Via the Rampant Coyote I find this trailer… teaser… thing… for the “upcoming” Fallout game. It’s more than a year off, so the thing is more or less worthless as an indicator of what the final product will look like, how it will play, or if it will be any good. It does demonstrate that the developers have hooked into the “atmosphere” of the original, for that that’s worth.
There seems to be some controversy about what sort of RPG we’re going to get. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 3 Trailer”
I’m still working my way through Prey. Not much to add except for a bunch of minor observations:
The thing with the kids was thankfully a very small part of the game. There still hasn’t been any explanation as to why the main character acquiring “spirit powers” led to the preteen poltergeists, and now I’m far enough past it that I don’t think any real answers will be forthcoming. It’s just this weird thing that happened.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey: Nearing the End (I think)”
In the past I have lamented about the lack of decent story arcs in American television. I talked about my profound disappointment with Sopranos, which I thought would have a coherent arc, but ended up being a soap opera for men. I’ve been anticipating that the show would simply stop rather than conclude. Looks like I was right. The finale has aired:
Yeah, I loved how he played against viewer expectations by not ending the story. How innovative! Maybe Final Fantasy VII should have played against gamer expectations by leaving out the last disc. Maybe J.K.Rowling should have played against fan expectations and just not written the last Harry Potter book. I stopped watching The Sopranos somewhere in season 4, and have been waiting to see what the end would be like before continuing. Based on this, there is no way I’m going to waste my time just so I can follow the tale to this dead end. What a shame.
To be fair, the show has a lot going for it. The acting, casting, and cinematography were on par with that of big-budget movies, and it was an incredible achievement to maintain that level of quality for 86 episodes. But for people like me who insist on a story, a point, a wrap-up, or some sort of closure, it’s still an incredible disappointment.
In this post I talked about some of the ways the show could have gone. One reader dismissed my ideas as “dumb and predictable”. Fine. But I suggest that they are all superior to the end we got, which was dumb, predictable, and pointless.
Someday television writers might get their act together and write a complete story*, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
* Babylon 5 being the rare exception. Can you believe that for all my ranting about complete stories, I have never watched B5? It’s on my to-do list, I swear.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings CXI:
You Can’t Take it With You”
This is the one thousand and first post to the site. WordPress has numbered it #1196, but that’s because there are a lot of posts that I start but later throw away, and WordPress doesn’t recycle those numbers.
For “fun”, I’m going to post the Useless Stats of my site as of right now. I posted my stats almost exactly a year ago. It’s funny to compare to the stats from last June, before I started writing DM of the Rings, and before the site grew to its current size.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Post 1,001”
“Mommy, it looks like the neighbor’s garage is on fire!”
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| Just a few hours before the fire. The garage is peeking out from behind the bushes and trees. |
There is shouting. People are very close to the building, frantically trying to do something. Are they trying to fight it? This is way beyond a garden hose or fire extinguisher sized problem. This blaze is not kidding around. A beautiful large-size pickup is so close to the building that it’s tail lights are probably melting. Screw the garage! Move the truck! The garage isn’t near any other important structures, so no houses are in danger as far as I can see.
It’s Saturday, May 26. Memorial Day weekend. It’s mid-afternoon on a nice sunny day. This morning we were running a yard sale. Now the neighborhood is in sudden chaos. I hear the wail of approaching fire engines. No, it sounds like an ambulance. Actually, it’s both. Eventually, it’s a lot of both.
The bad news: You’re confined to a wheelchair.
The good news: Wheeeeeee!
Actually it looks like that would have been scary. Thankfully he got away without a scratch. Seems like the guy was a good sport about it, though.
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
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.
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
T w e n t y S i d e d
