T w e n t y S i d e d
Directions:
1) Jump to the 5:05 mark.
2) Press play.
3) Watch for ten seconds.
4) Go to step 1.
Link (YouTube) |
Via.
Stolen Pixels #136: After Curfew, Episode 4
The latest Stolen Pixels has Breen talking about Borderlands, the first game I’ve pre-ordered since (I think) 2004. It looks like the game is a mixture of Fallout 3, Hellgate: London, and the not-yet-out Rage. The first two of those were games were fun but had more promise than payoff. Hopefully Borderlands delivers the post-apocalyptic fun I’ve been waiting for. If not, well… it’s not the end of the world.
(Ba-dum-tish.)
It really is hard to keep the visuals interesting in these monologues. I noticed today that the lighting is WAY warmer than previous ones, which is a break in consistency. Oops. Hopefully, nobody will notice. I mean, besides the people I just told.
Noctis Lex: Random Chapter
The title of this post is a lie. This isn’t nearly long enough to be a chapter. This is just me playing around with the idea I talked about here. I’ll note that NaNoWriMo is coming up. I certainly don’t have time to write a proper novel, but I might take the opportunity to play around with this story some more. It seems like there’s room for some of these types of stories out there. Okay, slightly “realistic” superhero stuff has been done (and done well) but it hasn’t quite been done to death the way (say) medieval fantasy has.
Anyway, here it is, for what it’s worth…
Violet peers out over the edge of the roof and stamps her feet a few times to try and coax her body into making a little more heat. She doesn’t have any trouble keeping warm when they’re on the move, but stopping like this just slows down the blood flow. She’s pulled her glossy white and gold cape around her in a very non-heroic pose.
“So you’re still going out with her?” Fastball is talking to Brick. Some of the other heroes know each other outside of crimefighting and they shoot the breeze about personal stuff during downtime like this.
Brick is standing on the very edge of the roof, arms folded. He’s almost a silhouette against the city lights below. He nods his head, “I told her my secret identity last night.”
“Which one?”, Fastball asks idly.
“The architect one.”
“Why architect?”, Fastball asks, looking up. He’s crouched on the ledge next to Brick, back bent and looking vaguely like a very thin, angular ape in this light.
Brick shrugs, “She seems to be soft for artistic types.”
“Why didn’t you just do the painter thing again?”
“Think about where she lives,” Brick says chidingly, “She likes money too much to go for the whole ‘starving painter’ thing.”
“Hm.”
Violet can remember being awestruck when she joined the group and met Brick for the first time. He was square-jaw, broad-shoulders, dimple-cheeks gorgeous. At twenty-nine, he’s the oldest member of the Steel Defenders, and he’s the unofficial leader of the team. Her enthusiasm was doused when she finally got a sense of who he really is. He’s not a bad guy or anything, and he’s saved more lives than most of the other members of the team combined. He’s just a selfish asshole sometimes. He has wit and charm that he can turn on at will, which he uses to mask his default personality.
“Cold roof is cold.”, Ophelia says curtly, “Let’s DO something.”
Ophelia didn’t show up for the last couple of weeks. The high-school aged heroes are always a little unreliable like that. This week she appeared with a new costume. The new one has kind of an emo vampire thing going on. She’s got a lot of white makeup and dark eyeliner, with lots of flowy bits of dark cloth hanging from her like a tattered cape. They had to talk her out of changing her name to “Eclipse”.
“Yeah”, Violet agrees, “This guy isn’t going to show. We should head back towards the metro and sweep the lots again.”
“Give it a few more minutes.”, Brick says, “He’ll show.”
It’s just the four of them tonight. The others are still away due to the holidays. Or the cold.
There’s a long pause. Eventually Fastball speaks up, “I thought you said she was a stripper or something?”
