Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Sunday May 4, 2008

Filed under: Pictures 23 comments

My wife painted a ~~picture~~ doodle of me. If you came to visit me, this is what you would see. I might turn around every once in a while to be polite and see if you were still there, but for the most part I’d be hammering away at the keyboard trying to keep up with my many obsessions. Sorry for being rude. I’m just terribly busy. Please help yourself to a drink from the fridge. Or some coffee. Maybe get me some while you’re up. That would be super. Thanks.

EDIT: My wife objects to calling this a painting, and insists that it was just a quick doodle, and that I’m making too big a fuss over it. Duly noted.

No fussing.

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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Starcraft:
The Secret Formula

By Shamus Posted Friday May 2, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 64 comments

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The Part-Time CommanderPrevious Post

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Gameplay 

Ten years. Ten years of re-installing this game, getting burned out on it, doing something else, and then coming back again. Ten years of “construct additional pylons” and “spawn more overlords”. Ten years of Battle.net rankings and LAN games. Ten years of custom scenarios and official patches. Not to mention that in that time the game has become a genuine professional sport in Korea.

Starcraft was not viewed as revolutionary when it arrived. It was popular, but (as someone pointed out the other day) it didn’t get perfect scores. The story was fine, but not remarkable, and didn’t seem to be related to the popularity of the title. It looked nice, but the graphics weren’t revolutionary. The AI was good, but games have come along since then with better AI, and Starcraft was still here after they’d gone. The production values were good, but the same can be said of a lot of other games that came and went.

I don’t think the Starcraft brand is the secret. The series has a few central characters, but Jim Raynor isn’t nearly as iconic as Link, or Master Chief. The attempted spinoff title Starcraft Ghost died in development, a sure sign that the people backing it don’t think the word “Starcraft” can guarantee a certain return on investment.

So what is it about this amusing game of resource gathering and unit management that has turned it into such a juggernaut? Why this game? Why not Warcraft II? Or Age of Empires? Or Command & Conquer?

I know I’m not the first person to ask, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a plausible explanation. Having played it myself for ten years, I still can’t tell you why I keep coming back to it. It just… feels right.

A few notable things that I think Starcraft has going for it:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Starcraft:
The Secret Formula”

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.

 Sins of a Solar Empire:
The Part-Time CommanderPrevious Post

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Gameplay 

64 comments

Hardware Review:
Sapphire X1650

By Shamus Posted Thursday May 1, 2008

Filed under: Nerd Culture 70 comments

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Sure, there are lots of hardware reviews out there. The usual practice is to have a smart and knowledgeable person review some gadget or device in detail. But I think we need a fresh perspective. We need the perspective of someone who knows nothing about hardware and is confused by new technology. We need in-depth analysis from a guy who knows just enough to not stick his screwdriver (a butterknife, actually) into his power supply and wiggle it around. We need a hardware review from a software engineer.

To that end, I bring you a review of my recently acquired graphics card…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hardware Review:
Sapphire X1650″

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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Halbert’s Mordan

By Shamus Posted Thursday May 1, 2008

Filed under: Tabletop Games 17 comments

 Thanks for coming, now go someplace elsePrevious Post

Next PostOn 4e and Ephemera 

Anyone who read my Mordan D&D Campaign here should find this interesting: Mr. Halbert ran the same campaign for his players, based on my notes. It’s a long read, but well worth it if you’re familiar with the original tale.

He made a few classic blunders (too much uber loot, by his own reckoning) and his players were a little more hack-n-slash than mine, but in the end our two versions of the story are still strikingly similar. I crafted the story with my players in mind. Having played with them through two previous campaigns, I had a pretty good idea of how they would react to circumstances. Halbert didn’t have that benefit, and the campaign wasn’t crafted for his players, but they still managed to very closely follow the thread of of our version. I don’t know if this was due to chance or if the campaign is more deterministic than it seemed.

This might sound odd, but he stuck to the source material more than I would have.

Some comments, having read the whole thing: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Halbert’s Mordan”

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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17 comments

Sins of a Solar Empire:
The Part-Time Commander

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Apr 30, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 53 comments

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Neverending SortiePrevious Post

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The Secret Formula 

I picked up Sins of a Solar Empire on Sunday. I’d been holding off until I had more time to play it, but then my friend Bogan showed up with it this weekend and taunted me. A purchase ensued.

