Like I said last week, I’m listing a bunch of YouTube channels that I find particularly interesting or noteworthy. The ordering of the list just reflects my own preferences and viewing habits, not the quality of the channel or its content.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Best of YouTube Part 2”
People call Borderlands “action comedy”, but that applies more to the second two games. I honestly find it really hard to nail down the tone of the first one. The trailers sold us action comedy, but when you played the thing it was sometimes dark and grim. In a few spots it was genuinely funny. For parts of the game it was mildly amusing by way of being over-the-top ridiculous. Most of the time it left you alone to blast dudes in the face for hours at a time without delivering any dialog, and the only thing supporting the supposed humorous tone was the cartoonish art style.
The second game has a modest contingent of critics that don’t find the game funny at all, and even describe the game’s humor as childish and lame. I’ll take a look at the humor (or lack thereof) a bit later in this series.
Borderlands doesn’t really have a story. It has a bunch of disconnected sidequests that are chained together and linked to plot-driven doors to force you to do the quests.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 5: Breaking Tone”
My reaction to the recent news went something like this…
Oh boy! Something new from Valve!
…DOTA…
Shit. Nevermind.
…collectible…
Yeah. Whatever.
…card game.
Forget it. I literally stopped caring three words ago.
Valve always leaves me in a tough position. I know I spend a lot of time complaining about publishers. But while I accuse outfits like Ubisoft and EA of being mis-managed due to ignorance of their audience, I grudgingly admit that Valve is really good at figuring out what the public wants. Sure, they make mistakes. Like any company run by human beings they’re prone to occasional bouts of carelessness, myopia, and bad timing, but their failings are usually understandable as the result of human frailty and not systemic management cluelessness.
When EA does something I don’t like, it’s usually because they have no idea what the public wants. When Valve does something I don’t like, it’s usually because they have a really good idea what the public wants and it just happens to displease me.
Which is to say, I’m sure this new game from Valve will be a quality title with lots of fans. It will make money. In fact, I’m willing to bet it will offer a far better return on investment than Half-Life 3 would. I might really want them to make HL3, but I can’t make a business case for it. I can only ask that they do it out of the goodness of their hearts. That usually makes for a lousy pitch.
Here is the announcement trailer for their new DOTA (ugh) collectible (yuck) card game (eye roll) titled “Artifact”…
Link (YouTube) |
As an aside, I can’t blame the people who got momentarily hyped that this was going to be some sort of Half-Life announcement. The music in the trailer is obviously the work of Kelly Bailey, using many of the same stylistic markers found in Half-Life 2 tracks. This trailer sounds Half-Lifey. If I hadn’t known what it was before hitting “play”, I might have made the same mistake.
While I’m sad we’re not getting more Half-Life, it’s probably for the best at this point. As someone pointed out on Twitter, there are no longer any writers (that we know of) working at Valve. Their entire creative culture has changed. Even if they suddenly decided it would make financial sense to make the game, it’s entirely possible it would lack the magic ingredients that made the series so popular. We could end up with a Mass Effect 3 type situation where the final installment of the story doesn’t fit, doesn’t lead to a satisfying conclusion, and feels tonally or thematically disconnected from what came before.
Is that better or worse than leaving us hanging forever? I honestly don’t know.
Last week I talked about using polish to turn a good game into a great one, but I deliberately avoided giving examples. That post was already 3,000 words long and there were too many disparate topics to cover that there wasn’t room to enumerate, explain, and quantify what I was talking about. So let’s do that now.
The point of the exercise is to come up with games that felt like they could be vastly improved by just a modest investment of additional work at the end of the project. Let’s imagine we’re aiming for stuff that can be fixed in ~6 weeks or less. Six weeks might sound like a long time, but in terms of AAA game development it’s not all that much. 18 months (78 weeks) is a pretty common development cycle, which means six more weeks is less than a 10% increaseWhich is probably a lot less than a 10% increase in budget, if we assume the team is reduced in size once you enter the polish stage.. Obviously this isn’t always possible. Sometimes the money just isn’t there, and sometimes you need to hit that ship date for Christmas. But if we find ourselves in a position where we can make a huge improvement to the game for only a 5% or 10% increase in budget, then that’s a move we want to make.
This short window limits what we can and can’t do. Obviously you can’t do major story re-writes or add detailed voiced characters. We can’t call famous voice actors back and have them re-do all their lines. Even if scheduling isn’t a problem, that’s not the sort of thing you can do cheaply. You probably can’t make sweeping changes to cutscenes, although maybe you can tweak things like props, timing, camera angles, and musical cues. Bonus points if we can improve the game by simply removing stuff that doesn’t work and still ship a complete experience.
