I’ve tried embarrassing the spammers by criticizing their work. I’ve tried offering constructive criticism. And yet they just keep sending the same broken pointless messages. It’s so strange. It’s almost as if they don’t actually read my site.
Well, let’s try again:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Messages From Spammers Pt 3”
So we decided to do a stream! And it’s Ubisoft’s man-slashing For Honor beta! Complete with peer-to-peer server problems! Check it out!
Thanks for everyone who tuned in, it was lots of fun. Especially after the game crashed.
Last week we attempted to locate the “original sin” of the season five Winterfell storyline – the place where it all started to go wrong. My conclusion is that the whole thing never should’ve happened to begin with. From a character motivation standpoint, it was hopelessly broken from the word go. And yet as you’ll recall, the critical backlash centered not on the fact that none of it made any sense but that Sansa’s rape was some mixture of excessive and exploitative. My personal explanation for this centers around something I call the “gitchy feeling.”
The phrase itself comes from an oldBy “old,” I mean nineties-era. You know, old. comic book called Bone. I briefly attempted to be a comic book nerd in the fifth grade – it never really took, but I did enjoy Bone, which had an art style and sensibility something like Walt Kelly’s Pogo, another favorite of mine. One of the characters in it is Gran’ma Ben, a salt-of-the-earth homesteader type who sometimes gets the “gitchy feeling,” an omen of bad things to come.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game of Thrones Griping 3: The Gitchy Feeling”
For a long time I’ve been wanting to contrast Batman with Dark Souls. But every time I get into it I realize we’re just going to end up having the same frustrating arguments that always arise whenever someone mentions Dark Souls.
Dark Souls is famous for being “hard”. But then some people will insist, with a straight face, that Dark Souls is “Not that hard” and someone else says the game is “Tough but fair” and someone else says it’s not hard because videogame torture devices like I Wanna Be The Guy exist. Still other people use Dark Souls as a universal metaphor of arduous challenge. As in: “Ghost Peppers are the Dark Souls of spicy food.”
On top of this is the judgemental attitudes people throw at each other over what difficulty level they play on. George Carlin once said:
Have you ever noticed when you’re driving that anyone who’s driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac?
Anyone playing easier than you is a filthy casual noob and anyone playing the game harder than you is a masochistic tryhard.
The point is that some people are really particular about what difficulty levels other people should play on, and so every discussion on what difficulty is ends up getting sidetracked into this side-argument on the “intended experience” and “the right way to play”.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Arkham City Part 3: A Difficult Discussion on Difficulty”
Today Fisher was handed his release papers from Avenger County Hospital–along with a puppy sticker, a shotgun, and orders to jump over East Asia into an active massacre. Turns out Rebel City’s being hit by Advent stormtroopers, and if we burn every cloud between here and there we might just save a few of the poor bastards camped out there.
I’ve managed to pick the distress frequencies up on my hospital monitor since we crossed the NFZ. I’m not supposed to, but I am the last great hope of humanity, so the medics don’t actually slap the thing out of my hand. After a few minutes of screaming and booming I kinda wish someone would.
I’d been wondering why those two new rookies decided to sign up with XCOM, even though we’ve lost so many folks, but I guess the wailing speaker gives me a hint. There’s just nowhere safe to stand in this resistance. You sit up straight, you’re gonna be in the aliens’ sights sooner or later–and at least if you join the rank and file you get a gun to shoot back.
I really don’t have it in me to regret signing up for this shindig. I mean, I’m an American; I used to have some ordinance that makes XCOM munitions look like a polite suggestion. I would’ve locked and loaded and got on the bus if the aliens had taken over a Burger King in Tallahassee, let alone the whole world, let alone the whole free world. Honestly, I mean hand to God, I sort of figured all this was gonna happen. I mean, I didn’t know it was gonna be aliens–but I didn’t know it was gonna be not aliens, know what I mean?
But the thing is–that’s just me. Now I’ve seen two ops go south, and I’ve listened to a lot of folks die on radios, and not for myself, but for all those people in Rebel City, I find myself hoping we find some down-and-dirty on these aliens real soon. Find out they were gonna kill us all or fry our atmosphere or turn us all into toilet paper. We better find out they’re up to something real bad, or I’m gonna have trouble looking in the mirror for the rest of my very short life.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Unfit for XCOMmand CH4: Driving Prince”
Last Tuesday I released a preview build of my half-finished puzzle game. At first it was really discouraging. I hadn’t included the right DLL files so the game didn’t run for some people, and then Windows gave inexplicable error messages that pointed me in the opposite direction of the problem. We got it sorted out, though. Probably.
So let’s try again.
The new build has been tested on Windows 8 and Windows 10 and appears to work properly on both. You can get it here:
EDIT: Sorry, I have taken down the early builds. It turns out it’s really annoying to get bug reports and feature requests for problems that were fixed months ago.
Feedback on everything (stability, interface, gameplay, puzzles, presentation) appreciated. I’m seriously considering putting this thing on Steam Greenlight. It’s only $100 to do so, and I’m sure I can make that back. I’d only need to sell about 44 copies at $5 eachYou need to sell more than $100 to MAKE $100, because Steam takes 30%, and taxes take 30% of what’s left.. It all depends on how much work it needs. I’m willing to spend a few days on it even if it’s not going to make any real money, but if it needs weeks of work then I need to shelve the project. I can’t afford that kind of time investment right now.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Pseudoku: Feedback to the Feedback”
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
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
