We are very quickly running out of year! I need to spend the next couple of weeks in a mad panic, trying to make some kind of sense of the whole thing so I can write my end-of-year thoughts.
In a fit of uncharacteristic productivity, we managed to clear out the mailbag this week. As always, if you’ve questions for the show, the email is in the header.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #281: PC Building, Fallen Order, Mailbag”
Martin Scorsese’s latest movie, The Irishman, was released on Netflix this past Wednesday. It’s about the life and times of truck driver-turned-mobster Frank Sheeran and his relationships with his family, Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa, and various figures in the northeastern underworld. I won’t go into any more detail than that because I don’t want to spoil people who haven’t seen it (yet – there’ll be a spoiler section below, I’ll let you know when it’s imminent). But I have thoughts about the movie.
Link (YouTube) |
One thing you may not know about me (since it’s never really come up) is that for most of my adult life I’ve been fascinated by organized crime. I don’t just watch movies about gangsters. I watch documentaries about gangsters, read books about (and even by) gangsters, read books about the cops who chase after the gangsters, and go to websites that report on what the gangsters are up to these days. And not just American mobsters but Latin American gangsters, Hong Kong gangsters, Mumbai gangsters, Russian gangsters, Nigerian gangsters, you name it. There are a thousand different varieties, and I’m interested in all of them.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Irishman, or I Heard You Write Blog Posts”
To all of my readers in the US and Canada: Happy Thanksgiving. Today I’m celebrating the onset of Stockholm Syndrome as a user of EA’s Origin gaming platform. I ought to be irritated at EA for causing a problem, but instead I’m feeling grateful for how they fixed it. To understand this goofy tale, we need to go back to…
I figure it’s time I should look into the new Star Wars game everyone is making a fuss about. The reviews are good across the board and I’m very curious if the game is actually good, or just good compared to EA’s disastrous Star Wars efforts over the past couple of years.
So I buy the game on Steam. Then to my horror, I realized that EA has Trojan Horse’d the Origin Launcher into the damn thing. I launch the game on Steam, and it turns around and launches Origin, which should then (theoretically) launch Star Wars… Fallen… uh… what is it again?
Arg. Can I just do a little aside on how much I hate the title for this game?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Thankful to Origin Support?”
I’ve been doing this game critic hustle for over a decade now, and one question that keeps popping up is, “Why are in-game economies so broken?” How come nothing makes sense? You’re halfway through a game and you’ve got enough money to start your own country. It’s weird that your character has this much wealth, and it’s even more weird that you can’t really do much with it.
So people ask me: What’s the deal here? Can’t game designers create a properly balanced economy? Why do roleplaying economies always dissolve into nonsense like this?
It’s annoying, I know. Different games have different kinds of currency, different ways of handling progression, and different ways of handling loot, but it’s still really common to have games where the player is able to trivialize the economy by just collecting and selling loot.
The good news is, there is a reason for this. The bad news is, it’s your fault.
Or more specifically, it’s the natural result of a perfectly reasonable series of expectations on the part of the player, and those expectations lead inevitably to this absurd conclusion.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Who Broke the In-Game Economy?”
If you want a podcast that’s an actual discussion and not me thoughtlessly talking over Paul for an hour, then don’t miss the Eh! Steve! Podcast this week, where I discuss Control with the hosts.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #280: Stadia, Jedi Fallen Order, Half-Life Alyx”
Are you looking for some extra podcast this week? If so, then you’re in luck. I was a guest on the Eh! Steve! podcast and we talked about Control. You might remember I did an analysis of Control a few months ago, but here we have a discussion and talk about a lot of stuff I didn’t cover in my series.
If you follow the comments on this site, then you might recognize one of the show hosts. Chris sometimes comments under the ccesarano moniker.
Note that this isn’t a replacement for the Diecast, which will still go up on Monday morning according to the ancient traditions.
While we’re here, I might as well do a rant about… Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Eh! Steve! Podcast: Control”
Achilles: We are now, in my opinion, cooking with gas.
The Grognard: How’s that?
Achilles: Everything’s better now! For one thing, Top Hat Guy and company are all level seven and above, meaning we can actually do stuff now besides whiff attacks repeatedly and cast magic missile twice a day.
The Grognard: I would say that overall, combat is more interesting in this installment. Some high-level magic duels get downright crazy, in fact.
Achilles: I can believe it. I salivate when I read about some of these high-level spells. But it’s not just that. Everything’s… cooler. For lack of a better word. They drop you right into a big city right away this time. And instead of a generic medieval-type city, it’s a crazy Arabian Nights place.
Link (YouTube) |
The Grognard: The first time you hear the Waukeen’s Promenade music is the time that a playthrough really starts, if you ask me.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Achilles and The Grognard: Athkatla, City of Coin”
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
T w e n t y S i d e d
