T w e n t y S i d e d
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #216: GDQ, Item Hoarding, NMS Rant”
Diecast #216: GDQ, Item Hoarding, NMS Rant
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
I’m Back!
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.
Okay, her butt is floating above the seat and her arms are floating above her legs and the pose looks totally unnatural, but I'd gladly overlook failings in production values if the writing could just get in the same ballpark as Mass Effect 1.
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!”
Grand Theft Retrospective: Introduction
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”
The Witcher 3: Skellige, Part 2077
Skellige is too sprawling to be summarized in any kind of wieldy way, so instead I’ll pick out a couple of high-water marks I particularly liked and find instructive.
The Cave of Dreams
I suspect a good chunk of players don’t know this quest even exists. I know I missed it entirely on my first playthrough, and probably would have missed it again on my second, had I not learned about it on the internet in the meantime.
You can start it either by stumbling across “Blueboy” Lugos (son of Clan Drummond Jarl “Madman” Lugos) outside a cave in an out-of-the-way spot most probably won’t go to, or you’re directed towards the quest after completing a Witcher contract to unhaunt the local haunted lighthouse. The wrinkle is that Blueboy Lugos dies in an entirely different questline, so if you do that one before the lighthouse contract (which I would guess is the case for most people) you’ll never see this one.
In fact… I botched my current playthrough, and finished the bear attack quest long before (long enough that I had no saves to reload) remembering I wasn’t supposed to do that. So I had to pull screenshots off the internet.
In any case, Blueboy Lugos and his two friends Uve “Jabberjaw” and Jorulf the Wolverine (Skelligans have the most advanced nicknames of any culture in the Witcher universe) are preparing to explore the “Cave of Dreams,” which in the local folklore is said to be the place where you face your greatest fears. It’s something like a vision quest – you go in the cave, eat a variety of hallucinogenic herbs and mushrooms, and then trip out. And CDPR is up to the task of pulling this off.
No one screenshot can do the place justice, but this one of the giant ghost whale comes the closest.
Once inside, Blueboy and his two friends each face their respective greatest fears. Uve Jabberjaw fears insulting the King again (his did it once while drunk and tore his own tongue out to keep his honor), Jorulf the Wolverine faces his guilt over indirectly causing his father’s death by becoming distracted by Sirens, and Blueboy Lugos faces down a ghostly version of his own father. Finally, Geralt faces a ghostly Eredin and confronts his greatest fear – losing Ciri.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Skellige, Part 2077”
Battlefield 1 Blind Play-Through
“Oh, I haven’t been feeling well lately. I should let my readers know what’s up.” That’s a nice enough sentiment, but it’s easy to use that as an excuse to bitch and moan about your health to the masses. I’m going to try hard not to do that here. I’ll pack all my whining into the next paragraph and then we can Get On With It Already.
It’s my eyes. I have this recurring eye problem that makes them burn and water for days at a time. When this happens I can’t adjust to light and I can barely focus. I had several days of that, and then just as it was clearing up I got something in my eye. I was setting up a fan and turned it on with the fan pointing at my face. It blew some debris in my left eye. It took a lot of blinking and flushing to get it out, and when it was over I’d managed to mildly scratch the dang thing. The result of all this misadventure is that I’ve spent the last 6 days hiding in the dark and squinting at a very blurry world. I didn’t write you any words and I didn’t record a Diecast.
I’m on the mend now and I’m going to see if I can salvage the rest of this week.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Battlefield 1 Blind Play-Through”
Steam Summer Sale
It’s that time of year again! Gaben assaults our wallets with irresistible deals and we fill up our game libraries with titles we earnestly promise to play “someday”. It’s a mad frenzy of shopping and spending and gifting and making memes about how bad this is for our wallets.
Except… is it?
The whole “Gaben took all my money” jokes vanished a couple of years ago. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that it’s been about two years since my last madcap spending spree on Steam. It’s not that the deals are bad, it’s just that I don’t feel like I need any more games. I’ve got a nice backlog of titles to draw from and there’s plenty of new releases to keep me busy, so I don’t feel compelled to stockpile tons of games just because they’re cheap.
For me, the market seems to have returned to some sort of equilibrium. And going by the conversations I hear, this seems to be the case for a lot of other people.
I can point to three factors:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Steam Summer Sale”
This Dumb Industry: Punishing The Internet for Sharing
I have a hypothetical situation for you: Let’s say you’re promoting a play or a concert or something. So you pay some money to have a graphic designer come up with a really clever, eye-grabbing advertisement for it. You print out a stack of leaflets. Your goal is to get these leaflets into the hands of as many people as possible. You want maximum saturation. You want everyone in town to see one of these things.
So you hire a guy to hand out the leaflets in the street. But instead of handing them out, he claims copyright on them and tries to sell them. He manages to get a few buyers, although obviously fewer people see the ad than if he just gave them away like you told him to. When it’s all over he proudly hands over the $1.25 he got selling a handful of flyers. The rest are still in his hand, unsold, un-viewed, unused. The concert tickets you’re selling go for $60 each, so this dollar and change isn’t really a lot of income for your operation.
Would you feel cheated by this guy? I would.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: Punishing The Internet for Sharing”
From The Archives:
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
Bad and Wrong Music Lessons
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
The Biggest Game Ever
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
What is Vulkan?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
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.