T w e n t y S i d e d
Link (YouTube) |
So maybe we didn’t make a lot of progress this week. And maybe our commentary rarely rose above the level of “LOL videogame logic!” But damn it, this was fun.
Let’s never ever do this again.
Hangout: New Year 2015: It’s Over!
EDIT: Thanks for watching. We'll have the full stream up on YouTube some time in the next week. Until then, you can watch the VOD here.
Original Post:
We’re going to play festive holiday games like Crusader Kings where you take over the world and plot the death of your family. It’s all in good fun!
Knights of the Old Republic EP38: Manaanigan
Link (YouTube) |
I’m not sure whether I respect KOTOR’s handling of the Selkath kids quest or am annoyed by it. On the one hand, in a modern (and unreasonably terrified you might miss content) game, the quest would have triggered when you approached the locked door whether you had it or not. And to an extent, that makes logical sense; at the very least, it doesn’t seem as if you knowing about the missing children ahead of time would make any difference as to whether or not the door would be open.
On the other hand, that aforementioned phobia that players might dare to actually miss content (the horror!) intensely irritates me on some base, indescribable level. And I have to give KOTOR props for committing to it, even if the player decides to take it as far as committing court-assisted suicide; I legitimately expected someone from the Republic to show up and go “No no no no,” right up to the moment we got electric-chaired.
I guess, ultimately, what I’m saying is that I respect KOTOR’s quest design, I just wish it was a little less clumsy with it. Which really is how I’ve come to feel about the game as a whole.
Knights of the Old Republic EP37: The Shocking Conclusion of KOTOR
Link (YouTube) |
Fair warning: This episode is bound to be an instant classic. It starts off with some armchair game design, loses its way, makes a bunch of inside jokes, and then goes off-topic, while unendurable ages of indistinguishable combat roll on. Then we discover we came all this way for nothing, before it’s revealed that we REALLY came all this way for NOTHING.
That’s a really strange ending for a AAA game, even in 2003. It lacked closure. Oh well. Next up I think we’re going to play Dragon Age: Origins: The Deep Roads: Maximum Difficulty: Solo Run.
See you there.
Good Robot #40: Overdraw
My to-do list grows and shrinks as the project rolls on. I’ll have 20 items on my to-do list one week. I’ll get 13 of them done. Then at our next weekly meeting, those 13 are reviewed. Some are marked as done. Some end up back on the list because my solution was too narrow, or didn’t work in all cases, or I misunderstood the problem. Then a few new issues will get piled onto the list.
So after the meeting my to-do list will be back up to 25 or so items and we’ll begin again. So it goes.
But some items have never been touched. They’ve haunted the bottom of the list, never getting done, never getting looked at. The oldest item on my list now is actually a collection of bullet-points that can all roughly be summed up as “performance problems”. To wit: The game runs too slow.
Not on my machine, mind you. It’s fine on my machine. But on craptopsCrappy laptops, or any similarly under-powered machine. is runs at about half the framerate it should. So what’s going on?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot #40: Overdraw”
Experienced Points: Yes, Minecraft is Still a Thing
My column this week seems like it’s about Minecraft, but really it’s about the occasional disconnect between the hype-driven gaming press and the actual interests and passions of gaming culture.
I include myself in this. If I did my writing based on what I was playing, this would be a “Minecraft and retro games” blog, with a new AAA game thrown in a few times a year for variety. Deciding what to talk about is always a balancing act between what you’re into and what you think other people want to talk about. It’s not bad, it’s just a strange artifact of this process that sometimes games that are a huge deal end up vanishing into their own subculture.
Diecast #134: Steampocalypse, 2015 Wrap-up, Star Wars
Hosts: Josh, Rutskarn, Shamus, Campster, Mumbles. Episode edited by Rachel.
This week we have a TOTAL SPOILER discussion on the new Star Wars. Turn back or have the movie spoiled. This means you, fanboy. Seriously, I drop the biggest spoiler of the whole movie right at the 40-minute mark as I introduce the topic.
Let’s just assume the comments will be spoiler-heavy, too.
Mumbles and Rutskarn haven’t done their end-of-year thing yet, so this week is their chance. Find out what they thought of 2015.
00:01:16: OMG Steampocalypse 2015!!11
Link (YouTube) |
00:08:56: Rutskarn and Mumbles talk about 2015.
They start with Undertale.
00:14:42: Pillars of Eternity
00:14:51: Arkham Knight
00:17:54: Fallout 4
00:20:25: Hotline Miami 2
00:21:51: Tony Hawk
00:22:59: Skylanders
00:26:11: The Beginners Guide
00:27:09: Fallout 4 again for some reason?
00:40:54: STAR THE FORCE AWAKENS WARS
Link (YouTube) |
From The Archives:
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Charging More for a Worse Product
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.
Punishing The Internet for Sharing
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
This is Why We Can’t Have Short Criticism
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
id Software Coding Style
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.
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.