T w e n t y S i d e d

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.

Last Wednesday I did another stream of Grand Theft Auto V. We drove around the city, looked at environment maps, talked about the police AI, discussed the internal building layout of strip clubs, and killed hundreds and hundreds of people.

It turns out this streaming stuff is pretty fun. I’m still working on the technology and such, but I’m getting there. Here is the archive of the stream:

At around the 27 minute mark I died, and it was unclear how anyone could have shot me. It looked like I was alone in the room. (Aside from the unarmed civilians.) I’d put a proximity mine beside the main entrance, and I was facing towards the back entrance. And yet somehow someone shot me in the back. Nobody watching the stream knew who shot me either. It looked completely random.

But now I’ve watched the replay and I think I’ve solved it. If you watch the map in the lower left you can see I was ambushed by the world’s luckiest policeman. Apparently the proximity mine wasn’t armed yet. I thought the audible “BEEP” signaled that it was armed, but no. I guess it just makes that sound when it attaches to the wall.

If the cop had arrived a split second sooner then I would have seen him and killed him. And if he’d been a second later the mine would have been armed and killed him. Lucky for him, unlucky for me.

Stuff I’m changing for the next stream:

1. I discovered a less kludge-y way to integrate chat into the stream. This means the chat won’t be cut off, and it should be a little more readable.
2. I figured out how to view the chat on my end without going to the front page where Twitch will randomly begin playing my own stream back to me. This will avoid the cutoff problem you see just after the one-hour mark. This will also let me make the chat window bigger, so it’ll be easier for me to converse.
3. I’ll be on time this week. On one day of the week I have a meeting at 7pm, and on Wednesday I stream at 6pm. I got the two times confused and didn’t realize I was late until you folks said so on Twitter. Whoops. Sorry.

I think we’re going to spend a couple more weeks will GTA V, just because the game is so perfect for streaming. However, feel free to nominate other games. We’re going to move on eventually. Witcher 3 is on my list of games to stream, but I think I should wait until Bob is done with his series. There’s already too much confusion about who is making what content and if we both cover the same game it’ll only get worse.

I’ll be streaming again this Wednesday at 6PM Eastern US time. I don’t know what time that will be where you’re at, because it’s time to pointlessly and stupidly fiddle with the clocks again.

If you can figure out how to convert 6pm my time to wherever you are, then you’ll be able to catch the stream on my Twitch page. I’ll announce the stream on Twitter just before I go live. See you there!

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.