Brick shakes his head, “Ex-stripper. Now she’s a… I dunno. A clerk or some crap now. Like, at a law firm or something? I think she told me but I wasn’t paying attention.” Brick spits off the edge of the roof, and there’s a pause while he waits to see where it will land. “Anyway, when I told her my secret identity she cried.“
Fastball laughs. He’s got a loud, high-pitched voice. Not effeminate, but harsh and abrasive. His laugh always has a taunting quality to it. “You gonna keep seeing her?”
“Noooo.”, Brick replies as if this is the most ludicrous suggestion he’s ever heard, “She talks way too much. I figure I’ll see her a couple more times, make the most of it.”
“What about the one we saved from that fire?”
“I didn’t call her. Maybe I will later. I dunno. She had kind of a big butt.”
Ophelia groans, “When this guy shows up I’m going to crucify him for making us wait around in the cold like this.” She levitates a bit and makes all the strips of cloth flare outward as if she were facing into a harsh wind. She’s been sort of practicing this move all evening.
A flash of white light radiates from the street behind them, followed by a thunderclap. Brick bounds to the opposite edge of the roof and looks down, “There. What did I tell you? He’s a natural.”
There’s a guy on the street below, flinging lightning bolts with his fingertips. There’s no sign of any technology on him. Brick was right. He’s another natural.
“Let’s kick his ass!”, Ophelia says, but she doesn’t actually move. She’s a natural as well, but she’s also as fragile as a commoner and so she makes sure to stay behind everyone else.
Brick is standing still, watching carefully. Lightning-guy is standing in the middle of an intersection throwing bolts around. He’s gesturing wildly and setting random things on fire. People are abandoning their cars and running. His screams are maniacal.
There’s a pop and one of the traffic lights explode. This startles the guy and makes him flinch. Then he gets embarrassed and intensifies his attack.
“He just broke through”, Brick says, nodding. “He can’t control it.”
Sure enough, the guy is pointing, but the bolts of energy don’t seem to be striking where he points. They’re just sort of radiating from his hands, sometimes shooting sideways or straight up. His screams are a mixture of rage and frustration.
“Probably a crackhead or something”, Fastball offers.
Brick doesn’t answer. He waits for another minute or so. Eventually the guy is more or less out of things that can be easily set on fire. The intersection is deserted. His bolts of energy seem to be getting weaker and shorter. Eventually he stops blasting and starts hammering on the hood of a smoldering car with his fists.
“That’s our cue”, Brick says, and steps off the roof. There is a pause as he free-falls six stories before he hits the pavement like a wrecking ball. Lightning guy spins around to see six and a half feet of muscle heading his way.
The rest of them dive off after him.
You Put in Other Details
In 1957 a young boy – in an earnest attempt to help his nation enter the space race – designed a rocket ship. He drew his design in ballpoint on index cards, and sent it off to some “top scientists”. Here is his letter:
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You can read a bit more about Denis Cox and the letter here.
The best part of it is the box with “You put in other details”. I would point out that engineers get these sort of requests all the time. Oh, they’re more professionally written and not so crudely drawn, but just about every engineer has had a run-in with a boss or client who mistook a desire for an idea and then asked the engineer to close the gap between the two.
I had dreams no less audacious at that age, I just never had the gumption to write the letter.
Thanks to Jay For the Link.
A Star is Born:
Let’s Play Champions Online Pt. 5
The adventure of Star on Chest continues!
Right. So I’ve saved the city, and must therefore leave before someone asks me to help clean up. I am offered a choice: I can go to “the Southwest Desert” or “Canada”. Both places are in peril, and need someone to un-imperil them. From the hints everyone is dropping, it sounds like they hope it will be me. The young and sexy Witchcraft invites me to the desert, and the freakishly goofy-looking Ravenspeaker invites me to Canada.
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| Is this a trick question? |
Think here. Let me think…
Sigh, I’m sorry Ravenspeaker, but I’m an American superhero through and through. I can’t travel to distant lands while my own shores are in danger. Good luck with whatever you’ve got going there in whatever country you’re from, but my people need me. Off to the hot babe! I mean the South West! Of AMERICA!
