Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #142: Firewatch, Deadpool, Mailbag”
This series could go on forever if it was nothing but gripes and praises.
Whatever else I have to say about the Elder Scrolls series, they are more multifaceted than nearly any release on the market. There are so many features, changes, retcons, experiments, reversions, and outright glitches that assuming I cut this series off before the next presidential election I am guaranteed to leave out that one part you were looking forward to. As it is, I’m sensing the graceful opportunity to conclude is coming up soon.
That’s why I’m taking a moment to talk over a few final Skyrim and Bethesda thoughts before I turn the next few entries over to review and Q&A. After that I’ll offer a few hot (or freezing cold, musty, and ageworn) takes on the games that exist at the outskirts of the franchise: outliers like Redguard, Battlespire, and TES Online, works that bear the branding if nothing else. The three have much in common: they’re technically canonical, they have novel mechanics, and nobody plays them.
So what remains to talk about now?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Altered Scrolls, Part 20: Miscellaneous, Q&A”
I hope you’ve all been enjoying Shamus’ series on the art of programming, which I understand is writing special words that make games happen. Sometimes you don’t write the words good enough and the game isn’t good; John Romero did this one time and he’s been working as a garbage man in Tulsa ever since. I’m the lead writer, so programming isn’t really my department, but having accidentally opened the source code while Arvind was explaining TortoiseHg again I can see why Shamus has been having so many problems–to be frank, the grammar was terrible and almost three quarters of the words were misspelled. I did an editing pass which I assume fixed most of the problems; Shamus has assured me this will be the topic of posts #43-129.
But I think we’ve all got the basic idea: coding is “hard” and “interesting” and “requires technical skill” and “can be objectively assessed.” But is it really the most fundamental part of a videogame? Shamus and Arvind say “yes,” repeatedly, at progressively louder volumes–but I’m not convinced. If you take away the code I’m sure a videogame will still run, but can you say the same about its story? What would Killzone, Rocket League, and Neko Atsume be without their rich internationally beloved canons? And if it wasn’t for Final Fantasy villains, how would you know which of your old forum accounts to be slightly embarrassed by?
My point is that my job writing Good Robot (or more precisely, writing a couple hundred headlines that display when interacting with vendors, plus some names to go with levelbosses) is exactly as critical as the stuff Arvind and Shamus do all week. I’m guessing. They keep forgetting to tell me when their meetings are.
So in the vein of the rest of this series, here’s a few days in the life of the Lead Writer (!).
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot #42.5: Good Writebot”
Anyway, back to 2012…
So having blown an entire entry on character creation. I think we’re finally ready to start this game. One final note is that I’m not going to try to color-correct and adjust the levels on all of these screenshots. If BioWare wants to make a world of plastic figures, bathe them in flat lighting, and smear a color filter over the whole thing, that’s their business.
The Star Wars theme swells as my shuttle descends towards the Jedi academy. As a padawan, I’m here to complete my training. Presumably I’m arriving from some sort of Jedi middle school.
The shuttle touches down as the music builds and I ascend the ramp to meet my new master.
This is supposed to be an epic moment, but I’m realizing now that this is basically, “Dude gets off the bus at college for the first time” with a John Williams soundtrack.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “SWTOR: Legend of Hipstar 2:
Back 2 School”
A couple of weeks ago, I was cleaning out the drafts folder on this blog. I had a hundred or so article ideas that I never managed to turn into proper posts. It was mostly just random notes and single-paragraph article stubs. But mixed in with those scraps was this thing. Way back in July 2012, I apparently began and subsequently abandoned this LP of SWTOR.
I think my heart just wasn’t in it. In the past, I’ve managed to make some fun stories. Champions Online was too dumb for its own good. I thought Lord of the Rings was earnest and admirable despite its occasional insanity. And while there are few places more well-traveled than Azeroth, I like to think I found a few funny places and ideas that hadn’t yet been given the mocking they so richly deserved.
But Star Wars the Old Republic is too bland a target for my kind of humor. It felt like the game wasn’t even trying to make a case for itself. When mocked, the game doesn’t even have the decency to fight back. The (early) quests were a bit lame, but not mind-bogglingly stupid like Champs Online. SWTOR was based on well-known source material, but unlike LOTRO I didn’t feel like this game arose from a genuine love and appreciation for the universe. Oh, I’m sure plenty of people on the project love Star Wars, but that wasn’t coming through the malaise of cookie-cutter game design. The stories eventually get interesting, but only after many endless hours of soul-crushing hotbar-based combat and trudging through environments that are too dull to mock in screenshots.
