T w e n t y S i d e d
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These little screenshots don’t really do the game justice. There are a lot of neat places to see. The puzzles have that “it’s obvious once you finally figure it out” thing going for them that I always enjoy. You can play the game at GGE or here.
The Convert
Jaquandor has broken down and got himself some dang videogames. I’d be lying if I said this didn’t make me happy. Sure, my hobby makes me miserable, but I love when others join the ranks. I guess from this one can conclude I just don’t like people.
Actually, this is interesting because he’s picked up quite a variety of games. Not just genre diversity, but a large diversity of quality. I am hoping he posts about his experiences with the games after he’s tried them. How will these beloved / loathed games look to a “newcomer”. Will he find gold where I found only tedium? Will he shun a game that I loved because he didn’t go through the preceding five or six games that “teach” you how these sorts of games work? The views of someone outside of the “hardcore gamer” crowd should bring some interesting perspective.
Plus, people always enjoy it when others take up their hobby. I was warmly welcomed by anime fans when I started writing about the subject. I don’t know why we’re wired this way, but we are. Somehow I enjoy my ham sandwich more knowing that you love ham sandwiches too.
Oh yeah. To Mrs. Jaquandor: Sorry about ruining your husband and your marriage and everything.
LATER: I must add, there is something humorously over-the-top about his approach to this that I find admirable. He didn’t just run out and get one game. No, he went in and got a big ‘ol pile.
It’s like a monk who decides to try alcohol for the first time, so he strides into the liquor store and gets a bottle of wine, some whiskey, a vodka, something printed in spanish which may or may not be be tequila, the makings for Jello-shots, and a case of beer. I mean, why screw around, right?
DM of the Rings LXXVII:
An Important Distinction
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I tried making a classic “gag” strip. It worked! Not only are you getting less jokes, but I’m doing way less work! It’s almost a win-win scenario. Well halfway, anyhow.
I can’t add much to the stuff on sparse loot. The idea has become a sort of zombie joke at this point. It just keeps getting back up, no matter how dead it is. Sooner or later a cleric is going to cast turning on my loot jokes and half of my material will be obliterated in a blinding flash of holy, humorless light.
I suppose the next joke needs to be Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas standing on a corner with a crude cardboard sign, “Will fight Sauron for food.”
Ambivalence on Oblivion
Hal says in the comments of my recent post on Oblivion:
I'm sorry you had a bad experience with it, Shamus. It really is a good game.
I realized that a huge majority of my current readers weren’t around when I wrote my Oblivion Posts. Sometimes I forget this. I imagine my entire site as this unbroken record, but for most people the thing started about three months ago. So let’s back up a bit.
Hal is right. There was a lot to like in Oblivion. I beat it twice, did all the missions for Mages / Fighters / Dark Brotherhood / Thieves, and collected a few properties. I filled in the map, and even made a (very trivial) mod. That is a lot of hours to sink into a game, and I wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t having a good time.
But the number of annoyances, quest flukes, bugs, and haywire scripts did grate. That, and I needed a user mod to get the game running on my Geforce 5500, which was well within the “minimum requirements”. A patch to at least meet those requirements would have been The Right Thing to Do, and such a patch wouldn’t be needed for the consoles.
Underneath the dents is a great game. I did have several posts of praise for the game. I didn’t have so much a bad experience as a profound anger that they claimed the game worked on systems where it clearly didn’t, and then never made things right. I strongly suspect that it isn’t the fault of the developers directly. If they are anything like me, they hate releasing buggy software and jump at the chance to correct mistakes. I’m sure the decision was made much higher on the food chain, possibly from the publisher. Honestly if I knew where to lay the blame I would bring my verbal chastening to bear on the guilty party swiftly and with grim efficiency. Sadly, I don’t know who made these decisions, so I have to shake my fist at Bethesda in general. I have little doubt that the decision to launch the game in its larval state was made by someone who probably never played the thing.
I have a better GFX card now and the game runs fine without any user-made mods, but I haven’t forgotten this fiasco. Lots of people picked up the game, played it, and were happy, but for those of us who had to turn to the community for help in getting some sort of playable experience from it, well… that sort of thing tends to leave an impression.
A major expansion is on the way. I will be watching the news very carefully after release, to see what sort of condition the thing is in when it comes out of the box. If it looks good then I just might pick it up. If I see another round of community-made patches arise, then I’m going to conclude the company itself is defective, and give them the same treatment I’ve given Obsidian in the past. They will become a verbal punching bag, my universal example of a game company gone wrong.