How the game works right now is that once you’re done [taking credit for] saving the city, you move on to one of the two available crisis zones, which act as secondary tutorial zones. The alien attack teaches you the basics, and the second area teaches stuff like crafting, teaming, and multi-stage missions. The two crisis zones play very differently, but teach basically the same concepts and cover character levels 6 through 10. At the end of the crisis is a boss fight, after which the gameworld will be open to explore freely.
It’s worth trying one crisis zone with your first character and the other with the second to see which one you prefer.
It looks like there is a patch coming that will let new characters skip the tutorial, and jump right to a crisis zone.
I arrive in Burning Sands, a broken land of scorched desert rocks and serpentine canyons. A land where a military base is under attack from irradiated monsters and vile mutants. A place awash in poisonous radioactive energy. Grotesque mutations pour out of the hills, assaulting the base and terrorizing the science staff.
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| You guys named your military base “project greenskin”, and then you’re surprised when it gets overrun with mutants? |
Woah! Hang on a second here, tiny-jaw. Radiation? Like, nuclear radiation? Like the kind you can’t see but which scrambles your DNA and gives you cancer? I am not crazy about this whole radiation business.
Bullets? I laugh at them. Missiles? Not a problem. Assorted death beams? Naught but a nuisance to a mighty hero like me. But radiation? Ew. You see, someday really I hope to meet my soulmate. Let’s call her Star On Bosom. We’ll marry and have little starlings and starlets of our own. And it is my fond hope as both a superhero and a father they will all have the correct number of heads. So I’m not keen on this whole “fighting to save an irradiated base” idea. Can’t we just write it off and build another someplace else? I would imagine one godforsaken canyon is about as good as another. The desert is pretty big, you know.
And speaking of bosoms, where the heck is Witchcraft? This is supposedly her territory, but she isn’t anywhere to be found. I thought she… you know… wanted me. To help.
(And just between you and me, there is something about this place that’s even more awful than mutated offspring, which is a needlessly aggravating layout. The base here was built by an idiot sadist. Here in Project Greenskin there is a loading screen between the quest givers and the things they need me to punch. It’s just a couple of seconds, but it’s really, really annoying. I click on an elevator, and a little “please wait” progress bar fills up. If some low-level slob of a mutant elbows me, the process stops and I have to fight him. Once I get through the elevator, there’s a needless hike past twenty useless NPCs to get to the one I have to talk to, then a hike back to the elevator, progress bar, loading screen, etc. One of the perks of being a superhero is that you don’t normally have to waste time waiting for and riding in elevators.)
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| Look Bobby, would it be too much trouble for you to stand at the OTHER end of this hallway? I’m going to have to come talk to you pretty often, and it would save me a fair step. And no offense, but it doesn’t look like you’re particularly busy at this end. |
I am sorry Project Greenskin, I’d like to help. I really would. But this? This isn’t working for me.
Now that I’m thinking about it some more, I’ve always wanted to travel to exotic faraway lands and learn about distant peoples and their proud cultures. Why should America get all the attention? You guys are so self-centered! Let’s get out there and see the world!
So, off to Canada? I guess?
As an added bonus, Ravenspeaker is the only hero who didn’t have a 50-foot holographic statue of himself back in the Hall of Ego in Champions Headquarters. Sure, he might be dressed like a musclebound transvestite showgirl, but at least he doesn’t suffer from the need to make a glowing 50-foot projection of himself. I’d rather be working for someone who isn’t a complete rampaging egomaniac anyway.
Ravenspeaker is a Native American-themed hero. Like many such heroes, his powers seem to be mumbo-jumbo about visions, a dash of spirit guides, an embarrassing costume, and a good dose of plot exposition. Anyway, he’s the go-to guy for stuff happening in Canada.
If you hate yourself and want to envy illiterate people, just read Ravenspeaker’s Bio.
