T w e n t y S i d e d
Max Payne continues his adventure. The conspirators are unveiled.
They’re not very interesting.
Spoiler Warning Fallout 3 #2:
Home Run Derby
The call for subtitles, less grouchy banter, and less Josh talking have been heard. Unfortunately, we have two more episodes before those suggestions will come into effect.
But I’m glad we did so many episodes in advance, since Josh recently had a series of personal computing disasters that ended in him ordering a new machine. If we didn’t have the episodes done ahead of time, we would have nothing for you next week. But thanks to our foresight and planning ahead, we’ll be able to give you two more episodes of rambling, crosstalk, and no subtitles.
Shamus Plays: LOTRO, Part 16
We’re getting down to the end of the Shire now. It will be a photo-finish to see if Lulzy runs out of quests or sanity first.
We win, either way.
Spoiler Warning Fallout 3 #1:
The Birth of Reginald Cuftbert
It’s the 1st episode. Of Spoiler Warning season 2. Playing Fallout 3.
This one ran long, the audio sucks, etc. The usual pleas for leniency apply. I’m sure we’ll get the hang of this sooner or later.
Stolen Pixels #191: Max Blame, Part 2
I was right that the game was doing something really screwy at load time. I searched around and found that if you add -disable3dpreloads to the command line like so:
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…the game will stop stalling on the loading screen. The load times went from two minutes to about eight seconds.
Max Payne always had horrendous load times. I wonder if this “feature” was the problem all along? Would this have sped things up in 2001? I no longer have a machine of that vintage so I can’t test.
On Sunday I plowed through the whole game using cheats, just taking in the story and trying to get a feel for the writing style. (Since I needed to mimic it for this series.) I wish I’d done so before I began the series. Part 1 was written in present tense. I could have sworn the game was written in present tense. But it wasn’t. Hopefully the shift isn’t too off-putting. It will probably be more noticeable to people doing an archive binge than to people who are just reading them as they come out.
I will say this series is really fun to work on.
“Max Payne” 3
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This is Max Payne 3? This is bald musclebound redneck is supposed to be John Woo-inspired bullet-time specialist Max Payne?
A beefy slob in a dirty wifebeater, gunning down terrorists in a sun-drenched ghetto. Has anyone related with this project ever familiarized themselves with the concept of noir?
Hats? Ties? Jackets? Cities at night? Moody lighting? Mobsters? Down on his luck detective? Neon? A protagonist who is NOT a hulking badass? Snappy dialog with clever dames and world-weary cops? Does any of this sound familiar?
You don’t need all of these things to make a noir story. In fact, it’s common to change a couple on purpose. But if you drop all if them, then it sort of defeats the purpose of calling it “noir”. If I made a superhero movie about a guy who doesn’t have any powers, doesn’t dress up, and makes no effort to fight crime or be heroic, then I didn’t actually make a superhero movie, did I? I just made some other movie and then mis-categorized it. Even if it turns out to be a great movie, I shouldn’t call it Spider-Man 4.
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It’s not like noir is this overcrowded genre where they needed to break away so they could stand out. They took a game which was thematically unique – the one active noir franchise – and made it into something else. Now it looks like Kane & Lynch, the poster child for bland and unlikeable.
The usual explanation when something like this happens (as with Xcom) is that they’re just harvesting the brand name to garner a few sales, but, it’s not like Max Payne is this obscure, struggling series that needed an overhaul to make it more “mainstream”. Metacritic scores:
Max Payne: 89
Max Payne 2: 86
Kane & Lynch: 65
Changing a unique series so that it can be more like other, less interesting, less successful titles makes no sense. Rockstar, I will be happy – delighted even – to eat these words if this game isn’t a soup of mindless battles, perfunctory boilerplate dialog, and sticky-cover based combat. But from where I sit you’re turning gold into lead.
Gun Trade
This has been bugging me for a couple of weeks now. There’s a person that comments at the Escapist who uses the image below as their avatar. The Escapist is pretty lenient when it comes to image sizes (this one is just shy of 500kb, while most forums I’ve been on seem to limit you to about 80k or so) and so there are a lot of really elaborate animations and some of them are genuinely amusing or interesting. This one caught my eye for some reason, and every time it shows up I find myself wondering where it’s from. This morning I thought…
Ah heck, I should look it up. Er. Actually, how do you look up something like this? It’s an image! Screw it, I’ll just crowd source it.
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So… Movie? TV show? YouTube meme? Can anyone say where this is from?
EDIT: 1 hour, 31 minutes later, and we have a winner.
Nice work E.
From The Archives:
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Crysis 2
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
The Truth About Piracy
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
Bad and Wrong Music Lessons
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
D&D Campaign
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.