I may shake my fist at the clueless corporate behemoth of EA, but the truth is I’ve come to depend on them. If their upper management was hospitalized and began getting the mental help they so desperately need, the company might end up in the hands of reasonable human beings and I’d be out of a job. I make fun of stupid, and nobody does stupid like EA.
Perhaps you noticed the lack of posts today. Perhaps not. In any case, I’m probably well over 1,000 miles from where Ike made landfall, but even Ike’s far-flung remnants provided us with an annoyingly impressive windstorm. One of those savage windstorms that make you glad you live in a brick house, or make you wish you did.
By morning the wind was gone, along with electricity, internet service, and large parts of the surrounding trees. Everyone’s yard was carpeted with leaves, like some sort of monochrome autumn.
My house seemed to be one of a small number in the neighborhood that still had power, although I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with electricity without the internet. I’d heard it was useful for other things, but I couldn’t remember anything off the top of my head. I tried to Google it, but then I remembered, oh right.
It’s nearly evening now, and you can hear chainsaws all over the neighborhood as people carve up the fallen branches and trees into moveable chunks. Internet is back on (obviously) and everyone seems to have power again. Good show.
I’m not complaining. Many others suffered a lot worse, and a day without internet is a pretty timid calamity. Still, it drove home the point that:
This makes me realize just how strange Starcraft must sound to Asian fans:
T w e n t y S i d e d
He’s not bad. He made me laugh, and I can’t even understand what he’s saying.
This is an unusual one. It’s probably the first & last single-panel comic I’ll ever make for Stolen Pixels. This is also one of those rare cases where I regret my overly verbose style. I wanted to show as much of the image as possible, and I pruned the text as much as I could, but in the end I really had to obscure a lot of it to make my point.
When you’re making screencap comics, it can sometimes be a bit hard to make fun of a game you refuse to buy. Since they’re even charging for the Spore demo, I thought I was going to be left without the means to mock the game. Then I discovered that the various videos in the ever-present ad campaign provided me with all the tools I needed.
The other day I briefly mentioned Good Old Games, but now the beta is going and I’ve actually had a peek inside. It’s tremendous.
I have not actually used it (yet) myself, but here are some of the good things I’ve been hearing:
This is an amazing thing. I’m actually feeling a profound sense of guilt that I haven’t given them any money yet. Not for a game, but just, you know, in general. I know I’m getting Freespace 2, and with these prices it’s actually pretty easy to just toss a couple of extra titles into your shopping cart.
Jay Barnson is the preacher, and I am the choir. Please turn in your hymn books to #132, “Is DRM Killing PC Gaming?“, and sing along with me.
I sing that song often enough around here, as everyone is painfully aware. But Jay has been both a mainstream and an indie developer (and in fact recently moved back to indie after another stretch in one o’ them highfalutin’ mainstream outfits) and it’s nice to have some support from someone on the other side of the gamer / developer divide.
I know we just went through this a month or so ago, but for no discernible reason Thunderbird lost all my emails. I restored a 2-month old backup, and it managed to lose those. I restored the backup again, but I have no way of knowing how long Thunderbird will keep them around this time.
More to the point: Any personal emails sent to me in the last 2 months are gone. If you emailed me in the past week or so and didn’t hear back from me, please re-send. Several people have sent me links and “You might want to see this” articles over the last couple of weeks, and now those are gone. I’d planned on writing about some of them
Boring details of the misbehavior follows: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I Blame Thunderbird”
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
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?
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.