Happy 2019! We start off the year with positivity and praise. It lasts almost half an hour before we spiral back into complaining and snark. We tried.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #239: Into the Spoiler-Verse, Activision’s CFOs”
Have you read my book yet? Based on what people are telling me, it’s not bad. The impression I’m getting is that it’s the best book I’ve written so far.
Marketing wisdom teaches that you should always put a good spin on sales. People are more likely to be interested in a product if other people are also buying it. Partly because following the herd can help you sort the good from the bad, but also because of the network effect. I’m more likely to see a movie if people I know have seen it, because we can talk about it later. If nobody else has seen a movie, then nobody else will care about my reaction and nobody else will have alternate viewpoints to share with me.
So you’re supposed to avoid admitting that sales are low while a work is still selling. I’m going to break this rule and admit that The Other Kind of Life is not selling as well as my previous book. Maybe I just don’t have the reach now that I did in 2012The Escapist was a bigger deal back then, and I was a major contributor rather than just a weekly columnist., or maybe the indie book market is more crowded. Maybe it’s the cover. Or the title. Or my half-assed approach to marketing. I don’t know. It’s a shame, but that’s how it goes.
Sales aren’t great, but some of you have read it. I think next week we’ll have the all-spoiler thread where everyone can discuss the book and nitpick / praise it as needed. In the meantime, let me talk about some of the thinking that went into it:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Other Kind of Post”
This blog is not a tentpole site with a suite of writers working in different genres. I can only cover games I play. I’m just one guyAlthough it really was nice having Bob Case around this year to do his long-form analysis of Witcher 3. and I tend to seek out games that can keep me going for weeks rather than promiscuously hopping from one game to the next like big-name reviewers do. Which means that I tend to miss a lot of games.
I didn’t play a lot of bad games this year, so my “worst of 2018” list wound up being pretty short. I suppose that’s yet another thing that makes this the year of good news.
But before I begin hurling rotten tomatoes at the games that had the audacity to disappoint me, let me talk about a few games I missed…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2018: The No-Show List”
Is it 2019 already? We’re getting pretty far into the future now, aren’t we? In fact, we’re so far into the future that even futuristic dates like 2010 and 2012 are somehow in the past. That’s crazy.
I’m worried we maybe went a little too far. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying this high-speed voyage through a fantastic future world of electric cars and pocket phones. I just get a little freaked out every time I look in the mirror and see how absurdly old I am.
But here we are. I guess this is really happening. All I can do is mark the time as it passes and try to make sense of it all. Maybe if we look at trends in enough detail and with sufficient hindsight we can discern the currents of history and understand the decisions that brought us to this moment. Or barring that, maybe we can use the turn of the year as an excuse to complain about videogames.
Actually, let’s just do the latter. That sounds a lot easier.
Every year I try to find (or contrive) some sort of connective theme. 2012 was the year of illusionary binary choices. 2013 was the year of the indies. 2014 was the year of “meh”. 2015 was the year about making games about making games about making games. 2016 was the year of waiting for VR to take off or die. (We’re still waiting, BTW.) 2017 was the year of the loot box.
Obviously these are pretty arbitrary, but I like assigning meaning to the chaos.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2018: The Year of Good News”
This is it. In this extra-long Diecast we’re cleaning out the mailbag. All questions are answered. I can’t promise that they’ll be answered correctly or even coherently, but you will get some form of mouth-noises in response to your inquiries.
Also note that we spend the first half of the show looking back on 2018, which means I’m sort of spoiling my end-of-the-year retrospective a tiny bit. That series begins tomorrow!
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #238: Farewell 2018!”
So the team is here on the planet Eos to fix the climate by fiddling with the inexplicably intuitive and user-friendly alien vaults.
Once we get the Nomad and do a little tutorial stuff, we settle into the rut the game designer has planned for us: Drive to three different monolith towers, shoot the inhabitants, do the puzzle, and then go to the alien vault to reset the global climate.
The three Monolith towers work something like this: Once you’ve murdered whoever is guarding itThe Kett, ancient guardian robots, or (very occasionally) local pirates or other assorted jerks., you’ll find a console. The aliens who built this thing may be from another galaxy, but by a strange coincidence they just happened to use computer consoles that are the right size for a human being. You’ll need to hop around the environments and do some light platforming to reach hidden glyphs on the tower. Once you scan those, SAM can hack the alien computer or whatever. You do a sudoku puzzle, the tower lights up, and you drive to the next one.
It’s not bad by the standards of BioWare puzzles. Or at least, the first couple are okay. But when you realize you’ve got to do three of these on every planet the whole thing starts to feel very Ubisoft-ish. It wouldn’t be so bad if each tower had a different gimmick, but the designer runs out of ideas very quickly and from there you’re just repeating the same task again and again.
Once you do three towers, a secret vault will open up somewhere on the map.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Andromeda Part 11: The Vault in Our Stars”
It’s Christmas! What are you doing on my blog? Why don’t you go watch that one Christmas movie you love? Or eat some food? No? Socialize a bit maybe? You’ve done all that? That’s not your thing?
Okay then. I guess I can share this YouTube video with you. After all, the nature of snooty fantasy elves is a topic near and dear to my heart.
Link (YouTube) |
Anyway. No matter what you do with the day, have a good one. Later in the week we’ll have another Andromeda post, and then next week we’ll be doing my end-of-year retrospective.
Merry Christmas, you big crazy internet.
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
T w e n t y S i d e d