We also can’t do major re-designs to the gameworld. No, we can’t completely change the layout of the Doom Fortress at the end of the game. But maybe we can remove the stupid hedge maze everyone hates. We can’t add all new guns to the game, but we can tweak what we’ve got. We can’t add a whole new village, but we could change an existing village so the player doesn’t constantly get caught on little bits of scenery as they walk around. We can’t redo all the sound effects, but maybe we can add or change a few.
So those are the ground rules. Here’s my list of games that could have been far better with just a little more effort.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: "Could Have Been Great" Games”
I’m still moving, and won’t have internet until Wednesday, so this week’s griping is brought to you by that greatest of all public works projects: Starbucks free wifi. For that reason, it might be a bit on the short side again.
We start with Ser Jaime, Bronn, and company on their way back from Highgarden. They have wagons piled high with gold and grain (or some kind of food). Highgarden appears to have had a great deal of gold squirreled away – we later learn it’s enough to repay the throne’s debt to the Iron Bank. That debt was last important all the way back in season five, when Mace Tyrell got the guy who plays Mycroft Holmes to give them a reprieve through a singing-based charm offensive.I just want to say here that I actually liked Mace Tyrell. I’ll miss him.
It seems a little strange to me that House Tyrell had this huge amount of money and no one had ever mentioned it before, but on this show things that “seem a little strange” barely register anymore. Bronn and Jaime exchange a bit of banter, where Bronn refers to Highgarden as “the biggest prize in the world.”
“The biggest prize in the world.” What? Look, I know this is a small thing, but every so often this show throws a line in that makes me wonder if they’re even trying, or if they even have an editing process at all. A line like that shouldn’t make it through editing. If nothing else, it should be changed to something like “you’ve just won a great prize,” or maybe “you’ve just won the biggest prize in the Reach,” or something like that. Don’t call Highgarden “the biggest prize in the world” when it’s clearly not. It’s just sloppy. It speaks to a lack of care.
Next Jaime has Bronn and the Tarlys collect the Reach’s last harvest. That’s presumably the last harvest before a winter that will last several years. So… did Jaime just condemn an entire region of Westeros to starvation? I’m not sure. I guess we’ll find out.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Timely Game of Thrones Griping 4: The One With the Giant Honking Battle”
Steve C asked a question last week:
Shamus, what Youtube channels do you watch?
I remember you mentioning on the Diecast that you don't watch TV anymore. That your recreational TV time has been replaced by Youtube. Personally I wish I could do that. There's just not enough of stuff on Youtube I want to watch. Except I know that I'm wrong. With a few million years worth of content on Youtube I know that there has to be more than stuff on there that I'd like, I've just never found it.
So I'm curious what non-TV options you fill your time with.
It’s not completely true that I don’t watch television. That’s only mostly true. There’s exactly one traditionally big-media show that I’m into. I’ll talk about that at the end of this post series. The rest of my passive entertainment comes from YouTube.
Here’s a list of the channels that I’m into these days. We’ll start with the ones of mild interest and work our way up to the channels that I never miss and which have have remained engaging through repeated archive binges. For each channel I’ll list a “viewing suggestion”, which is one particular video that’s either remarkably good, a personal favorite, or a suitable starting point for new viewers.
And yes, the title of this post is a lie. This is not remotely the “best” of YouTube. But “The Stuff I Happen To Watch On YouTube Because I Subscribed Six Months Ago And I’m Too Lazy To Unsubscribe And Besides It’s Mostly Pretty Good” isn’t as catchy.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Best of YouTube Part 1”
Sometimes you come across a game that’s not doing anything particularly new, but it’s re-treading old ground with such a dedication to quality that it feels new. “I never knew this sort of game could be this genuinely enjoyable.”
Mechanically, The Room is a descendant of the classic “escape the room” titles that were all the rage among browser-based games a decade ago. Through careful examination you discover a sliding panel, which reveals a button, which pops open a container, which contains a key, which opens a safe, which contains a scrap of paper, which details the correct arrangement of some previously-inscrutable switches, which unfastens a lid, which reveals a clock, which you get the idea. In this game you’re working your way into a puzzle box rather than working to exit a room, but it’s the same basic idea. Either way you’re unraveling the work of some obstructionist jackass who has confused obscurity with security, leaving their plans vulnerable to someone with a flair for lateral thinking and lots of free time.
The trick for me here is that it’s really hard to quantify what makes The Room so good. Which kind of sucks, since that’s my job. But in order to sustain my thin veneer of professionalism, let me take a half-assed stab at it…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Steam Backlog: The Room”
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
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.
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
T w e n t y S i d e d
