 |
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World can’t possibly be as tremendous as it seemed yesterday afternoon. Looking around, everyone else seems happy to call this a great movie. Sitting in the theater, I couldn’t escape the feeling that this was a legendary movie, the likes of which I haven’t seen since Back to the Future or Raiders of the Lost Ark.
You should not trust my opinion on this. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Scott Pilgrim vs. MY FACE”
Have you found out about Minecraft yet?
Link (YouTube) |
It’s sort of like a first-person Dwarf Fortress. Procedurally generated world, which can be altered through digging and building. Minecraft is (I’m told) the work of a single individual. A multiplayer version is in testing now.
If you like, you could blow a few hours playing the free version of the game game or reading the development blog. I mean, it’s Saturday. That’s what Saturday is for.
 |
Last week was grim truths. This week my column is obvious advice that will be ignored, to the ruination of millions of dollars and many jobs.
Ah well. At least all the other industries are just as screwed up as this one.
 |
I’m afraid I can’t explain today’s comic. This is unfortunate, because this is something people are likely to ask me to do. I don’t know where it came from. It just sort of happened.
In my defense, I found it funny. But then I watched the Guild Wars 2 trailer like seven times so I might not be the best person to ask.
 |
Last episode, I claimed that the site No Mutants Allowed had a pronounced elitist bent, and that it was hostile or arrogant towards certain types of players and playstyles. Firstly, this is incorrect: the editorial staff of No Mutants Allowed demonstrates a level tone, and the community, while it has its bad patches, isn’t any worse than you’d find on neutral sites such as The Escapist. In part, my statements were a result of a few outside links to forum threads coloring my judgment; upon reviewing the recording, however, I think the biggest problem was that I accidentally referred to the wrong damn site.
As my track record suggests (Enclave!=Brotherhood), I have a habit of occasionally referring to one thing while talking about another, especially if they occupy the same spot on my brain’s mental map (morally questionable dudes in power armor trying to turn on a water purifier and get Reginald killed). In this case, the site I intended to refer to was RPG Codex, a site whose forum was (in the weeks leading up to Fallout 3’s release) a hive of grognard elitism that frequently engaged in ship-to-ship combat with Bethesda’s forums. Frankly, the staff aspect of that site isn’t much better; they would sit around waiting for news to come down the pipe, then ambush it with a suitably snarky editorial, even when the news was positive or inconsequential. I swear, if another game site had posted an article like, “Pete Hines really enjoys peaches,” they’d have posted a front-page snippet saying, “Reknowned Donkey Molester Pete Hines enjoys peaches, ruining gaming.”
But that’s besides the point, which is that NMA doesn’t deserve the payload I’d intended for a totally different site. I’d like to formally apologize to the staff and community over at NMA. Please don’t nuke my house.
Sincerely,
Rutskarn
AKA Dogmeat Genocide Device
AKA Stimpack Magnate
AKA Richard Nixon
 |
The original Guild Wars did not really work for me. When I complained, people said that the game “isn’t really about leveling”. Which is like offering me a sandwich and suggesting that I not judge it by the taste. I was then told that the real heart of the game was PvP, which is like saying that the thing that makes the sandwich good is the live scorpions. So I walked away from Guild Wars with the impression that this was a game for Other People.
Guild Wars is a strange creature. It’s an MMO, but there’s no monthly fee. You just buy the game and play it. The towns are shared space, but the adventuring areas of the game are all instanced. There is no “open public gameworld”.
Say what you want about the game, but it’s not just another second generation WoW clone, which was an Everquest clone, which was an Ultima clone, which was spawned in the primordial soup of some pre-graphical MUD on a dial-up BBS in the early 90’s. People use the word “clone” in these conversations to imply that the game is somehow bereft of new ideas. But I think we can trace a line from those early MUDs to current-gen MMORPGs and see a pretty clear evolutionary progression. And I’m not talking about the graphics. Smartass. But Guild Wars doesn’t seem to fit into that lineage. (No pun intended.) It’s as if they made an MMORPG without having played one before, and thus came up with all of these different ideas about how these games should work. It’s like some alternate-universe MMORPG.
Anyway. The game seemed to do well. I wouldn’t blame them for making a sequel that took these core ideas and just gave us more of the same but with better bling mapping and more fishnet armor. Better to keep your existing fans happy than to go chasing after folks like me. It’s not like there’s some sort of leveling & exploration drought in the MMORPG genre. But instead of making a nice, safe game, ArenaNet has gone loco and decided to reinvent the wheel… again?
Consider me intrigued.
And it really does take great physical effort to not comment on those graphics. I’m trying to be grown up about this, but… wow. That’s like, amazing and stuff.
Here it is. The end of Fallout 3. This episode weighs in at just under 50 minutes. Sorry about that. But it was better to do the whole thing in one go than to break and do another episode. It’s like pulling off a band-aid. It’s going to hurt you either way, so we might as well do it in a way that doesn’t waste too much of my time.
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. |
We give a shout-out to the folks at No Mutants Allowed. Hit up their site for a bit about who the voice actors are in New Vegas. (Hint: One of them is 1,000 times more famous than me.)
Now that Fallout 3 is done, we’re ready to talk about the next game:
 |
But not yet. We’re going to take a bit of time off before we begin BioShock. I’ll announce the launch date once we have one.
I know this was a rough series. Hope you were able to enjoy it anyway. Thanks for watching.
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
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.
T w e n t y S i d e d
