Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Monday Dec 2, 2013

Next PostRemember Me, Starbound, and Skyrim 

I wanted to talk about this game when I played through it, but everything I wanted to say about the game boiled down to, “Did you get to the part where [thing] happened? Yeah. That was hilarious.” It would be gibberish to people who haven’t played the game and a pointless re-tread to those who have. The game says what it says, and there’s not much I can add to it.

But Chris has lots of things to say about it!

Link (YouTube)

We need a name of this emerging genre. Dear Esther. Stanley Parable. Proteus. Setting aside the annoying argument over whether or not these are “Games”, they’re certainly things you “play” on the computer. What do we call these things with exploration as the only gameplay mechanic? I mean, I suppose we can call them “exploration games”. But that would be boring, accurate, and clear. I feel like we need a genre name that’s just as stupid and meaningless as “RPG”.

I vote we call them “gunless shooters”.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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168 comments

Metro 2033 EP15: That. Was. SPARTA!

By Shamus Posted Friday Nov 29, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 68 comments

 Metro 2033 EP14: Door is MVPPrevious Post

Next PostMetro 2033 EP16: Knife a Wooden Door 

Link (YouTube)

So here we are, finally getting to the last few episodes of Metro 2033. I want to stress that a lot of my criticisms this week are just sort of gut reactions to how I experienced the game. I usually offer some commentary on how things could have been done, but I don’t know how to fix these problems without creating new ones.

Case in point: The guntravaganza in Sparta. It’s sort of disappointing to the frugal player to discover they’ve been carefully saving for… nothing. All guns are free, and it didn’t matter if you were frugal or a spendthrift, you still get it all. That’s kind of disappointing, but the alternatives are all worse. To allow the player enter the end game without the weapons they need would lead to potentially game-killing states. And of course having NPC’s sell you the stuff you need to save their lives has always been a silly setup.

Likewise, I don’t know what to think of the James Cameron-style band of misfits we’re dropped into as we reach the final areas. It feels like we’ve stepped into another game, tonally. The guys look so much alike that I couldn’t tell who was who unless they were speaking. Their banter was kind of hit and miss, and I never really felt invested in the proceedings. Then again, if they weren’t there at all then it would feel like the badass Rangers were sending the new guy to go into the pit of hell to save the world while they sat around base shining their guns.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Metro 2033 EP14: Door is MVPPrevious Post

Next PostMetro 2033 EP16: Knife a Wooden Door 

68 comments

User Reviews

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Nov 27, 2013

Filed under: Video Games 102 comments

 Twenty Sided's PS4 Launch Coverage!Previous Post

Next PostErrant Signal - The Stanley Parable 

The question was put to me on Twitter:

@JimSterling @DanStapleton @shamusyoung what do you guys think of the "user" section of Metacritic?

— Shri (@ResonanceSD) November 26, 2013

Interesting question. I don’t go to Metacritic very often, but assuming by “user” section we’re talking about the place where users submit reviews and scores, then I guess it depends on what you value in a review. Some people think review scores should converge on some hypothetical One True Score that accurately reflects the value and quality of a game. Some people (me kinda people) aren’t as interested in scores, but instead value the opinions of specific critics. Other people think of game critics as corporate shills and sellouts and only “true” gamers can be trusted.

On one hand, users often write little text blurbs to go with their ratings, and they often come out like this:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “User Reviews”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Twenty Sided's PS4 Launch Coverage!Previous Post

Next PostErrant Signal - The Stanley Parable 

102 comments

Good Robot #29: Saves Go In the Save Place

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Nov 20, 2013

Filed under: Good Robot 292 comments

 Project Good Robot 28: Art CreepPrevious Post

Next PostProject Good Robot #30: Interesting-ness 

Players expect to be able to save their game. Which creates the question of, “Where do we store those saves?” Previously we’ve seen some surprisingly lively debates around the subject in the comments. I can’t find it now, but one person even went so far as to say that if a game doesn’t save in the /My Documents/ folder then the game is broken.

