Like I said on Monday, I spent the weekend dicking around with Final Fantasy X and Cheat Engine. I learned a few fun things, a few annoying things, and a few curious things. So let’s talk about it…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Final Fantasy Cheat”
Last week I admitted that – much to my embarrassment – there were a bunch of details in the game that I’d missed. Then in the comments I discovered that I am not alone in this. Everyone seems to have gaps in their knowledge. Even more interesting is that everyone’s gaps are unique. We all know 90% of the backstory, but the missing 10% is different for everyone.
The terrible thing is that it’s really hard to fill in these gaps. If I claim that X, then someone else will respond with, “Hey. I never saw X. Are you sure about that? Can you cite your source?” And of course I can’t. We’re all just reading emails on hacked computers and fragments of magazine articles found in locked rooms. There are hundreds of these kinds of messages in the game, and it’s easier to remember what you read than where you read it.
But I think there’s one misconception I should be able to clear up. Last week several people had the impression that in order to make a neuromod with skill X, a Typhon needs to consume the mind of a human being with skill X.
Based on what the game tells us, this is extremely unlikely.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 4: Good Morning Morgan”
Issac was still on the road this week. So we didn’t have anyone to edit our podcast. So we didn’t record one. So you get this instead. He’s on his way home as I write this, so we should be back to our usual schedule next week.
The mailbag is getting a bit out of hand, so I’m going to dig through the questions and see if there are any that I can answer alone.
But first let’s talk about what I did this week…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast Unplugged #8: Playing the Long Game”
The weird thing about Prey is that it has almost no story, but it has absolutely tons of backstory. Most of the game consists of Morgan just trying to get from A to B and running into an endless series of hazards and complications because the space station is in such disarray. Morgan’s adventure is primarily a series of door-opening exercises, but there’s a ton of worldbuilding and history leading up to that adventure.
The author shows a lot of respect for the intelligence and curiosity of the player. There’s never a scene where someone grabs the player’s camera for a brute-force info dump. Very little of the history is revealed through direct dialog, and the little bit we do get is provided out-of-order. If you want to understand the world of Prey, then you need to read bits of in-game lore, listen to optional audiologs, pay attention to environmental cues, and extrapolate the whole based on these various hints.
I love it. The knowledge is there if you care about it, and the gameworld rewards serious inspection. At the same time, the game never force-feeds you and you’re free to run around and shoot shit in blissful ignorance if that’s more your speed.Although, if that’s the case then I can’t help but think you’d be better served by some other genre.
For the sake of this retrospective, I’m going to present the important bits of historical context in order.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 3: The Story is Mostly Backstory”
My editor is on the road this weekend, which means I don’t have anyone to take our weekly podcast and wrangle the audio into something presentable. So no podcast. We might not get one next weekend either. The young people are making the plans around here lately, which means everything is disorganized last-minute chaos.
I really envy them sometimes.
At any rate, let’s talk about…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast Unplugged #7: The Steam Machine Reboot”
In Prey you play as Morgan Yu, who can be either male or female. Both are equally valid. Both voice actors give solid performances and neither option feels tacked-on. I never noticed any conversations where people used male pronouns for female Morgan. I did notice a few awkwardly worded email messages where people went out of their way to avoid using pronouns for Morgan, but it wasn’t a big deal. To avoid having to perform similar grammatical contortions, I’m going to pick a gender for this series.
I’m going to spend a lot of time talking about Morgan, and Morgan’s older brother Alex. It’s actually super-handy if I make Morgan a female, because then I can use “she” and “he” for the siblings and you’ll know which one I mean. So I’ll be playing as female Morgan for this series.
The game begins with Morgan waking up in her penthouse apartment on the morning of March 15, 2032. From there she heads to the roof and takes a private helicopter to the nearby TranStar building where she meets up with her brother Alex. Apparently the Yu siblings are executives in the TranStar corporation. Morgan is about to travel to the TranStar space station in orbit around the moon, but first she needs to run through a battery of tests.
The helicopter ride here reminds me a bit of the…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 2: Tram Legacy”
We’re reached another big round number of Diecasts, so I feel like I should… do… something. Or say something. So here’s a fun fact…
There are 79 episodes of the original Star Trek, 178 episodes of TNG, 176 of DS9, 172 of Voyager, and 98 episodes of Enterprise. An hour-long TV program in the USA is typically ~41 minutes. Which means there are, roughly, 480 hours of Star Trek television to watch. And no, we’re not counting the appalling new stuff like Discovery and Picard, which are action dramas with science words in them and not science fiction. Yes, there’s a difference, even if the dunderheads at CBS don’t know about it.
Anyway. 480 hours of trek. Diecast episodes these days are just a smidge over an hour. But back in the day when the cast was bigger, episodes regularly ran for an hour and a half. For the sake of laziness, let’s just assume the average is around an hour twenty. That means there is somewhere in the neighborhood of 460 hours of Diecast. So there’s almost as much Diecast as there is Star Trek.
None of that means anything. I just thought it was interesting.
Link (YouTube) |
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
T w e n t y S i d e d
