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In this episode we argued about the last time we did the Towers of Hanoi on Spoiler Waring. I am 99% sure it was Mass Effect EP8: Oh Crap, a Popup, which originally aired on March 2nd, 2010. For my part, I don’t blame Chris for confusing it with episodes he’s been in. I’ve done the same thing. Wait, I’m not in this one? I could swear I remember being there for the recording?!?
Here is the RocketJump Ft. Key & Peele Sketch sketch I mentioned in the episode.
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I suspect that Jorak Uln here must be voiced by someone who did a lot of voice work in the 70’s. When I hear this voice, I get this strange flash of memory for Saturday morning cartoons, back when Hanna-Barbera was one of the giants of the medium, before they become a light snack for Turner Broadcasting. The voice is strikingly familiar, yet I can’t picture a single specific character associated with it.
So mid-way through the previous paragraph it really started bugging me. So I looked him up. This character is voiced by Frank Welker, a man I’ve been listening to my entire life without ever noticing his name. Check out just a partial list of his voices: Scooby-Doo, Fred (From Scooby-Doo), Megatron, Soundwave, Dr. ClawHey! I can do this voice!, Curious George, some Smurfs, some G. I. Joes, a bunch of mid-period Marvel superheroes, Schlepcar and Wonderbug, and – as I suspected – a healthy dose of Hanna-Barbera stuff. He has literally been voicing characters since before I was born.
Which makes me wonder: Welker is the man of a thousand voices. And yet, the creative director chose THIS as the voice of their ancient Sith Lord? Not the Megatron voice? Not something the the Dr. Claw range? None of the other villain voices Welker has done? No? They went with “goofy, overly nasal voice?” That’s an… interesting creative decision.
I can only assume this was deliberate. This “captured in a cutscene” stuff can really irritate players, and maybe making it slightly comic took the edge off. Maybe making him too menacing would run the risk of making this one-off troublemaker into too big a threat. We need Darth Malak to loom large over this story, and we can’t do that if you run into too many other Very Bad Dudes in your journeys. I mean, they already made this guy a Zombie Sith Vampire Nazi. If he also had a cool voice then they might as well dump this Revan clown and make Jorak Uln the main character.
The Alliance calls Shepard to some sort of hearing. This hearing (or whatever this is, they don’t follow any sort of protocol) would have been a great chance to pave over the plot holes of Mass Effect 2 and give us some context for what happened between “I’m going to find some way to beat the Reapers” and “I’m going to sit in this room doing nothing until I’m sent for”.
Maybe show that the Alliance was really, really wrapped up in some secondary problems or conflict that seemed really important to them at the time, which is why they seemed so inert in the last game. Maybe show a political struggle that explains or partly justifies their seemingly odd behavior. Maybe show that they were indeed working on the Reaper threat, but were afraid to tell you because of the whole Cerberus thing. Maybe this is all just an inquiry, so Shepard can explain (to both the Alliance and the players who missed Mass Effect 2) what happened at the Collector base.
As it stands, we know more about what happened in the Rachni wars two thousand years ago than we know what our protagonist has been up to since the end of the last game. This writer must hate worldbuilding.
The writer put the Alliance behind a stage curtain last game. At the start of this game they were free to claim whatever they liked about what the Alliance was doing. And they chose to reveal that the Alliance was doing… nothing.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 34: We Fight Then We Die”
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I know we’re making fun of this poor game, but the truth is I really miss this stuff. Korriban is loaded with worldbuilding. It’s full of history, intrigue, puzzles, characters, and stories. Sure, the puzzles are a little clunky, the characters are arch, and the stories are all trope-y as hell, but it gave the game another dimension. A lot of this kind of content has been sanded off in modern games. You’re either doing combat or someone is explaining where we need to go to get the next batch of combat.
I’ve been playing a classic dungeon-crawling game to loosen up for my upcoming Patreon series, and since I’m still building up a buffer for my next Tuesday LP, I’m doing a little one-off. Probably a little two-off, actually. Let’s see what happens when failure’s even more guaranteed than usual.
