Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Saturday Apr 26, 2008

Filed under: Random 25 comments

If my writing seems unusually witty or incisive, it’s probably because I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and it’s got all these cool features which will undoubtedly make me a better blogger. </sarcasm>

This was a big upgrade. I’ve skipped the past couple of updates, mostly because I hate doing it so much. I don’t really feel the need for any new features, so going through the upgrade rigamarole seems sort of pointless. Most new features focus on making the process easier for non-technical people. (In this version, there’s a whole system for uploading, embedding, and managing catalogs of images, movies, etc.) That’s nice for the people who need it, but I’ve already got a system I’m using and I’m fairly set in my ways.

Response to WP 2.5 has been overwhelmingly positive, but for me it was just a pointless shuffle of all the administration controls, so now I can’t find anything. Still, sooner or later I’ll grow attached to this. Probably just in time for the next upgrade. I know I’ll get it when it comes, for the same reason I got this one.

This must be what it feels like to be a Mac user.

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.

 Turning GreenPrevious Post

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25 comments

Serious Sam:
The Mayhem Shooter

By Shamus Posted Friday Apr 25, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 29 comments

 Doom 3: MuhahahaPrevious Post

Next PostRise Of Nations:
Neverending Sortie 

It has been observed that in terms of gameplay, the true descendant of Doom was not Doom 3, but Serious Sam. In Doom you played a man who could run at something approaching the speed of an automobile. You carried a cache of weapons, ammunition, and armor that would, in a more plausible reality, require a U-Haul truck to transport. You were a bullet sponge of epic proportions and capable of falling any distance without being harmed. Most importantly, you fought multitudes of foes in huge, chaotic, open-air battles. In all of these ways, Serious Sam is like Doom, only moreso.

After Doom, the entire genre of FPS games moved away from this sort of thing. The games slowed down as they fragmented into numerous sub-genres. The Stealth Shooter. Survival Horror Shooter. Tactical Shooter. Roleplaying Shooter. Puzzle Shooter. But Serious Sam embraced its roots. It exhumed the abandoned gameplay of the Mayhem Shooter, dusted it off, polished it, and made it fun again.

It’s all played for laughs, which is fitting. This isn’t a game where you engage in soul-searching and probe the mysteries of what it is to be human. This ain’t Shakespeare. This is a game where you kill an unbelievable number of foes with massive guns and overwhelming bravado. It’s good, mindless fun.

It actually took me a while to get through the game. I can only take it in limited doses. After twenty minutes of holding the fire button down and watching things go boom, I need to sit quietly and let my nervous system recover.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Serious Sam:
The Mayhem Shooter”

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.

 Doom 3: MuhahahaPrevious Post

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Neverending Sortie 

29 comments

Thanks for coming, now go someplace else

By Shamus Posted Thursday Apr 24, 2008

Filed under: Tabletop Games 41 comments

 Campaign LogsPrevious Post

Next PostHalbert's Mordan 

Several worthy RPG links that I’ve sat on for too long:

Mr. Halbert has a post talking about how he ran the Mordan campaign for his D&D group. This is the first time anyone has run a game based on what I’ve written. It sounds like it went well. Even better is that it sounds like he got to explore some of the ideas that I overlooked or never developed.
Chatty DM asks some profound questions about potions.
It might be a bit of a stretch to file this under “roleplaying”, but Ctrl-Alt-Del webcomic just completed a communal “choose your own adventure” story, where readers got to vote on the actions of the protagonist along the way. The story is complete now, and I think it turned out wonderfully. Aside from the art (which was fantastic) the story managed to be both humorous and compelling. I always like Ctrl-Alt-Del, but this series was exceptional. The series begins here.

EDIT: Oh come on. Some people will fight about anything. I don’t know what the deal is, but someone people can’t stand the fact that others hate their beloved comics, or vice-versa. It’s like we can’t be happy until the entire net is a morass of groupthink where everyone precisely agrees on what things suck and to what degree. This is common in everything from operating systems to movies, but when it comes to webcomics people take it really seriously.

I’m nuking some of the idiocy and closing the thread.

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.

 Campaign LogsPrevious Post

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41 comments

Meet Singles

By Shamus Posted Thursday Apr 24, 2008

Filed under: Pictures 44 comments

 No SharingPrevious Post

Next PostIt's Me 

I’m sure most people have seen those ads for dating sites that proclaim, “Meet singles in your area now!” The ads always show a half dozen pictures of hot women purportedly from whatever town you live in, but the lie is so clumsy and halfhearted that I doubt many men are even able to imagine it to be true. I’ll see the girls supposedly from my little town near Pittsburgh, sitting next to a cactus or a palm tree or at the ocean. More absurd is that the ads always show women. How are these dating sites so chock full of gorgeous girls if they never even bother advertising to them?

The dating sites seem to be in a war of escalating lies. Whoever tells the most brazen fib to the most people, wins. They have been selling the fiction that your town is packed with hot, lonely women who are comfortable uploading pictures of themselves in provocative underwear, and who want to meet “you”. The next step seems to be in telling men that not only do they have women who are hot, young, lonely, and minimally attired, the women in question are precisely of the type you’re looking for! Goths, Republicans, Democrats, Jews, African-Americans, Left-handed Redhead Vegans who enjoy wakeboarding. It doesn’t matter how esoteric your tastes run, they want to assure you that they have an entire database of exactly your sort of woman.

