The Saturday morning movie post begins with a coy introduction designed to make you curious about the video in the hopes of enticing you to watch it. Then it’s followed by a YouTube embed of the video in question:
After the video I’ll refer to the content more explicitly, and I’ll try to mention what parts I thought were interesting or perhaps what it is about the subject matter that caused me to link it in the first place.
And finally I’ll have the wrap-up paragraph, where I’ll say something in hopes of inciting a response or starting a conversation.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
The videogame business began as a service. You’d go to the bar or the arcade and put in your quarter and the machine would give you a few minutes of amusement. When it was over you didn’t have anything to show for your quarter except whatever memories you’d accrued while the machine was in your employ.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
I really miss having a dedicated TF2 server for Twenty Sided. (I let it lapse because the server was usually empty whenever I wasn’t playing, and I just didn’t have time to play. I wish I’d have been able to get the thing into some sort of self-sustaining state with a few regular admins.) This new influx of Mac users is going to create a need for low-intensity, newbie-friendly servers. I hate to think of all those new players being introduced to this incredible game during a round of “SNIPER FAGGIT!!!!” mic spam. Alas.
How often do Mac and PC players get to play together like this? It’s not often, I’m sure. This is bringing us still closer to my dream of being able to play some sort of co-op with my friends regardless of whether they are PC, Mac, or Xbox.
EDIT:
If you want a friendly server, Valaqil suggests:
When the D20 server went down, a group of people who played on it that visit Chocolate Hammer, Giant In The Playground, and here, all banded together to start a TF2 server. Newbies are always welcome. We love having players there, and, most nights, stay at least at half-capacity. It's entirely community-run, community-funded. We each chip in, and view the server as our little place to hang out and have fun with friends. Without further ado:
Additional: When I do play, this is my go-to server.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
I want to stress again how silly it is to have such flagrant and absurd plot holes in the game. It’s one thing for a player to gloss over a plot hole or two during fifteen minutes of exposition spread out over forty hours of gameplay. It’s another thing to spend months writing and recording dialog and building up a world around those plot holes. Dad is supposed to be kind, wise, and brilliant, and yet his actions indicate he’s careless, selfish, short-sighted, and stupid.
I’d be so ashamed if I was ever fortunate enough to get Liam Neeson to enact my dialog, and then I handed him something that wasn’t even consistent enough to support his character.
And as somone pointed out earlier in the series, Bethesda didn’t always behave this way. Morrowind had its flaws, but the plot was stable enough. Oblivion fell short of Morrowind, and the character motivations were a bit questionable, but the thing still managed to make some kind of sense. Now we have Fallout 3 where the premise is absurd, where the characters either have no motivations or their actions make no sense, and where you can’t say and do perfectly reasonable things because the nonsense plot says so.
These three games do seem to indicate a sort of trend. Our only hope to reverse this malignant development is for all of us to band together as gamers and complain about it. On the internet. On a blog. To each other. Long after the game has faded from the public interest.
If their games don’t improve, it means you haven’t been complaining hard enough. Do your part!
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Since recording the episode I’ve discovered a new game to love and hate: Dance Dance Revolution. My kids got a copy as a gift. The game had always looked sort of dull to me. I mean, it’s just doing what you’re told, right? I didn’t see the appeal until I stepped onto the dance mat myself. Then I discovered that the game could be quite fun, and creates one of those experiences where you can clearly see yourself growing in skill.
The “hate” part of the equation didn’t kick in until the next morning, when I found that all of my joints were ruined, my legs ached, and I was worried that I might actually survive the horrifying experience. And yet… I still wanted to play some more.
You could argue that it’s not Konami’s fault that I’m a brittle old geezer, but your pro-Konami rationalizing sounds pretty thin over the sound of my heart exploding. So back off.
I strongly suspect I’ll be sick of DDR by the time I’m actually in good enough shape to play it.
Anyway. Listen to the podcast if you want to hear the discussion. (Which was a lot of fun.) Thanks to Ivan and Shamrock for having me on again.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
T w e n t y S i d e d
