Link (YouTube) |
I was all in favor of covering this game until this very moment, when I realized I had to write this post and didn’t have anything to say that I didn’t already say on the show. I have a PS4. I could get this game and play through it now. But I’m way too busy as it is. I’m not sure what I’ll put in these entries as the series goes on.
If you’re wondering why I reacted so strongly to the threat of David Cage, it’s because I played this.
I’ve been playing this game obsessively for months, and yet I haven’t mentioned it on the site or even the podcast. That’s strange. I guess it’s because Factorio has supplanted Minecraft as my “Zen” game. It’s the game I play when I need to relax and think. A lot of the analysis you see on this site is the result of me stepping away from the word processor and zoning out to a low-action game for a few hours.
Factorio is an indie game by the ten-person Wube software. As of this writing it’s still in Early Access on Steam. I don’t often cover Early Access games, but I wanted to talk about Factorio because:
In Factorio, you begin with your character – a nameless person with no particular story or identity – being dropped into the middle of an alien wilderness. You’ve got a pickaxe, and you can see there are deposits of coal and iron spread around, as well as trees to chop down. At this point you probably assume this is just another survival game. It might even feel like one for the first couple of minutes. But it isn’t. Your character doesn’t need to gather resources to survive and in fact your character is little more than a human-shaped camera / cursor.
Instead of gathering food, your goal is to launch a rocket into space.
After the first five minutes of the game, you’re done gathering resources manually. After that, you’ve got machines to gather the resources and conveyor belts to carry them to a refinery. After a few more steps up the tech tree you’ll have conveyor belts feeding those refined materials into assembly machines to make parts, which will go on to be assembled into a final product. From that point on you’re just adding additional layers of automation onto an increasingly convoluted industrial complex that sprawls across the landscape in every direction.
You’ll need power to keep this enterprise running, which means you’ll need to build thundering coal-fired generatorsEventually you can unlock solar panels, but those come with their own drawbacks. to generate electricity. These generators will belch sooty smoke into the sky, which will agitate the local population of alien beasts. These creatures will rush at your base like a swarm of Zerglings to assault your power plants, and anything else that gets in their way. This means you’ll need to build walls and turrets to keep the riff-raff outThere’s an option to play the game in peaceful mode, where the monsters never attack first..
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Factorio”
Arvind and I are planning an update for Good Robot. There are a few lingering balance changes that have so far only been available on the beta test branch, and we want to make those public. But we thought we should add some fresh content to the game while we’re at it. We’re still working out what those changes will be. Ideally we’d like a little of everything: New music, levels, weapons, foes, etc. We’ll see what we can do. It’s a busy time of the year and we don’t want to put this off until spring.
But let’s go after some low-hanging fruit first. I’ve made a poll where you can vote on whatever kind of hat you’d like to see in the game. It’s a fill-in-the-blank, so go nuts. Just remember that we’re going to be looking for popular choices. If you’re the only one that votes for a particular hat, then it can’t really rise to the top of the pile.
So go nuts, but not TOO nuts.
Once again I have to commend the folks at Google. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to waste 700×750 pixels on a one-question, one-line survey, but they somehow pulled it off. I know Google likes their whitespace, but this form wouldn’t fit on an 800×600 monitor without scrolling, and it’s ONE QUESTION. I distinctly remember the 90’s, and having more than one sentence on the screen at a time. This thing is so wasteful it looks like satire.
Note that this survey requires you to be logged into the Google Overlord. If you don’t have a Google account, you can’t participate. Sorry, but it was a practical necessity. This is the only way to limit votes to 1 per person. We have to read these by hand, and we don’t want to wade through hundreds of ballot-stuffers and joke entries.
EDIT: Poll closed. I usually publish the results right away, but this one will take some time to digest. Thanks for participating.
Fun fact: Bob and I both release videos once every 2d6 months, but last week we randomly released videos within one day of each other.
Anyway. Happy Halloween, NERDS.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #174: MrBtongue, Skyrim Remastered, Civ 6”
Boom. Mortal realm. I’m suddenly back in Azeroth, and once again knee high to a Gnome.
“Gobstab! Praise the Light! I need your help,” Norman cries. He looks like he’s seen some tough times.
I shrug, “I told you I’d be back. Although I’m one-hundred percent positive you shouldn’t praise the light when you summon a demon.”
Norman thinks for a second, “Would that be considered an insult to good, or evil?”
“Both, I think.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Shamus Plays WoW #7: The Cataclysm Begins!”
Two days ago I asked people what content brought them to my site, and how they found it. The poll ran for 24 hours and has 1,717 total responses. As before, no effort was made to prevent ballot-stuffing. I also didn’t filter out nonsense answers, like people claiming they found me through last year’s Mass Effect series but have been reading for a decade. This is trivia, not science.
Here is the pie chart that Google made of the results:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Poll Results: Finding Twenty Sided”
Link (YouTube) |
Here is almost three hours of Civilization gameplay and banter with people in chat.
During the stream I said that I was feeling bad for not playing the new Hitman this year. After dumping on Hitman: Absoludicrous last year I kind of felt like I should take a look at the new one, since it was reportedly a return to form. After the stream, someone gifted me a copy. I’m happy to report that it is indeed a return to form. It might even depose Blood Money as the defining entry in the series. The levels are gigantic, there are numerous approaches, the disguise system is better than ever, the tone is right, and it looks gorgeous and runs like a dream. It feels great to pull off a clean hit and it’s hilarious when things go sideways. Is this really the best entry in the series, or am I being overly generous because Absolution was an abomination? Time will tell.
I also said during the stream that I was torn on whether to buy Civilization 6, or wait for Dishonored 2. I’m still torn. This decision is made more complicated by the fact that Skyrim: Remastered Edition comes out today and I’m really feeling like a nostalgia tour of Skyrim is in order. The end of the year is coming fast and there are only so many hours to spend on these games.
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
T w e n t y S i d e d
