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Hosts: Josh, Chris, Jarenth, and Shamus.
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Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #52: Goat Simulator, Burial at Sea”
Diecast #52: Goat Simulator, Burial at Sea
Skyrim EP21: Ricki vs. Jenny
Link (YouTube) |
At the seven minute mark when the dragon body teleports back up the hill: I have to think this is like one of those moments in a D&D game when players are screwing around, shouting random crap and the line between “wouldn’t it be funny if I did” and “I am actually” gets kind of blurry. After a couple of minutes the DM just ignores the mayhem and resumes the game as if nothing happened.
If you’re confused about WHAT HAPPENED in this episode, here is the best I can figure out:
Josh cast frenzy on a horse. This caused the horse to go hostile. Jenny then jumped in to his defense. Since the horse is a member of the Imperial Legion faction, This caused the whole camp to go hostile to Jenny. Once the horse was dead, Jenny looked for the next acceptable target and chose Ricki. So then Jenny and Ricki (both of whom are immortal) fought, with Ricki prevailing. Once Jenny was down, Ricky attacked the player. I’m not sure if this was because of the fight with Jenny or because Josh frenzied the horse.
After Josh ran away, he waited (standing in the same spot of the snowy wastes for several days) during which time the game spawned a bunch of thugs, who were ostensibly hired by Anise to punish the player for the crime of looting her cabinThese thugs are a scripted event, created when the player robs somebody. If you never steal, they never show up.. Since we looted it after we killed her, I’m not sure when this job was commissioned.
The three day wait apparently didn’t do anything to calm Ricki, who was still out for blood. The only way to placate her was to attempt to murder her, and after her defeat she went back to pretending nothing happened.
Also, while this is a great big pile of nonsense, I need to defend the game by pointing out that half the crazy came from Josh, who was behaving just as random as the AI.
Skyrim EP20: The King’s Speech
Link (YouTube) |
If I wanted to argue that Skyrim should have been Game of The Year in 2011, I would use this video to make my case. If I wanted to argue that Skyrim was the worst game of 2011, I would also use this video. This is a perfect snapshot of why all the awful and stupid things in Skyrim are also kind of awesome.
Related references:
Oh Rikkei, you so fine. You so fine you blow my mind.
Thief Autopsy Part 4: A Friend in Need
So Garrett has miraculously stumbled into the catacombs below the House of Blossoms, even though he doesn’t know his goal is here and it required the use of a key he didn’t know he’d need.
This place is obviously a Keeper library, even though it’s never called that. Kind of like how Catwoman was never called such in the last Batman movie. It follows the keeper motif established by Thief: Deadly Shadows: You’ve got books everywhere and impractical staircases.
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| Ooooh! Spoooky missing art assets! |
As Garrett enters the ruins and look down into the depths, Garrett says, “Whatever that is, it doesn’t look human.” I’ve played through this part three times now, and I’m sure there’s nothing down there. Garrett is seeing something that doesn’t exist in the game. Evidently in some earlier build they had monsters down here, and at some point they removed the monsters but forgot to take out Garrett’s comment. (The monsters do show up much later in the game, and in this version of the story it wouldn’t make any sense to have them appear here.) I’ve watched a couple of Let’s Plays of this section to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. It’s the same for everyone. Garrett makes his comments and the player stops and becomes befuddled. What? What did I miss? Am I supposed to be seeing something?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Thief Autopsy Part 4: A Friend in Need”
Skyrim EP19: Bottle Fairy
Link (YouTube) |
I love how Kelly Mumbles and I lament that the Homestarrunner site is dead, and then two days after the recording we get the first new entry in three years. High five, Mumbles.
Next week we’re just going to play the Strong Bad game and do nothing but bitch about how long it’s been since the last Strong Bad email. Maybe we can jump-start the site again.
