Today I deliver the final stroke to the equestrian corpse that is my World of Warcraft series. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed the weeks of intense cravings, vomiting, cramps, and terrifying hallucinations that I experienced during my WoW rehab.
I am uncharacteristically at a loss for words at the moment, but I can’t bear to send you away empty handed. So check this out: Requirements Not Met, the first of what I hope will be a series of posts that look at what games look like at the minimum visual settings.
Game companies often release screenshots that are more or less fiction. They crank up the visuals and the resolution to the point where the game would be unplayable even on high-end machines, and then they offer up these images as if they were examples of what the game will look like for the average user. It’s stupid and dishonest and everyone knows it and they do it anyway. Releasing comedic screenshots of the game at the other end of the quality spectrum is a perfectly reasonable response to this.
(And yes, I realize the absurdity of claiming to be at a loss for words at the top of a hundred and sixty five word post.)
EDIT: I stand corrected. I’m crazy busy this morning and don’t have time for the whole thing, but the first few minutes were conciliatory and civil. I am thrilled to have my cynicism proven wrong. Onward. Original post follows:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mike vs. BJ Shea”
This image was gleefully swiped from Cake Wrecks – which is one of those sites that will steal a lunch hour from you if you give it half a chance.
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A San Andreas cake. For a four year old boy. This is like one of those, “How many things wrong can you find in this picture”, except that this one is too easy. The answer is: Everything. This is an image of perfect wrongness, from the expertly reproduced likeness of Cesar Vialpando holding a gun, to the wads of play money jammed into the icing. This cake is the work of a very skilled madman.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Grand Theft Auto: The… Birthday Cake?”
Just yesterday I said that while SecuROM is an insult to customers, it had never personally caused me any difficulty. This morning I got to enjoy its shortcomings first-hand. With CD in the drive, I click to launch my game and…
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Hm. Laying aside the immorality of forbidding your customers from making Fair Use backups of stuff they own, I want to point out that the legit disk was, in fact, in the drive.
I clicked the link in the dialog for help, where I was told the following:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “SecuROM causes Bad Breath and Leukemia”
I’ve said before that if game developers would back off from the bleeding edge, they could do more with less, and GTA is the perfect example of this in action. If you’ve been reading this site for any length of time you’ve heard this rant before. My big plan over the weekend was to do a video review / commentary thing for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on the PC, to illustrate what I’m talking about.
It didn’t work out. I’m still not sure why.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “GTA:SA:PC: Strangeness”
The journey through Azeroth and self-indulgence continues. Please follow these steps for maximum enjoyment:
Note that when I said “maximum enjoyment”, I was talking about my enjoyment, not yours.
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
T w e n t y S i d e d
