T w e n t y S i d e d
For those of you who have been eager to hear us criticize Valve a bit… your moment has come.
Link (YouTube) |
Autoblography Part 10: Meet the Sitters
During the school year I spend my day in three environments: Home, the sitters, and school. When school is out, it’s just the sitter, all day. Since Mom works full time and her job is almost an hour away, this makes for a long stretch of time with an adult who is paid to tolerate us.
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| There are very, very few pictures of the Dark Year. That’s my brother Patrick on the left, me on the right. I’ve been told that Cthulhu has that same wallpaper in his dining-room. |
Our current sitter is Amelia, a demanding, prudish woman with a deep southern accent. Her husband is a preacher. She has two sons – Carl and Darren – who are just a little older than Patrick and I. (All of these names are changed, to protect the… uh. You’ll see. Well, not Patrick. His name is the same. Look, you know how this works.)
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 10: Meet the Sitters”
Spoiler Warning Half Life 2 Special EP6: Father Danny
Link (YouTube) |
I know Dead Space is a popular game, so before people jump on us about how we “hate” Dead Space, I should clarify:
I enjoyed Dead Space 2. The gameplay was fun, but the atmosphere was often undercut by heavy-handedness and a complete lack of pacing. In the opening cutscene, before you’re even given control of your character, the game gives you a close-up, full-on view of a monster roaring in your face. It feels like too much, too soon, with too little reason to care. By blending the exposition and tutorials with a slow-building threat they could have made something far, far more powerful.
Also, I simply refuse to believe that Josh grabbed a flaming barrel with the gravity gun and survived the subsequent detonation. I’ve made that same mistake a few times, with a 100% fatality rate.
Autoblography Part 9: Therapy
We’re still stuck in the Dark Year. Hang in there.
Apparently there are concerns about my behavior at school. I’m odd and spastic with people, exhibiting rapid mood swings. I blurt out things without thinking. I’m edgy and I can’t sit still. I’m fidgety and I’m always playing with random objects. I’m constantly tilting in my chair, messing with stuff in my desk, and making sounds with my mouth. My strangeness really displeases the other kids, and their distaste for me intensifies. While adults aren’t generally aware of it, I also have terrifying recurring nightmares.
It is observed by many that I am not a happy kid.
At school I’m sent to some sort of counselor. He’s nice and he means well, but his counsel consists mostly of asking me why I do the odd things that I do, which doesn’t work because I don’t know. He asks me why I don’t do my work, which doesn’t lead us anywhere useful. I don’t have the nerve or the eloquence to tell him the truth: I hate this place, I resent the other kids, the work is stupid and I don’t think any of this matters. I’m just running out the clock until I graduate and can go do something with computers, and everything between now and then is simply a trial to be endured. So I stick with the old standby of shrugging. He’ a nice guy and very patient with me, and I wish I could help him. But the problems we have here are large and neither of us has the agency to fix them.
Outside of school, Mom takes me to Irene Stacey Community Mental Health Center, where I have a twice-monthly visit with a psychologist.
While 10-year-old Shamus doesn’t understand, I think it’s probably obvious to the reader: None of these people have taken into account the fact that I’m on more drugs than Ozzy Osborne. You can’t jam that many pills down a kid’s gullet and not expect some some sort of behavioral repercussions.
Perhaps they did notice this detail, but they never discussed it with me. A shame, really. It would have been really useful for me to know. The thing about being on drugs is that your own behavior can seem normal to you. Your only clue that you’re acting like a freak is the reactions you get from others. I’m only aware of my odd behavior because people routinely mentioned it.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 9: Therapy”
Spoiler Warning Half Life 2 Special EP5: Welcome to Ravenholm
We’re going to spend this week playing Half-Life 2: RAVENHOLM!!!
Link (YouTube) |
Here is a link to the Guild Wars 2 Manifesto, which has the guy who posed as the face model for Father Grigori. (He appears around the one minute mark.)
Next week, we begin the new season with (assuming all goes to plan) Assassin’s Creed 2.
Josh Plays Total War: Shogun 2
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1545: This is Sengoku Jidai, the Age of the Country at War. For 200 years, the Ashikaga Shoguns have ruled from Kyoto. Great power and splendor were theirs. But now, the over-mighty clans no longer obey. The time has come for a new warlord to become… Shogun!
