Hosts: Josh, Shamus, Mumbles. Episode edited by Rachel.
Whoops. Rachel left about four minutes of dead air on the tail end of the podcast. In her defense, she edited the show while sick, and her computer crashed and forced her to start over at the halfway point. I figured it was better to let it slide than to wake her up and make her re-encode the whole thing. You understand.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #129: Fallout 4, Fallout 4, Fallout 4, Fallout 4”
Link (YouTube) |
I love the entire conversation with the sand people. It wouldn’t be terribly interesting if we could just talk to him directly, but HK-47 is able to give this layer of meta-commentary about what things are touchy subjects and what concepts would be hard for the other side to comprehend. The HK dialog is doing triple duty: It characterizes HK, it does some Sand People worldbuilding, and it relates the details and rationale of your next task.
Link (YouTube) |
Man, I just never got the hate for this philandering hunter. The game seems to think you’ll relish killing him / letting him die. Bastila is even down for killing him, and I’m not sure why. Is she THAT into monogamy?
You could say this option is there for Sith characters, but this sort of leads into just how lame and petty the Sith options are in this game. Can you imagine (say) Darth Maul or Vader showing up and choosing to let this guy die because he’s an unrepentant cad? Or maybe Count Dooku saying, “THIS is what you get for being unfaithful to your own wife!” That’s just weird.
Then again, you’re kind of supposed to bump into this guy in town before you come out here, and I don’t remember doing so as a female character. It’s possible he comes off as such an awful creep that you WISH you could attack him, thus setting up this moment of evil catharsis? I don’t know.
Also, the credits list me as being from “Space-Ireland”, but it turns out I’m actually a city in Iran somehow?
Mass Effect 2 is a strange game. As the previous entries made clear, some of the writing is smart, witty, and interesting, and other parts of it are appallingly clumsy, idiotic, and tone-deaf. It’s not that the quality follows a broad gradient, it’s that the quality is incredibly modal. If you’re in a bad scene, then everything is generally bad: Characters can’t maintain a consistent personality or motivation, the player dialog becomes railroading and doesn’t line up with the prompts on the dialog wheel, established rules are discarded carelessly, and important details go unexplained. Then you get to the next scene and suddenly the characters behave sensibly, your dialog wheel is useful, the universe stops contradicting itself, and your actions are given proper context and justification.
It’s like having slices of Michael Bay’s Transformers interspersed with scenes from Gattaca, or Moon. It’s maddening.
We’re going to look over the main plot of Mass Effect 2, but instead of viewing facts in isolation as a first-time player would be forced to do, we’re going to examine them in light of things that are revealed later. We’re also going to examine the plot missions in order, instead of doing them with a half-dozen recruitment and loyalty missions between them.
Also, we’re probably going to re-tread a couple of things I said about the opening of Mass Effect 2 in previous entries, because I really want the through-line of the plot all in one place. Sorry about that. I’ve been editing this as I published it, but I can’t go back and re-arrange stuff that’s already published. (Well, I could, but it would be chaos.) Hopefully this isn’t too annoying or distracting.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 22: Under New Management”
Link (YouTube) |
I blanked out during the show, or I would have noticed that HK-47’s habit of characterizing his own statements was re-used by the Elcor in Mass Effect.
I also mentioned how this one Czerka woman has a better facial design than anyone in Skyrim, despite her artist having a fraction of the polygons and texture budget to work with. I’m happy to report that Bethesda finally seems to be overcoming this. I’ve spent a few hours with Fallout 4, and it looks like the scourge of the potato-faced Bethesda mannequins is over. I’m not suggesting they’re the best or anything, but I think Bethesda is finally able to stand with its contemporaries.
But I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for artists that can do amazing things under tight texture and polygon constraints, and this game does a lot of that.
Four cabalvision goblins spring a trap as I make my way out of the locker room. The stinging glare of the blue lights and feedback from the interview wand stabs through my hangover to refresh me on a few basic mundane details, like: what was happening today, why I’d gotten so drunk last night, and who I was. “Aw, shit,” I say on general principle as a goblin harmonizes with a flatulent bleep.
“Mister coach,” says the lead cretin, “your boys are going up against the Pinkfoot Panthers in twenty minutes. What would you like to say to the other coach?”
“He’s the one who also coaches a team of halflings?”
“That’s the one.”
“I don’t have to say anything. He knows. We’re the only ones who understand.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Half Time CH7: Double Fature”
My column this week in all about how paying $6 billion for the Candy Crush developer was ridiculous. As others have pointed out, Disney only paid $4 billion for Star Wars. And Star Wars has a lot more staying power than the latest fad game in a long line of match-3 clones.
A couple of small points:
Most of my argument is built on the idea that the mobile / casualWe really need a better name for this. There’s nothing “casual” about the casual market. And “mobile” leaves out the web-based side of things. market is a crapshoot. We have a repeating pattern of small-fry operations hitting it big, and giant companies who were unable to replicate previous successes. We have yet to see the “Blizzard of mobiles”, where a single company turns out hit after hit. If King is miraculously that company, then this deal would start to make some kind of sense.
The other thing is that apparently Activision had a huge pile of income overseas, but they couldn’t bring that money home without paying about a billion dollars of taxes on itThis is based ENTIRELY on un-sourced comments. I haven’t looked into it yet.. So this deal kind of represents Activision trying to get some value for that money, rather than seeing it vanish.
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
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