Not having the time to invest in the game properly until the weekend, I decided to just run through the tutorials. The most important thing that I learned was that under no circumstances should I ever be allowed to run a galactic empire. It’s harder than it sounds, and the consequences for failure are rather dire. During the tutorial I was taught a few short lessons about some buttons. Apparently there are buttons, and they need to be pressed sometimes. There were some other details in there about economies and spaceships, but they eluded me once the tutorial had run its course. I’m still pretty sure about the button thing, though.

Thus graduated from the Sins education system as a functional illiterate, I assumed absolute power over a fledgling empire and began my first game.

I built a small collection of spaceships, which were sent to an adjacent planet where they were murdered by space pirates. I built a trade center which sat idle, since I didn’t have anyone with which to trade. I built a series of scout ships and sent them to auto-explore, after which I never heard from them again. I built a capital ship and subsequently misplaced it. I pushed some other buttons related to the running of my main planet, none of which seemed to have any real effect except to deplete my coffers. Then I found some ships I didn’t remember building, flying around my world. They didn’t respond to my commands, and it wasn’t until just before they began bombing the place that I realized why.

A half hour into the game I was running an inept empire whose only accomplishments were staggering financial and military losses. I felt like I was playing Soviets in Space. My empire wasn’t so much mismanaged as sabotaged by my bumbling button-pushing. I quit the game before some sort of space-Khrushchev showed up with my resignation pistol.

I will say that Sins of a Solar Empire provided an absolutely gorgeous environment in which to lead my people into ruin and anguish. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Sins of a Solar Empire:
The Part-Time Commander”

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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Neverending SortiePrevious Post

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The Secret Formula 

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Batman Vs. Batman

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Apr 30, 2008

Filed under: Movies 45 comments

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Compare the 1989 Batman trailer, and the one from this year. Everyone is unconsciously aware of the rhythm of these things, but I never would have guessed they were this formulaic:

I wasn’t a very big fan of the 1989 Batman, a position that is viewed as heretical by most. I expect to get flamed for this one. I know it’s coming. I know it broke box-office records and was hailed and embraced even by die-hard Batman fans, but the 1989 movie earned little more than a polite shrug from me.

I was glad it was made, and happy that Hollywood threw us a bone, but I couldn’t help but wish they had landed closer to the mark. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Batman Vs. Batman”

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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A Different Kind of Review

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Apr 29, 2008

Filed under: Video Games 31 comments

 Four-Five-OnePrevious Post

Next PostBioWare and EA: Dumbass Effect 

Sometimes I feel guilty about putting up these long-winded reviews and over-analysis on ten year old games. I enjoy doing it so much that I just assume I’m being horribly self-indulgent. I’m lucky in that many people seem to find this sort of thing entertaining, and so together we form a nice symbiosis – I get to scratch my itch for esoteric blather, and you get to read stuff that (I’m assuming) you can’t find elsewhere.

But whatever faults and excesses I might engage in here, at least I know I’ll never do anything as goofy as writing a nine-page print preview for a still-buggy pre-release game and giving it a 10 out of 10. That article has scans of the review of GTA IV from XBox 360 magazine, where the reviewer dings the game for various bugs and shortcomings and then gives it a perfect score anyway.

I’m glad it’s not my job to review GTA IV and try to assign a numerical value to it, because it’s essentially an impossible task. It’s greatness is directly related to what aspects of the game you cherish. I don’t like the stories. (Ugly and meandering.) I don’t like the main characters. (Wearisome thugs.) I don’t like the core gameplay. (DIAS.) But I derive fantastic satisfaction from inhabiting and exploring a sprawling simulated world of lavish detail, and no other series can hold a candle to what GTA has in that department. Since you have to slog through the parts I loathe to get to the parts I crave, I’m at a loss as to how I might rate the experience. How do you rate a restaurant that serves mouth-watering steaks for $5 and a punch in the face before the meal?

Other people have other value systems and a completely different perception of the game. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A Different Kind of Review”

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.

 Four-Five-OnePrevious Post

Next PostBioWare and EA: Dumbass Effect 

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