I found this thanks to Kathleen of Loading Ready Run.
From the YouTube description: “This is an animation music video that produced independent in 2009.”
Link (YouTube) |
For the enjoyment of interesting events this video is to be reviewed until satisfaction is achieved!
Last week I somehow messed up my Experienced Points article and ended up making people think I was unhappy with BioWare, rather than celebrating their efforts. That is, I ended up saying more or less the opposite of what I intended. I tried to patch it up with additional comments and such, but alas the thing was published and its errant message was already delivered to the hearts of thousands of now-annoyed gamers. In print, you cannot un-say something, you can only append “clarifications”. I did what I could with the tools I had, but some people no doubt think of me as “that guy who hates BioWare”. Most wounding of all were the messages from people who do in fact hate BioWare, who were welcoming to their fold and accepting me as one of their own.
I began to think it might just be easier to learn to hate BioWare than to clear things up.
I suppose this sort of thing happens from time to time. I’ve written about 23 MB of text here in the past four years. For reference, that’s more text than The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the The Silmarillion combined. With that kind of output, it’s amazing this kind of misunderstanding doesn’t happen more often. It’s like the old analogy: If you put a monkey at a typewriter long enough, sooner or later he’ll type something you’ll have to apologize for.
So anyway, I was careful to make the gist of this week’s article as unambiguous as possible. I even put the message into the title, so that even if you never read my articles and you only click-through so you can look at my picture, you should still leave with the correct impression of my thesis. Then I made sure to link it four times, to make sure you wouldn’t miss it.
I’ve done what I can.
Q: What do Ronald McDonald, Bozo, and the Grey Warden have in common?
A: Far too much.
Responses on the previous post were gratifying, since nearly everyone had the same complaints that I did. I brought this up not because I wanted to pick on poor LOTRO, but because I was really curious how other people would react to it. I was worried that perhaps noticing this sort of thing was a leftover from the time when I did this for a living. Maybe I was just being a 3D art snob? Maybe the average player doesn’t notice or care about details like this? But it looks like people do notice this sort of thing.
For the record, I was talking about the texture mapping:
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(Also for the record: I’m playing the game with high detail settings, and this shot is not indicative of what the game looks like as a whole. Also also: I just now tried to fire up the game and make sure I didn’t accidentally set the graphics to “ass”, but LOTRO is in the middle of an update at the moment. So let’s just go with what we’ve got here.)
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “LOTRO Screenshot, Follow-up”
I want to try a little experiment, if you’ll indulge me. Take a look at these two screenshots from Lord of the Rings Online:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “LOTRO Screenshot”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dragon Age: Twitter Review Pt. 5”
Several people have asked when the Champions Online series will end, if I’ll do anything next, and what that might be:
1) The Champions Online series will end with part 15. This should go up the last week of December or the first week of January, depending on how much time I take off for the holidays.
2) Yes, I’ll be doing another Let’s Play series after this.
3) I can’t tell you any more than that right now.
Now, those of you following my Twitter feed know that I’ve been voting for The Escapist in the latest Web 2.0 popularity contest at Mashable.
Despite my mocking, this sort of thing is actually really important to web companies. Nobody ever talks about it because it would be unseemly, but scoring awards like this can give a publication a lot of clout when attracting advertisers and also in dictating what they can charge those advertisers. Winning stuff like this can help improve the fortunes of a company, particularly younger ones. Since I’ve hitched my wagon to the Escapist, I’d love for them to reap those rewards.
I’d also love for them to win because of the nice counterbalance they provide to the review-score hype mills that usually get all the attention*. I think a lot of us here like thoughtful articles as opposed to fanboy-driven ego-stroking, and so it would be nice if we could lift up the stuff we value.
Which is all a really roundabout way of me begging for votes for my friends at The Escapist, which is a thing you could do by clicking on this link. It’s all done through Twitter, so you have to have a Twitter account to vote. I’m sorry. It’s a web 2.0 thing. Didn’t you know? Web 2.0 is about connecting every social media site to every other one in a giant clusterfarg of account names and logins until the whole network collapses in on itself and forms a CSS-compliant singularity.
I’ll make a deal with you: If the Escapist wins, I’ll post a burning, hate-filled screed on everything that totally bugs me about the Mashable awards.
But not yet. Don’t want to tip our hand just yet.
But if you dig what I do over there, or over here, then please consider voting.
* And by “attention” I mean “money”.
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
T w e n t y S i d e d
