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Continue reading ⟩⟩ “#39 On Barbarian Culture”
#39 On Barbarian Culture
Spider-Man Part 20: The Pugilist Spider-Man
New York city is now filled with escaped convicts terrorizing the populace. Sable agents have declared martial law and are using their unchecked power to imprison civilians, beat them, and seize their property. The Sinister Six are loose in the city and causing even more destruction. Doctor Octopus has released Devil’s Breath, which is causing a pandemic that will certainly claim thousands of lives, and might even kill millions if we don’t find a cure.
The city is now screwed so bad I kind of stop caring. As far as I’m concerned, Spider-Man lost. This is the kind of cataclysm he’s supposed to prevent. This reminds me of the destructive brawl Superman had in Man of Steel. The fantasy of thwarting evil is gone. Sure, Spider-Man saves the city later, but that doesn’t fix the fact that so many people died under his watch.
This looks like it should be the GAME OVER screen, but it isn't.
Maybe a disaster of this scale might work as a dark turn in the second entry of a trilogy, but as the introduction of a new franchise it’s incredibly off-putting to me. I know how producers think and I know they feel compelled to constantly go “bigger” and “more epic” and to continually raise the stakes. I’m really not looking forward to the “more epic” version of a citywide pandemic + prison escape + brutalist police state + Sinister Six rampage in the eventual sequel.
This compulsion to constantly go bigger is what turned the final Arkham game into such a bloated mess. At least Batman started small-scale and worked up to ridiculous over the course of four games. Spider-Man is starting with a massive doomsday threat that kills thousands, so there isn’t a lot of room for them to scale up from here without getting into problems that are too big for Spider-Man’s world.
I realize this is a matter of taste and I’m sure lots of people will enjoy this “darker” take on a Spider-Man story, but for me the game has refused to deliver on the central thing I look for in Spider-Man: I want the hero to save the day. If I wanted to see the hero fail I’d turn to Watchmen, and if I wanted to see the quasi-hero avenge the fallen I’d turn to PunisherOkay, I can’t actually do that because they aren’t making Punisher games. But they should!. To me Spider-Man is a guy who saves the day at great cost to himself and with little thanks from the public. If you take away the “saving the day” aspect of the story then it’s just wallowing in misery. No thanks.
The next section of the game is going to have a lot of punching. We need to fight strongholds of prisoners, Sable bases, and six supervillains. So I guess now is a good time to talk about…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spider-Man Part 20: The Pugilist Spider-Man”
Stadia’s Pricing Model Will Ultimately Be Its Downfall
The topic of my column this week is, shockingly enough, described by the title. Stadia makes no sense. Even if Google has truly invented a way to magically solve the latency issues inherent with cloud gaming, this is not something anyone needs. I think their target market is, “People who have top-tier internet, who never have to share internet with housemates, who love gaming but are unwilling to buy dedicated gaming hardware, who own multiple non-gaming devices and want to switch between them at random times while hanging around the house.”
Are there enough of those people to form a customer base? I can’t see how. I don’t think there even enough of those people to fill a Prius.
Based on what we’ve been shown, I think the ideal user of Stadia is, “Person who wants to show off cloud gaming on the stage at E3.” So far that’s just one guy, and I’m pretty sure he’s not a paying customer.
A couple of mop-up points in response to the comments at the Escapist:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Stadia’s Pricing Model Will Ultimately Be Its Downfall”
Proc-gen ShipShip
So far in this series I’ve played with circles and squares in an attempt to explore the range of spaceship designs that look good. Well, maybe “good” is too strong a term. Look not terrible. That look, let’s say, unoffensive in the context of a low-budget star-field.
Let’s talk about the starfield, actually. It’s just a big sphere with a couple particle systems attached to it. There’s a “clumping” setting in Blender that gives it a little texture, and that’s it! Well, I also added a few smudgy galaxies too. I’d like to put some nebulae in as well, but who has time for that? We’re not here for stars! We’re here for starships in space! Spaceships among the stars!
Still could use some nebulae, but otherwise perfect. Okay! Let's never use this background again.
Ideally, though, these ships would be recognizable in another context, like a planet or a hanger or underwater. So that’s what this article is about. We’re going to address the other half of the word. Being in spaceor in the context of stars isn’t enough. We’re going to need to look something like a ship. We’re going to need the stuff I was talking about at the end of the last article:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Proc-gen ShipShip”
Diecast #264: Sethian, Satisfactory, Mailbag
Another wrinkle in the adventure to get the RSS feed working: As I’ve said before, the only way to get the podcast RSS to do its job is to place a link to the show somewhere in the post. I normally generate the boilerplate stuff (like the media player you see below) using shortcode and it creates the links for me. But the RSS generator doesn’t see these auto-generated links, so it doesn’t know this is a podcast. To get around this, I must manually put a fully qualified link using raw HTML in the post body. That’s annoying and will cause chaos if the URL of this site ever changes, but fine.
But I also don’t want 2 identical links to the same audio file. (The auto-generated one, and the manual one I’m forced to add.) That would be confusing for the end user. To get around this, I make the manual link invisible by making it a single empty space. This means it isn’t visible to the user, which is fine since it only exists for the benefit of the dumbass RSS generator.
BUT!
The newer versions of WordPress have made the editor “smarter”. Now it sees an empty invisible link, concludes that’s a mistake, and then silently deletes it from the post. I feel like I’m actively fighting the system all the time like this, where I have to come up with workarounds to protect my other workarounds because the system is trying to do my thinking for me.
Sigh. I don’t know. Maybe the RSS feed will work this week. Maybe it won’t. I did what I could.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
This link exists only so the stupid RSS generator will do its job.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #264: Sethian, Satisfactory, Mailbag”
#38 No Need to Thank Me
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “#38 No Need to Thank Me”
Baldur’s Gate III
I was expecting many things to happen in the year of Our Lord 2019, but the announcement of a third entry in the Baldur’s Gate series was not one of them. After all, the last entry in the series, the Throne of Bhaal expansion, is now old enough to buy cigarettes in most states. There was said to be a third game in the series planned back in 2003Working title The Black Hound., but it was never made, and is now consigned to the history’s what-if pile alongside a third Black Isle FalloutAlso never made, working title Van Buren.. Since then, Beamdog (developer of the BG and BG2 enhanced editions) has occasionally made noises about making a sequel, but their resources were never equal to the task.
But lo, it has returned. A franchaise last seen in 2001. That was a whole different era. Having Baldur’s Gate III announced at this late hour makes me feel unmoored from linear time. It’s like if Al Gore ran for president, or Phil Jackson suddenly announced he was getting Shaq and Kobe back together again. For RPG fans of a certain age, Baldur’s Gate is one of the four gospels of the Infinity Engine era, along with the two Fallouts and Planescape: Torment.
I know this much: if I can't romance a Mind Flayer, the game will be an unmitigated failure.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Baldur’s Gate III”
From The Archives:
This is Why We Can’t Have Short Criticism
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
The Best of 2019
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
Skylines of the Future
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Why Batman Can't Kill
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.