Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Sunday Aug 6, 2017

Filed under: Random 109 comments

 Messages from Spammers Part 7Previous Post

Steve C asked a question last week:

Shamus, what Youtube channels do you watch?

I remember you mentioning on the Diecast that you don't watch TV anymore. That your recreational TV time has been replaced by Youtube. Personally I wish I could do that. There's just not enough of stuff on Youtube I want to watch. Except I know that I'm wrong. With a few million years worth of content on Youtube I know that there has to be more than stuff on there that I'd like, I've just never found it.

So I'm curious what non-TV options you fill your time with.

It’s not completely true that I don’t watch television. That’s only mostly true. There’s exactly one traditionally big-media show that I’m into. I’ll talk about that at the end of this ~~post~~ series. The rest of my passive entertainment comes from YouTube.

Here’s a list of the channels that I’m into these days. We’ll start with the ones of mild interest and work our way up to the channels that I never miss and which have have remained engaging through repeated archive binges. For each channel I’ll list a “viewing suggestion”, which is one particular video that’s either remarkably good, a personal favorite, or a suitable starting point for new viewers.

And yes, the title of this post is a lie. This is not remotely the “best” of YouTube. But “The Stuff I Happen To Watch On YouTube Because I Subscribed Six Months Ago And I’m Too Lazy To Unsubscribe And Besides It’s Mostly Pretty Good” isn’t as catchy.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Best of YouTube Part 1”

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.

 Messages from Spammers Part 7Previous Post

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Steam Backlog: The Room

By Shamus Posted Friday Aug 4, 2017

Filed under: Game Reviews 22 comments

 Steam Backlog: Car Mechanic Simulator 2015Previous Post

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Sometimes you come across a game that’s not doing anything particularly new, but it’s re-treading old ground with such a dedication to quality that it feels new. “I never knew this sort of game could be this genuinely enjoyable.”

Mechanically, The Room is a descendant of the classic “escape the room” titles that were all the rage among browser-based games a decade ago. Through careful examination you discover a sliding panel, which reveals a button, which pops open a container, which contains a key, which opens a safe, which contains a scrap of paper, which details the correct arrangement of some previously-inscrutable switches, which unfastens a lid, which reveals a clock, which you get the idea. In this game you’re working your way into a puzzle box rather than working to exit a room, but it’s the same basic idea. Either way you’re unraveling the work of some obstructionist jackass who has confused obscurity with security, leaving their plans vulnerable to someone with a flair for lateral thinking and lots of free time.

The trick for me here is that it’s really hard to quantify what makes The Room so good. Which kind of sucks, since that’s my job. But in order to sustain my thin veneer of professionalism, let me take a half-assed stab at it…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Steam Backlog: The Room”

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.

 Steam Backlog: Car Mechanic Simulator 2015Previous Post

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22 comments

Borderlands Part 4: Diamond in the Rough

By Shamus Posted Thursday Aug 3, 2017

Filed under: Borderlands 107 comments

 Borderlands Part 3: Cast of Character ClassesPrevious Post

Next PostBorderlands Part 5: Breaking Tone 

Based on what the developers have said about the game, Borderlands was apparently a title that came together at the last minute. It shows. Almost every part of the game seems to be missing something obvious.

The Airing of Grievances

The field of view is so narrow it's genuinely uncomfortable. It doesn't look too bad here in a screenshot, but trust me: It's really pronounced when you turn your head.

In the PC version, the multiplayer matchmaking was handled through the now-defunct Gamespy, which was awful and inconvenient when it wasn’t outright broken. The game had voice chat but no real interface, which means that once you joined a game it was always just broadcasting your default microphone with no option for push-to-talk, no ability to mute yourself, no control over the volume, and no hint that this was happening. The field of view was shamefully narrow, to the point where it felt like you were “zoomed in”, as if you were always looking down iron sights. I actually find this nauseating. Even today, the only way to fix this is to hack config files.

