T w e n t y S i d e d
Link (YouTube) |
Wherein Campster reveals that he’s never actually watched Homestar Runner or anything related to Homestar Runner. I invite you all to throw rocks at him. Also: Pun wars, arrows, and making fun of my mom offscreen!
Tomb Raider EP8: The Colon of Sadness
Link (YouTube) |
I agree with the rest of the cast: The tomb puzzles are where the game felt the most Tomb Raider-y. It feels like a slice of the best part of the earlier games.
The game is at its strongest when it moves away from the shooter stuff and embraces the platforming and puzzles. It’s not that I dislike the combat, either. I just think the game would have been thematically stronger if we had, like, half the fights and a third the body count.
I also like this particular puzzle. It presents a timing obstacle and your first instinct is probably to assume you’re supposed to do it as fast as possible. But the timing is actually really slow. Open the shutters, wait, THEN act. It’s obvious once you see the solution and it’s not hard to execute once you get what you’re supposed to be doing.
Man I wish the game had more of this.
And then a few minutes later you get punched by a guy standing just off-screen and suddenly I hate the game again. I think this “captured in the cutscene” moment needs to count twice, since you get captured by one group in the middle of getting captured by another.
I feel like I’m in this tumultuous relationship with Tomb Raider. One minute we’re holding hands, laughing, and platforming and three minutes later we’re screaming at each other and she’s throwing things at me. I tell her we’re going to break up, for real this time. No seriously. It’s over. Then she starts talking about how she knows about another hidden tomb around here someplace and suddenly I go all spineless.
Tomb Raider EP7: Oh, Honey
Link (YouTube) |
As I said in the previous episode, I had to bail on our recording session this week. I’m sorry I missed this section of the game in our show. Here is the commentary I would have given you if I’d stuck with it:
If ships always get stranded here, then who climbed to the top of this crazy mountain and built a refueling station here? Also, why would anyone build a fueling station here? Did Lara really need to blow up ALL the fuel? Couldn’t she have made a smaller, safer, and less destructive signal fire?
Let’s imagine the rescue plane didn’t get struck by lightning. Where was it going to land? Why would an airplane be sent on a rescue mission where there is no known airfield? And as others have pointed out: We’re off the coast of Japan. Why is the rescue plane American?
Individually these are not horrible sins. I think the audience is mostly prepared to allow for a bit of slop in a pulpy adventure story. But I think a little attention to detail would have spared me from about five minutes of sustained eye-rolling.
Also, I think the rope arrows are a good mechanic in theory, but this looks ridiculous. Lara fires a rope arrow into a wooden structure and then pulls it down. I’m even willing to spot the game the hand-wave of arrows penetrating and holding unlimited loads. I’m even willing to spot the game a second hand-wave and allow her the unlimited supply of rope that’s always long enough and never needs to be recovered. (We can hand-wave this by saying it would just be tedious to have her reel in and re-roll the rope every time.) And naturally we’ll give a pass to the silly notion that these little arrows could still hit their targets while dragging that much weight.
But even with all of that duct tape applied to the bridge of disbelief-suspension, this is still pretty silly. Lara can’t be exerting force on these lines that exceed her weight. (If she did, she’d just fall over or haul herself up.) Which means these structures require less than her body weight to fall over. Okay, okay. Videogame rotted wood, etc. But if that’s the case, then she didn’t need the rope arrows. She could pull any of these objects over by grasping them and pulling. If nothing else, they should dump the doors that are reachable on foot but can only be opened with rope arrows. That’s just too preposterous.
I’m sorry Tomb Raider. I ran out of hand-waves for you.
Tomb Raider EP6: The Crash
Link (YouTube) |
Mumbles crashed the show but then the game crashed just before the crash and so I had to go because I needed to crash. I will say that this game hates Josh’s machine. The strange framerate stuttering. The vanishing scenery. The terrible performance of TressFX. The CRASHES. I had a bit of trouble with the game, but nothing like this.
I was in need of sleep, so I’ll be missing from the rest of the episodes this week. Not to worry. Mumbles does an uncanny impression of me at the 15:30 mark. You’ll be fine.
The Witcher
Over the years a lot of people have asked me about this series, and so I’m putting this post here as a kind of catch-all. When these questions pop up again (like when Witcher 3 comes out) I can link back here and hopefully avoid repeating myself and having the same argument a dozen times.