Forum Follies
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve noticed a few of my old posts are attracting trolls and morons. Some of my movie posts have a tendancy to pick up people who want to engage in tiresome nitpickery over the plot or the degree of suckage manifested by the film. But by far the big draw to the posts of yesteryear is my old post on Oblivion and the way the graphics engine fails at simple tasks. It took me a while to figure out why this was. That post has a steady stream of people who jump in and insult me for having the audacity to use an old graphics card and then expect games to work, even if the card meets the stated system requirements. Some of these people are downright combative. I’ve deleted the worst ones, but there are still a few there that think I’m being unreasonable for expecting something as exotic as lighting to work in the game. These people do not appear elsewhere on the site. That post is seven months old now, but still there are people who come in, drop a few insults, and move on.
Looking at my referrers, I see a lot of traffic coming from the Elder Scrolls forums. The site is actually my #3 referrer, right after Stumbleupon and (recently) Bloglines. There must be some long-standing debate there about this problem and someone probably cited me in the thread. Great.
What is the rationale for this? Is the forum just not filling their need for fruitless debate? Are they so starved for contention that they have to come here and supplement the vast bounty of tireless foes one normally finds in forums? At any rate, coming to my site is a terrible waste of time because I don’t really care to spar with these kids. In fact:
End of story, pixel-humpers.
And I get to say “end of story”, because I’m busy and I have all the bully powers here. If you want a fair debate, then return to the place whence you came, forum-spawn!
(Of course, I could close the comments on that post, but aside from my feigned outrage above I actually find this to be sort of interesting. It’s funny that one of the major sources of newcomers to the site is to a minor post from seven months ago about a game I no longer play. Although I really do wonder about what drives them to comment.)
Forecast: Windy, cold and abusive
On Tuesday my kids were outside in swimsuits, spraying each other with the hose. By Friday morning we were knee-deep in new snow.
It’s like taking a beating in the playground. The pummeling stops, and you uncurl from the fetal position and start to wipe the snotty tears off your face when suddenly the kicking begins anew. He was just waiting for you to uncurl.
March is such a bastard.
What time is it?
Daylight savings time is an absurd prank, and after 35 years I think I’ve had my fill of this. Steven recently said he wasn’t doing it. Admirable. I wish I could take that route. Right now my phone, my computer, and this server all disagree on what time it is. The server is an hour behind. My phone is an hour ahead. All three were in harmony until this goofy clock-changing business.
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| Here is the latest version of the Microsoft Timeserver. |
My friend and I tried to imagine how the time server could be so useless. We eventually concluded that the time “server” must be some sad, middle-aged guy sitting in a windowless room with no clock somewhere in the bowels of the Microsoft offices. When someone queires the server, he gets a popup dialog asking the time. Then he has to run upstairs to the break room, look at the clock, and then run back and type it in. The accuracy of the system varies depending on whether or not he’s in the middle of a game of minesweeper.
Recently several people have linked to me or left comments that were directly or indirectly insulting or irritating, and instead of letting it roll off I’ve been tempted to respond with a salvo of excoriation. That’s no way to live. If you get mad every time you see someone being rude or idiotic on the net, you’ll spend your life in a state of perpetual Defcon 1 rage. At first I thought that perhaps the number of ankle-biting nitpickers had somehow multiplied, but then I realized I was just getting riled up more easily. I’ve been in a horrible mood and I’m taking things more personally than I should. Looking back, I can see I’ve been this way since the clocks changed.
Each evening I sit down to write one of the posts for the following day, and lately all I can come up with are rants. Not my usual semi-humorous rants, but bitter, angry rants that wouldn’t amuse anyone. Thankfully, so far I’ve had the wisdom and self-control to toss most of them. I’m glad I have a few DM of the Rings already written, because I don’t think I can make any funny in this condition. I’m thinking that “D&D is stupid, players are all idiots, DMs are all jerks, Peter Jackson is a hack, and I HATE THEM ALLLLLLLLL” isn’t really the right frame of mind for writing comics. It isn’t likely to lead to anything that will make people smile, at any rate.
I can’t blame the mood on DST for sure, but it seems a likely culprit. I’ve had some other problems this week that could also be the root of the problem, (trips to the hospital) but I’ve weathered much worse with a good deal more grace in the past. Whatever the reason for my foul temper, this week would have been a little less miserable if I wasn’t getting up an hour earlier every morning.
Harumph!
From The Archives:
Deus Ex and The Treachery of Labels
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Control
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
The Gameplay is the Story
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
The No Politics Rule
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.