Link (YouTube) |
This “being called by people in the videogame” would be WAY too real for me. I’d actually be really uncomfortable with it. Also I hate taking on the phone. One of these boys would call me and I’d be like, “DUDE. Email me!”
Anyway. This was good for a laugh and I’m sorry if I got a bit mean at the end. This was a fun idea. I’m glad Mumbles suggested it, and I’m grateful to Josh for making it happen.
With this miniseries, I hope I’m demonstrating how important a game’s rules are. Mechanics direct and shape gameplay on a profound level. The first few games we talked about stretched their rules across the entire world, for GM and players alike, and asked the player characters to be essentially plugged in to an objective framework. The middle games demand only creativity and initiative of the GM and reserve almost all of their rules for players to interestingly determine success and failure. Now we’re onto the latter games, where the rules define how the players tell the story–and the GM doesn’t exist at all.
Mist-Robed Gate (2008)
The elevator pitch for Mist-Robed Gate: instead of dice, you use poker chips and a knife.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rutskarn’s GMinars CH7: The Gamesbow 8-10”
Link (YouTube) |
Not-so-fun fact: One of my migraines began during this segment. It hadn’t started to hurt for real yet, but I was getting the strange tingly vision and mystery painIf you ask me if I’m in pain, I’ll say yes, but if you ask me where it hurts I won’t be able to tell you aside from “somewhere in the vicinity of my head”. I can’t describe it. that serves as a warm-up for the Big Show. I was getting stressed and cranky and not thinking clearly. The smart thing to do would have been to bow out and leave the show to the rest of the team, but like I said in the previous sentence: I wasn’t thinking clearly. As a result, I didn’t have much to say about the game and I don’t remember much of this now. And I think I turned mean at the end of it. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.
Anyway, this was all very silly and makes me feel like I’m a thousand years old.
The airship Tidus helped salvage at the start of the gameThe Al Bhed don’t acknowledge this or thank him, which would really go a long way to smoothing out that whole unfortunate slavery “misunderstanding”. is parked here, and it’s been cleaned up and is ready to fly.
If you go strictly by the visible day / night cycle in the game, then…
So in nine days the Al Bhed hauled the Airship up from the bottom of the ocean, cleaned it up, figured out how it worked, found or built replacement parts, repaired it, fueled it, figured out how to pilot it, and gave it a factory-fresh coat of paint?
Yeah, yeah. Final Fantasy. I know.
I know.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Final Fantasy X Part 13: The Wedding Crashers”
Link (YouTube) |
It’s a Spoiler Warning first! We play an untested mobile game on an untested emulator with no preparation. Watch us figure out technology in real time!
I wasn’t joking when I said I was confused. I’ve never used text messages, and there are a lot of conventions at work here that are not obvious to the uninitiated. When there were multiple conversation threads going, I was constantly struggling to match messages with replies. And when the boys sent animated chibi images of themselves I wasn’t sure how literally I was supposed to take what I was seeing. I mean, I don’t have a button on my phone to send someone a chibi picture of myself giving a particular emotional reaction.
So we’ve got three different unfamiliar systems at work: Dating in the 21st century, texting and mobile conventions, and Korean culture. I’m really glad I’m married, because I’m pretty sure I’m not smart enough to perform the required mating rituals of this day and age.
Happy birthday, Mumbles.
Across trackless dimensional matrices, through the eye of manifest malice, in the murderous playground of a bloodhungry god, across a hostile plain patrolled by unkillable horrors, through the waterfall, across the unbridged chasm, past an army of daedra, I enter the tower. A dozen eyes burning with blue rage turn to me–and I’ve already popped the boots out of the footlocker and whistled briskly out the tower exit.
I am The Most Disappointing Game.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts vs. Battlespire CH26: The Running Manling”
I know that dumping on No Man’s Sky was all the rage a few weeks ago, and the only thing worse than showing up for a pointless dogpile is showing up late for a pointless dogpile. So I want to make it clear that nothing I’m saying here should be taken as a personal attack and I don’t have anything against the developers. Hello Games made a game that was hotly anticipated by their fans and then ended up disappointing a lot of them after release. I can’t hate them for that. I did the same thing earlier this year.
In fact, I’m hoping they made enough on this game that they can give it another try. I really do think that they have something special here. Imagine if the first iteration of Minecraft had been really awkward, frustrating, had a terrible building interface, and was constantly limiting and undermining your creative abilities because the developer thought the game should be focused on combat. I wouldn’t want the idea of a cube world to die on the vine. I’d want it to get another chance to become the creative, engaging, meme-spawning classic that was embraced as a hobby by millions worldwide.
So I think there’s some value in picking apart the mechanics of No Man’s Sky and understanding why they don’t work. Lots of people (including me) have said that the space combat in this game sucks, but I think it might be more useful to dig into the details of why it sucks. Space combat isn’t just the victim of a couple of unfortunate design choices. It’s a chain of conflicting goals and bad decisions that comes up with new ways to annoy you as you play.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: The Sky isn’t Worth Fighting For”
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
T w e n t y S i d e d
