Link (YouTube) |
At the end of the episode the good doctor gives a psych test. From the standpoint of scientific rigor, it’s about as useful as a “What kind of lover are you?” quiz from the pages of Cosmo. But let me answer them anyway:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Until Dawn EP3: Girlfriend Arguments”
So I spawn here, weak and tired
Another gulf of lava beckons
Once again, yours truly reckons
Soon I’ll be in daedra mired
And again, be Battlespire’d
Shake the handle off death’s rattle
Then, once more, my zig-zag hustle
One more time, a stupid puzzle
Listen to an end-boss prattle
Shuffle to the final battle
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts vs. Battlespire CH33: Versed in Strategy”
Link (YouTube) |
Since I don’t know anything more than you do about where this story is going, I can’t offer much additional commentary. BUT! I can embrace some of the digressions that wouldn’t fit in the show. So let’s do that…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Until Dawn EP2: Haunted Exposition!”
In the belly of Sin, Tidus at last comes face-to-face with his father. This is… strange. Jecht became Sin, but then we find Jecht is also inside of Sin? That’s like Optimus Prime transforming into a truck, but then you look in the driver’s seat and Optimus Prime is behind the wheel. That’s confusing.
It’s an awkward conversation when Tidus confronts his father. The last time they saw each other, Tidus was a different person. They both were. They didn’t understand each other before and nothing in the last ten years has corrected that.
Eventually Jecht urges them to get on with it. He’s about to lose himself again and become the rampaging beast again. Which means he’s about to turn into a boss monster. So six-foot Jecht turns into a fifty-foot aeon which is inside of stadium-sized Sin, and all three are supposedly Jecht. That’s even more confusing.
After the fight, Tidus runs to his father’s side and they talk a bit more. Tidus ends the conversation by saying, “I hate you.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Final Fantasy X Part 20: Finale Fantasy”
Link (YouTube) |
I was all in favor of covering this game until this very moment, when I realized I had to write this post and didn’t have anything to say that I didn’t already say on the show. I have a PS4. I could get this game and play through it now. But I’m way too busy as it is. I’m not sure what I’ll put in these entries as the series goes on.
If you’re wondering why I reacted so strongly to the threat of David Cage, it’s because I played this.
I’ve been playing this game obsessively for months, and yet I haven’t mentioned it on the site or even the podcast. That’s strange. I guess it’s because Factorio has supplanted Minecraft as my “Zen” game. It’s the game I play when I need to relax and think. A lot of the analysis you see on this site is the result of me stepping away from the word processor and zoning out to a low-action game for a few hours.
Factorio is an indie game by the ten-person Wube software. As of this writing it’s still in Early Access on Steam. I don’t often cover Early Access games, but I wanted to talk about Factorio because:
In Factorio, you begin with your character – a nameless person with no particular story or identity – being dropped into the middle of an alien wilderness. You’ve got a pickaxe, and you can see there are deposits of coal and iron spread around, as well as trees to chop down. At this point you probably assume this is just another survival game. It might even feel like one for the first couple of minutes. But it isn’t. Your character doesn’t need to gather resources to survive and in fact your character is little more than a human-shaped camera / cursor.
Instead of gathering food, your goal is to launch a rocket into space.
After the first five minutes of the game, you’re done gathering resources manually. After that, you’ve got machines to gather the resources and conveyor belts to carry them to a refinery. After a few more steps up the tech tree you’ll have conveyor belts feeding those refined materials into assembly machines to make parts, which will go on to be assembled into a final product. From that point on you’re just adding additional layers of automation onto an increasingly convoluted industrial complex that sprawls across the landscape in every direction.
You’ll need power to keep this enterprise running, which means you’ll need to build thundering coal-fired generatorsEventually you can unlock solar panels, but those come with their own drawbacks. to generate electricity. These generators will belch sooty smoke into the sky, which will agitate the local population of alien beasts. These creatures will rush at your base like a swarm of Zerglings to assault your power plants, and anything else that gets in their way. This means you’ll need to build walls and turrets to keep the riff-raff outThere’s an option to play the game in peaceful mode, where the monsters never attack first..
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Factorio”
Arvind and I are planning an update for Good Robot. There are a few lingering balance changes that have so far only been available on the beta test branch, and we want to make those public. But we thought we should add some fresh content to the game while we’re at it. We’re still working out what those changes will be. Ideally we’d like a little of everything: New music, levels, weapons, foes, etc. We’ll see what we can do. It’s a busy time of the year and we don’t want to put this off until spring.
But let’s go after some low-hanging fruit first. I’ve made a poll where you can vote on whatever kind of hat you’d like to see in the game. It’s a fill-in-the-blank, so go nuts. Just remember that we’re going to be looking for popular choices. If you’re the only one that votes for a particular hat, then it can’t really rise to the top of the pile.
So go nuts, but not TOO nuts.
Once again I have to commend the folks at Google. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to waste 700×750 pixels on a one-question, one-line survey, but they somehow pulled it off. I know Google likes their whitespace, but this form wouldn’t fit on an 800×600 monitor without scrolling, and it’s ONE QUESTION. I distinctly remember the 90’s, and having more than one sentence on the screen at a time. This thing is so wasteful it looks like satire.
Note that this survey requires you to be logged into the Google Overlord. If you don’t have a Google account, you can’t participate. Sorry, but it was a practical necessity. This is the only way to limit votes to 1 per person. We have to read these by hand, and we don’t want to wade through hundreds of ballot-stuffers and joke entries.
EDIT: Poll closed. I usually publish the results right away, but this one will take some time to digest. Thanks for participating.
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
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.
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
T w e n t y S i d e d
