I’ll spare the gentle Garrison Keilloresque lead-in, because I know people are impatient to find out just why the hell I can’t equip my two-handed sword. So pay attention, because I’m about to lay out my theory.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts vs. Battlespire CH15: The Dance Commander”
I was going to start the Good Robot postmortem today, but that needs a little more time. So instead, please enjoy whatever this is:
I’ve often made reference to the fact that I drink a lot of tea. It’s become something of a running joke on the Diecast. This has led to the mistaken conclusion that I’m some sort of tea aficionado. Given how much I consume, I must surely be aware of all the flavors, be particular about my brands, and be picky about how I prepare it, right? Like a wine snob, but for tea?
Well, no. In truth, the only good thing I can say about tea is that I like it better than water.
So why do I drink it?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Tea Drinker”
Hosts: Josh, Rutskarn, Shamus, Campster, Mumbles.
Episode edited by Rachel.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #157: Overwatch, Doom, Vive”
I’m in the town of Scary. Things could be going better.
I’ve been working on the problem of a goblin invasion. Generally people fall into two camps with regards to goblins:
1) AH! I saw a goblin! We are dooooooomed!
2) Bah. The goblins are a myth.
Somewhere between these two viewpoints, it would be nice to find someone who thought that walking out to the goblin camp and killing them all would be a good plan. I have brought back news of the goblin camp to one Wilcome Tunnelly, in hopes that he would mobilize his people to do exactly that. Instead, he’s sending me into the mines because they have a… spider problem? And in order to fix the spider problem, he wants me to recover a skull they uncovered at the bottom of the mine?
Wilcome is warning me that I’ll need help on this job. Sadly, there’s no help to be had. I don’t really have any friends that go in for this adventuring type of business. And It’s been days since I saw another adventurer running around.
No, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it alone. In we go.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Shamus Plays LOTRO #19: I Don’t Have Any Friends”
So now I’ve made friends with a daedric captain by way of watching his flunkies blow themselves up. Have I mentioned I’m starting to get the hang of Battlespire?
It’s all about embracing the chaos, the gamebreaking, the murderous non sequitur. I’ve escaped a tower with no elevator, arranged the world’s worst inventory, mastered the art of uncovering secret doors by headbutting furniture, and overcome fireball spam parties by standing very still and counting to twenty. I’m not going to act like getting this far has been easy, or even that it’s getting easier, but I will say that the game appears to be running out of arbitrary obstacles.
On an unrelated note, I can no longer equip weapons.
Let me back up a bit. I can’t risk making this problem sound too straightforward or comprehensible.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts vs. Battlespire CH14: The Amazing Disintegrating Wardrobe”
WARING: This episode contains violence, drug use, kink, kink-shaming, marriage, bicycle kicking firearms, Bethesda dialog, baseball bat journalism, and allusions to that one episode where Rutskarn read us the Wikipedia entry on hemipenes. This episode may be harmful to children, pregnant women, and everyone else.
Link (YouTube) |
Maybe I need to apologize for this episode? But I kind of feel like this episode needs to apologize to ME? In any case, something has gone wrong, somewhere, and it’s probably Josh’s fault.
Also, why was that vault door closed / how did they manipulate it without a Pip boy?
EDIT: Wow guys. I just realized: When Reginald died, do you know where the last save was? If you re-watch the episode, it was in the closet with the yellow drug container, which is the exact moment when Josh claimed he’d “become a god”. The game KNOWS. It punished him for his hubris!
I’d be okay with that, except we wound up getting punished along with him.
Link (YouTube) |
I think Fallout 4 wouldn’t be nearly so infuriating if the dialog didn’t keep making promises that the writer never intended to keep. It makes it sound like wall-painter guy has stories to tell, but he’s just a nonsense fetch quest. You meet a big bad guy who wants to talk, but the conversation is dumb and pointless because my character isn’t allowed to ask any interesting questions. You meet people with pre-war memories, or strange backstories, or in odd situations, which makes it seem like they’re designed specifically to deliver exposition and stories. But no. It’s just another bland NPC who wants to give you caps to kill a bunch of crap.
In most games, the designer will use a story to hook you into doing a quest. In this game I kept doing quests, hoping to find a story somewhere.
I was usually disappointed.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
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.
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
T w e n t y S i d e d