When I look back at my growth as a gaming fan, I would be remiss to ignore the impact that strategy games have had on me. Before I played shooters, and before I played RPGs, there was Command and Conquer. I’d been introduced to the genre during a visit to my cousins’ many years ago, and my brother and I were both instantly hooked. When I lived in Western New York some eight or nine years ago, we convinced some of our neighborhood friends to get Red Alert 2, and we would play online multiplayer matches against each other all the time. Now that I think about it, that was probably the game that got me into online gaming.
But as much as I loved the old C&C games, and despite the countless hours of “one more turns” in Civilization, there’s one game series in particular that â€" ever since I discovered it several years ago â€" has stood above the others purely by virtue of its uniqueness. The Total War series demonstrates a meticulous attention to detail, and an enduring dedication to historical accuracy in presentation. They may not get everything right, and the series has always had to make some concessions from its accuracy in order to preserve gameplay, but the sheer volume of what Creative Assembly does manage to get right is astounding at times, especially considering the current climate of tightly focused, “cinematic” games that has weeded its way into the market. And its in that capacity that I am quite comfortable with calling the Total War games “simulations.” I mean, really, where else can you find such detailed reproductions of line-based warfare and tactics on a AAA budget?
According to Steam, I’ve sunk 222.2 hours (no really, that’s what it says at the time of this writing) into the latest release in the series, Total War: Shogun 2 (or Shogun 2: Total War if you have the series’ old naming scheme burnt into you mind as I do). And after throwing so many hours into it, I’ve worked up quite the urge to write about it â€" which brings us to this Let’s Play. Now this is a little new to me; I’ve read a lot of Let’s Plays, and I’ve edited a video Let’s Play non-stop for a year and a half, but I’ve never actually attempted to write my own.
Now, I’m not going to attempt to conjure up some sort of original fiction for this series â€" Shamus and Rutskarn are both much better at that sort of thing than I am â€" but I have something else I’d like to focus on. All of the Total War games are rife with historical context, owing to their creators’ attention to detail and accuracy. And while I wouldn’t quite characterize myself as a “history geek,” I love reading about it, especially when its on a topic I got very little exposure to at school (e.g., anything that’s not American History (argh) or beginning-of-civilization-era world history).
Without further ado then, let’s talk about the historical context surrounding Total War: Shogun 2, shall we? What is the Sengoku Jidai? Why are all of these people fighting? What does it all mean? And more importantly, what’s up with those crazy hairdos?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Josh Plays Total War: Shogun 2”
Autoblography Part 8: The Dark Year
It’s the 1980-1981 school year. Mount St. Helens erupts. The Rubik’s Cube craze spreads to my corner of the world and I discover the pleasure of puzzling over one. Adults won’t shut up about “Who shot J.R.” Pac-Man fever is sweeping the country. I’m in fourth grade.
Things are not going well for me.
I’ve come to think of this period as “The Dark Year”, but it really took place over the course of two years or so, with things becoming gradually more intense in the last nine months. It’s not like the new year rang in and suddenly everything went to hell. This was the end of a long process, and I have trouble putting the various plot-points into proper chronological order.
I’ve struggled a great deal with what to say about this time period. This is a very ugly stretch in my life. I don’t want this series to be a chore to read. I don’t want this to deteriorate into a long screed of complaints and self-pity.
I could skip these events, but that would leave a curious and continuity-breaking hole in my life. I could be explicit, but that would involve a lot of ugly stories that would, I think, be unfair to the adults in my family, and my mother in particular. The only way to avoid making her look like the bad guy would be to tell the whole story, which would be incredibly long, bleak, and not terribly compelling.
Here is the best I can do:
Some adults entered our lives who were no good for us. As a result, my brother and I ended up spending a lot of time under the care and influence of some very rotten people. Just to assuage your worst fears: I wasn’t seriously beaten, I wasn’t molested, nobody died. Nobody gave me illegal drugs. (Although given the witches’ brew of prescription medication I was on, I was arguably higher than the adults in my life.) This isn’t anything that serious. This was a time of neglect, not abuse. Lots of people had home lives that were far more dangerous than the one I knew in these years. But it was rough, and it hit me in an area where I had very few coping mechanisms.
So instead of belaboring things in a litany of complaint, I’ll just pick through the anecdotes of the time and we can move on. Sound good?
I feel like I have very little control over my life. I don’t decide where I go, what I do, what I eat, or who I associate with. This is normal for kids, but it doesn’t feel normal to me.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 8: The Dark Year”
From The Archives:
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Silent Hill 2 Plot Analysis
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
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.