T w e n t y S i d e d
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Man, these are some really great Khans, here.
Spoiler Warning S5E10: Boone Comma Boom
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We got sidetracked a bit talking about Defense Grid: The Awakening. I wasn’t kidding about it using Gamebryo, either. Here is the splash screen:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning S5E10: Boone Comma Boom”
PSN Outage
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This story about the Playstation Network being hacked is huge. Just trying to draw a chalk outline around the thing is a major undertaking. The degree to which this will impact the behavior and attitudes of the rest of the industry is hard to judge. But you can bet the people in Redmond are letting out a slow breath and saying, “Thank God this didn’t happen to us.” And then they laugh and go back to brainstorming new ways to make Games for Windows LIVE even more horrible.
This is the worst-case scenario for Sony. Their entire network is down, it’s been down since last week, and they don’t even have an estimate of when it will be up again. They don’t have an explanation. And someone out there has all of the personal data of all of the PSN users, ever.
Here is an email from my brother Patrick, this morning:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “PSN Outage”
Stolen Pixels: A Hat for Every Head
You know, if the Portal 2 store sold one of these, I would totally buy it.
Spoiler Warning S5E9: No-Vac(ancy), No Problem
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Yeah, so… two minutes into the next episode we realized that Josh hadn’t actually accepted the quest, which is why we couldn’t DO the quest. But we blamed the game anyway. Look, give us a break. There’s only four of us. We can’t possibly notice every tiny little detail, and sometimes little things like WHAT QUEST WE’RE ON get lost in the shuffle.
Yeah, we suck.
Experienced Points: DLC for Dummies
Here is a little bit about the Portal 2 review-bombers. The story so far is this: Last week, thousands of enraged, barely-literate people went to Metacritic and rated the best game of 2011 a zero because it has DLC which is less offensive and more consumer-friendly than anything that came before it.
Part of this is classic over-correction of opinion. A thing appears which you mildly dislike. Everyone else loves it. Their celebration of the mundane offends you, and their enjoyment of something you find distasteful breeds resentment. If they visit Metacritic and award it 10/10, then you feel the need to correct this. Since you are outnumbered, your only recourse is to give it zero out of 10, to bring the score down to the middle, where it “should” be. In conversation, it’s not enough to dismiss it as lackluster. You must vilify it. You must excoriate it. You must hold in contempt the armies of sheeple who are too stupid to see what is so manifestly clear to you.
I’m guilty of the same thing. I’ve calibrated my indignation with regards to DRM to compensate for the widespread apathy most people have regarding the issue. It happened to Halo. Avatar. The Wii. Farmville. Nothing is more detested than when it is both ordinary and celebrated.
But even this doesn’t explain the behavior of the Portal 2 protesters. I’ve read the comment thread at the Escapist (over 300 responses so far) and it is a madhouse of muddled concepts.
“The content is stupid and nobody wants it and it shouldn’t be in the game at all and therefore Valve should let me have it for free. Since they refuse, the entire game sucks.”
There’s nothing to refute or discuss. I can’t even figure out where these people stand or what they believe in. It’s clear most of them haven’t even played the game.
I suspected this was some sort of automated system, just like other publishers sometimes have their own people rate their own games 10/10. But the thread at the Escapist proves these people are real. Crazy. Incoherent. But real.
Stolen Pixels #253: The Playboy
Okay, I get why they put a Playboy magazine collection game in Mafia II. Although, if they’re such fans of the female form, then can someone explain to me why all the women in the game look like THIS:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Stolen Pixels #253: The Playboy”
From The Archives:
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
What is Piracy?
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Revisiting a Dead Engine
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.