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Thanks so much to Glitch, who apparently forgot that Sunday night was Spoiler Warning night and sent Josh all the Steam messages while we were recording, because he wanted to play a videogame. WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR VIDEOGAMES BECAUSE WE’RE BUSY WITH MASS EFFECT 3!
Also note at 19:10 – the elusive left-handed salute!
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Note the longer load times and frame skipping we have going on now that Randy is our player. I do wonder what sort of magical herculean CPU Josh has under his desk. You can see Randy’s machine struggled to keep up with Mass Effect here. The CPU load of capturing full-frame video to disk AND capturing video, reducing, and streaming it to Livestream is a considerable challenge, and this is on top of running a videogame. Josh’s computer does this week after week without skipping any frames.
Hey everyone! We’re hanging out and Josh is playing some kinda strategy game. You can watch the stream live.
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Spoiler Warning finally hops across the pond to London. And then we blow everything up. Somehow, we managed to avoid falling into a British cliche storm in this episode, though I think that’s only because we were distracted by how bad this game is. Like, seriously, nothing makes sense.
On a side note, we’re doing another hangout tomorrow at 2 PM Pacific, 5 Eastern, and 10 GMT. Hopefully, this will be a more accessible time for you guys in Europe. I know it’s still late in the evening for a lot of you, but it’s really the earliest any of us can manage.
See you then!
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Now we finally get the payoff for the end of Mass Effect 2. Did you destroy the collector base? Did you keep it? Did you agonize over the decision? Now you can find out what happened!
It really is absurd. This is the big moral choice at the end of Mass Effect 2. We’d already predicted that it wouldn’t have any impact on the story. (Cerberus would get the technology it was supposed to get no matter what.) But I still held out hope that it would have a cosmetic payoff. But no, that choice is clearly and deliberately negated for no reason. The Reaper Baby isn’t used as an explanation for anything specific, so it’s not supporting other plot points. (It’s being used as a “power source”. Great. That explains where Cerberus is getting their electricity, which is already free in this universe and the one thing they have that we aren’t questioning.) You could simply have this room appear empty if you wanted. There. No dialog. No additional art assets required. It’s a situation that will happen to one player and not another.
But instead BioWare went out of their way to have the Reaper Baby appear here, even though that makes no sense. They even spent money on slightly different dialog. Then the dialog specifically calls out how it makes no sense for this thing to be here. A lot of people cited parts of the game as feeling like the writers were showing open contempt for the audience. I have to say, I’m kind of feeling it in this scene.
And what’s with the line James has here? “All those assholes who doubted you… I wish they were here right now.” Why James? So they could tell us how right they were? Remember? In Mass Effect 2 everyone said working for TIM was stupid and pointless, even the player, and now we have proof that they were right. All of them.
Also Kai Leng died.
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Short version: You now have to check a checkbox to leave a comment. This may or may not be a permanent change. I’ll be monitoring this new system over the next couple of days to see how well it works. In the meantime, please provide checkmarks along with your comment to placate the untrusting computer. If you’re curious about the why & how, then read on…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Growmap: Check the Checkbox”
Link (YouTube) |
I know we picked on this section of the game where you assault the Cerberus base, but it’s actually got some good points. My excuse is that the dream sequence caused some sort of build-up of complaint energy that needed to be released. That’s totally how it works.
Chris was right, in that the enemy variety is pretty good. There’s a good mix of tight corridors and open areas, along with some multi-level combat to keep things fresh. There are bright areas, dark areas, cool blues, and deep reds. You’ve got snipers, turrets, shield guys, standard mooks, and mechs.
The thing where you launch the fighter to blast a hole in the wall is a pretty classic BioWare gate. (Like using the mining laser in Mass Effect 1.) It’s there to give you a combat breather and allow time for a few lines of dialog without stopping for a cutscene.
As a bonus, the whole “Am I who I think I am?” moment takes the form of a dialog wheel that you can exit if you’re apathetic or you’ve seen it before, which is better than packing it into a linear conversation.
So yeah. Ignoring the whole “Cerberus” thing, this is actually a fun section of the game.
I still like the idea that your team breaks into their base to find Cerberus is fighting rogue robots, space-zombies, holographic ninjas, haywire vehicles, carnivorous plants, biotic dogs, robot thresher maws, zombie thresher maws, astrally projected thresher maws, regular thresher maws, indoctrinated ghosts, and an army of mantis-men. It’s like this every day at Cerberus HQ. There’s a line of troopers punching in at the Cerberus timeclock, just shooting the breeze and talking about what sort of failed, escaped experiments they’ll fight today. They ignore you when you blast your way through the Cerberus break room because 1) You’re not on the schedule of stuff to fight and 2) they’re on break.
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
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.
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
T w e n t y S i d e d
