This is a second entry, following the first one, which makes this a series now. If you remember, my son Issac made a level for Garry’s mod that I thought was cool, and I foolishly assumed it would be easy to get it translated to a modern engine. Here’s the original level:
It was unreasonably difficult to extract all of those polygons and render them in another game engine. Let’s talk about why. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Revisiting a Dead Engine”
This no-content post is brought to you by sloth, incompetence, and malfeasance. I have lots of content in the pipeline, but I recently got sidetracked by a project that I figured ought to take “a few hours”, and has now devoured much, much more than a few hours.
It all started when my son Issac showed me a Garry’s Mod level he was working on…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “No content today. Except for this.”
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel like doing a podcast.
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #297: Pandemic Mailbag!”
The Grognard: This game is going to have time limits. I can feel it in my bones.
Achilles: All your bones? Or just that one elbow that hurts when it’s about to rain?
The Grognard: All of them. The evidence is too strong. One: in the beginning of the game we get a mind flayer parasite stuck inside our brain. Two: Baldur’s Gate 3 is based on Fifth Edition rules, which distinguish between a short and a long rest and are specifically designed to avoid the fifteen-minute workday. Three: There’s going to be a “camping” map, where you get to talk to party members during a long rest. Four: Pathfinder: Kingmaker exists.
Achilles: This is the game where everything is oriented around the passage of time?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Achilles and The Grognard: Time Limits and Temptation”
It’s time for another round of video game Show & Tell. How are you getting through the quarantine? Replaying old favorites? Buying new stuff? Finally getting to work on that huge backlog?
Here’s what I’ve been doing:
I finished this game last week. It was pretty good. I liked it less than Doom 2016, which I liked less than Doom 1993, but Doom – like pizza and sex – manages to be fun even when it’s not the best.
I know I have a reputation for being the weirdo that reads all the lore items, watches all the cutscenes, obsesses over codex entries, and listens to all the audiologs, but not this time. The designer really wanted to flesh the world out and so there’s lots of background details explaining why Earth wanted to tap into hell energy, what the demons want, where the demons come from, how the Doom Guy became an unstoppableIn the story, he’s unstoppable. When I was playing, he got stopped a lot. killing machine, and a bunch of other stuff. I like that they tried, but this franchise was always based on narrative minimalism and I’ve never been curious enough to learn more about how this wacky world works. I read the various codex entries for the first couple of hours, but there are a lot of them and I didn’t feel like bringing the flow of gameplay to a halt every couple of minutes to read three more short paragraphs on the military structure of hell demons.
I appreciate that they were trying to make the game more skill-based. In the old games, you just need to keep firing and backpedal like crazy. You could switch weapons if you ran low on ammo or you got tired of your current murder-tool, but you were free to settle into a rut with your favorite gun for hours on end. Now you need to switch weapons constantly and use your specials on a regular basis: Chainsaw to replenish ammo, grenades to refill health, and flamethrower to get armor.
It’s not a bad system, but I wasn’t in love with it. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Week I Played… (April 2020)”
I hope everyone is safe and healthy this week. Here’s an hour or so of us whistling in the dark and waiting for the quarantine to lift. Enjoy!
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #296: Everything is Fine”
The last entry covered the overall shape of a hypothetical Mass Effect 4, and how to use stalling and retconning to mitigate some of the difficulties of the ending. Now it’s time to consider what the new game will actually look like.
In the past I’ve warned against the dangers of sticking to a formula too closely. That doesn’t mean that formulas are useless, just that sequel developers should aim for a balance between the familiar and the new. One particular part of the Bioware formula still works relatively well: their typical five-act structure. In it, RPGs are divided roughly into the following parts:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hypothetical ME4: Five-act Structure and Character Creation”
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
T w e n t y S i d e d
