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We’re out behind the church. In the graveyard. Norman is looking around like he’s afraid he’s being followed.
I nod, “Nice. I like this. Lotta room for more dead people here, though. What say we fill this place up?”
Norman turns to me. “Look. This is a bit tricky, but warlocks are sort of outlawed a bit.”
“Explain that.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Shamus Plays WoW #3: Into the Bandit’s Den”
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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”
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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”
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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.
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
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.
T w e n t y S i d e d