He explains that Canada is beset by… bad weather. It’s snowing a lot. Apparently an angry demon is using ancient magic (Is there any other kind? When was the last time anyone was harassed by brand-spanking new cutting-edge magic?) that is making it snow. Like, more than usual, I guess. I dunno. I’ve never been here before. If they told me it was like this year-round I wouldn’t know if they were pulling my leg or not.
Anyway. Snow. What a cunning plan. A demon has decided to unleash his fury and get Canada’s snow all cold. This ranks right up there with attacking Florida by making it really muggy in August, or inflicting dire traffic congestion on L.A. You’d think that step one of bedeviling a land would be in choosing a target that will notice. If this demon had any sense he’d be snowing on people who don’t have parkas, plowing equipment, and hot coco.
As I fly in during the opening cutscene, I’m treated to a 50 foot astral projection of Ravenspeaker.
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| This just made my list of top ten images I didn’t need to show to my eyeballs. |
Facepalm.
Ravenspeaker shouts, “THIS IS NO ORDINARY STORM.”
You know, when I’m treated to a fifty foot projection of a guy in his underpants and a bird mask, my first thought isn’t, “Oh wow, this is unusual weather, isn’t it?” In fact, I really wouldn’t have noticed the weather if you hadn’t brought it up. And is it COMPLETELY necessary to take the up-angle on this projection?
As I step off the Chopper I’m greeted by a man waving his arms who tells me, “THIS IS NO ORDINARY STORM!”
Geeze. I didn’t even bring it up, okay? Everyone is so defensive about the weather around here.
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| No! Honest! The weather is usually not like this at all! Canada is a wonderful place to visit! It’s usually five or six degrees above zero this early in August! |
So… what am I supposed to do about it? I punch stuff, and blizzards are not punch-able. I mean, I’ll give it a go if there’s XP in it, but I hope you guys have a Plan B.
Oh, also there are zombies attacking. You can barely get anyone to shut up about the weather to tell you about it, but they’ve got a zombie problem.
I have arrived at Force Station Steelhead, the local good-guy headquarters. Judging by the weather in Millennium City, it must be summer, but everything is frozen here. So this is all permafrost, I guess. Which makes me wonder what the base is here for. There aren’t any cities around. Are we guarding the snow?
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| The place uses pretty standard Canadian architecture: A walled-off compound of pod buildings with neon trim, built in the middle of a glacial wasteland. You know, standard stuff. |
Well, first things first. I go to the powerhouse. The powerhouse is a self-contained complex where you can obtain and test out new powers when you level. You get there through a big gear-shaped teleporter / stargate.
On the way to the gate, I pass some civilians. The poor folks are caught outside without protection from the cold.
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| These poor, poor people. They don’t even have coats. I warn them that they should find someplace to get warm, and let them know that THIS IS NO ORDINARY STORM. |
They’re injured and suffering, and the small number of medical people around can’t do anything but stare listlessly into space as their charges die of shock, exposure, or hypothermia. Even worse is that they’re sitting ducks out here and easy prey for the invading zombies. Even if they don’t succumb to the cold or their injuries, they’ll most likely end up chewed to death by the shambling undead. It’s a tragic and bleak scene of human suffering and drives home the terrible cost of this storm. If only there was someplace these people could go for shelter.
Anyway, I wish them luck and walk through the nearby gate to enter the toasty warm and perfectly safe power house where all the other superheroes are hanging out.
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| Man, is it roomy in here, or what? It’s like, I bet I could fit about twenty or thirty dying frostbitten civilians in this room alone! Just imagine what you could do with all this space. We should set up a disco! |
I jump through the gate and get hooked up with my travel power, which is flight. Because wearing a cape and walking is like hitchhiking while dressed as an airline pilot. Nobody would think to ask you why your aren’t flying if you weren’t wearing that. I also gain access to a new superpower I like to call, “Punching, only more so.”