I submit that this has now gone too far:

This was an actual ad my wife saw yesterday.

Pentecostal women, you say? And they want to chat? Sounds good, but what kind of pentecostal girls are we talking, here? Are they Trinitarian, Oneness, or Evangelicals? Are any of them Restorationists? These are things I need to know before I go jumping into live chat with a chick in her underwear. I don’t want to get half an hour into things and suddenly realize I’m dealing with a girl who likes to “experiment” with Calvanism once in a while. I have standards, you know.

The internet is a veritable fountain of silly. It makes me happy.

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.

 No SharingPrevious Post

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44 comments

Doom 3: Muhahaha

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Apr 23, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 42 comments

 Deus Ex - Invisible War:
Poor ChoicePrevious Post

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The Mayhem Shooter 

It’s time to over-analyze a dusty old videogame once again! Why people let me continue to get away with this will forever elude me…

A lot of people have dumped on Doom 3. Certainly no game could live up to the hype that preceded it, but I don’t think the game was quite as brain dead-as some made it out to be. I’ll even go so far as to say that I think it was a fine story, all except for the character of Dr. Betruger. If it wasn’t for him, this game would have been about twenty IQ points smarter.

While many fans have dissed the survival horror aspect of Doom 3, I still think the game had some genuine scares and some good emotional hooks. Maybe I’m just a lightweight, but I thought several of the scenes were handled deftly and with an eye towards restraint. The whispering female voice and footprints leading you to the secret cache of supplies was a creepy moment. The introduction of the spiders was executed with cunning. And the “zombie” levels at the start of the game mostly worked. If you look at these parts of the game in isolation, it starts to look like a game with some subtlety and a good sense of how to manipulate the player. All of which makes it that much more frustrating when the thing spazzes out later on.

The original Doom was about as thin as you can get, story-wise. The introduction to the game wasn’t even part of the software: You had to peruse the README text file if you wanted to put the events in their proper context. The intro wasn’t much, just a basic outline of the situation and a little bit of flavor text, but it at least explained where you were and how you got there. I wonder how many people played the game without even knowing about it.

When id Software went to make Doom 3, they faced the challenge of how to do so without making an unintentional comedy. Videogaming had evolved in the ten years since the original, and plotless games with a procession of mindless foes to gun down were no longer taken seriously. id Software needed to start over. The only thing they could keep – and the thing that would make it Doom – was the premise. So they were stuck with grafting a plot and characters onto the original idea. I actually think the writer did an admirable job, right up until he got to Dr. Betruger. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Doom 3: Muhahaha”

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.

 Deus Ex - Invisible War:
Poor ChoicePrevious Post

Next PostSerious Sam:
The Mayhem Shooter 

42 comments

About the mini-comics

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Apr 23, 2008

Filed under: Projects 15 comments

 Wavatars: DeprecatedPrevious Post

Next PostWavatars: New Faces 

Several people said they liked the recent little comics I’ve been doing. I’m glad they’re going over well.

Someone suggested doing a regular comic along these lines, like a Deus Ex comic. That sounds amusing, but I don’t really have time to take on (another) full-blown comic project right now. Even if I had the time, I’m not sure I’d want to make that commitment. These little ones are fun and easy. They take about twenty minutes. Unlike my other comics, they don’t need to stand on their own, so it’s okay if they aren’t terribly funny or well done. It’s kind of nice to be able to slap something together without worrying about continuity, characterization, joke recycling, or layout. I can just dump any pseudo-humorous exchange into a vertical strip of panels and call it done.

The comics are basically just there to keep the front page from looking like a wall of text. In the past I’ve often tried to start posts off with some stock photos or screenshots or something visual, and this is another way of accomplishing that. Screencap comics are sometimes less time consuming than fishing around for just the right photo.

You can see a list of all posts with a comic in them if you search for the comic tag. There are only a handful right now. Maybe there will be more later. Maybe there will even be one later today.

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.

 Wavatars: DeprecatedPrevious Post

Next PostWavatars: New Faces 

15 comments

Wavatars: Deprecated

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Apr 22, 2008

Filed under: Projects 26 comments

 New Theme: Lawful GoodPrevious Post

Next PostAbout the mini-comics 

I read on the Gravatar blog that several popular icon systems have been simply built in to the Gravatar system. This means my Wavatars plugin is now superfluous. Instead of installing Wavatars on your blog, you can just use the built-in support for Gravatars and set the default code to “&default=wavatar”. This means that Gravatars.com will handle the storage and CPU load of all those icons. This also means that WordPress.com blogs will be able to use wavatars, as well as people who just don’t like mucking about with downloading and installing plugins. Good deal all around.

The existing Wavatars plugin will remain, but I have no plans to update it in the future. I’m glad to see that the plugin was popular enough to merit inclusion in the Gravatar system. Always nice to see an idea you nurtured grow to the point where it goes and lives on without you. (Not that I was the first to think of procedurally generated avatars, just this particular set of cute little faces.)

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.

 New Theme: Lawful GoodPrevious Post

Next PostAbout the mini-comics 

26 comments

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Steam Summer Blues

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