My column this week is a reader question where my answer goes immediately off-topic, devolves into a list, runs long, gets sidetracked, and then ends on a cliffhanger.
No need to thank me. Just doing my job.
It was just Josh and I this week. Mumbles was sick, Chris was on a trip, and Rutskarn is actually such an astounding nerd that our videogame podcast was not nerdy enough for him and he needed to go out and find something that is somehow even nerdier. Spoiler: This means no Spoiler Warning this week. Sorry. (You nerd.)
I might have some reheated content from yesteryear (an abandoned text LP I never finished) to post in place of Spoiler Warning this week. We’ll see how things go.
Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #141: Lord of the Rings, Firewatch, Square Enix”
Before we progress to my Skyrim wrap-up, I’d like to share a few brief notes concerning art design. I don’t think I’ve ever made more than a perfunctory mention of art when talking about the previous games, and that’s because I’ve never had much of substance to say about it: Daggerfall has too many pinups, Morrowind looks weird and cool but a bit too brown, Oblivion‘s wilderness is pretty, characters across the franchise look like dollar store coloring books or pantyhose dolls. In each entry the art does a passable job of capturing a fantastical setting for the game, whether that’s a novel setting like Vvardenfel:
Or a prosaic Tolkish pastiche like Cyrodiil:
And then there’s Skyrim.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Altered Scrolls, Part 19: Gloom”
Link (YouTube) |
In this episode we argued about the last time we did the Towers of Hanoi on Spoiler Waring. I am 99% sure it was Mass Effect EP8: Oh Crap, a Popup, which originally aired on March 2nd, 2010. For my part, I don’t blame Chris for confusing it with episodes he’s been in. I’ve done the same thing. Wait, I’m not in this one? I could swear I remember being there for the recording?!?
Here is the RocketJump Ft. Key & Peele Sketch sketch I mentioned in the episode.
Link (YouTube) |
I suspect that Jorak Uln here must be voiced by someone who did a lot of voice work in the 70’s. When I hear this voice, I get this strange flash of memory for Saturday morning cartoons, back when Hanna-Barbera was one of the giants of the medium, before they become a light snack for Turner Broadcasting. The voice is strikingly familiar, yet I can’t picture a single specific character associated with it.
So mid-way through the previous paragraph it really started bugging me. So I looked him up. This character is voiced by Frank Welker, a man I’ve been listening to my entire life without ever noticing his name. Check out just a partial list of his voices: Scooby-Doo, Fred (From Scooby-Doo), Megatron, Soundwave, Dr. ClawHey! I can do this voice!, Curious George, some Smurfs, some G. I. Joes, a bunch of mid-period Marvel superheroes, Schlepcar and Wonderbug, and – as I suspected – a healthy dose of Hanna-Barbera stuff. He has literally been voicing characters since before I was born.
Which makes me wonder: Welker is the man of a thousand voices. And yet, the creative director chose THIS as the voice of their ancient Sith Lord? Not the Megatron voice? Not something the the Dr. Claw range? None of the other villain voices Welker has done? No? They went with “goofy, overly nasal voice?” That’s an… interesting creative decision.
I can only assume this was deliberate. This “captured in a cutscene” stuff can really irritate players, and maybe making it slightly comic took the edge off. Maybe making him too menacing would run the risk of making this one-off troublemaker into too big a threat. We need Darth Malak to loom large over this story, and we can’t do that if you run into too many other Very Bad Dudes in your journeys. I mean, they already made this guy a Zombie Sith Vampire Nazi. If he also had a cool voice then they might as well dump this Revan clown and make Jorak Uln the main character.
The Alliance calls Shepard to some sort of hearing. This hearing (or whatever this is, they don’t follow any sort of protocol) would have been a great chance to pave over the plot holes of Mass Effect 2 and give us some context for what happened between “I’m going to find some way to beat the Reapers” and “I’m going to sit in this room doing nothing until I’m sent for”.
Maybe show that the Alliance was really, really wrapped up in some secondary problems or conflict that seemed really important to them at the time, which is why they seemed so inert in the last game. Maybe show a political struggle that explains or partly justifies their seemingly odd behavior. Maybe show that they were indeed working on the Reaper threat, but were afraid to tell you because of the whole Cerberus thing. Maybe this is all just an inquiry, so Shepard can explain (to both the Alliance and the players who missed Mass Effect 2) what happened at the Collector base.
As it stands, we know more about what happened in the Rachni wars two thousand years ago than we know what our protagonist has been up to since the end of the last game. This writer must hate worldbuilding.
The writer put the Alliance behind a stage curtain last game. At the start of this game they were free to claim whatever they liked about what the Alliance was doing. And they chose to reveal that the Alliance was doing… nothing.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 34: We Fight Then We Die”
Link (YouTube) |
I know we’re making fun of this poor game, but the truth is I really miss this stuff. Korriban is loaded with worldbuilding. It’s full of history, intrigue, puzzles, characters, and stories. Sure, the puzzles are a little clunky, the characters are arch, and the stories are all trope-y as hell, but it gave the game another dimension. A lot of this kind of content has been sanded off in modern games. You’re either doing combat or someone is explaining where we need to go to get the next batch of combat.
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
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.
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
T w e n t y S i d e d
