As promised last week, we answer listener questions. As always, the show email is in the header image.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #172: Mailtime!”
Link (YouTube) |
I actually really enjoyed watching the fight at the end of this episode. It was hilarious chaos with emergent humor. I think the damage sponge foes are generally a bad thing in this game, but if anything should be a damage sponge, it should be a sentry bot. It’s when you run into a human in street clothes that can take a half dozen shotgun blasts to the face that my patience starts to wear thin.
I think these moments of combat intensity would work better and more frequently if they felt a bit more intentional. In Diablo or Borderlands, you plow through mooks. Every N encounters is a badass. Every N badasses is a boss in an impressive location. But here there’s just a bit too much randomness at work. You’ll have a couple of legendaries back-to-back, but then both of them will be overshadowed but a nameless foe inexplicably higher in level than everything else in the area, which winds up being about as strong as the boss encounter at the end, which is then followed by a stream of mooks instead of the action winding down. I can understand why the open world parts are chaos (although Borderlands managed to make its open areas work) but far too often the murder dungeons feel just as unstructured.
The encounter at the end of this quest was one of the moments when it felt like the encounter was actually appropriate for the quest.
EDIT: As Mumbles pointed out below, you can see her tour the Nuka World DLC (and see the son she mentioned in this episode) on her YouTube channel.
Link (YouTube) |
Some people ignored the main quest. Some people did all the endings in various playthroughs. Some people were able to side with more than one faction.
I’m torn. I think the Minutemen are the least crazy in their goals, but the most boring to actually work with. I’ve played many characters to level 30, but I’ve only ever seen the ending credits once. I sided with the Institute. Yes, they’re evil imbeciles with no coherent goal and yes they force you to murder the other factions for no good reason. But when it was all over, I knew I’d get to live in a place with electric lights, clean food, and toilet paper.
Maybe life will be uncomfortable living with the guilt that I helped the robo-Fascists. Is that more uncomfortable than living in a pile of rubble and trading gunfire with supermutants and killbots every night? I doubt it.
But let’s say you have to choose once and for all. You have to choose one faction and destroy all the others because the game says so. Brotherhood of Steel, Minutemen, Institute, or Railroad. Which faction do you choose, and why?
Tidus is still stuck in a dreamworld, and a ghost kid is taking a huge exposition dump on him.
I think it’s interesting to compare this kid (while he isn’t explicitly named in the story, I’m going to call him Bahamut from now on) to Some Kidd from the end of Mass Effect 3. In both cases you’re using a transparent ghost child to deliver exposition in bulk. Both are introduced / hinted / foreshadowed in the opening scene, are hinted at in visions during the story, and then show up again in the third act where they explain things. Both are cryptic and mysterious and they even seem to be about the same age.
Here is why I think Final Fantasy X gets away with this plot device while Mass Effect 3 doesn’t:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Final Fantasy X Part 17: Some Kid Dreamed”
Link (YouTube) |
So which choice is more vacuous and pointless?
This can be about ideology, but it can also be a matter of aesthetics. Which conflict got the most investment out of you, or made you care about a particular faction?
At great personal cost and after many salt tears, I’ve passed the fifth level of Battlespire. At last that purgatorial desert of corruption, pain, and empty fugue-lives falls behind me; ahead is the Promised Land, a garden metropolis where savegames may be plucked from hanging vines and death means nothing at all. I strike my first new save in weeks, its name reflecting my summery mood.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rutskarn vs. Battlespire CH30: Through the Sucking Glass”
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my misadventures with the Windows 10 Store, and how trying to conduct a simple transaction had screwed up my computer. Some people quite reasonably pointed out that my complaints were more focused on the problems with the operating system than with the store, so my comparisons to Steam were unfair.
Okay then. Let’s ignore all the horribleness of the Anniversary Update and focus on the store. Let’s try to buy Forza 3 Horizon.
When I search the store for Forza 3, this is where it takes me:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: Windows 10 Store, Round 2”
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
T w e n t y S i d e d
