Yes! Two Reset Button videos in the space of a month. I was going to make this a regular thing, but I’ve just taken on another project. We’ll see what happens.
Also, I think I’m sticking with this graph paper motif for now. Reset Button hasn’t had a unifying style before now, but I think the graph paper is something I can live with.
Link (YouTube) |
Transcript below:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Reset Button: Do it Again, Stupid”
I don’t usually spend a lot of time looking forward. It feels dangerously close to buying into the whole publisher-driven hype machine. Too many sites spend all their time looking at the horizon. Rumors. Teaser trailers. Screenshots. Exclusive first looks. Hands-on press demos. Then the game comes out, gets reviewed, and vanishes forever.
It’s common to discuss movies that are a couple of years old. And it’s routine to discuss books decades after they come out. But games are hurried off stage to make room for the next act and we rarely take time to look at old games with fresh eyes. That’s really unhealthy. Moreover, it sort of leaves the readers out of the conversation. During pre-release, there’s nothing to say except:
But after a game comes out we can talk about what worked, what didn’t, and why. That’s the good stuff. That’s the reason I’m in this writing gig. The looking back stuff is often more fun than playing the games themselves. In my end-of-2014 wrap-up, it was really encouraging to see lots of people talking about how they were playing games from 2013, 2012, or even 2010.
Having said all that, I guess there is a time and place to cautiously look forward. Really, I’m just doing this now so I can look back at the end of 2015 and compare my expectations with reality. So I’m only looking forward now so that later I can do a compare & contrast when 2015 comes to and end.
With that in mind, here is what I’m looking forward to in 2015:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Looking Ahead: 2015”
Once again, my goal here is to use this project to push me into doing something new. So this time around I’m going to tackle the Deus Ex: Human Revolution soundtrack. I didn’t really fall in love with this soundtrack when I played the game. I didn’t even really notice itAside from the callbacks to the original Deus Ex., but now that I’ve taken the time to listen to it properly, I have to admit it’s really amazing:
Link (YouTube) |
I’ll be honest: This is a stupid idea. I’m not remotely skilled enough to take on something like this. And even if I had the skill, I don’t have the equipmentEquipment needed: An orchestra. And singers. And someone who can conduct them.. Here is what I think is distinctive here:
I did what I could. Here is what I came up with:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Button Masher: Sarif Gift Card”
Link (YouTube) |
We’ve been doing this crap for five years. There are now about 285 hours of spoiler Warning. To put that in perspective, let’s say you wanted to watch every single episode of Spoiler Warning ever. At the same time, your neighbor decides to do a Trek marathon where they watch all of the original series, all of the Trek movies (including the Abrams reboot) and every episode of Next Generation.
When your neighbor is done, you will still have about 68 hours of Spoiler Warning left to watch. (I’m sorry.) In our defense, I have no idea why you decided to watch all that.
Thanks for watching. We still haven’t picked the game for next season.
For the record: I thought The Yawhg was kind of charming and fun. If I had any friends, I’d totally play it with them.
My column this week is about the column itself. It’s about how the gig works and what kind of controls the site imposes on me.
For context, last week Defy Media (company that owns the Escapist) let a bunch of their staff go. I had no idea this was coming, and nobody really said anything afterwards.
Another interesting point: I set up the [email protected] email address specifically so people could propose questions for the column, and almost nobody uses it. The Diecast inbox is constantly overflowing with more stuff than we can answer, but people don’t seem interested in seeing questions answered in column form. I’m not sure why, but there it is.
“This week, let’s plow through the backlog of mailbag questions,” I said. Everyone agreed this was a good idea. And then over an hour later we’d managed to cover two.
Download MP3 File
Download Ogg Vorbis File
Hosts: Shamus, Josh, Chris, and Rutskarn.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #90: Secret World, Batman, Destiny”
This is the second and final part of my 2014 retrospective. And you thought it was never coming.
Last time I said I thought 2014 wasn't such a bad year, and then spent most of the post raking two games over the coals for their collective bad design decisions. I think it's only fair I start talking about the games I really liked in 2014. These games would be on this list regardless of how well the AAA market was doing.
 |
In a market that is increasingly dominated by games that seem more interested in being movies, The Last of Us is the most movie-like game I've ever encountered. This is not a compliment. It's not a straight “movie” like Heavy Rain or even the more recent Telltale titles, but the entirety of the narrative, almost all of the character development, and even much of the most important action sequences take place in cutscenes.
I've always been enamored by the potential of the interactivity of video games. “What unique stories,” I thought, “could be told by taking advantage of the player's input to influence the way the narrative unfolds?” Instead, at least when it comes to big budget AAA titles, everyone's more interested in making a Hollywood blockbuster with the action scenes replaced by poorly justified shooty segments. These often go together about as well as oil and water, and the player ultimately has no more control over the character they're playing or the way the story unfolds than a viewer watching a movie. One almost wonders if it would have been better for them to make a movie from the start. And while I'm not presumptuous enough to say that this is an invalid way to make a game, I'm still a bit bitter that anyone with enough money to actually explore this potential is instead wasting it on vapid action movies with by-the-numbers revenge plots.
But perhaps the other reason I dislike these “games as movies” is that I never once got the impression that they'd make very good movies. That is, if you were to strip out all of the gameplay segments and replace them with typical movie action scenes and then release them in theaters as movies, I doubt they'd be very well received. I think film critics would generally pan them, and they'd be relegated to “this summer's bombastic-yet-vapid popcorn film,” equally inoffensive and insubstantial. It kind of makes the whole exercise seem a bit pointless, doesn't it? Not only are they often not very good games, with action segments that too often clash with the story they're ostensibly trying to tell, but they can’t even manage to be very good movies, either.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Five Games Josh Liked in 2014: Part 2”
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
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?
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
T w e n t y S i d e d