Rockets didn’t work properly, character classes weren’t really balanced, and it was far too easy to grief people and far too troublesome to deal with griefers. The developers bragged about how they simulated bullet trajectories instead of using the more typical hitscan approach, but in practice it was wonky and the only time you’d notice the difference was when it malfunctioned. The game ran poorly compared to contemporaries. Claptrap would pester you constantlyEven interrupting combat and story dialog! if there were quests available that you hadn’t yet accepted. The interface was obnoxious to use with a mouse and keyboard. Some simple gameplay conceptsLike respawn stations or the bounty board. were patronizingly over-explained by voiced characters while other less obvious topicsLike weapon proficiencies and ammo storage limits. weren’t explained at all.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 4: Diamond in the Rough”

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.

 Borderlands Part 3: Cast of Character ClassesPrevious Post

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107 comments

Overhaulout Part One: New Game

By Rutskarn Posted Wednesday Aug 2, 2017

Filed under: Video Games 116 comments

 Summer Games Done Quick 2017Previous Post

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EDIT: Not sure how I managed to turn comments off. Fixed!

If someone hasn’t already heard that Fallout 3‘s story stinks, they probably don’t care—and they don’t really have to,

It doesn’t matter if you can line up all the ways the game’s characters were thin, the plot didn’t make much sense, and the choices were odd and insubstantial. A fan of the game might listen, might even end up agreeing. They’ll nod, shrug, and admit that yeah, it sure wasn’t Shakespeare. Congratulations! You’ve successfully argued that the story of Fallout 3 is bad. But thought it might seem self-evident, you haven’t actually made an argument that the bad story made the game much worse to play, and that a good story would have made them like it even more. The fan is a fan for a reason. They didn’t hallucinate a better storyline than existed, they were just satisfied with the moral choices and combat and exploration and worldbuilding that they got. If they didn’t really notice or care that the economy didn’t make sense, how can you effectively argue that the game would have been more worthy if it did?

At the end of the day, the only sensible thing to do is accept the disagreement, allow people to enjoy things, and move on. And instead of doing all that, I’m rewriting Fallout 3.

Actually, mostly just the big parts. And of those big parts, as little as possible.

Art pictured is concept art from the game. As best as I can tell, all of it's the work of the late Adam Adamowicz.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Overhaulout Part One: New Game”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.

 Summer Games Done Quick 2017Previous Post

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116 comments

This Dumb Industry: Free Advice Part 2

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Aug 1, 2017

Filed under: Column 90 comments

 This Dumb Industry: Free Advice Part 1Previous Post

Next PostThis Dumb Industry: "Could Have Been Great" Games 

Last week I gave some advice to the leaders of the videogame industry. This week I’m going to wrap things up.

3. Stop with the Perma-Crunch

The working conditions here are AWFUL. It's like the bosses are Nazis or something.

I already dedicated two entire columns to this topic last year, explaining why crunch is a bad idea and why crunch should be saved for emergency situations. The short version:

It’s been well known for years that productivity drops off sharply as hours increase. Above a certain threshold, increasing hours worked can actually DECREASE the amount of work accomplished! And that’s just regular boring office work. The effect is even more pronounced in creative fields. (Protip: Game development is a creative field.) You are making your employees miserable, un-creative, and disloyal, while generating negative press, and at the same time also fueling a high turnover rate within the industry that’s driving people out just as they’re getting good at their jobs. And after all that damage, you’re probably making games SLOWER than if you just ran a proper business. You are screwing everyone else in order to screw yourself harder.

Yes, there’s an extreme glut of would-be game developers out there. The game colleges are pumping out wave after wave of sad-sack graduates who are dragging heaps of student loan debt into the workforce. They’re enough to replenish the exodus of experienced workers. I’m only saying this because you’ve evidently figured it out already. (Otherwise, why would you be treating your workforce this way?) But the point still stands: Just because you can get away with treating people this way doesn’t mean there’s any benefit in doing so.

Do you know if it really makes business sense to rely on a work force of disgruntled, burned-out, and inexperienced creatives? Have you ever tried doing things the other way?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: Free Advice Part 2”

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.

 This Dumb Industry: Free Advice Part 1Previous Post

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90 comments

Timely Game of Thrones Griping 3: What Exactly Is This Show Doing?

