T w e n t y S i d e d

A reminder: The goal of this series isn’t to make a comedy laugh riot. We’re not really trying to be MST3k. It’s all unrehearsed, which means sometimes we’ll get things wrong, make mistakes, or fail to say enlightening things. You should view this more as being on the couch with us while we play, and not see it as an extended version of Unskippable.

I liked it better when you couldn’t hear me and everyone assumed I was saying these brilliant, incisive things. Now Josh has fixed my audio levels and you can enjoy witty observations about how red the terrain is. Clever material, that. Stayed up all night writing it.

We debated a lot on whether or not we should include the full Mako sections of the game. I was in favor of cutting the game to remove lengthy sections of driving and / or combat, and distilling the experience down to the story and some representative fights. I was worried the non-story bits would just be twenty minutes of dead air, mumbling, and throat clearing. That turned out to not be a problem, and now I can see there is a certain need to give the viewer the whole game without editing. It’s actually a good rule of thumb: If we can’t fill the time with commentary then we probably shouldn’t be covering the game to begin with. (Which is why we’ve dismissed Borderlands. Too much combat that looks more or less the same from the viewer’s perspective. We’d run out of stuff to say before we left the tutorial.)

But the inclusive approach does lead to episodes like this one, where basically nothing happens.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.