Have you been following the development of this game? Well, I’ve managed to get the thing on Stream Greenlight. If you’d like to see Pseudoku on Steam, then please vote for it.
Link (YouTube) |
I was going to have a longer post about it this week, but I’ve been goofing off recently and have fallen behind on my work. Composing this tune and editing this minute and a half trailer is all I managed to get done.
Five years ago I quit working on a sci-fi novel. It had a few cool ideas and there were a lot of things I liked about it, but… I don’t know. I just couldn’t work on it.
So I uploaded the half-a-book to see what the internet thought of it. Paul Spooner took the book and finished it. He sent me the completed work. At the time I said to him via email:
This is amazing. You’ve gone in a radically different direction from anything I’d imagined. I haven’t read the whole thing, but I’ve been skimming my way through.
Before you sent this to me I wondered: If this story was released, would anyone be able to see the seams? Could they tell where I stopped and you started? Then I realized that I’d already released my half of the book, so anyone that read that would know.
But still, this has gotten me thinking about how we consume and invent stories. We often divide stuff into “authentic” (stuff written by the original author) and “inauthentic” (fan fiction). I wrote an entire fan fiction novel myself, and I’m aware of how strange this line can be. People who never played System Shock before were far more receptive to my book than people who were familiar with the source material. Their understanding of the original work changed their perception of my story. Would that work in reverse? If someone was told that the game was based on my book, would they dislike the game for its “inaccuracies”? (Setting aside the fact that the game is hard to find, looks terrible, had a horrible interface, and the gameplay hasn’t held up over time.)
My own version of the novel uses very few characters from the first half. Rin doesn’t really talk to the other crewmembers. The whole story takes place on this alien world and the only person we see again is David. My book ends shortly after returning to Earth. It’s entirely possible that your version, which is tied more to the first half of the book, would seem more plausible as the “true” ending.
I haven’t read enough to give you useful feedback on what you’ve done, and I keep getting caught on, “This never would have occurred to me!” I don’t have much in the way of feedback, except to say I don’t think you’re doing anything obviously wrong or bad. I realize that this isn’t really useful, but this is a strange experience for me and it’s hard to read objectively.
Annoyingly, reading his version kinda made me want to go back and work on my own. (Spoiler: I didn’t. Too much other stuff going on.)
Creativity is obnoxious sometimes. Imagine if, after decades of dicking around and not working on the prequels, George Lucas finally let someone else make the prequel movies. So then Spooner steps in and takes a shot at it. After years of work, Spooner brings the completed movies to LucasSTAR WARS Episode I: The Spooner Menace.. Lucas begins watching the Spooner cut. After halfway through the opening crawl, Lucas stands up, exits the theater, and announces he’s going to make the prequel movies after all.
What an asshole, right?
I didn’t want to end up doing that to Paul, so I haven’t actually read his completed version of the book. I’ve read some chapters, and it feels pretty strange to to mePaul left out Jar-Jar Binks? Jar-Jar was the key to everything..
But if you read the half-novel back in 2012 and were frustrated by the cliffhanger, maybe the Spooner cut of the story will give you some closure. Or maybe it will just kill some time on a Tuesday when I don’t have any content for you.
A big part of what I do around here is make lemons into lemonade. If I have a programming problem, I write about programming. If I have a problem with a videogame, I write an article about the videogame. If I have a problem with Uplay, then it’s Tuesday.
So maybe it would be more accurate to say that I take lemons and make them into long complaints about lemons. Whatever. It seems to be working out well enough for us so far.
The point is that I’m not sure my usual technique can work here. I’m just finishing up my worst week in years and I’m way behind on my writing. I haven’t been on this site in days, even to read the comments. I don’t know if I’ll have any content for you this coming week and so I’m trying to do the lemons-to-lemonade thing to fill the gap. Also, having a really good bitch-and-moan can be kind of therapeutic.
On the other hand, I’m not sure if I have anything insightful to say about the mundane experience of getting sick. It happens. To all of us. It’s stupid and miserable and we’ve sort of come to accept it as part of being alive on this planet. It’s like if we just accepted that once every six to eighteen months, you have to take a totally random baseball bat to the face for no reason. Ken comes into work on Tuesday with the left side of his face swollen shut and everyone is like, “Dude! Looks like the baseball bat really got you this year.” And Ken just nods his head like, “Mffgh gh mxxxlt.”