I have a bit of a cultural bias in favor of the team behind the Witcher series. Being named Shamus Young, most people sensibly assume I’m quasi-Irish. Like a lot of Americans I’m a cultural mongrel, but if I can be said to have any cultural heritage at all it’s probably Polish.
If you’re curious: Mostly Polish, secondly German, a small dash of Irish, and a single Native American great-grandmother.
The family culture was much stronger when I was a child in the 1970’s and my grandparents (and even a great-grandparent) were still alive. These were first or second generation immigrants and still had some attitudes and habits from the old country. (Particularly when it came to food.) Those folks are mostly gone now and my generation is about as Polish as Doritos and Mario Kart. But I still have a soft spot for the Warsaw-based CD Projekt.
Aside from my pro-Polish bias, I have a lot of reasons to like The Witcher. It’s a rare book-to-videogame adaptation that doesn’t just use the setting as window dressing on shallow, derivative gameplay. (As in the case of the Harry Potter games, for example.) It’s a fantasy RPG that isn’t just trying to copy Tolkien.
 |
On top of all that, CD Projekt is one of the most consumer-friendly companies in the industry. They run the excellent Good Old Games. We sometimes praise Valve for doing such a good job of lubricating / sugarcoating their DRM, but CD Projekt actually stands against DRM. They have released huge content patches for free in situations where just about any other company would charge money. They support PC games. They’re good people.
Good company. Literary approach to worldbuilding. No DRM. Fantasy RPG. Diverse mechanics. Gorgeous visuals. I have every reason in the world to love the Witcher series and beg people to play it.
Every reason except for the fact that I hate these damn games.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher”
Diecast #18: Xbox One, The Witcher, Unrest
Mystery guest this week. Even if you’re not usually a Diecast listener, you might want to give the first couple of minutes a try. Just saying.
Download MP3 File
Download Ogg Vorbis File
3:15 Chris is still working off his indentured servitude to Thomas Nook, certified jackass of Animal Crossing.
8:50 Rutskarn explains the depth and verisimilitude of the Tropico political simulation.
12:00 Josh tells us some Crusader Kings II stories. And also X-Files.
19:45 Shamus has been playing Papo & Yo and watching the Red Bull Training Grounds Starcraft II tournament.
23:30 Xbox One policy reversal.
46:05 Rutskarn regales us with his horror stories of the Witcher’s tutorial and the tragedy of his faithful companion, Jackass McSpuds
54:20 Kickstarter, Unrest, Horrible Pick-up Lines, and Snake People!
1:11:55 Mailbag
The Twelve-Year Mistake Part 7: The Unicorn
It’s 2012. Early in the year we go to PAX and I get to meet my friend Josh face-to-face for the first time. We do the PAX thing and generally have a lot of fun. It’s nice to get away from the house for a few days and stop worrying about the mortgage and instead worry about the expenses and logistics of travel.
I’m always conflicted about travel. I love visiting new places but I really hate the act of travel. This is like enjoying food but hating eating. You really can’t have one without the other. I develop some really strange OCD behaviors when I travel. Where are my keys? Do I have my wallet? What happens if the car breaks down? Where are my keys? What if the GPS stops working? Do I have my wallet? Do I have my medicine? What if I get sick? What if my asthma gets bad? What if I get one of my headaches? What if I make a fool of myself at one of my public appearances? Do I have my wallet? What if I’m allergic to the hotel room because everyone on this wretched planet owns a friggin’ pet? Do I have my medicine?
Part of the problem is that I’m incredibly absent-minded, and the only way I can mitigate this is by keeping rituals. I think nothing of going for three weeks eating the same meal three times a day, drinking the same tea, playing the same games, making the same jokes. The rhythm keeps me on track and lets me manage complexity. But travel shatters all rituals and I start to freak out.
 |
| Day two of PAX East 2012. I’m sore, tired, and waiting for the tea to kick in before we set off for the convention center. |
My book is out now, and it’s a fine success by the standards of first-time authors. It brings in a nice chunk of money. When sales finally drop off, I’ll gross about a third of my old salary at Activeworlds. It took me a year to write it, but I didn’t work on it full time. In fact, I spent a lot less than one third of my work hours on it.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Twelve-Year Mistake Part 7: The Unicorn”
From The Archives:
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.
Civilization VI
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
The Brilliance of Mass Effect
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
Project Frontier
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Mass Effect Retrospective
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.