Everybody wants the Orb of Zot, and if you don’t, you’re a degenerate and you need to get the hell out of my office.
What does it do? What does it do? What kind of slackjaw rube question is that?
Nobody knows what it does, you knucklehead. Nobody’s seen it. It’s at the bottom of a rotten daemonic middenshaft bursting with the worst things ever. To get the orb you’re going to need to fight more living things than you have seen in your entire life so far and personally kill all of them. Beast by beast. Room by room. Stratum by stratum. The least messed-up things you’ll see will be snakes the size of horses and rats bred exclusively on living flesh, and within ten minutes, you are going to be powerfully nostalgic for such simple pleasures. Then you are going to get lost. Then you are going to get cursed. Soon you are going to starve–and if you’re lucky you’ll starve to death. You’re going to need to do the unheard of, win impossible victories, and get enough hidden evil magic runes to unlock a unholy antechamber with an unsurvivable anteconfrontation followed by a general-purpose brouhaha–and if you’re legendary enough to survive that, congratulations! The Orb is yours. At least for a few seconds, because now you’re going to have to fight back up except this time evil gods are showing up to kill you personally.
So are you gonna sign the contract or are you gonna wuss out on me?
What’s in it for you? You’re asking about the Dungeon of Zot. You’re asking me why you ought to go down into a hole and die. I do not have the answer to that question. That’s why the lease on this office is “annual”, not “until I’m eaten by orcs doing something an idiot would do.” If you had an ounce of sanity and any good reason to live, you wouldn’t go–wouldn’t think about going. You wouldn’t even be asking these questions. You’d be meeting somebody nice at a tavern and splitting a roast chicken or you’d be out on your porch whittling a duck. Look, I can promise you what’s in the contract, which is–in the downright apocalyptic eventuality that get the Orb–a percentage of whatever money turns out to be involved in that. In exchange I give you a weapon, some cheap clothes, a breadstick, and a toothbrush. Is it a good weapon? Well, let me point out to you that I’ve never ever gotten one of these back, so you tell me: am I going to give you a good weapon?
There’s my door. If you don’t have some kind of awful, horrible reason why you need to throw your life away trying to get that Orb–you walk right out there and never come back.
No?
That’s what I thought. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts Plays CRAWL: Part 1 of Dead”
Good Robot has a problem. It’s a strange, goofy, inexplicable problem and I’m pretty sure (60%-ish) that it’s not my fault. Here is what’s up:
Our game is capped at 60fps. That’s fine, except the cap isn’t self-imposed. Oh, I have a frame-limiter in the game, but it doesn’t do anything. If I disable it, the game is still limited to 60fps. Even if I render nothing more than a blank screen, I can’t get the framerate to go above 60. Under those conditions, the framerate should be in the thousands.
That’s not the problem. It’s certainly a curiosity, and it’s been on my long list of “mysterious stuff that bugs me” for a couple of years now, but it’s not really a threat to the project as a commercial product that will hopefully feed us someday. The more serious problem is that if you try to capture the game footage at all through Fraps, Bandicam, or streaming software, the framerate drops to 30fps.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot #42: The Framerate Unleashed”
Last week on the Diecast I kind of sneered at the story in Rise of the Tomb Raider. In my column this week I kind of back off from that by suggesting that the story is fine in broad strokes, and it’s the over-abundance of needless cutscenes that kills it. And now that the column is up I realized this problem is more widespread than I thought: The cutscenes were the worst part of Hitman Absolution. And like I said in the article, they didn’t do the Thief reboot any favors either.
Square Enix has a bunch of talented game developers working for them, but someone at the top has decided to turn them all into shitty filmmakers. I suspect it will take a few more crappy games and millions of dollars in needless expenses before someone comes to their senses and dials back on this nonsense. The first step is admitting you have a problem, and right now I bet the wannabe movie-mogul behind this is still thinking this is the developer’s fault.
If you were curious about the “laser sauna” rant in the Diecast, below is what I was talking about. Warning! Shamus gets angry and swear-y:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experienced Points: Rise of the Tomb Writer”
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
T w e n t y S i d e d