The baseball bat this year was a vicious, hateful, pernicious son of a bitch. I really hate this thing, and it’s frustrating that there’s no way to get revenge on something with no sense of identity, memory, or intelligence. I’d love to go all Liam Neeson on this bastard for what it just did to my family.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Bollypox”
Season six is a mess. I can’t think of any other way to describe it. It starts with nonsense, ends with nonsense, and the middle part is crammed with whatever leftover nonsense they could scrounge up from the bottom of the pan.
One of reasons I’ve had trouble explaining my problems with Game of Thrones to people is that when they ask me “what don’t you like about the writing?” the nearest thing I can give to an accurate answer is “almost everything.” But that sounds churlish and isn’t particularly useful as criticism. I have to organize my griping somehow, and splitting the show up into smaller chunks and them dealing with them in mostly-chronological order is the best solution I’ve come up with. So it makes sense to begin the proceedings by recounting the story of the almost completely meaningless death and resurrection of Jon Snow.
The whole sequence can help illustrate why opinions on the show can differ so much. For those who still trust the writers, and who are still emotionally invested in the show, I suppose I can see how Jon Snow’s death and resurrection was a source of drama and excitement. But for those of us on the wrong side of story collapse, it almost seems like the writers are deliberately yanking our chains for their own amusement. I’m writing this whole thing at least in part as an attempt to form a sort of venn diagram between the two groups. Where is the overlap? Where are the parts of the story that bother all of us? Maybe I can at least describe what this whole mess looks like to me.
Those of you who watch the show already know that season five ended with Alliser Thorne, Olly, and a dozen of their stooges going all Julius Caesar on Jon Snow for supposedly betraying the Night’s Watch. The opening shot of “The Red Woman” (season six’s first episode) picks up where we left off. Thorne and his co-conspirators apparently just left the body lying in the castle courtyard. Maybe they expected the janitorial staff to take care of it.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game of Thrones Griping 4: The Gospel of Jon”
Sometimes Dark Souls players will tell you they like the game because it’s “fair”. This has probably caused more misunderstandings and arguments than anything else about the game, because “fair” is a horribly loaded word with contradictory meanings in different contexts and for different players.
When someone says fair, which one of these ideas are they talking about?
Those aren’t just different definitions, they’re opposing definitions. And yet people will often talk about “fairness” in terms of gambling, sports, board games, and videogames without ever clarifying which concept of fairness they’re talking about. Is roulette “fair” because every space has equal chances of winning, the wheel is unbiased, and the rules are clear? Or is it “unfair” because the odds clearly favor the house? If I play golf against Tiger Woods, is the game “fair” before or after we institute a stroke handicap that allows for our vastly different skill levels?
In Dark Souls, there’s a bit where you can get hit with a boulder. Some dudes roll it down the stairs at you, and if you’re not ready for it then it will pulverize you. It’s a small moment near the start of the game but it’s sort of infamous as a moment of confusion, indignation, or dismay for new players that blunder into it unaware. Let’s compare this to some other games.
In Tomb Raider 2014, there’s a cutscene where Lara stupidly blunders into the villain’s lair, loudly announces herself, and then initiates a confrontation using the worst weapon. Naturally she ends up captured for her trouble. This moment sometimes strikes players as unfair, because they feel they could have avoided this setback if they’d been allowed to retain control of their character.
So the Dark Souls boulder is “fair” because the game doesn’t force you to get run over by it in a cutscene. It’s up to you, your memory, and your reflexes. Tomb Raider is “unfair” because no matter how good you get at the game, you still have to accept this setback of being captured by guys you could easily defeat outside of a cutscene.
On the other hand…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Arkham City Part 4: Dark Souls vs. The Dark Knight”
Link (YouTube) |
As Josh announces on the stream, the next season of Spoiler Warning will be the Dishonored 1 DLC. We’re doing this in preparation for the eventual Dishonored 2 season. We’ll cover another game between these two so 2017 doesn’t end up being non-stop Dishonored coverage.
I took the night off for Valentine’s DayActually, I’ve worked on something for Patreon backers, but the point is I took it more off than usual., but since by its nature my little tango through XCOM could snag a rug and eat floorboard any second, I figure it’s prudent to start priming the next project. I’m not going to ask for game suggestions exactly–I think I’ve got a pretty tight list–but I do have a more abstract question I’d like you all to weigh in on.
You may have noticed that I’ve got two speeds:
I’ve had little success merging the two, and think at this point I’m most comfortable with one or the other. But I don’t know which you prefer.
Does one of my house styles work better for you? Do you like or dislike both? Chime in below and I’ll bear that in mind picking the next game.
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
T w e n t y S i d e d
