Link (YouTube) |
I love Rutskarn’s idea of someone trying to coach the Supermutants to say cool one-liners, but they come out horribly mangled because they supermutants are too dumb to grasp the idioms at work. So I thought I’d try to take some famous bad-ass phrases and imagine them shouted by a moron who didn’t understand their own words:
I AM HERE FOR BUBBLEGUM!
MY LITTLE FRIEND SAYS HELLO!
YOU ARE THE DISEASE AND I HAVE MEDICINE FOR IT!
WE FIGHT OR WE DIE!
This is fun. Try it.
It’s safe to say that playing Battlespire demands my full attention. When my deadlines and lukewarm professional reputation depend on figuring out why my god damn longsword won’t equip, and the documentation to assist me is a nakedly speculatory shrug of a wiki article written by third parties–who are the only other people to have played the game, very possibly the only people to have enjoyed it–I end up needing the kind of laser-focused attention that in a less wasted life might build navies or cure eczema. Battlespire, in short, is not a game to play with a movie on in the background.
Which makes it an interesting, probably even unique experience among dungeon crawlers. There’s not much going on at the surface level–watch me go through this level and you’ll see me swimming around, killing any daedra obstinate enough to block my way, chugging potions, and searching for little levers, just like in a hundred other little RPGs nobody remembers. I’d say it even aspires to be the average door-to-door fightfest. But when any number of factors from jumping to walking to standing overly still could mean getting stuck or taking inexplicable damage, every section is pregnant with the worst kind of tension. So it’s nice to have the occasional riddle or challenge break things up–it’s nice to know that broadly speaking, being baffled or fascinated is the intended effect.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts vs. Battlespire CH22: Touching the Hand is Optional”
So No Man’s Sky is out, and everyone is talking about how “big” it is in terms of playable gamespace. Way back in 2010 I did a video talking about how FUEL was the “Biggest Game Ever” according to the Guinness Book of World Records. (With a qualifying asterisk that it was merely the biggest on any console.) so I guess now is a good time to revisit the topic.
Link (YouTube) |
Having said that, talking about the “biggest” or “best” or “smartest” game ever is a ridiculously troublesome and unrewarding task, because you’re just opening yourself up to death by a thousand quibbles.
I made that video because I love talking about procedural worlds. I love talking about how they’re built, how we explore them, how to fill them with interesting content, and the unique rendering challenges they introduce. Which means that for me, that video has officially the Most Annoying Comment Thread on YouTube. Because none of those people want to talk about any of that.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: The Biggest Game Ever”
Thanks for the feedback last week. I know how I want to structure these posts so that the RSS feed works and is easy to find, and the built-in media player appears properly. I just need to get around to making the changes. This would be done already, but No Man’s Sky is out and its ability to fill space is matched only by its ability to eat time.
Hosts: Josh, Rutskarn, Shamus, Campster.
Episode edited by Mindie.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #163: No Man’s Sky, Dead Adventurers”
The sun is setting when I crawl out of the bandit lair. Sara Oakheart is nowhere to be seen, which means she swam across this lake and vanished into the woods in the time it took me to riffle through Toradan’s pockets, step over his corpse, and then walk ten paces to the front door of the cave and shove it open.
I kind of feel like I need to report this mess to the proper authorities. But who? Ellie? She’s only interested in poaching. She’d have me hunt down a band of chattering brigand squirrels or something. Jon Brackenbrook? Nah. He doesn’t even care about his own town.
Ah! I can go to constable Underhill.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Shamus Plays LOTRO #24: Shortcut to Marsh Doom”
Link (YouTube) |
I want to run into Bethesda studios dressed like the Silver Shroud and start shouting, “At last, villain, you will be punished for your villainous acts of over-written dialog, which have gone unpunished for far too long, and so I am finally here to punish you for your villainy!”
And I’d just keep doing that until the police dragged me out of the building.
And just to be clear, at the end of the show I’m pretty sure that after killing a bunch of murderers around Good Neighbor, both Nick Valentine and Hancock decided to kill Josh for taking an empty beer bottle. That’s… really something.
Link (YouTube) |
You may have blinked and missed it while Josh was doing the jackrabbit two-step around Kellogg’s foggy noggin, but we just passed The Quote From Fallout 4. You know; the singular monologue that gets memed and shared around like a dying cigarette in a post-apocalyptic campground. It’s not mandatory, but even if you passed over it in your playthrough (and you probably didn’t unless you were very impatient) there’s a good chance you’ve seen it online:
“The thing about happiness is that you only knew you had it when it’s gone. I mean, you may think to yourself that you’re happy. But you don’t really believe it. You focus on the petty bullshit, or the next job, or whatever. It’s only looking back by comparison with what comes after that you really understand, that’s what happiness felt like.”
I mentioned before that I found the line overwritten, and that the message is got across quite well by “The thing about happiness is that you only knew you had it when it’s gone.” I’m not cynical enough to think the line was stretched out so people would take it more seriously, but I think the elaboration does suggest a lack of confidence. I’d still like to see more dialogue like this in the game–and in a way, that’s the biggest problem.
This isn’t a special moment where everything comes together. This isn’t a hammer blow, a mic drop, or a thesis. This is a reasonably interesting throwaway line that does a little to illustrate a character’s perspective and keep the player’s attention from wandering–and yet it has so much more gravitas, thought, and meaning than the dialogue surrounding it, and when you’re playing it you get this instinctive feeling like it’s Something Important. And I have to ask–is it?
I don’t think it resonates well with the themes of the game–past a point we’re fast approaching, feelings of wistfulness and nostalgia have little importance in the game’s storyline. I don’t think it comments incisively on human experience–I’d argue that “you don’t really know you’re happy until you know that you were happy and now you aren’t happy” is a pretty shallow cut and there’s not much in the context of the scene to give it more meaning. So all it does is tell us about Kellogg, and since I just killed him, I can’t unkill him, and there was never anything I could do but kill him–and since Kellogg’s impact on the plot is constrained to one trigger pull and one messy death–that’s some pretty weak tea.
I put it to you that in a game where solid characters spoke about interesting topics that had thematic cohesion and significance, Kellogg’s line here would have been practically ignored.
-Shamus
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T w e n t y S i d e d