This isn’t fun and it isn’t funny. It’s mostly just sad to see how much money was spent to make something so lifeless. I’m only posting this because my choices are:
1) Delete this and leave the blog blank for a few days.
2) Post it.
So don’t read this and think, “This is supposed to be good.” More like, “This is hopefully better than having no content for several days.”
Okay, back to me-from-2012…
Let’s play Star Wars the Old Republic. Partly because I want to comment on the game, but mostly because it’s free-to-play up to level 15. Assuming you can get in. Not that I’m bitter.
Unlike some of my other series, I’m not going to meticulously track in-character and out-of-character commentary. Also, I’m not going for comedy here. We’re just going to jog past all the quests while I point at them like a tour guide. In keeping with the standards of tone and continuity set by the Star Wars Expanded Universe, we’re going to half-ass this.
Are your expectations sufficiently lowered? Great. Let’s get started…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “SWTOR: Legend of Hipstar 1: Character Creation”
So now that the Reapers are actually on Earth and have begun the reaping process, Shepard sort of accidentally steps into the quest hinted at in the closing moments of Mass Effect 1. He doesn’t know it when he arrives, but his job on Mars is to recover plans for a device to beat the Reapers. Better “Way, way, WAY Too Late” than never, I suppose.
Shepard arrives on Mars to discover that the plans for the MacGuffin are here in a research station, and that Cerberus is murdering everyone to secure those plans.
Like the main plot of Mass Effect 2, there aren’t any peasants to meet. There’s no dialog where you can talk to somebody about what this place was and how it worked. Liara shows up, but she’s just here to join the party and explain where we need to go and who to shoot. She’s not here to tell stories. Mars is just a big industrial base filled with mooks and dead civilians. Nobody around here is interested in filling in details or worldbuilding.
During the assault we discover that Cerberus has been partially husk-ifying their soldiers, turning them into half-machine slaves. We see that Cerberus is willing to slaughter a bunch of civilians to steal some intel for themselves. We see that they are needlessly cruel and the whole “pro humans” idea is just a fig leaf excuse for their atrocities.
So Cerberus mole Dr. Eva Coré infiltrated the outpost, betrayed the scientists, and let the Cerberus strike team in. They slaughtered the scientists, presumably twirling robo-mustaches beneath their power armor. Once they have the plans for the Crucible they start deleting them so that nobody else can have them.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 35: Mars Effect”
I get a lot of spam on this blog. This place is quasi-popular and pretty dang old by internet standards. This means it’s both an attractive target for spammers and there’s been plenty of time for this site to get added to everyone’s rolodex.
There are several layers of protection between the idiots and your eyeballs. First are the crude tools: IP blocking for particularly naughty IP rangesA year ago I tried removing some of these, and within a few days got crushed by unwanted traffic. I don’t know if it was a flood of spam, a low-yield DOS attack, or WHAT. But I needed my hosting provider to help me out and re-block the troublemakers. I’m less interested in lifting IP bans now. Sorry if you’re stuck in one of those nasty IP ranges and you can’t even reach the site to read this apology.. Then there’s filtering for clearly red-flag behaviors, like someone trying to leave comments who never loaded the page they’re supposedly commenting on, or people leaving a comment every few seconds. After that is the keyword checking, and filtering out people who post tons of links.
The final layer of spam filtering is… me.
Some filters delete the comment instantly. Some filters put the spam into the spam folder, where I’ll never see it unless I go looking for it. Some filters put suspect messages into moderation, where I’ll see them and have to choose to approve or delete them.
Spam is kind of like the weather. It varies in intensity. Some days I’ll only see a few, and some days I’ll see dozens. But over the last couple of years the spam has settled into a very predictable pattern. I never see porn links these days. Piracy stuff is now super-rare. Brute-force word salad messages are either an abandoned technique, or the filters have gotten really good at catching them, because I never see those anymore. The messages that are just dozens on links don’t get through. The only thing I see these days are the plausible-but-fake comment spam, which are just a little too subtle for the spam filters to detect. These are messages of semi-coherent English with no links. Usually the given name is the thing they’re selling, so that (if I allowed the spam through) clicking on the name would take you to their site.
The messages usually look something like this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spam Script”
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
T w e n t y S i d e d
