For our one-year episode, we wanted to do something really special. We didn’t just want 15 minutes of footage from a game we’ve already talked about or played, so we decided to spoil an entire game, all in one go. We played Amnesia: The Dark Descent for well over an hour, and we made a highlight reel of the result.
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Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning: Happy Adversary”
Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of Spoiler Warning. Today, we’re going to wrap up the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC with a special two-part episode.
I know this is longer than most of you prefer, but if you can tough it out you will reap the following rewards:
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Link (YouTube) |
Aside from the fact that he was a new, unique alien, I really had no idea what the Shadow Broker was like. I guessed that he looked like Bowser, as a joke. Later I guessed that he was Dr. Claw, as a joke. I guessed that he had a throne room, as a joke. I made these guesses for humorous effect, because of how stupid and absurd they sounded. Then at the end we found out he looked like Bowser, sounded like Dr. Claw, and sat around a throne room.
BioWare is like your high school sweetheart that you marry right after graduation, and then wake up one day years later and realize you simply don’t know this person anymore. Where did it all go wrong? It’s hard to say. Their attention seems to be elsewhere, and you suspect they might be wooing someone else behind your back. The only thing to do now is to start drinking and feeling sorry for yourself.
On the upside, the hook at the end was pretty cool and I can’t wait to see how the consequences of this play out in the next game!
This is it, the penultimate episode.
My days in WoW are coming to a close. I need to reclaim that time and apply it elsewhere. I never did hit level 70, but I burned a lot of time leveling alts in various parts of the game. I did the worgen starting area a couple of times, and leveled some horde-side characters as well. It’s shocking how much time I’ve sunk into this beast, and I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. World of Warcraft is Disneyland: A vast majority of its visitors will miss a vast majority of its content.
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But, what kind of moron would sign up to be a mook for a super villain? In Batman: Arkham Asylum, you can lurk just overhead goons and listen to their tea time chat. Most of them end up talking about how they happily killed their sister for money and suddenly it makes perfect sense why they’d work for a homicidal maniac like the Joker. They’re insane.
They’d have to be so crazy that they’d believe Batman won’t break every bone in their soft little bodies. And, that’s really the problem with all mooks in every video game, comic book and movie. No one is stupid enough to think that they can personally take down someone who calls himself the Goddamned B…wait what were we talking about again?
Oh yeah. Mass Effect 2.
I had this [semi-] joke I use to tell:
I always said it would be a cold day in hell before I got married, which is why we’re getting married on January 25 in Slippery Rock.
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| The little guy is my new brother-in-law. He was born the year Heather and I met. |
Lots of people are down on marriage. My generation certainly wasn’t crazy about it, and the next generation is even less inclined to take the plunge. I didn’t think it made sense. I mean, half of them fail, right? And some portion of the other half are probably unhappy, right? Those odds suck, so why bother? It’s just a piece of paper. It’s so expensive. It will fail anyway. But I did it despite this cynicism, and it was one of the best decisions of my life.
You don’t often hear about people who are in happy, stable marriages. I can understand why. “They lived happily ever after” is a terrible beginning for a story. And maybe you think, as I used to, that it can’t work for you or is an outmoded idea. My advice: Marry, or don’t marry, but you shouldn’t let movie dramas inform your image of marriage any more than you should let action flicks inform your perception of driving and firearm safety.
I can’t promise you that marriage will be a happy time, or that it will work for you. And I can guarantee that it won’t make you happy all the time. But if you’re young and suspicious of the institution, I can say that it does work for some people, and the payoff is a rich life and a steady supply of self-sustaining joy.
Happy Anniversary, Heather. I won’t post the gushy stuff here on the blog, because you’d hate that. But, you know, I do.
I’m really starting to run out of name for episodes where everything is fighting all the time.
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In any case, I want whatever Vasir’s having. Seriously, this boss fight took most of the episode. And let’s have a look at the sequence of events here:
1. We crash her spacecar into a building. She’s apparently injured, but not enough to keep her from shooting a bunch of robots and walls for no reason.
2. She walks into a large bar while bleeding out to the point that her boots are covered in her own blood, and takes a hostage.
3. We shoot her (and the hostage, yay!) which is apparently the equivalent of a mild breeze to Vasir because…
4. Only after all of that do we finally launch into a lengthy seven minute boss fight wherein we discover that she still possesses an enormous reserve of spare shield energy and armor (and a respectable supply of mooks).
I swear, she has more lives than Saren. And she’s more of a pain to kill to boot! I know the Illusive Man keeps telling Shepard that she’s “humanity’s savior” and that she can “do anything,” but sheesh, this was just one of the Shadow Broker’s agents! I mean, we do have the “reload last save” button on our side, but really, my years of shooter experience tell me that “godmode” is better.
Maybe we could just settle on noclip.
I’ve been playing Minecraft in single-player survival mode, with a self-imposed hardcore death. If I die, I delete the world and start over. (I’ve heard there is a feature planned that will do this for you, but I’d rather just play on the honor system. After I die, I like to go back and look the place over before hitting delete. I don’t mind losing the world, but I like to know what I did wrong.)
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In survival mode, you begin the game empty-handed and homeless, and you have until sundown to scrape together enough resources to see you through the night, because the monsters will kill your fragile ass if you don’t have fortifications between you and them. You start by punching down a tree (no, really) and using your bare hands to turn the lumber into wooden planks. Then you turn the planks into a workbench. Then use the workbench to make a crappy wooden pickaxe. Use the pickaxe to mine some stone. Use the stone to make a better pickaxe. Find coal if you can, and make some torches. Build a house. You don’t have much time, so a simple shack will have to do. (I’m more of a Hobbit at heart, and I prefer to excavate my first home as opposed to building it.)
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Minecraft – Creepier Creepers”
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
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.
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
T w e n t y S i d e d
