So I guess we’re doing these things once a month now, even though the series is called “This week I Played”. That makes no damn sense. Who is running this ridiculous website?
On a more positive note, these posts now have a proper category so they aren’t clogging up the category I use for general announcements. So if you wanted to archive binge though these thingsFor some unimaginable reason., you can do that now.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Week I Played… (May 2020)”
This week we end the show on a slightly controversial subject: Raising kids and how to manage their relationship to games / screens. Neither of us had any idea what the other was going to say before we began the discussion. And YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!
Or I guess you probably will. You folks know us pretty well by now.
Link (YouTube) |
My bot is nowWell, not RIGHT now. This series was written after the bot was completed. downloading pages from Metacritic, one at a time, at the rate of a page every couple of seconds. This would be painfully slow if we were trying to read something large-scale, but right now we’re just scraping for PC games that scored above 30 over the last 19 years. That’s well under 1,000 games.
Of course, downloading these pages isn’t useful unless I can pull information out of them. Much earlier in this series I mentioned I’m using the Html Agility pack. This library can parse HTML for me and return the bits I’m interested in.
One of the funny things about this project is that I’m so far out of my comfort zone / area of expertise that I don’t even know what I don’t know. Not only am I likely making lots of hilarious blunders, but I don’t even know that I’m making them.
This is strangely liberating. When I know what I’m doing, then every cut corner makes me feel vaguely guilty. But when you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re free of the obligations to do things the Right Way(tm) because you don’t know what the right way is! As far as I know, I’ve just written the best web scraper in the history of scrapingDespite the lack of proof, I’m fairly confident that I have not actually written the best web scraper in the history of scraping..
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Scraping Part 4: THE FINAL CHAPTER”
I LOVE Cities Skylines. I know it seems like I spend more time complaining about games than I spend enjoying them – and that’s probably true in a lot of cases – but Cities Skylines is one of those games that gets more interesting every time I come back to it.
For the last few weeks I’ve been on a huge Skylines bender. I’m sure you’re familiar with this sort of thing. You start skipping sleep. You stop talking to people. You end up with a game on one monitor and its wiki open on the other. Factorio and Dwarf Fortress players will definitely know what I’m talking about.
It got really bad this time. I’d download a dozen mods and buildings to add to the game, play for a few hours, then slam down some junk food while reading the Skylines subReddit, then watch some YouTube videos about the game, then download more mods and start the whole thing over again.
Link (YouTube) |
I’m mostly recovered at this point. I think. My rehab counselor said I’m making good progress and I’m allowed supervised access to a computer now. My family is adjusting to having me interact with them again. So I’ve decided to pretend like I was actually working this whole time by making a video about the city-building genre and why I love Skylines so much.
In my work, I’m usually whining about how much better things were in the Good Old Days of gaming, but not this time. This is it. Cities Skylines is the zenith of the city-building genre. City simulation has never been this good. In fact, thanks to DLC and mods, this game is better now than it was when it came out in 2015. And it was already a great game back then.
This isn’t a simple clone of the classic city-building games with a new graphical paint job, this is a deeper and more interesting simulation. I tried going back to old Sim City classics after playing Skylines, and the older games felt shallow and repetitive in comparison.
I want to tell you why I think this game is so good, but before I do that we need to go on…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Please Help I Can’t Stop Playing Cities: Skylines”
Three hundred is a lot of podcasts. If podcasts were a physical object and not audio files, and if you took all 300 diecasts and stacked them up, then the resulting pile would be tall enough to fall over. Amazing.
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #300: Three Hundred!”
So now I’m done messing around and being silly. It’s time to actually scrape the web for stuff. There are three different sites I’m interested in:
There’s also a bit of information that can come from any of these sources: The url for the game’s official website might be handy, and we also need to get the publisher, developer, and release date from one of these places.
Of the three sites, it seems like Metacritic is the best one to start with. It has games listed by platform, which is necessary in a structural sense. For the purposes of our database, it’s possible for the same game to have vastly different information depending on platform. For example, maybe a game is released on the Playstation 3 in 2010 by Beloved Developer, but then a year later it gets ported to the PC by Shovelware Games. Metacritic is the only place where we can get this information reliably. Steam obviously isn’t going to have non-PC data, and Wikipedia entries aren’t guaranteed to have all the per-platform data in an easy-to capture locationIt might be in the info box on the right, or it might be buried in the article text (good luck capturing THAT) or it might not be listed at all..
Metacritic even has a handy index page that you can go through: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Scraping Part 3: A Well-Behaved Bot”
So there are thousands of webpages that have information we want. When faced with this problem, ancient civilizations used to go to these pages using Internet Explorer 6 and copy the data into Notepad. We don’t know what they did with it after that, because they got eaten by Woolly Mammoths or conquered by Mongols or whatever. I’m not a historian so I might be slightly off with my timeline, but you get the basic idea: The past was hard.
But now we have these newfangled web scrapers that can surf the web for you and harvest whatever data you like. The problem is that putting the data into Notepad isn’t terribly helpful. Great, now you have an enormous text file of random facts. Are you going to sit down and read it manually? Probably not. So what do we do? Write another program to read that file? You need to turn this text into data sooner or later, and to do that we need to put it into a database.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Scraping Part 2: Full Control”
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
T w e n t y S i d e d
