T w e n t y S i d e d
Several people have asked overlapping questions about my unusual employment. I’m not sure what triggered this, but rather than write a bunch of emails I thought I’d write one post.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Working from home”
Frayed Knights
Jay is onto something great here. He’s working on a comedy RPG. I had to make a WILL saving throw to keep from making a little “squee” sound when I read about it.
(The post mentions a hemp golem for crying out loud. There are about a hundred jokes in that idea alone.)
DM of the Rings XCII:
Ding!
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GTA: LCS: Grand Theft Railroad
One of the things which bugs me about Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (and its many siblings) is the appalling lack of freedom when encountering challenges: There are a dozen apparent ways to attempt to solve a problem. One of them is correct. Retry until you guess right.
Most missions require a certain degree of foreknowledge. Going into a situation, you never know if you will need a fast car, a heavy car, a motorcycle, or if you will be fighting on foot. Will you fight many weak foes (bring a pistol) or a single strong one (bring a shotgun) or will you need to be shooting while driving? (Bring a submachine gun.) You have to try a mission a few times to know what you’re up against and use that knowledge to prepare, but then the game thwarts attempts to otherwise use that knowledge to your advantage. You have to use some foreknowledge, but not too much, and only when the game allows. Case in point:
The Setup:
Salvatore Leone, a Mafia Don, has been kidnapped. His kidnappers have him in the trunk of a car. They plan to take the car to the junkyard and put it into the crusher. Sal is a lying, murderous, drug-selling, wife-beating scumball, and my job is to rescue him.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “GTA: LCS: Grand Theft Railroad”
Pharmacomedy
For the last two weeks my sleep has been all messed up. Most nights I get between four and five hours. Once in a while I’ll luck out and get six. The doctor gave me Rozerem samples to see if that would help. Except: Once I had them I didn’t want to use them. I hate sleeping pills. They don’t really solve problems, only delay them. Sure, I can take a pill and it will put me to sleep tonight, but tomorrow if I don’t take the pill it will be even harder to get to sleep than it was in the first place, as my body will be anticipating the drug.
I decided to see if there is some sort of informational webpage that might describe the drug. Oh. My. Goodness.. I was expecting some raw text with technical specifications (or whatever you call them) of the drug. Instead I found this flash-driven comedy show staring an insomniac, a beaver, and Abe Lincoln. The drug doesn’t have it’s own webpage. It has its own website. With message boards. Message boards!
I like that the site lists other ways to help you get to sleep (some of the advice I found to be kind of helpful) without using their drug, although it was hard to find what I was looking for: Side-effects, how long the drug lasts, what the risks are, and how to take it. (With food, or water, or on an empty stomach, etc.) Eventually I found that you can get more info on the drug by (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) clicking on the beaver, and if you hunt around you can find a PDF with boring details like the side effects.
What a strange site. I’m not suggesting that these guys are going to supplant Homestar and Strongbad anytime soon, but still. I wonder how many other drugs have their own sites like this? Maybe judging the hilarity of a proposed drug will become part of the FDA approval process. Which drugs are the funniest, I wonder? If there is a site for Lithium, I think it should look like Sweet Cuppin’ Cakes. That would be awesome.
DM of the Rings XCI:
The Predictable Surprise
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The Predictable Surprise”
How Hard is this Game?
There are lots of interesting comments in this post, where GTA fans stand up for the gameplay I obviously loathe so much. This one in particular caught my eye:
[…]I've never had any real trouble with the missions in any of the GTA games, and I've actually thought that they should perhaps include a “hard” difficulty setting as well, where the bad guys are a bit harder to kill, the cars a bit quicker, and that sort of thing. By the sound of things though, it seems like there should be an “easy” difficulty, too.
I've never had any problem with the storylines, either. Sure, they're about stealing, killing, extorting and whatnot, but if they weren't it wouldn't be called Grand Theft Auto. I find it quite refreshing to play as a “good guy” who isn't actually all that good.
I do agree, however, that it'd be nice to have some sort of “sandbox mode” as has been suggested, where it acts as if you've effectively finished the game already – be that through a cheat or some menu option, it'd be fun. I know that that's what gives GTA games their replay value for me.
So what we have here are different groups of players, some of whom think the game is infuriatingly hard and other players who find it to be a little too easy. Part of this has to do with the frustration threshhold of the player. When playing a videogame, do they think:
That game is easy. I only died every once in a while. Maybe a couple of times a level.
Or:
This game is frustrating. I died twice on just about every level.
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Some players (like me) see death / failure as something that should only happen if you are careless. Other players see death or failure as inevitable part of the game. Beyond that, different players have different expectations for the penalty they expect to endure for failure. Some players are comfortable with replaying the last five minutes. Others resent the setback and would rather simply retry the game from the point just preceding their failure. (See also Jay’s post on saving the game, which outlines the fiendish details of this problem that game developers face when letting the player save the game or otherwise negate or minimize failure.)
So, to various readers of both stripes: How many times do you have to fail a mission before you think, “This is too hard”, or you feel that your time is being wasted?
From The Archives:
Punishing The Internet for Sharing
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
Wolfenstein II
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
Seven Springs
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Could Have Been Great
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Project Octant
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.