T w e n t y S i d e d
So Star on Chest flies off into the sunset for the last time. Again.
Next week, we begin my series on World of Warcraft. Here is a sneak peek:
 |
Note that Cataclysm launches in just seven weeks. This should be interesting.
Stolen Pixels #236: Breen Interviews Ken
Here is a comic which is all about Call of Duty. And not Minecraft. Heavens no. We’re talking about real games now. Serious games.
Call of Duty. Not Minecraft.
Spoiler Warning:
Where Do Spoilers Come From?
The show is on hiatus this week. I’ll be announcing the next series on Thursday. In the meantime, I thought I’d give a look at how we do what we do. It’s a lot more complex than most people imagine.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning:
Where Do Spoilers Come From?”
Postcards from Minecraft
Minecraft is the exceptionally rare sort of game that can bridge the gap between myself and my kids. Most titles are a compromise of some sort. I can enjoy a bit of Mario Galaxy, but it doesn’t resonate with me the way it does with my son. They liked watching me play Half-Life 2 or Civilization V, but I don’t think they would have taken interest if not for the fact that I was playing. But Minecraft is just as fun at nine as it is at thirty-nine. And I think it’s the first time we’ve been able to really play together in a multiplayer setting.
 |
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Postcards from Minecraft”
Stolen Pixels #235: Laugh or Die
Spoiler Warning 3×14: Who’s Your Daddy?
And so it ends.
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
It may be apparent from the way I kept complaining about just about everything while I played, but I didn’t enjoy this season quite so much as Fallout 3. Hell, I was getting frustrated with Bioshock just from watching last episode while I was editing it together. I think the problem was (aside from terrible gameplay balance, boring enemies, and useless weapons) that there just weren’t enough opportunities to utterly break the game in Bioshock – compared to Fallout 3, where I could just walk around and ruin the game designers’ master vision. If they even had one. This is “you have to close all 495 Oblivion Gates that popped up while you were dicking around with the Dark Brotherhood to complete the main story”-Bethesda we’re talking about here.
Even so, I have to admit, I did smile every time I managed to freeze a splicer mid-air.
But that’s all water under the bridge now. In retrospect, this season did provide (in my mind, at least) a fairly compelling counterpoint to Bioshock’s overwhelming praise in the larger gaming community. Was it a good game? Sure, I think I can at least give it that. At least it had some fairly surprising twists – there are a lot of games with gameplay that’s just as bad (or worse) that have no redeeming factors whatsoever. But was it a great game? It seemed like the whole momentum of the game’s story relied on those few twists – or really just the one – and after that truly great moment, not only does the whole game spiral sharply downwards in an irrevocable stall, but I never felt any desire to play it again until we decided to do it for this season.
And yet to play devil’s advocate to my own devil’s advocacy, it is worth noting that the unanimous praise was largely aimed at the console version. I’m not sure if the gameplay was significantly better on the 360 or not – I probably wouldn’t be able to tell, playing shooters with thumbsticks is a skill which endlessly baffles me. But I think I can conclusively say that the PC version of Bioshock, at the very least, fails to live up to its hype. By far.
As an extra note, I had a montage sequence all lined up for the credits of this episode, but when I tried to encode the four minute long segment, Windows Movie Maker immediately attempted ritual suicide and told me it would take four hours to encode the damn thing. In an unrelated bit of news, I am now accepting donations to purchase Adobe Premiere.
Project Hex: Part 1
Well, I seem to have found myself with some extra free time, so let’s put that to use and start a new project.
Like a lot of wannabe developers I have a stack of game ideas floating around in my head. Some are just fragments of a game – a basic mechanic or a story hook. Others are decent one or two person projects. And some are immense pipe dreams that would require a team of people and a silver-plated eighteen wheeler carrying a diamond-encrusted vault packed with golden briefcases full of money. And Sid Meier would need to drive the truck.
This particular idea has been floating around in my head for a few years and I thought I’d tinker with it a bit. However, I don’t want to start with talking about the game. Not because I’m afraid anyone will “steal” my idea. Like having “a great idea for a movie / book”, an idea alone is basically worthless. Anyone capable enough to use the idea is going to be too interested in working on their own stuff to worry about stealing ideas from random mooks on the internet. I don’t want to start off this series with pages and pages of mechanics and concepts. Doing so would only invite an avalanche of “but how does this part work?” sorts of questions. I might not have answers for those, the design might change once I see it in action, and I’m not even going to be working on that stuff right away. So let’s start simple.
First, I need a bit of technology.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Hex: Part 1”
From The Archives:
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Trashing the Heap
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
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.
Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Rage 2
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
Patreon!
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.