By Bob Case Posted Monday Jul 31, 2017

Filed under: Game of Thrones 134 comments

 Timely Game of Thrones Griping 2: The Wages of AdaptationPrevious Post

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This series analyzes the show, but sometimes references the books as well. If you read it, expect spoilers for both.

I’ve had a busy week – I’m in the middle of moving, and a friend of mine got married this weekend, so I didn’t get back into town until almost midnight last night. So this week’s review is a bit late, and will be a bit shorter than most. With that in mind, it would be good to limit its scope to the easy, specific questions, such as:

What Exactly Is This Show Doing?

I don’t mean on an existential level. I mean what is it doing on a basic plotting level. Basically, at the start of season seven, the writers had a problem: Queen Daenerys was too powerful. She had either the finest or tied for the finest infantry in the world (the Unsullied), a huge force of crack cavalry (the Dothraki), countless ships, and three full-grown dragons. Queen Cersei, by contrast, seemed to have one army of indeterminate size, led by Jaime Lannister. I say “seemed to have” because you can never quite be sure with this show, which more and more has been playing fast and loose with its balance-of-power details.

Either way, it’s a pretty lopsided matchup, so, in the interests of drama, something must be done to even the odds. In other cases I’ve been sympathetic to the challenges of adapting the page to the screen, but not here. It was the showrunners that wrote themselves into this particular corner, not GRRM, and they’ve been straining mightily against plausibility ever since to write themselves out.

Their main vehicle so far has been Euron Greyjoy. He’s built an unbeatable fleet offscreen between seasons, and has now won two major (and confusing) victories in the space of two episodes. The first rested on the idea that he could find Yara’s fleet in the middle of a dark night without them even noticing he was coming. The second rests on the idea that Euron has time-bending powers that dwarf even Littlefinger’s.

Euron is played by a Danish actor named Pilou Asbaek. He at least seems to be having fun, so there's that.

Let’s rewind to the end of episode two: Tyrion, adhering to the ancient military maxim of “just divide your forces, it’ll be fine,” sent the Unsullied to attack Casterly Rock, the Lannister stronghold of great and hitherto unmentioned strategic value. At what I presume is the same time, he sent Yara’s fleet to collect Ellaria Sand’s forces in Dorne. It was the same time, right? I mean, why wouldn’t it be?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Timely Game of Thrones Griping 3: What Exactly Is This Show Doing?”

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.

 Timely Game of Thrones Griping 2: The Wages of AdaptationPrevious Post

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134 comments

Obsessive Compulsive Daydream

By Shamus Posted Sunday Jul 30, 2017

Filed under: Personal 63 comments

 Autism?Previous Post

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I don’t normally watch Vlogbrothers videos. I know they’re the titans of YouTube and beloved by millions, but their topics don’t often land in my particular wheelhouse. (For me, Numberphile, Tom Scott, and Deep Sky Videos are where it’s at. And also CGP Grey when the planets align and he makes a vid.) But once in a long time the YouTube suggestion heuristic offers up a Vlogbro video that catches my eye, which was the case this past week: What OCD Is Like (for Me).

Link (YouTube)

(No, I don’t know why I’m talking about this sort of oddball mental stuff two weeks in a row. It’s not a sign of any particular trouble on my end. Probably just random chance, or the result of too much introspection.)

I don’t know anything about OCD aside from the pop-culture depictions of it, so this made for an illuminating video. OCD is, as I suspected, badly portrayed in media. I do not have OCD, although I’d like to use this as a jumping-off point for a tangentially related topic…

John Green talks about how a particular idea will stick in his mind and he won’t be able to stop worrying about it. While I haven’t experienced his particular problem of ongoing vexation, I am familiar with the idea of having an idea that sticks with you for weeks and months and kind of grows on you despite it not having any practical value. In my case it’s a completely harmless personality quirk rather than a source of stress or dysfunction. Which is nice. But it also made me wonder if this is a common thing. Does everyone have a clingy idea or scenario that won’t leave them alone?

In my case the thoughts revolve around impossible hypothetical situations like:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Obsessive Compulsive Daydream”

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.

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