T w e n t y S i d e d
This is the episode everyone has been telling me I must do, since the start of the series. Here it is, the installment where Lulzy’s crumbling sanity is demolished for your amusement. You heartless jerks.
Spoiler Warning 15: Art Collectors and AA Guns
Again, I apologize for the crappy audio. The little tone you hear just before I talk is actually my Ventrilo client. It makes a sound when you begin and end talking. It’s never shown up in a recording before, and now all of a sudden it is? It’s amazing that of all the crazy tech that goes into making this – the game, the video editing, the streaming – it’s the audio that consistently gives us the most trouble.
We recorded episodes 14-16 all at once, so we have one more episode of difficult audio to get through. Hopefully we’ll get this issue worked out.
Stolen Pixels #183: Hello, Handsome
Why do we have to keep liking games in spite of their stories? I know the conventional wisdom is that the industry doesn’t tend to financially reward good storytellers, but that’s no reason to hold the story in obvious contempt. There’s a difference between, “we’re not going to go out of our way to make an incredible story” and “we won’t even make the slight effort to devise a story which is worth seeing and makes some kind of sense”. The cutscenes in Red Faction: Guerrilla are a waste of time. Unless they were designed to be mocked in comics. In which case I guess they’re a middling success.
I will point out that the final two developers in the March Mayhem contest are both companies with strong writing: BioWare and Valve. (And yes, Valve has strong writing. Not a lot of writing. Their games are mostly action. But if characters are talking you can bet they’re saying something worth hearing.) I still maintain the writing is more important than developers think it is, and that Red Faction: Monkeytown could have been a much bigger hit with the exact same budget and setting, but with a writer who knew what they were doing. (In fact, you could probably improve the game just by doing a reverse-Mystery Science Theater and dub over their ridiculous dialog with something smart and genuine.)
Final Chainmail Bikini Strip
Shawn is coloring the very last CB strip tonight, if you’d like to watch it on livestream.
UPDATE: All done now, but the comic itself will be up later this week. If you want to see the replay:
Part 1. (Skip ahead to about 1 hour, 40 minutes to get to the CB stuff)
And check out Shawn’s Livestream chanel if you want to see him drawing other stuff.
Mortal Online
I managed to emerge from the weekend without having written anything substantive. <?php generate_excuse (); ?> So as a way of distracting you, allow me to point out that even though I poke fun at Lord of the Rings Online and I savaged Champions Online, they are nowhere near the bottom of the MMO barrel. Check out this visit to Mortal Online via Serial MMOgamy. Actually, read the last few entries. Leslee plays a lot of esoteric MMO games and it’s amusing to see some of their outlandish design decisions in action. Some are just attempting to cater to unusual tastes or a small niche. But others just seem to be designed by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
TEDxUSC – Kellee Santiago
We’ve had the “games as art” discussion already, but I like her take on it.
Link (YouTube) |
Experienced Points: Zynga and the Rise of the New Gamer
The name of Zynga is somewhat accursed among mainstream gamers right now. I think it’s sort of like fighting for thirty years to make a successful family restaurant based on authentic Mexican food, and then waking up one day to find out you have one tenth the business of Taco Friggin’ Bell. I couldn’t fully cover the subject in this week’s article (and I had to leave out the bit about Zynga’s shady business practices) but seeing the armies of “casual social gamers” finally appear in the same venue as “hardcore gamers” for the first time is a really interesting process.
The hate coming from the hardcore crowd to the Farmville / Mafia Wars types is intense. Well, nearly as intense as the hate that the various console devotees have for the other platforms. So, I guess they’ll fit right in.
From The Archives:
The Strange Evolution of OpenGL
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Raytracing
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Mass Effect Retrospective
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.