T w e n t y S i d e d
This is why “philosopher” is never a playable character class in an MMO.
Postcards From Unable to Connect
So I’m playing WoW. Can’t find a the cave where I’m supposed to kill some Burning Blade guys. Check online. Yes, other people are having trouble with this. The map marker isn’t helpful and the given directions are basically sabotage. But players have posted the coords for the cave. 52, 28, eh? Too bad the game doesn’t tell you your position. Fine. I log out, download an addon to tell me my position, and thirty seconds later I try to log back in and I can’t. Wha?
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I mess around. I remove the plugin. I click on the “click here for more information” link that it gives when it can’t log in, but that just takes me to a super-generic page which poses the question, “What sort of problem are you having?” The choices are stuff like crashing, hacked accounts, billing issues, etc. Nothing about not being able to log in. I could submit a support ticket, but I tried that four months ago when I wanted to re-activate an old account and I am still awaiting a reply.
Sigh. I guess we have to resort to the forums. Let me get my boots on.
Ah. There we are. Top of the page. Well, it’s the top-most real post, after the twelve(!!!) sticky posts above it. People unable to connect. Wow. A lot of people. It goes on for a couple of pages. “I can’t connect!” followed by “me too!” and “same here” for dozens and dozens of posts. All of them in the last hour. Then there is a bit of stupid trolling, like you get in large communities like this when players get frustrated and bored and start amusing themselves with mischief. I glance up to the top and see that this thread goes on for seventy-eight pages. In one hour.
Well, this thread went to hell in a Netherweave Bag. Let’s just look at the last page and see what’s going on. Let’s see, the last post is…
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour two 9 inch pans. Combine the graham cracker crumbs, brown sugar, walnuts and butter. Divide mixture evenly between the prepared pans. Set aside.
2. In a medium bowl, mix together the cake mix, water, orange juice and oil until blended. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stir in the orange zest. Pour the mixture evenly over the crunch layer in the pans.
3. Bake in the preheated oven for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Allow to cool for 10 minutes, then invert onto a wire rack and cool completely before frosting. Frost (crunch side up) between layers, on top and sides. Arrange orange sections on top, then refrigerate.
4. To make the frosting: In a medium bowl, beat the vanilla frosting until light and fluffy, then mix in the whipped topping. Stir in the orange and lemon zest. Use frosting on completely cooled cake layers.
People are trading Christmas cookie recipes and baking tips. I love it.
Merry Christmas Blizzard, you lovable fumbling goofs.
Spoiler Warning S4E16:
League of Gentlemanly Krogan
Junktown sure has some weird population demographics. It seems to consist entirely of rejected Krogan professors and incompetent Blue Suns mooks.
Link (YouTube) |
As an aside, this is the last episode of Spoiler Warning this week, and there will be no episodes this week, because I am totally going on vacation!
(And in case you skipped over the “posted by” tag just under the title, that’s Josh that’s going on vacation, not Shamus. He’ll still be around, I think. Probably wishing he was on vacation. But luckily, I stole all of his plane tickets. And bourbon.)
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning S4E16:
League of Gentlemanly Krogan”
Spoiler Warning S4E15:
Welcome to Junktown!
Enjoy your stay.
Link (YouTube) |
Everyone is so worried about the recent Mass Effect 3 trailer, complaining about how bad the next game will be. So I sat down and interviewed Mr. Scruffy, who is actually the Creative Director of Creativity at BioWare and not a sock puppet on my left hand. He gave me the following details on the upcoming game:
In Mass Effect 3, Cerberus no longer believes that the Reapers exist, and abandon Shepard. Shepard is then forced to work for “The Secretive Man”, who is the shadowy leader of the Blue Suns. When confronted with the fact that all of his men have been hapless mooks, he’ll explain that those men were rogue elements of the organization, and the real Blue Suns are actually all cybernetic Ex-Navy SEAL Ninja biotics in power armor. He’ll give you the Normandy 3, which looks exactly like the other Normandi except it’s even bigger on the inside. There will be a little pet house where you can play the Tamagotchi-style space-hamster game. There will be a disco where you can play Japanese-style dating sim with your harem of collectible Yeomen. There will also be a Mako racing circuit.
The rest of the game will take place in bombed-out New York, the linchpin of the entire galactic invasion. The only way to stop them is to find someone who is bad ass enough to hunt down the gigantic bio-mechanical Reaper King, who has taken control of the Statue of Liberty and bombed the city with highly toxic Brownium-5.
How does the final battle end? Do the Reapers win? You’ll have to wait until the game launches to find out!
Spoiler Warning S4E14: Let’s Talk About Our Feelings
Link (YouTube) |
I have to say, the Miranda interview had a lot less fan service than I expected. I seem to remember that every time I visited Miranda I was treated to the boob-cam and the butt-cam whenever she spoke. Maybe it only does that if you’re male Shepard. Or maybe that happens later in the game.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning S4E14: Let’s Talk About Our Feelings”
Let’s Code, Part 4
Actually, that was a lie. It is, in fact, not remotely done. Which is good, since you can read about the steps being taken to correct the fact that it is not done.
In this entry Michael explains the z-buffer. Let me take a crack at the same thing, because I enjoy doing it…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Let’s Code, Part 4”
Spoiler Warning S4E13: Cheerleaders and Terrorists
Link (YouTube) |
At the three-minute mark:
Hey, your videogame protagonist is so fat, she jumped up in the air, and got stuck.
Thank you, thank you. I’m here all week.
While BioWare games are always trope-filled, I think cataloging all of the tropes in Jack’s recruitment would be a lengthy undertaking. Jack herself is a few tropes, then there’s her breakout, the warden, his plan, his shield and boss fight, and the prison itself.
Having said all that, I actually enjoyed the gameplay here, even though the story is a bit bent. Later there’s Grunt’s recruitment, which is pretty good, story-wise, but which I thought was tedious from a gameplay standpoint. (Fight waves of Krogan in a brown industrial wasteland? Ugh.)
From The Archives:
Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
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.
Dead or Alive 5 Last Round
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
D&D Campaign
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 Telltale Autopsy
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
Good Robot Dev Blog
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Silent Hill 2 Plot Analysis
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.