T w e n t y S i d e d

You might remember my complaint from yesterday, where I talked about a bug that killed my Prey playthrough. I managed to solve the problem. What I found might also help all the other people experiencing strange broken quests triggersAt least on the PC. If you’re playing on a console you’re on your own. Sorry.. I don’t know. It turns out that (at least in my case) this is an issue with save data collisions between different games.

Note: This post is spoiler-free, aside from the names of levels and random screenshots of the first fifteen minutes.

Prey is pretty good in terms of PC creature comforts for a game of 2017. It’s got quicksave and quickload and they’re reasonably fast to useThis isn’t one of those game engines that purges EVERYTHING from memory when doing a quickload.. But it’s still a game of 2017, which means there are some console-minded design decisions impacting the interface. Specifically, you get three save “slots”.

Now, each of those slots can hold multiple saves. If you start a game in Slot 1, within that slot you can have multiple auto saves, quick saves, and manual saves. This isn’t inherently a bad system. If you and your little brother are both playing through the game, this system means you can both have your own games without the save files getting all mixed together. The “only three active campaigns at a time” limit is a little alien to my PC sensibilities, but whatever. It’s odd, but I’m okay with it.

Or I would be, if it wasn’t for the problems it caused…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey: Debugging the Problem”

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.

It has been bugging me for years: maybe the problem isn’t the games. Maybe it’s me.

I didn’t like the Thief reboot. I was tepid towards BioShock. The new Deus Ex games have some charm, but they never engrossed me the way the original did. Dishonored was kind of amusing, but it always felt like classic Thief with the best parts ripped out. Most other people loved these gamesAside from the Thief reboot. Nobody liked that.. Reviewers like them, the public embraces them, but they just don’t blow me away like in the good old days.

Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I’ve just played too many games. Maybe after rolling over the same tropes and gameplay for years I’ve just lost the ability to give myself over to a game like I did back in my 20s. Maybe what made those games so magical was my own sense of wonder.

It’s been bugging me for years, but Prey proves that this isn’t the case. My fondness for those old titles isn’t blind nostalgia. Modern games really have been missing something special that I’ve been craving. I know this, because Prey has these things and I’m suddenly experiencing a game in a way I haven’t since I was 28. Prey is the real deal.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey vs. My Nostalgia”

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.

No, I’m not going to try to get you to feel sorry for me.

The Expectation: Now that I have Saturday nights free, I should be able to get more writing done!

The Reality: A couple of weeks ago I started playing Diablo III. And then the Factorio update came out, and I’ve been waiting for that for five months. And then Prey came out, and rumor was that it’s a spiritual successor to System Shock. Given my history with those games, I HAD to get it. And then STRAFE came out and I’ve been waiting for that since I backed the Kickstarter in February 2015.

So I’m trying to play four games at once and it’s going about as well as you might expect. I can’t say anything substantial about any of them, so let me say something insubstatial about each of them…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I Am Currently Playing Four Videogames”

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 was going to be my first impressions on Diablo III. Yes, 5 years after Diablo III was released I suddenly got the urge to see what the fuss was about.

It all started when I watched Joseph Anderson’s critique of the expansion and I saw how some of the late-game combat worked and how some of the skill trees operated. I started thinking that maybe there was enough complexity to be worth a look. My initial impression of the beta back in 2012 was that Diablo III was very pretty, but hopelessly dull and shallow. Also the “always online single-player” was pretty off putting. It still is. I guess the $20 price tag for the base game made the decision a little easier.

As I played, my “first impressions” post grew into a mini-review, which grew into a full review, which then expanded into analysis, which made me think that maybe this isn’t the kind of thing I ought to dash out over the space of a day and a half. That’s probably for the best anyway. Making something thoughtful and analytical is usually better than just blurting out the first 1,000 words that come charging out of the atavistic crevices of my brain. But this does leave me without a post for today.

So let me ask a question that’s pretty much always on my mind: What are you folks playing these days?

I don’t mean “what mobile game are you using to kill time while waiting for the bus”. I mean what game is really consuming your thoughts and attention in your free time? Or if you don’t have enough free time, what game would you spend it on if you did? Old stuff? New stuff? AAA stuff? Indies? Platformers? Shooters? Shooters? Visual novels? Is all of the time going into one title or are you splitting your attention between multiple games? There’s a really big world of games out there these days.

For me:

Primary: I’ve been playing the new 0.15 update for Factorio. It’s a pretty big improvement across the board, but after several hours I’ve only just begun to get a feel for the new content.

Secondary: I’ve also been playing Diablo III. I can’t decide if this is the best terrible game I’ve ever played, or the worst awesome game I’ve ever played. Nothing is an accident here. Blizzard made exactly the game they wanted to. But the game they wanted to make keeps deviating from the game I expect in strange ways.

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.