Now, back outside to the storm. I need to make it stop snowing and zombie-ing all over this place.
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| Ah, the gift of flight. NOW I’m a superhero. I don’t care what your powers are, if you have to take a bus, you’re not super. |
There’s a public quest to do here, but like so many public quests it’s broken in some stupid way and remains broken despite repeated patches. These are the best part of the game when they work, but nobody will fix the dang things. This public quest is fun (fighting zombies is always fun) but it’s kind of long and it doesn’t deliver any XP reward at the end like it should. So, I skip it. Alas.
The fierce wind and snow of this storm yanked a couple of aircraft out of the sky. Which is odd, since we’re in the middle of this godforsaken wilderness and there isn’t an airport or city anywhere on the map. Anyway, I head on out to the frozen lake and find survivors who are being threatened by ice demons.
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| The airplane crash. Considering the plane was ripped to shreds and the people thrown into the snow and then covered by debris, it’s kind of surprising to see people survived. Almost as surprising as seeing a parked ambulance (like the one to the left of the crash) in a land where there are no populated areas. Or hospitals. Or roads. |
Well, it’s been a long session, and it’s time to wrap things up for this week. But at least I’ve accomplished… Hm.
Say, what did I accomplish this time around?
Oh right:
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| I can fly! If only there was a city around here so that people could look up and see me doing it. I don’t think polar bears will be awed by this. |
I abandoned my homeland and got the ability to fly. Yeah!
I’m awesome. I love flying.
Stolen Pixels #135: Everyone’s Favorite Nemesis
I had a lot of fun writing this one.
(By the way, don’t forget that Chainmail Bikini – my comic from 2007 – is also running. New strips MWF. This means five total strips by me a week. Sigh. Even recycling two year old content, I STILL can’t keep up with David Morgan-Mar.)
Evil Genius
In order to meet the relentless public demand for reviews of five year old games:
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| One of the key strategic decisions in the game is where to put your vault. You want to keep that sucker safe, but you also want your men to be able to access it easily. |
I am making you a steak. Excellent, high-quality, grade-A, prime-cut, whole beef, etcetra kind of steak. Cooked just the way you like. Now I am going to cut that sucker up and use it to make twenty gallons of soup, all for you. I call this soup Evil Genius.
Evil Genius is a brilliant game. You play as a mastermind set on world domination. The goal is to recruit a criminal empire, seize crucial world resources, construct a high tech doom fortress at the heart of a volcano, and then unleash a doomsday weapon to take over the world. The whole thing is done in the style of a classic 60’s Bond movie, with you playing the part of the scheming villain.
The game is a smattering of genres that combines strategic base-building, unit management, economic management, and map control. It does this seamlessly, and with a dose of genuine humor and deliberate, enthusiastic camp. It’s witty. It’s innovative. It’s charming. I played the game through once and enjoyed the gameplay, but I doubt I’ll ever play it again.
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| Units begin on the left as simple workers, and you have to train them up through job paths to turn them into more powerful or specialized units. It takes a long time for a new grunt to work up through the chain to become one of the top-tier units. Annoyingly, units lose their earlier utility when they are promoted to a new rank. If a mission calls for eight valets and you don’t have enough, you can’t use diplomats instead, even though a diplomat should know everything a valet would know. (Since he used to be one.) This means you have a lot less freedom to dictate the makup of your forces than it might seem. It also means that occasionally you’ll spend long periods of time waiting for men to train up to re-balance your personnel makeup. |
The problem is that the game feels like it has too much needless filler. Once you make a strategic decision, there is far too much busywork and waiting between making the decision and seeing the result.
