EDIT: Thanks for watching. We'll have the full stream up on YouTube some time in the next week. Until then, you can watch the VOD here.
Original Post:
We’re going to play festive holiday games like Crusader Kings where you take over the world and plot the death of your family. It’s all in good fun!
Link (YouTube) |
I’m not sure whether I respect KOTOR’s handling of the Selkath kids quest or am annoyed by it. On the one hand, in a modern (and unreasonably terrified you might miss content) game, the quest would have triggered when you approached the locked door whether you had it or not. And to an extent, that makes logical sense; at the very least, it doesn’t seem as if you knowing about the missing children ahead of time would make any difference as to whether or not the door would be open.
On the other hand, that aforementioned phobia that players might dare to actually miss content (the horror!) intensely irritates me on some base, indescribable level. And I have to give KOTOR props for committing to it, even if the player decides to take it as far as committing court-assisted suicide; I legitimately expected someone from the Republic to show up and go “No no no no,” right up to the moment we got electric-chaired.
I guess, ultimately, what I’m saying is that I respect KOTOR’s quest design, I just wish it was a little less clumsy with it. Which really is how I’ve come to feel about the game as a whole.
Link (YouTube) |
Fair warning: This episode is bound to be an instant classic. It starts off with some armchair game design, loses its way, makes a bunch of inside jokes, and then goes off-topic, while unendurable ages of indistinguishable combat roll on. Then we discover we came all this way for nothing, before it’s revealed that we REALLY came all this way for NOTHING.
That’s a really strange ending for a AAA game, even in 2003. It lacked closure. Oh well. Next up I think we’re going to play Dragon Age: Origins: The Deep Roads: Maximum Difficulty: Solo Run.
See you there.
My to-do list grows and shrinks as the project rolls on. I’ll have 20 items on my to-do list one week. I’ll get 13 of them done. Then at our next weekly meeting, those 13 are reviewed. Some are marked as done. Some end up back on the list because my solution was too narrow, or didn’t work in all cases, or I misunderstood the problem. Then a few new issues will get piled onto the list.
So after the meeting my to-do list will be back up to 25 or so items and we’ll begin again. So it goes.
But some items have never been touched. They’ve haunted the bottom of the list, never getting done, never getting looked at. The oldest item on my list now is actually a collection of bullet-points that can all roughly be summed up as “performance problems”. To wit: The game runs too slow.
Not on my machine, mind you. It’s fine on my machine. But on craptopsCrappy laptops, or any similarly under-powered machine. is runs at about half the framerate it should. So what’s going on?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot #40: Overdraw”
My column this week seems like it’s about Minecraft, but really it’s about the occasional disconnect between the hype-driven gaming press and the actual interests and passions of gaming culture.
I include myself in this. If I did my writing based on what I was playing, this would be a “Minecraft and retro games” blog, with a new AAA game thrown in a few times a year for variety. Deciding what to talk about is always a balancing act between what you’re into and what you think other people want to talk about. It’s not bad, it’s just a strange artifact of this process that sometimes games that are a huge deal end up vanishing into their own subculture.
This week we have a TOTAL SPOILER discussion on the new Star Wars. Turn back or have the movie spoiled. This means you, fanboy. Seriously, I drop the biggest spoiler of the whole movie right at the 40-minute mark as I introduce the topic.
Let’s just assume the comments will be spoiler-heavy, too.
Mumbles and Rutskarn haven’t done their end-of-year thing yet, so this week is their chance. Find out what they thought of 2015.
00:01:16: OMG Steampocalypse 2015!!11
Link (YouTube) |
00:08:56: Rutskarn and Mumbles talk about 2015.
They start with Undertale.
00:14:42: Pillars of Eternity
00:14:51: Arkham Knight
00:17:54: Fallout 4
00:20:25: Hotline Miami 2
00:21:51: Tony Hawk
00:22:59: Skylanders
00:26:11: The Beginners Guide
00:27:09: Fallout 4 again for some reason?
00:40:54: STAR THE FORCE AWAKENS WARS
Link (YouTube) |
This Thursday night, we’ll be hanging out and streaming, celebrating the New Year by playing one of Josh’s incomprehensible strategy games about history or politics or something else that isn’t kung-fu or aliens.
The stream will start at 10pm eastern time, by which I mean Josh will wake up and begin preparing food at 10pm and he’ll start the stream once he’s done eating, cleaning up, and watching a couple of episodes of Good Eats. So we should probably all start watching the stream at 10pm because that’s what we always do.
For those of you who don’t live on the eastern seaboard, you’ll have to convert the time zones yourself, or consult the little gadget below:
I’ll put up a link to the stream when the time approaches.
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
T w e n t y S i d e d
