Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #138: Pony Island, Dragon’s Dogma”
I’m wrestling with the most gut-twisting and unfair dilemma of my misspent life, and it naturally follows that I’ve taken my ethical contortions to the bar. I’ve a hazy notion that a few stiff ones will push me out of my deadlock. They won’t, obviously; that’s just a thin pretext for the usual moral procrastination and substance abuse. I’ve reached the point where I can observe and label my failings with the keenness of an ornithologist.
That’s the bother, isn’t it? Knowing what’s wrong with your life is certainly helpful. It just doesn’t require the same skillset as fixing it.
“Bartender, give me something really disgusting.”
“I’ll have what he’s having,” wheezes the man beside me.
The voice is painfully familiar. I do one take, then–as the evidence filters through the inebriation–a double-take. That besotted fop sitting next to me, red-eared, red-cheeked, and with the wispiest peach-fuzz hint of grizzled stubble on his chin–he’s the coach of the Surf Somethings, and he looks as bad as I do.
“What?” he says. “So I’m having a couple. Elves can’t get drunk.”
“I think they can,” I say.
“Can they? Shit.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Half Time CH15: The Big Game”
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Here it is. The big reveal of the big secret the game has been hiding right under our noses. The truth is out, and it will forever change how we see our character, our friends, and our relationship with the villain. Old conversations will take on new meaning and the earlier visions suddenly tell us more than we realized.
So naturally I expect everyone will jump down to the comments and argue about THAC0. Nerds.
Like I’ve said before: This twist wasn’t so much “concealed” as “obfuscated by genre tropes”. BioWare did the exact same thing in Jade Empire. All the stuff that sounded like the usual “YOU ARE THE PROTAGONIST OF A VIDEOGAME” ego-stroking was actually the foreshadowing. And most people didn’t question it because we’ve been soaking in “chosen one” narratives since we were tiny little baby nerdlings and this sounded like more of the same.
Here’s the latest episode of Spoiler Warning, in which we have a surprise guest!
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When Mumbles mentioned dragging dead women to her hideout, she was talking about this gem from the Fallout 4 forum, on NeoGaf, by way of Twitter, now shared on my blog:
T w e n t y S i d e d
A NeoGAF member points out what he finds to be a terrible flaw in Fallout 4 pic.twitter.com/Q2r8UKQgGn
— Alex Donaldson (@APZonerunner) November 20, 2015
The stuff Chris brought up about butts vs. anuses vs. WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS is a reference to our fourth anniversary episode.
So you shoot the baby Reaper in the face until it falls down and goes boom. Once it’s gone, you can access the Collector power core or whatever, and you can either set it to explode, or set it to irradiate all life and leave the technology intact. The Illusive Man wants you to leave the installation so his scientists can study it. But Paragon Shepard objects because…
This place is an abomination?
This is some messed-up superstitious thinking. He seems to be suggesting that learning about our enemy is inherently evil. Your companions also take this position, too. Even #1 Cerberus apologist Miranda suddenly does an abrupt heel-face turn saying, “I’m not so sure. Seeing it first hand… Using anything from this base seems like a betrayal.” And not because of indoctrination, but because of some completely un-articulated principles.
The last game ended with us beginning a quest for knowledge. That idea was wiped away to fight the Collectors. And now at the very end of the game we finally return to the question of “How do we stop the Reapers from killing us all?” except the narrative frames the acquisition of knowledge as an inherently evil and irresponsible thing. As a fan of sci-fi, I find this idea to be repugnant. The first game gave us a quest for knowledge and the second one is going to follow up with caveman science fiction?
Shepard says, “It liquefied people. Turned them into something horrible. We have to destroy the base.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 31: Choices Matter”
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I wasn’t in this episode. I also haven’t watched the episode. And I barely remember this part of the game. So I have nothing to say about these events. Let’s just watch it together and ponder how it’s still more fun to watch this game than to actually play The Old Republic.
If you had asked me yesterday how important Twitter was to me I’d have said, “Meh. I check it once an hour or so, post a few messages a day.” And that’s technically true. But it wasn’t until now that I realized just how integral the service is to my internet habits.
Twitter has been down for about 3 hours, and I keep getting caught in these stupid little obsessive behavioral loops:
I would never have guessed the service was this important to my information diet, but there you go. I can’t believe we’re supposed to be the smartest mammals on this planet. This is disgraceful.
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.