I hope to have SoldierHawk on Real Soon Now. Send in any questions you have for her / us. The email address is in the header image.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #217: July 4th, Google Drive, Raytracing”
I really did intend for this to be a more positive stream. I deliberately aimed for doing a quest I liked, but then some open-world busywork got in the way and I spent most of the two hours just picking at things.
Link (YouTube) |
Mass Effect Andromeda is a hot mess of a game, even after all the post-release patches. But underneath the technological jank and cringy dialog are some really good ideas. I’ll be doing a full retrospective on this series at some point in the future, but for now if you want to talk Andromeda with me the best thing to do is just stop by and say “Hi!” in the chat during a stream. I plan to do another stream this coming Wednesday. I’ll have more details later in the week.
GTA might be one of the most successful, big-budget, high-tech franchises in history, but it actually began as a rather sad, cheap, and not-yet-impressive top-down 2D game.
While the screenshots might make you think the game was perhaps isometricIsometric means you’re looking down from above, but the angle is skewed so you can see the sides of things. like Diablo (one of its contemporaries) or even orthogonalLooking directly down an axis with no perspective. like Hotline Miami, the game is actually “3D” in the sense that the buildings are made of polygons and you get some parallax between the stuff on the rooftops and the more distant action on the ground. It does a good job of giving a sense of scale and speed, but it does so at the expense of visibility. You’ll often end up unable to see what you’re doing because a walkway, bridge, or rooftop ends up between your character and the camera.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Grand Theft Original”
It’s a bit of an abridged entry today due to the holiday, but I thought I’d button up some of my thoughts on the first part of the game.
After finally gathering up various macguffins (the phylactery, the incantation to activate it, and a weird baby thing called Uma), Geralt and company are ready to polish off the first half of the game. If you haven’t played The Witcher 3, or even if you have, the parenthetical in the previous sentence might be a bit confusing. It’s still confusing to me, and I’ve played through the game several times.
Basically, we’ve been on Ciri’s trail this whole time, following rumors, gathering clues, and talking to people who met her passing through, trying to figure out what exactly has happened to her and where she is now. This is difficult because Ciri is a child of the “Elder Blood,” also known as the “Hen Ichaer.” I won’t lore dump about this right now, but suffice it so say she has unique magical abilities, chief among them the ability to teleport.
The problem is that she doesn’t entirely have control over these abilities. If she gets into a sticky situation, she can teleport out, but she won’t always know where she’ll arrive until she gets there. This obviously makes tracking her difficult, and it explains why we have to trek all over creation to piece together her story. Now I’m a reasonably attentive person, and I’ve played this game multiple times. However, even I am not entirely sure what exactly happened to Ciri and in what order. I’m going to try and reconstruct my understanding of events, without cheating by looking at the wiki.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Drunk-Megascoping Sorceresses”
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #216: GDQ, Item Hoarding, NMS Rant”
Like I said last week, I’ve been having trouble with my eyes. If you’re curious about the medical Twilight Zone that caused this, I have the strange details at the end of this post. If you’re a normal person and you just want to know what sort of content we have to look forward to in the coming week, then read the very next paragraph.
I’m playing Mass Effect Andromeda. It’s been patched pretty well by this point so it’s no longer the distracting and meme-worthy circus of malfunctions. It’s still a bit janky around the edges, but not enough to really bother me. The narrative is paradoxically better than I expected and yet far worse than I’d hoped for, if that makes any sense.
My impressions have been oscillating wildly like, “Hey. This is a cool idea. Actually no, I guess not as cool as it seemed at first. Ugh. This is atrocious. Okay this conversation isn’t bad. Oh, now it’s making me cringe again. Okay, this character could be interesting. Or they were, until they left. Hey, I like this puzzle. And this jetpack stuff is cool. I like this shotgun. Oh no, this really grating character wants to talk again. Oh, but she’s giving me a cool quest. Nope, wrong. This quest is too dumb to think about.”
What I’d really like to do is have a stream where I play the game and discuss things with chat. I have this sneaking suspicion that some of you have opinions on the Mass Effect series. I figure we can hang out for an hour or so. I’ll play some early / mid-game content, and we can talk about the game.
I’m planning on streaming this Thursday. This event link should have all the details. I know I usually stream on Wednesday, but Wed is July 4th and I know a lot of my American readers will be busy blowing their fingers off.
So what’s going on with my eyes?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I’m Back!”
The Grand Theft Auto games have always been a big deal, but number five seems to have attained stratospheric new heights. For context, it was the #7 best selling of 2017. Not bad for a game that came out in 2013. Particularly since – as of this writing in April of 2018 – it’s still selling for the launch-day price of $60. It’s also in the top 20 highest-rated games of all time. (Although it’s below Grand Theft Auto IV, which I find mystifying. But we’ll talk about GTA IV later in this series.)
I do wonder who is buying the game at this point. Who is it that decided to buy the game in 2017 for full price that hadn’t already bought it in 2013 for full price? There’s no marketing push going on, so what’s driving these sales?
I guess I’m part of the problem. I have two copies. I got one for the Playstation 4, and another for the PC. I’ve played all the way through both versions multiple times, although for the sake of convenience all of my screenshots in this series will come from the PC version.
After writing this series, I discovered that I’d lost a majority of my game footage. So I had to replay quite a bit of the game to re-create that footage. However, I’d since changed the outfits of all the characters and turned down the graphics settings for the purposes of streaming the game. So this is a heads up that a lot of the GTA V screenshots are going to be mismatched in terms of character attire / graphical quality. It’s not a big deal, but I know some people would ask about it I didn’t explain it ahead of time.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Grand Theft Retrospective: Introduction”
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
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.
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
T w e n t y S i d e d
