. Tharsis bugs me in the same way that Xcom-2Or X-Com 2, or Xcom 2-, or XCOM2, or whatever the stupid name is that I’m sick of looking up every time I have to type it. does. A game with this much deliberately random noise in the outcomes is completely uninteresting to me. “Oh. A low number. I lose. Oh! A HIGH number! Lucky me. I get to not lose this turn.” Random number generators are not interesting adversaries. Losing to them is annoying, and winning feels meaningless. Yuck.

Up tomorrow: The 7th anniversary of the show. I can’t tell you what game we’re playing, but I can promise it will focus on us driving into poles over and over again.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

We really need to stream more often. We do it so rarely that we all forget the pitfalls and have to re-learn the whole thing again. It doesn’t help that each game has its own unique way that it thwarts streaming. The resolution is messed up. The in-game framerate is garbage for no reason. The in-game framerate is fine but the stream shows it as terrible. There’s no audio from the game. It streams a blank screen. It only streams a portion of the screen. There are just too many ways that something can go wrong.

I suppose part of the problem is that every game is a special snowflake with its own ideas on how rendering should work. Welcome to PC gaming, where the rules are made up and the specs don’t matter.

Today’s mishap is that the audio levels are out of balance so that Jarenth and I are very quiet.

It’s a shame. This was my favorite part of the stream. This is a really fun game to watch.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.