The game will go something like this:
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| The world map is color-coded by law enforcement faction. Each faction has its own heat level, and you want to avoid getting the heat too high with any single faction or they’ll drop elite commandos on your island who will wreck your base and kill your dudes. You also don’t want to piss off all factions at the same time. The trick is to balance your heat load, striking at a faction and then withdrawing from their territory until they cool off. |
- Ok, I think I want to steal artifact X from nation Y. Let’s see… The job calls for six diplomat units, and I only have four. So, I need to train up two more units. And because you never ever want to send ALL of your diplomats out at once (if your last diplomat dies you won’t be able to make more until you kidnap another one, a lengthy process in and of itself) I should actually train four. That’s going to take at least five minutes.
- Okay, I have the units I need… no wait, one of the diplomats got killed, I need another. So a couple of more minutes.
- Okay, now I send them to the world map. It will take the units a few seconds to get the idea, and then a few more for them to drop whatever they’re doing, and then a few more for them to hike all the way from their current location to the helipad.
- Now the units are “in transit” for a couple of minutes.
- Ah! Finally the chopper delivered the units to the world map. Now I can… Aw hell. The good guys have just happened to place a superspy unit on the same area of the world map. That superspy will wipe out every one of my units in the country if I try to act, so I tell my team to go into hiding and wait a couple of minutes for the spy to go away.
- I go fuss with my base for a minute or two, make sure the training programs are rolling, the perimeter is clear, the cash is secure, and then I kick off the next stage of research. When I come back I see my units left hiding automatically. (This is my #1 hated feature of the game, there is no way to get your guys to STAY in hiding, so you have to keep going back and re-hiding them manually while you move your other pieces into place. Most of the lost time was because of this feature.) Once they came out of hiding, one of them was picked off by the police. Sigh. Now I’m one diplomat short and I can’t attempt the mission.
- I order the team to go back into hiding and go train another diplomat.
- I order the team to go back into hiding again and tell the diplomat to head for the chopper.
- I order the team to go back into hiding again again and wait for the diplomat to show up on the world map.
- Finally the units are all in place and I hit the “Go!” button on the mission. Now I have to wait five minutes to see the result.
- Darn. That superspy unit popped up on the map halfway through the mission and wiped out my team. I’ve been trying to make this mission happen for half an hour and now I’m back to square one.
- Whoops. Actually I’m worse off than when I started. The failed mission generated an insane level of heat and now the good guys are sending strike teams to attack my island. I have to spend several minutes fighting the strike teams. Then I’ll need to wait several more for the heat to die down. Then I’ll need to replace all of my diplomats. Then I can start over.
Thus you can spend 45 minutes or so just trying to pull off a single five-minute mission. This is fun the first few times and feels appropriately like an international game of cat-and-mouse. But going through that same process dozens of times just killed it for me. I was sick to death of the whole “hurry up and wait” pace of the game before I even hit the halfway point. I’d make a decision, and then I’d spend half an hour doing very routine, repetitive things to make the decision a reality. My play-through of the game took twelve hours (give or take) and I feel like it offered about four hours of real entertainment.
There’s nothing wrong with a slow pace if I can jump to another window and play or do something else, but your empire requires constant attention to keep from falling apart. You have to watch the front door and tag enemies for elimination, you have to keep re-hiding your guys on the world map.
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| You get to gather together the various criminal elements and put them under your thumb. It feels good to be bad. |
This is all a shame, because the game didn’t need this much padding or filler. There are three evil Genius archetypes to choose from, and three different doomsday devices you could build. There are also all sorts of strategies and approaches you could take in designing your base. This game has a ton of replay value, and if the game had been shorter I’d have been happy to play through multiple times.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about this flaw in the game, which may seem unfair because it’s basically the only thing wrong with what might otherwise become a treasured classic for me. This is a great game and worth playing. (You should be able to find it in the bargain bin for cheap. It’s only ten bucks on Steam, if you’re into that sort of thing. A demo is also available.) Like twenty gallons of steak soup, it would be so much better if they hadn’t felt the need to add so much filler.
From The Archives:
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
Overthinking Zombies
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.
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
Final Fantasy X
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.
Object-Oriented Debate
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
The Strange Evolution of OpenGL
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.