Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Friday Feb 19, 2016

Filed under: Lets Play 43 comments

 SWTOR: Legend of Hipstar 1: Character CreationPrevious Post

Next PostSWTOR: Legend of Hipstar 3:
Holo-con 

By popular demand, I’ve added mouseover text to the images, which is routine today but wasn’t part of my shtick back in 2012, when this was originally written. I don’t really remember these scenes very well, but I’ve done what I could.

Anyway, back to 2012…

So having blown an entire entry on character creation. I think we’re finally ready to start this game. One final note is that I’m not going to try to color-correct and adjust the levels on all of these screenshots. If BioWare wants to make a world of plastic figures, bathe them in flat lighting, and smear a color filter over the whole thing, that’s their business.

I think the medium blues act as a nice contrast against the slightly-above-medium blues.

The Star Wars theme swells as my shuttle descends towards the Jedi academy. As a padawan, I’m here to complete my training. Presumably I’m arriving from some sort of Jedi middle school.

The shuttle touches down as the music builds and I ascend the ramp to meet my new master.

This is how I always stand when getting off a bus: Heels together, head up, and my back straight like someone just shoved my practice saber into the dark side.

This is supposed to be an epic moment, but I’m realizing now that this is basically, “Dude gets off the bus at college for the first time” with a John Williams soundtrack.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “SWTOR: Legend of Hipstar 2:
Back 2 School”

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.

 SWTOR: Legend of Hipstar 1: Character CreationPrevious Post

Next PostSWTOR: Legend of Hipstar 3:
Holo-con 

43 comments

SWTOR: Legend of Hipstar 1: Character Creation

By Shamus Posted Thursday Feb 18, 2016

Filed under: Lets Play 90 comments

 Ruts Plays CRAWL: Part 1 of DeadPrevious Post

Next PostSWTOR: Legend of Hipstar 2:
Back 2 School 

A couple of weeks ago, I was cleaning out the drafts folder on this blog. I had a hundred or so article ideas that I never managed to turn into proper posts. It was mostly just random notes and single-paragraph article stubs. But mixed in with those scraps was this thing. Way back in July 2012, I apparently began and subsequently abandoned this LP of SWTOR.

I think my heart just wasn’t in it. In the past, I’ve managed to make some fun stories. Champions Online was too dumb for its own good. I thought Lord of the Rings was earnest and admirable despite its occasional insanity. And while there are few places more well-traveled than Azeroth, I like to think I found a few funny places and ideas that hadn’t yet been given the mocking they so richly deserved.

But Star Wars the Old Republic is too bland a target for my kind of humor. It felt like the game wasn’t even trying to make a case for itself. When mocked, the game doesn’t even have the decency to fight back. The (early) quests were a bit lame, but not mind-bogglingly stupid like Champs Online. SWTOR was based on well-known source material, but unlike LOTRO I didn’t feel like this game arose from a genuine love and appreciation for the universe. Oh, I’m sure plenty of people on the project love Star Wars, but that wasn’t coming through the malaise of cookie-cutter game design. The stories eventually get interesting, but only after many endless hours of soul-crushing hotbar-based combat and trudging through environments that are too dull to mock in screenshots.

This isn’t fun and it isn’t funny. It’s mostly just sad to see how much money was spent to make something so lifeless. I’m only posting this because my choices are:

1) Delete this and leave the blog blank for a few days.
2) Post it.

So don’t read this and think, “This is supposed to be good.” More like, “This is hopefully better than having no content for several days.”

Okay, back to me-from-2012…

Get on With It Already

Let’s play Star Wars the Old Republic. Partly because I want to comment on the game, but mostly because it’s free-to-play up to level 15. Assuming you can get in. Not that I’m bitter.

Unlike some of my other series, I’m not going to meticulously track in-character and out-of-character commentary. Also, I’m not going for comedy here. We’re just going to jog past all the quests while I point at them like a tour guide. In keeping with the standards of tone and continuity set by the Star Wars Expanded Universe, we’re going to half-ass this.

Are your expectations sufficiently lowered? Great. Let’s get started…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “SWTOR: Legend of Hipstar 1: Character Creation”

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.

 Ruts Plays CRAWL: Part 1 of DeadPrevious Post

Next PostSWTOR: Legend of Hipstar 2:
Back 2 School 

90 comments

Mass Effect Retrospective 35: Mars Effect

By Shamus Posted Thursday Feb 18, 2016

Filed under: Mass Effect 189 comments

 Mass Effect Retrospective 34: We Fight Then We DiePrevious Post

Next PostMass Effect Retrospective 36: Argument Clinic 

So now that the Reapers are actually on Earth and have begun the reaping process, Shepard sort of accidentally steps into the quest hinted at in the closing moments of Mass Effect 1. He doesn’t know it when he arrives, but his job on Mars is to recover plans for a device to beat the Reapers. Better “Way, way, WAY Too Late” than never, I suppose.

Mars

I really dig the look of the Mars installation.

Shepard arrives on Mars to discover that the plans for the MacGuffin are here in a research station, and that Cerberus is murdering everyone to secure those plans.

Like the main plot of Mass Effect 2, there aren’t any peasants to meet. There’s no dialog where you can talk to somebody about what this place was and how it worked. Liara shows up, but she’s just here to join the party and explain where we need to go and who to shoot. She’s not here to tell stories. Mars is just a big industrial base filled with mooks and dead civilians. Nobody around here is interested in filling in details or worldbuilding.

During the assault we discover that Cerberus has been partially husk-ifying their soldiers, turning them into half-machine slaves. We see that Cerberus is willing to slaughter a bunch of civilians to steal some intel for themselves. We see that they are needlessly cruel and the whole “pro humans” idea is just a fig leaf excuse for their atrocities.

