T w e n t y S i d e d
Jarenth and Josh are here to rescue your new year’s eve parties by acting like morons!
Edit: Well that was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone who showed up to cheer us on as I drove cars onto boats and boats onto land.
Announcing the Second Annual Josh and Jarenth Save the New Year Stream!
That’s right, you asked for it! The illustrious buddy cop duo/pair of idiots are back again to save and possibly ruin the new year! And you’ll be able to watch this terrible trainwreck in real-time tomorrow evening!
We’re not actually quite sure which games we’ll be playing or when we’ll be playing them, but if you tune in tomorrow, you might find us playing:
Sleeping Dogs – Wherein Josh attempts to take down a criminal empire by crashing into things and beating up street merchants!
Space Marine – Wherein Jarenth laughs at Josh because he doesn’t actually know anything about Warhammer 40k – or this game!
Hitman Absolution – Watch Josh guide Agent 47 through his most linear and poorly optimized adventure yet!
Tropico 4 – Josh achieves his dream of becoming El Presidente of a burgeoning banana republic – and then probably ruins everything!
War Thunder – Jarenth and Josh take advantage of the new year to go back in time and shoot down planes in the arcade flight sim you’ve never heard of!
And of course,
Borderlands 2 – Josh and Jarenth murder their way across Pandora to see how long it takes before they degenerate into five hours of car wrestling!
Currently, we plan to start at 6 PM Pacific and stream until midnight Pacific. And I know, that means we’re technically excluding all European New Years celebrations, but we really don’t think we can stream for nine hours straight and I can’t just go cutting it early. Look at it this way: You can have your real New Years Eve parties with all your cool friends, and then come back and watch Jarenth and I screw everything up.
The stream link will be posted tomorrow before we start. Feel free to give feedback about the games we might be playing or suggest others in the comments.
Hope to see you then!
Postcards From Linux Part 4:
Can You Hear Me Now?
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The Linux-ing continues. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to continue much longer. At the very least, we’re going to have to go into some kind of dual-boot scenario. Aside from gaming, there are a few tools that I need and can’t get in Linux. For example…
Vent
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This is the big one. I use Vent to hang out with my various internet friends, and we also use it to record Spoiler Warning. So I’ve been trying to run the Vent client under Wine.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Postcards From Linux Part 4:
Can You Hear Me Now?”
Errant Signal – Hotline Miami
Rutskarn, Chris and I talked about Hotline Miami quite a bit when we were making our way through it. They had wildly different interpretations of the game and it made for an interesting conversation. I should pitch the idea to them of doing a podcast together. I can’t believe Josh hasn’t suggested something like this yet.
Link (YouTube) |
Either I have had amazing luck in acquiring titles recently, or this has been a banner year for games. Heck, FTL and Dishonored were probably the “worst” I played, and both were still good games in many respects. A year where my worst two games are a retro space-roguelike and a slightly tepid mechanical successor to Thief? Can we just keep having more years like this, forever? Is that too much to ask? Heck, if Dishonored had come out two or three years ago it might have made one of my “best of” lists.
As Chris points out, this had been the year for games talking about games. Spec Ops, Hotline Miami, and (purportedly) Far Cry 3 all discuss the medium. Chris is tired of it, but I kind of like all the super-meta analysis.
I’m going to see if I can get some sort of wrap-up posts done before the end of the year.
EDIT: Ah. I’d forgotten that Mass Effect 3 was THIS year. I had it in my head that it was a Christmas 2011 release. But it came out in 2012, which sort of re-calibrates my whole 2012 scale. Also, this was a huge disappointment.
Mass Effect 3 was the reader’s choice for 2012 over at the Escapist. Now, I’m glad people enjoyed the game and I don’t begrudge anyone their good time. (My grudge-making is aimed at the writing at at BioWare.) But that’s such a sad choice for “favorite”. I don’t expect the masses to nominate stuff like Hotline Miami, Journey, or X-Com. But didn’t anyone play the Walking Dead? Borderlands 2? Dishonored? Spec Ops? There were a lot of games that were more polished, more mechanically sound, and took more chances than Mass Effect 3. And just about everything had a stronger and more well-executed art style.
Ah well. You can’t argue with the masses.
Coding a Parser
I spent Christmas day coding. That was fun. As part of my efforts to move to Linux, I decided to port some of my code. One of the first things I’ll want in the world of Linux is the ability to read .ini files.
I really like .ini files. You can put any program settings in them in any order. You can edit them with a text editor. You can read and write to them from within your program. This is much better than (say) storing all your settings in binary files. Some people are moving to XML these days, but XML files are massive overkill for a job like this, and end up being incredibly verbose and annoying for humans to read. For context, here is the .ini file for Project Frontier:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Coding a Parser”
Postcards From Linux Part 3:
Mouse vs. Keyboard
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My adventure into the world of Linux-using continues. With regard to the holy war of GUI interfaces vs. the POWER OF THE COMMAND LINE, I have to say that I see this as a false dichotomy. A menu lets you know what can be done, where stuff is, and what the options are. Once you know these things, a command line is [sometimes] the fastest way to do them. In the terminal I feel blind. In a windowed situation I feel like it’s too many steps to reach certain options.
You know what interface paradigm I always loved? Games made with id Tech 4 and Source engines. (Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, respectively.) You’ve got your menus and sliders and checkboxes and whatnots, but if you need to get into the crazy stuff you tap tilde and you’ve got sleek command line interface with text coloring, command history, script execution, and autocomplete. Yes, I know operating systems are more complex than videogames, but there’s a lot of value in this hybrid approach.
An interesting problem I like to think about: How can you use the GUI to teach the user to use the command line? I know this is heresy to the purists, but I see a lot of value in it. However it worked, it would have to be like keyboard shortcuts: When you look at a menu it usually lists the keyboard shortcuts for the stuff you’re doing. You can use the menu or the shortcut, and it’s up to the user when they want to make the mental investment of learning to do things the optimal way. If you select the same thing again and again, you’ll get irritated enough to memorize the shortcut. However, you never have to memorize anything and are free to do almost everything with the mouse. Repetition will create a desire for optimization which will create willingness to learn.
For me, a great example of this is MySQL. I use it once every six months or so. These intervals are so far apart that I don’t remember the commands. I have to look up every command, every time. One example of a dozen:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Postcards From Linux Part 3:
Mouse vs. Keyboard”
The Walking Dead EP12: Fork This Guy
Link (YouTube) |
So, it’s only been three months since the OMGZOMBIEPOCALYPSE event, and already these people have resorted to cannibalism. That’s quite a stretch, particularly since – of all the people we’ve met so far – they seem to be the least likely to go hungry. I mean, they have the ingredients to bake biscuits. I don’t know how long I would have to eat biscuits before I became so bored with them that I felt the need to add people, but I’m pretty sure it would be longer than this.
Also they really are terrible cannibals. I mean, they’re feeding the group, which is going to cost them a lot of food. Also, what kind of idiot would keep their slaughterhouse in this condition? Since they’re slaughtering for food and not for giggles, this place ought to look like a butcher shop and not like a serial killer’s playroom. A butcher who kept his kitchen in this condition wouldn’t live long.
Here is my outcome for episode 2:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Walking Dead EP12: Fork This Guy”
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