REMINDER: The RSS feed has changed as of a couple of weeks ago. The new feed is here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?feed=podcast.
We’re out behind the church. In the graveyard. Norman is looking around like he’s afraid he’s being followed.
I nod, “Nice. I like this. Lotta room for more dead people here, though. What say we fill this place up?”
Norman turns to me. “Look. This is a bit tricky, but warlocks are sort of outlawed a bit.”
“Explain that.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Shamus Plays WoW #3: Into the Bandit’s Den”
Link (YouTube) |
This “being called by people in the videogame” would be WAY too real for me. I’d actually be really uncomfortable with it. Also I hate taking on the phone. One of these boys would call me and I’d be like, “DUDE. Email me!”
Anyway. This was good for a laugh and I’m sorry if I got a bit mean at the end. This was a fun idea. I’m glad Mumbles suggested it, and I’m grateful to Josh for making it happen.
With this miniseries, I hope I’m demonstrating how important a game’s rules are. Mechanics direct and shape gameplay on a profound level. The first few games we talked about stretched their rules across the entire world, for GM and players alike, and asked the player characters to be essentially plugged in to an objective framework. The middle games demand only creativity and initiative of the GM and reserve almost all of their rules for players to interestingly determine success and failure. Now we’re onto the latter games, where the rules define how the players tell the story–and the GM doesn’t exist at all.
Mist-Robed Gate (2008)
The elevator pitch for Mist-Robed Gate: instead of dice, you use poker chips and a knife.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rutskarn’s GMinars CH7: The Gamesbow 8-10”
Link (YouTube) |
Not-so-fun fact: One of my migraines began during this segment. It hadn’t started to hurt for real yet, but I was getting the strange tingly vision and mystery painIf you ask me if I’m in pain, I’ll say yes, but if you ask me where it hurts I won’t be able to tell you aside from “somewhere in the vicinity of my head”. I can’t describe it. that serves as a warm-up for the Big Show. I was getting stressed and cranky and not thinking clearly. The smart thing to do would have been to bow out and leave the show to the rest of the team, but like I said in the previous sentence: I wasn’t thinking clearly. As a result, I didn’t have much to say about the game and I don’t remember much of this now. And I think I turned mean at the end of it. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.
Anyway, this was all very silly and makes me feel like I’m a thousand years old.
The airship Tidus helped salvage at the start of the gameThe Al Bhed don’t acknowledge this or thank him, which would really go a long way to smoothing out that whole unfortunate slavery “misunderstanding”. is parked here, and it’s been cleaned up and is ready to fly.
If you go strictly by the visible day / night cycle in the game, then…
So in nine days the Al Bhed hauled the Airship up from the bottom of the ocean, cleaned it up, figured out how it worked, found or built replacement parts, repaired it, fueled it, figured out how to pilot it, and gave it a factory-fresh coat of paint?
Yeah, yeah. Final Fantasy. I know.
I know.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Final Fantasy X Part 13: The Wedding Crashers”
Link (YouTube) |
It’s a Spoiler Warning first! We play an untested mobile game on an untested emulator with no preparation. Watch us figure out technology in real time!
I wasn’t joking when I said I was confused. I’ve never used text messages, and there are a lot of conventions at work here that are not obvious to the uninitiated. When there were multiple conversation threads going, I was constantly struggling to match messages with replies. And when the boys sent animated chibi images of themselves I wasn’t sure how literally I was supposed to take what I was seeing. I mean, I don’t have a button on my phone to send someone a chibi picture of myself giving a particular emotional reaction.
So we’ve got three different unfamiliar systems at work: Dating in the 21st century, texting and mobile conventions, and Korean culture. I’m really glad I’m married, because I’m pretty sure I’m not smart enough to perform the required mating rituals of this day and age.
Happy birthday, Mumbles.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
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.
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
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.
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
T w e n t y S i d e d