I can understand this. Microsoft created the /My Documents/ folder as a place for applications to store their crap. In an ideal world, someone wanting to back up their computer ought to be able to back up /My Documents/ and be reasonably certain they have everything. It’s supposed to be a general dumping ground for text documents, spreadsheets, game saves, configuration settings, power point presentations, email archives, web bookmarks, drawings, photographs, and whatever other data people create with their computers. It’s one location where users should be able to look and find ALL their files.

Unfortunately, /My Documents/ suffers from all the same problems that plague the Windows registry. Microsoft created “one system to rule them all”, and then made the implementation ambiguous. And it didn’t really do everything it needed to do. And it created security concerns. And then they changed how it worked from one version of Windows to the next.

For one thing, it’s not even called /My Documents/ these days. It’s /Users/. The location keeps changing. The internal structure keeps changing. The rules governing access keep changing. All of this creates problems for would-be game designers. Where do I put the user’s saves?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot #29: Saves Go In the Save Place”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Project Good Robot 28: Art CreepPrevious Post

Next PostProject Good Robot #30: Interesting-ness 

292 comments

Diecast #37: Oblivion, Anthropology, and Sid Meier

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Nov 19, 2013

Filed under: Diecast 94 comments

 Diecast #36: Battlefield 4, and Gaming CulturePrevious Post

Next PostDiecast #38: Frozen, No Man's Sky, and Rambling 

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Hosts: Rutskarn, Josh, and Shamus.

Show Notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #37: Oblivion, Anthropology, and Sid Meier”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Diecast #36: Battlefield 4, and Gaming CulturePrevious Post

Next PostDiecast #38: Frozen, No Man's Sky, and Rambling 

94 comments

Notice

By Shamus Posted Monday Nov 18, 2013

Filed under: Notices 90 comments

 Comment Threading BrokenPrevious Post

Next PostHangout December the 13th: FRIDAY THE 13TH OH NO 

Let’s just skip the boilerplate crap about being busy and making excuses and get right to the info-dump:

1) I’m still working on Good Robot.

I’ve never taken a public project this far and I’m kind of at a loss as to what to say next. I’m not solving interesting problems and I’m basically done with the experimenting and prototyping. We’re to the phase of the project where I’m just working my way through feedback, complaints, bug reports, and Very Dull Features. Blogging that would be like a cooking show where you watch the chef sit around for half an hour waiting for the cake to finish baking.

So… ask some questions?

B) Yes, editing comments is disabled.

I was using Ajax Edit Comments plugin for WordPress, and it was causing way too many SQL queries, which was leading to performance problems. The majority of you probably didn’t notice. (Unless you visited during one of those moments when the queries ate so much CPU(?) that the machine went down and the site vanished) but for those of you who leave comments you probably noticed it took the site bloody ages to do anything. (The reason for this is that most people see a cached copy of the page that only updated when someone left a new comment, but for people who themselves left comments a fresh page was generated every time, since it needed to update the “edit” buttons and pre-fill the comment fields.)

But those slowdowns were peanuts compared to what I was experiencing in the moderator pages, which sometimes took several minutes to load.

So, the edit comments plugin is gone. Sorry. Try not to make any embaressing typoes.

III. No Spoiler Warning this week. Again.

We’re about to finish up Metro 2033, and we want to have the whole crew on hand for that. So, we have to wait for a week where all four of us are available.

We don’t have our next game picked out yet. We’re hoping to find something Mumbles is into.

Forth: The Diecast this week is going to be odd.

There were only three of us, and I went into it tired and in a bad mood. I don’t know if that impacted the show, but when it was over I felt like I’d just been in an argument or read some horrible news. I didn’t know it at the time, but while we were recording I was in the run-up to a day long migraine. I don’t know if the bad mood had anything to do with the migraine or not. For a long time I’ve had this pet theory that migraines begin long before I can feel them, and so I’m always looking for altered mental states before and after the event.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Comment Threading BrokenPrevious Post

Next PostHangout December the 13th: FRIDAY THE 13TH OH NO 

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