Spoiler Warning S5E14: A Night on the Town

By Shamus Posted Wednesday May 11, 2011

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 204 comments


Link (YouTube)

Annotated:

00:52: I call this Bethesda View-ganking. It should be outlawed.

04:39: I know some people hate the bunny-hopping, but what drives me bonkers is lugging around heavy-ass weapons that you never use. SELL THE INCINERATOR.

05:19: This is my favorite Spoiler Warning stunt ever. Better than pants mining. It’s just gleefully juvenile and absurd.

10:33: This casino is the Atomic Wrangler. I meant to bring it up during the show, but we were busy with other things. This is where I lost my $16,000 jackpot to a crash. It’s also a very odd place and feels incomplete. The proprietor invites you to try the prostitutes and reads you the rules about how things work re: Paying for sex around here. You can hear the sounds of commerce-driven nookie as you explore the place. The only problem is that there are no prostitutes in the building whatsoever, and the sounds are coming from nowhere. It feels like they either didn’t finish the place, or they had to cut some content for rating purposes.

12:00: Josh decided to pummel this thug bare-handed, just for laughs. Which is why the fight took so long.

12:19: Josh dons the thug’s hat for a victory lap.

13:00: Man, that hike took FOREVER without the benefit of time-lapse.

14:58: SELL THE INCINERATOR.

17:27: For those of you keeping track at home, that was a four and a half minute bartering session. And people complained about the inventory sorting in Mass Effect.

22:26: NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

 


 

THIS IS WHAT IRONY TASTES LIKE

By Shamus Posted Wednesday May 11, 2011

Filed under: Rants 127 comments

splash_psn.jpg

So Capcom senior VP Christian “Sven” Svensson mentioned that Capcom is losing money because the Playstation Network is down. This is especially hard on Capcom, because the phone-home DRM Capcom uses has locked all of their Playstation customers out of their games.

Svensson went on to lament:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “THIS IS WHAT IRONY TASTES LIKE”

 


 

Stolen Pixels #257: The Electronic Artists

By Shamus Posted Tuesday May 10, 2011

Filed under: Column 431 comments

Hey, check out this Mass Effect 3 comic I made.

I knew I was in for another round of “You can’t criticize a game until it comes out” when I made this one. I guess I just enjoy misery. But since we’re going down that road again, why don’t we just cut to the chase and get the next six months of debate out of the way now?

Mass Effect 3 isn’t looking very good. The direction the company is taking is really-

You don’t know anything about the game. I can’t believe you would criticize a game without even knowing anything about it!

Okay, now we know a bit about it. The EA execs have said that…

I’ve really lost respect for you. They said that to INVESTORS. They could be lying! You can’t say anything bad about the game until you see some footage of it in action.

Okay, they released these promotional videos and they look just horrible.

What? Those are pure marketing. You of all people should know better than to believe those. OF COURSE the videos are just going to show off explosions and combat. You can’t really judge the game until you’ve played it.

Now I’ve played Mass Effect 3. I think it sucked.

Why did you buy the game? They made it very clear in the promotional materials that this was a shooter, which you hate. If you bought it then that’s your own stupid fault.

 


 

Spoiler Warning S5E13: Ring-a-Ding Bang, Baby!

By Shamus Posted Tuesday May 10, 2011

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 103 comments

Spoiler Warning returns in partial triumph!

I’d just finished re-installing Windows in time for recording this session, and I’d neglected to balance my audio levels properly. Josh does what he can post-production, but this week I’m still going to cut out and sound crappy. Sorry about that. The interface on my sound card is this awful, proprietary gizmo with enough sliders to govern three soundcards, and making simple changes sometimes involves calling NASA for tech support.

We’ll have that ironed out next week. In the mean time, enjoy the sound of me shouting sentence fragments over a PA system with blown speakers.


Link (YouTube)

So last week we canceled Spoiler Warning. Some people wanted us to post the crappy episodes. Others just wanted to know what happened. For the curious, here is what you “missed”:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning S5E13: Ring-a-Ding Bang, Baby!”

 


 

TwentyMine Server: Hardware Needed

By Shamus Posted Monday May 9, 2011

Filed under: Notices 54 comments

minecraft_guy.jpg

You may remember that our Twenty Sided Minecraft server is down. Curses!

Minecraft servers need two things:

  1. A machine with lots of upstream bandwidth. The server pumps out an unbelievable volume of information. No really. It’s ridiculous. Get four people in there just wandering around and checking out new regions and find out how fast you run out of outgoing bandwidth. According to Clint, “The Minecraft server uses about 400GB of transfer per month, and needs roughly a 4 or 5 megabit upload speed to be lag-free.”
  2. Hardware. The hardware requirements of a Minecraft server are so strange. It’s very much a big iron situation, where you need a decent machine but not really a cutting-edge machine. You need memory and CPU, but you don’t need graphics hardware. This is a freight train, not a racecar.

Clint has secured us #1. He’s procured a line with lots of available bandwidth for the very reasonable price of $free. The connection is at MIT, which increases the risk of having the server become a sentient robot with the mind of a creeper, so there’s that. But it’s free… so. Now all we need is a machine.

Clint was talking about putting up the Twentymine PayPal button again. The nice thing here is that this would be a one-time drive. Once we have the machine up, there should be no further costs. However, someone might be able to provide a machine outright. So, I’m going to put the PayPal button here, and we’ll see where the discussion takes us. A reminder that this PayPal goes directly to Clint and is used exclusively for funding the server. I never see the money, and as far as anyone knows Clint isn’t using it to build himself an army of assassin droids.





 


 

The Virus, Follow-Up

By Shamus Posted Sunday May 8, 2011

Filed under: Personal 167 comments

desktop.jpg

So, we’re off and running again after that nasty business.

The first thing people say when they see my desktop is, “Why is your taskbar on the left? Clearly, you are a deviant and should be put down for the good of mankind.”

The taskbar is a strange beast. I first encountered it back in Windows 95. At the time I was a 3D modeler and using a program called Truespace. Truespace is to 3D content creation what Windows Movie Maker is to video editing. And Windows Movie Maker is to video editing what a deadly house fire is to cooking. You may accomplish your goal with this software, but you will learn the meaning of suffering and regret in the process.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Virus, Follow-Up”

 


 

Yelle “Que Veux Tu” (Madeon Remix)

By Shamus Posted Friday May 6, 2011

Filed under: Movies 84 comments

Yeah. So. I’m still sorting things out. But just so the blog doesn’t go dead for us, let me fill it with some content.

Hm. Content… content. I know I’ve got some rainy-day stuff packed away for just this sort of occasion. Oh! Here’s some French pop music!


Link (YouTube)

Interesting thing about videos. I wouldn’t normally listen to music like this, but it’s the video that sells this for me. The joyful exuberance is infectious. And to be honest, if I could dance like this guy, you’d have to point a gun at me to get me to stop. Plus, I’ve never seen this particular trick of duplicating the same dance at different locations and intercutting them. It’s fun.

Lyrics.