Good news for those of you who enjoy my droning voice: I’ll be on the Eh! Steve! Podcast in early April. We might talk about videogames. Or Steve. Not sure. Maybe I should get clarification.
Link (YouTube) |
Like I said before, I’m compiling my Mass Effect series into a book. I’ve finally finished the ugly brute-force work of getting the chapters into a single document and re-creating the original bold, italics, section markers, chapter headings, and so on. Yes, you’d think that such a thing would be automatic. Look, there are like three dozen ways of building an .epub from existing material and they all have some glaring fault. Maybe I’ll write about this later, but for now let’s just move on.
The final word count is 186,000 words. For rough comparison:
There are 265 footnotes. On the e-reader I’m using for testing, they work more or less like they do on the blog: you click on a footnote and the text pops up in a little box. That’s nice, but I’ll bet these footnotes are going to be a pain in the ass on in print. I turned many of them into parenthetical statements, but most of them needed to be footnotes because they were too large and complex to work as an aside in the middle of an unrelated paragraph.
I still have to add a preface and make numerous adjustments to remove useless previews / recaps to each post. It’s usually only a sentence or two like, “Next week I’m going to talk about Kai Leng’s stupid cowboy hat” and “Last week we talked about Kai Leng’s stupid cowboy hat”. On the blog these are a natural part of the format, but for someone reading straight through in book form they feel very strange. Also, explicitly referencing “weeks” is a bit goofy. The audience will probably assume I think they’re really slow readers.
I’m not sure what to do about the images. They’re an integral part of the work, but 186,000 word books don’t usually have this many pictures in them!
I discovered that the printed version can’t be printed in color with my current on-demand press. Even if it could, I’ll bet the cost would be prohibitive. Also, BioWare’s abuse of the color filter means that a lot of these screenshots will turn into a smear of blurry grey ink in black & white. Also, lots of shots are seriously underlit, which will result in a big puddle of black ink rather than a useful screenshot. I don’t know what I’m going to do about this. This book is already going to be a real doorstopper, and making it even longer for a bunch of messy unreadable images seems like a bad choice. I don’t know.
I do think I need to cut the “Everything is fine” joke from Andromeda. Images are cheap on the web, but having half a page wasted on a repeated image is probably not going to amuse someone holding the physical copy.
Yes, I could go though and manually fix the contrast in all of these muddy images, but…
Of course, none of this will be a problem for the electronic version. I’m actually really looking forward to seeing the e-book version of this thing.
You’re late. You were supposed to be reading this an hour ago. Did you sleep in? No? Is this actually MY fault because I turned my clocks ahead on Sunday? Well, what was I supposed to do? Leave my clocks alone and use them to tell time like a sane person?
Anyway, if this episode is a little short it’s probably because of time dilation due to changing the clocks, or something.
Honestly, I think people aren’t taking this daylight savings business far enough. If moving the clocks is a good idea, then let’s really make the most of it. I say we abolish March and replace it with an extra August later in the year. That will give us one less month of winter, and instead we’ll get an extra month of summer! Sure, that will really screw with everyone’s existing calendars, and things might get a little messy for people with birthdays in March / August, but think of the possibilities, Shepard!
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #336: Creepers, Butts, and Sonic Games”
Over the years, I’ve gotten quite a few requests from people for a book version of my Mass Effect Retrospective. That sounds strange to me. Haven’t you already read it? And can’t you read it anytime you like? But I don’t know. The heart wants what the heart wants.
I got an email this week suggesting that now might be a good time to do this, since Mass Effect Remastered is coming out in a couple of months. This could essentially be a “remastered” version of the retrospective. You could get it as an e-book, or you could even murder a tree for one if that’s more your style.
So what “improvements” would this new version have?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good News, Everyone!”
You might remember that last year Epic Games decided to pick a fight with Apple. Epic’s gripe was that Apple used their monopolistic power over the AppStore to make themselves an even BIGGER monopoly. The idea is that if you put an app / game on the App Store, then you MUST use their store for all financial transactions. Furthermore, by using their store you end up surrendering 30% of your income to them.
Now, a few details on this are still a bit hazy to me. I heard many claims that Apple tries to extend their control to other platforms. So if you’re based on iOS, then they want 30% of ALL transactions, even ones on Android devices. On the other hand, I’ve heard other people say this claim is nonsense, and other people claim it’s true, except Apple makes exceptions for large partners. Maybe my search skills are inadequate, but I couldn’t find a definitive answer to this. All I could find were merry-go-round flame wars between randos in the comments. If you’ve got a definitive (or at least authoritative) answer to all this, please drop a link in the comments.
It should go without saying, but I am not a lawyer. I do not give legal advice, and I’m not trying to. Also, this is not intended to be news or serious analysis. I’m not telling you the news, this is just me yelling at the television while the news is on.
Anyway, before we explain how Valve Software comes into this, let’s talk about where this all started…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Epic vs. Apple, and also Valve for Some Reason”
People have been telling me for years that the Persona series is brilliant and that I would love it. So then last week Persona 5 Strikers came out. Is this Persona 5 with some extra DLC? Is this a spin-off title? If so, is it anything like the core games? Normally you can read the webpage and it will answer these sorts of questions, but I did, and it didn’t. Can anyone tell me what this thing is?
Then again, some dumbass put Denuvo Anti tamper on this thing, so maybe I don’t care.
Link (YouTube) |
The game ends with our heroes on the ship. They just destroyed the holocron. Their mission is over. The final line of the story is when Cal asks, “So where to next?”
Now, that’s a fine enough ending I suppose. I don’t mind that they’re setting up a sequel. My concern is that they seem to be setting up a sequel specifically for Cal.
The first game establishes your starting point, while the second one establishes your direction. If you make the second game about Cal, then the audience will assume this franchise belongs to Cal, just like Tomb Raider belongs to Lara and God of War belongs to Kratos. Stick with him now, and it’ll be harder to change later. More importantly, sticking with Cal constrains you in so many ways.
First, we’ve learned his backstory and experienced his big character arc. Order 66 was the most important event in his life, and he’s now dealt with it. There really isn’t room for more big surprises in his story. Sure, you can add flashbacks to awkwardly sandwich fresh skeletons into his mental closet, but how long can you keep doing that? How many games can claim, “Oh, here’s yet another life-defining moment he needs to deal with and that’s never been mentioned before.” The dude just isn’t that old. You can’t do that forever. Eventually he becomes a stable adult with a clear moral compass, it becomes harder to take him in a new direction. Sure, you can bend him a little, but he’ll never be as malleable as a new character.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Jedi Fallen Order Part 26: The Next Jedi”
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
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.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
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.
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
T w e n t y S i d e d
