Link (YouTube) |
Wow. A whole week of fumbling around, tranq’ing guards, hacking computers, and juggling inventory. And then in the last half of the last episode we have a boss fight, an important conversation with Pritchard, a major glitch, we meet Bill Taggert, and we’re introduced to the whole anti-aug side of the argument.
Link (YouTube) |
A side note: I’ve updated the Spoiler Warning page. Hopefully this will make it easier to surf the archives. I know I get lost looking for particular episodes, and I’m thinking maybe being able to see the titles will help.
As I mentioned in the episode, the “vast underground complex filled with guards and control rooms” is pretty much a required component of the Deus Ex conspiracy-driven story, but it flies apart if you do something foolish like think about it. Having fifty or a hundred people all pile into an abandoned building every morning would be a pretty big giveaway. At lunchtime a half dozen people would file out, grab huge piles of Starbucks and take-out food, and disappear into the building again.
You could fix this by saying the people live in the base, but then you have the problem of needing to bring in truck loads of food every couple of weeks. You’d need laundry infrastructure, dorms, and a plan for getting rid of all the trash. There would be little bits of traffic every couple of weeks as personnel rotated in and out of their six-month shifts. Again, people would notice.
Which brings up the question of why this base needs to be in a city at all. What is this place for? I understand they were spying on Sarif from here, but certainly they didn’t need ALL of these people for a job like that. And those people could have worked out of an office tower downtown without really raising any eyebrows. What is it that the bad guys want to accomplish that requires a sprawling, Dwarf-like warren under the earth?
EDIT: For the record, I’m not saying these are plot holes or anything. I’m just musing.
Some background: This is an article talking about the level CTF-Facing Worlds in the game Unreal Tournment. It was a horribly broken, unbalanced map with a layout that encouraged all the wrong behavior from players. Despite this (or perhaps even because of it) CTF-Face was by far the most popular map of all time. There were countless servers that hosted games running exclusively in this map. I once saw numbers suggesting that there were more hours clocked on CTF-Face than on all other maps combined.
The map is just a floating island in space, with a tower on either side. Inside the tower is the flag room. Inside the flag room is a teleport that will send you to the roof where you will find a sniper rife, some sniper rounds, and armor. Players spawned in the open, beside the tower. The towers were usually covered in snipers, who would shoot respawning players again and again. Here is Facing Worlds:
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| Click to big-ify. |
The game had a melee weapon called the piston hammer. It was this pneumatic device that built up a charge over the space of five or six seconds. At full charge, the hammer was a guaranteed kill against an unarmored player. All you had to do was get close to someone with the charged hammer and it would go off, smashing them to bits. Players also had a translocator gun, which would shoot out a puck with a little glowing antennae on top. You could instantly teleport yourself to this puck.
This is an article I wrote around 2000-ish, back when I was really into the game. I was so proud when this thing was linked on the gaming news sites of the day. I got over two thousand views. (OMG I’M FAMOUS!) Keep in mind I was in my late twenties / early thirties when I wrote this, and I’m 40 now. It seems pretty childish by today’s standards, not to mention overlong and rambling, but I can see little hopeful glimmers of the someday-critic peeking through the cracks.
This is actually kind of embarrassing to post, but I’m hoping it will be good for a laugh. Or… something.
I have left the article just as it ran, with all of the original errors intact. Here we go…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Piston Camping for Fun and Profit”
Link (YouTube) |
Am I the only one who misses that synth music they used in Deus Ex, Unreal, and Unreal Tournament? I remember opening up Unreal Ed and using it like a music player back in the day, having it play through all of the available tracks.
I also loved the MIDI music used in Descent. That was great stuff. I was actually really disappointed with the music in Descent 2, which replaced the beep-boop electronica with real CD tracks and a more “hardcore” musical vibe. Maybe it was the tonal shift that put me off, or maybe this is a case of me preferring chicken nuggets and cheese doodles over roast chicken and baked potato. I never claimed to have refined tastes.
Link (YouTube) |
Oh no! Somebody changed my internet show and now it’s different! Change it back! I fear things that are new and strange!
