T w e n t y S i d e d
Shamus Plays: LOTRO, Part 12
This is the episode everyone has been telling me I must do, since the start of the series. Here it is, the installment where Lulzy’s crumbling sanity is demolished for your amusement. You heartless jerks.
Spoiler Warning 15: Art Collectors and AA Guns
Again, I apologize for the crappy audio. The little tone you hear just before I talk is actually my Ventrilo client. It makes a sound when you begin and end talking. It’s never shown up in a recording before, and now all of a sudden it is? It’s amazing that of all the crazy tech that goes into making this – the game, the video editing, the streaming – it’s the audio that consistently gives us the most trouble.
We recorded episodes 14-16 all at once, so we have one more episode of difficult audio to get through. Hopefully we’ll get this issue worked out.
Stolen Pixels #183: Hello, Handsome
Why do we have to keep liking games in spite of their stories? I know the conventional wisdom is that the industry doesn’t tend to financially reward good storytellers, but that’s no reason to hold the story in obvious contempt. There’s a difference between, “we’re not going to go out of our way to make an incredible story” and “we won’t even make the slight effort to devise a story which is worth seeing and makes some kind of sense”. The cutscenes in Red Faction: Guerrilla are a waste of time. Unless they were designed to be mocked in comics. In which case I guess they’re a middling success.
I will point out that the final two developers in the March Mayhem contest are both companies with strong writing: BioWare and Valve. (And yes, Valve has strong writing. Not a lot of writing. Their games are mostly action. But if characters are talking you can bet they’re saying something worth hearing.) I still maintain the writing is more important than developers think it is, and that Red Faction: Monkeytown could have been a much bigger hit with the exact same budget and setting, but with a writer who knew what they were doing. (In fact, you could probably improve the game just by doing a reverse-Mystery Science Theater and dub over their ridiculous dialog with something smart and genuine.)
Final Chainmail Bikini Strip
Shawn is coloring the very last CB strip tonight, if you’d like to watch it on livestream.
UPDATE: All done now, but the comic itself will be up later this week. If you want to see the replay:
Part 1. (Skip ahead to about 1 hour, 40 minutes to get to the CB stuff)
And check out Shawn’s Livestream chanel if you want to see him drawing other stuff.
Mortal Online
I managed to emerge from the weekend without having written anything substantive. <?php generate_excuse (); ?> So as a way of distracting you, allow me to point out that even though I poke fun at Lord of the Rings Online and I savaged Champions Online, they are nowhere near the bottom of the MMO barrel. Check out this visit to Mortal Online via Serial MMOgamy. Actually, read the last few entries. Leslee plays a lot of esoteric MMO games and it’s amusing to see some of their outlandish design decisions in action. Some are just attempting to cater to unusual tastes or a small niche. But others just seem to be designed by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
TEDxUSC – Kellee Santiago
We’ve had the “games as art” discussion already, but I like her take on it.
Link (YouTube) |
From The Archives:
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Pixel City Dev Blog
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
Skyrim Thieves Guild
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
Netscape 1997
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
My Music
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.