So Cerberus mole Dr. Eva Coré infiltrated the outpost, betrayed the scientists, and let the Cerberus strike team in. They slaughtered the scientists, presumably twirling robo-mustaches beneath their power armor. Once they have the plans for the Crucible they start deleting them so that nobody else can have them.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 35: Mars Effect”

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.

 Mass Effect Retrospective 34: We Fight Then We DiePrevious Post

Next PostMass Effect Retrospective 36: Argument Clinic 

189 comments

Spam Script

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Feb 17, 2016

Filed under: Notices 94 comments

 Hangout: New Year 2015: It's Over!Previous Post

Next PostDiecast Autoplays 

I get a lot of spam on this blog. This place is quasi-popular and pretty dang old by internet standards. This means it’s both an attractive target for spammers and there’s been plenty of time for this site to get added to everyone’s rolodex.

There are several layers of protection between the idiots and your eyeballs. First are the crude tools: IP blocking for particularly naughty IP rangesA year ago I tried removing some of these, and within a few days got crushed by unwanted traffic. I don’t know if it was a flood of spam, a low-yield DOS attack, or WHAT. But I needed my hosting provider to help me out and re-block the troublemakers. I’m less interested in lifting IP bans now. Sorry if you’re stuck in one of those nasty IP ranges and you can’t even reach the site to read this apology.. Then there’s filtering for clearly red-flag behaviors, like someone trying to leave comments who never loaded the page they’re supposedly commenting on, or people leaving a comment every few seconds. After that is the keyword checking, and filtering out people who post tons of links.

The final layer of spam filtering is… me.

Some filters delete the comment instantly. Some filters put the spam into the spam folder, where I’ll never see it unless I go looking for it. Some filters put suspect messages into moderation, where I’ll see them and have to choose to approve or delete them.

Spam is kind of like the weather. It varies in intensity. Some days I’ll only see a few, and some days I’ll see dozens. But over the last couple of years the spam has settled into a very predictable pattern. I never see porn links these days. Piracy stuff is now super-rare. Brute-force word salad messages are either an abandoned technique, or the filters have gotten really good at catching them, because I never see those anymore. The messages that are just dozens on links don’t get through. The only thing I see these days are the plausible-but-fake comment spam, which are just a little too subtle for the spam filters to detect. These are messages of semi-coherent English with no links. Usually the given name is the thing they’re selling, so that (if I allowed the spam through) clicking on the name would take you to their site.

The messages usually look something like this:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spam Script”

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.

 Hangout: New Year 2015: It's Over!Previous Post

Next PostDiecast Autoplays 

94 comments

Experienced Points: Why Make Games Random?

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Feb 16, 2016

Filed under: Column 46 comments

 Experienced Points: Rise of the Tomb WriterPrevious Post

Next PostExperienced Points: Skinner Boxing 

My column this week is a reader question where my answer goes immediately off-topic, devolves into a list, runs long, gets sidetracked, and then ends on a cliffhanger.

No need to thank me. Just doing my job.

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.

 Experienced Points: Rise of the Tomb WriterPrevious Post

Next PostExperienced Points: Skinner Boxing 

46 comments

Diecast #141: Lord of the Rings, Firewatch, Square Enix

By Shamus Posted Monday Feb 15, 2016

Filed under: Diecast 113 comments

 Diecast #140: Rise of the Tomb Raider, Massive Chalice, The WitnessPrevious Post

Next PostDiecast #142: Firewatch, Deadpool, Mailbag 

Direct download (MP3)
Direct download (ogg Vorbis)
Podcast RSS feed.

Hosts: Josh, Shamus. Episode edited by Rachel.

It was just Josh and I this week. Mumbles was sick, Chris was on a trip, and Rutskarn is actually such an astounding nerd that our videogame podcast was not nerdy enough for him and he needed to go out and find something that is somehow even nerdier. Spoiler: This means no Spoiler Warning this week. Sorry. (You nerd.)

I might have some reheated content from yesteryear (an abandoned text LP I never finished) to post in place of Spoiler Warning this week. We’ll see how things go.

Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #141: Lord of the Rings, Firewatch, Square Enix”

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.

 Diecast #140: Rise of the Tomb Raider, Massive Chalice, The WitnessPrevious Post

Next PostDiecast #142: Firewatch, Deadpool, Mailbag 

113 comments

The Altered Scrolls, Part 19: Gloom

By Rutskarn Posted Saturday Feb 13, 2016

Filed under: Elder Scrolls 46 comments

 The Altered Scrolls, Part 18: A Time to KillPrevious Post

Next PostThe Altered Scrolls, Part 20: Miscellaneous, Q&A 

Before we progress to my Skyrim wrap-up, I’d like to share a few brief notes concerning art design. I don’t think I’ve ever made more than a perfunctory mention of art when talking about the previous games, and that’s because I’ve never had much of substance to say about it: Daggerfall has too many pinups, Morrowind looks weird and cool but a bit too brown, Oblivion‘s wilderness is pretty, characters across the franchise look like dollar store coloring books or pantyhose dolls. In each entry the art does a passable job of capturing a fantastical setting for the game, whether that’s a novel setting like Vvardenfel:

Bizarre idolatry? Check. Impossible mudbrick architecture? Check. Vast and lonely? Check.

Or a prosaic Tolkish pastiche like Cyrodiil:

Cottagey Fantasyland aesthetic? Check. Vibrant colors? Check. Trappings of high adventure? Check.

And then there’s Skyrim.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Altered Scrolls, Part 19: Gloom”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.