T w e n t y S i d e d

It really is a shame things didn’t work out with Nier. And for that of you who are about to leave a comment without watching the video: Yes, I installed the FAR mod, which legend claims is a panacea for all graphical issues. This claim is false, as the stream shows. The game very regularly had the freeze-frame “crash”, and FAR didn’t help with that. I’m not the only one with the problem. It’s been reported by people for a full year now and if they haven’t fixed it by now then I doubt they will in the future.

I was willing to put up with the crashes to get through the game, but I’m not going to put up with that sort of nonsense during a stream.

New week the plan is to play Left 4 Dead. Yes, the original. Yes, I’m aware that the game turns 10 this year. But see, I’ll be playing with my podcasting buddy Paul Spooner and this will be his first time playing the game. Here’s the event reminder. I hope you can make it. I’m not sure if I can play the game, teach Paul, and talk with chat, but it might be fun to watch me try and fail.

I’m looking forward to this one.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I know I’ve been posting a lot of video lately. I didn’t get a column up yesterday and I haven’t had much to say in the comments. I’ll spare you the usual two paragraphs complaining about my health and just cut to the chase: I’m off my game this week. Hopefully I’ll bounce back soon. In the meantime, here’s three hours of my playing Grand Theft Auto V:

As a reminder: Tonight I’ll be streaming some Nier: Automata. Here’s the event reminder for the time. I should be there as planned, although I might not be my usual chatty self. We’ll see if I can get some sleep.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

In this episode we surf on cars, ride trains, break the AI, and shoot down dozens and dozens of helicopters. If you haven’t been watching my streams and you don’t have an hour to spend on video, then this is the kind of highbrow gameplay / narrative analysis you’ve been missing out on.

The total helicopter kill count is 32. 8 of those were during the train ride, and the other 24 were part of the rooftop rampage. In the chat it was suggested that a helicopter costs about $120k. Going by that figure, the Los Santos police had to cough up 3.8 million to replace their inexplicably massive fleet of helicopters.

Then on Friday I did another, unannounced Stream of Batman: Arkham City. And then on Saturday night I did the final (for the time being) Stream of Grand Theft Auto V. I haven’t uploaded that to Youtube yet. It’s been fun and we may come back to it later, but it’s time to move on to the next game. I just picked up Nier: Automata. That’s a great game to stream and I’d love to talk about it with you. On the other hand, the damn thing keeps crashing and that’s the last thing I want to deal with while streaming. We’ll see if I can make it work.

I’m not sure how to handle this reposting of streams. In the future. I don’t think we need one of these “Here is the VOD I uploaded to Youtube.” posts every single time I do another stream, and I don’t want to clutter up the blog archives with that. If you’re into streams then you probably know how to subscribe to YouTube / Twitch, and if you’re not then all of this is just clutter. We’ll see.

This coming week the Stream will be a bit later. Here is the event on Twitch, which should give you the proper time in your timezone.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.