Ruminations on Homestar Runner follows:
It’s actually hard to introduce people to Homestar Runner these days. The jokes mostly stem from this fractally complex meta-lore that grew over the years. The team would make new versions of existing characters as part of a one-off joke. Teenage versions of the characters. Anime versions. Mid-90’s “edgy” re-designs. Comic book version. Vaudeville version. Storybook version. Then the joke characters would grow in complexity until they had a little world of their own. Then there would be a joke that created a crossover between the worlds, or made a new spinoff within the spinoff, or whatever. The jokes are impenetrable to people who don’t understand the origins and lineage of all these characters. Imagine a version of the Star Wars universe that you couldn’t follow unless you were familiar with all the movies, the novels, the 80’s cartoons, the videogames, the arcade games, and the comic books.
The longer the site ran, the more rewarding it was for longtime fans and the more impenetrable it was to outsiders.
So obviously the way to experience the site is chronologically, right? Except, there’s no easy way to do that. The Strong Bad Emails form a nice orderly numbered progression, but they often make references to the holiday specials or one-off toons that aren’t part of any series. I’m not even sure how you’d go about watching the site in order. The wiki would certainly help, but you’d still need to jump around quite a bit and understand the different types of toons and when they tended to appear.
Making matters worse is that a lot of the old toons are pretty rough by today’s standards. They were amazing in 2001 when animated, voiced content was hard to come by and the net didn’t really have the infrastructure for instantaneous video delivery. They’re much less impressive in a post-YouTube world.
I’d love to know how the Strong Bad videogame went over with people unfamiliar with the site. My guess is that the whole thing would feel like random nonsense, but I don’t know. It’s very hard to look at this through the eyes of an outsider.
Experienced Points: One Platform to Rule Them All
So my column this week is about the ongoing platform wars. Spoiler: It starts off talking about the Nintendo vs. Microsoft vs. Sony thing but then jumps in with some numbers suggesting that Steam is as big as any living room console in terms of customers.
Originally I was going to write about how well Valve is integrating into foreign markets, which is always a tough hill to climb. But the more I looked into it, the less confident I was to talk about it. The subject is just so vast. I spoke with Robert Rath, who writes the Critical Intel column at the Escapist. (Highly recommended.) His article on buying games in Hong Kong can give you an idea of just how different markets can be once you get outside of North America and Europe. There are so many countries, and every one of them has a completely different and equally outlandish way of doing business with consumers.
Some other facts about Steam that didn’t make it into the column:
- The “users” number represents active users, not existing users. Publicly available numbers for Xbox or Playstation are given in existing users.
- The growth of Steam users is accelerating, and has been for the last three years.
- The Oculus Rift could bolster the PC market even more. The buzz surrounding the VR market is that “VR makes converts on contact”. This hasn’t been true in the past. After twenty years, we finally have the technology to make this work, and apparently the results are amazing. Note that this buzz is coming from engineers like Carmack and Abrash, not marketing types. I find their recent talks on the subject to be very convincing.
Diecast #51: The Mailbag
This is it: The great Mailbag Reckoning. If you sent in a question before March 26th and it hasn’t been answered before, then it’s either answered today, or never. All questions are forever answered, or forever ignored.
To be clear: If your question didn’t make the cut, it doesn’t mean it was a bad question. It might just mean we didn’t have anything to say on the subject. If you ask about something and there’s less than three people that have something to say about it, then we usually set the question aside.
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Hosts: Josh, Chris, Mumbles, and Shamus.
2:00 What are some RPG systems you don’t like?
21:00 What happens when a vocal group of players demands things that are antithetical to the design?
30:00 What are your favorite board games / card games?
36:00 What are your thoughts on procedural content?
51:00 Question time is over. Chris talks about Infamous: Second Son.
1:04:00 Josh is playing Assassins Creed: Liberation.
Have a question for the cast? Address is in the banner at the top of the post. To have the best chance of it making it onto the show:
- Try to keep it no more than two sentences.
- Aim for subjects that the whole cast can discuss. (So, questions about Good Robot would be bad, since it would just be me talking.)
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