Once you get over the shock, please welcome Chris Franklin to the show. You might remember him as Campster, the guy who had the AUDACITY to not love Half-Life as much as we do. Josh, Rutskarn and I have been plotting our revenge for weeks. After a long discussion, we couldn’t come up with anything more unpleasant than being on the show with the rest of us. So here he is. Our plan is to subject him to Rutskarn’s puns until he agrees to wear a “Half-Life is #1 game with no flaws” foam finger on his right hand at all times.
He didn’t crack this week. In fact, he pretty much just talked about Deus Ex the whole time. During the show about Deus Ex! Can you believe it? Whatta n00b.
On a less absurdist note: If you want some bonus content today, check out his take on Duke Nukem Forever, where he argues that people hated it for all the wrong reasons. This is just the sort of meta-commentary that makes me happy.
You might notice I didn’t review DNF. I couldn’t do it. Despite all the jokes I made at the expense of the game, deep down I really wanted to like it. When the game failed, I wasn’t angry. Just disappointed. I actually quit playing when I got to the platforming section in the burger joint. I meant to go back and give it another try, but I never did. I could never stockpile enough indignation to get a good rant going, and so I let the game slip by in silence.
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We begin with this story, where Guru3D tries to test Anno 2070 on various test machines with different configurations of graphics cards and quickly runs out of allowed installs. And then later Ubisoft thought this was perfectly reasonable.
At the time I wrote:
I’m actually glad that Ubisoft isn’t falling over themselves trying to make this right. Yes, this DRM is horrible, unjust, counter-productive, and anti-consumer. We’ve been over this. But aside from the DRM itself, I’d say the most pernicious practice is one where the media is excused from having to deal with it. If a publisher wants to saddle their game with time consuming, annoying, nagging, inconvenient DRM, then that practice should be reflected in the review score.
Developers don’t like this idea because they don’t want their magnum opus to end up with a low score because of something the publisher did. I admit that’s a bad deal for them, but reviews aren’t written for the benefit of developers. They’re consumer advice, and if they don’t advise the consumer then they’re worthless. (See also: Bugs.)
But before I got around to posting that, Ubisoft announced they would remove graphics cards from the “machine identification” process, thus letting Guru3D get their benchmarks without Ubisoft having to confront or even explain their nonsensical DRM policy. I was depressed by this. It’s technically a small victory for customers, since it means Ubisoft games will be slightly less annoying to install and run, but it was a window of opportunity for them to re-evaluate their policy. They could have sat down and thought about DRM and the impact it has on piracy, consumers, and the medium as a whole. But instead they put a band-aid on a PR problem and walked away.
Try to imagine this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Anno 2070 DRM”
It’s the 28th of January. You know what that means?
Link (YouTube) |
It’s overwhelming, really, to look at the calendar and realise that we’ve been doing Spoiler Warning for two years now. It certainly doesn’t seem like it’s been that long. Heck, to me, it seems like just a few months ago that I ran the marathon editing session for the hilarious first anniversary episode of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. And that episode is still, in my mind, neck and neck with Railroad to Nowhere for our very best work on this series.
Then again, looking back on our very first episodes, they certainly seems like a world away from what we do now. For the editing of this episode I ended up digging deep back in my archives and watching a bit of the end of the first season and beginning of the second, and I was cringing the entire way through. Awkward pauses large enough to drive a vertibird through, terrible image quality, poor editing. It’s a wonder we stuck with it long enough for things to get out of those dark ages. But get through them we did, and look at all the games we’ve covered since! Deus Ex is our seventh full game, and we’ve nearly covered an eighth with our randomly scheduled off-time episodes of Half Life 2. That’s almost four games per year.
Still, as cringe-worthy as it is to look back at the early episodes, it also highlights, to me, how much really has improved – both between us as a group and our ability to deliver interesting commentary and humor simultaneously without tripping all over ourselves – and also in my own abilities to properly edit the series. When Spoiler Warning started, it was just an idea I’d had – I had no idea how video editing worked, what “codecs” really were, or how to sort out all of the black magic I found myself diving headfirst into. Two years later, we have proper credit sequences, full 720p HD videos, and a much tighter flow to each every new episode. I can scarcely believe it when I remember how confused I was at the beginning.
What about you guys? What are your favorite Spoiler Warning memories from the past two years?
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
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.
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
T w e n t y S i d e d
