Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Friday Oct 23, 2015

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 229 comments

 Knights of the Old Republic EP23: You Must Gather Your PartyPrevious Post

Next PostKnights of the Old Republic EP25: Lore Drop 

If you’re reading the comments, then you know there’s a pronounced and constant debate on KOTOR vs. KOTOR II, which is actually a proxy of the larger debate of Obsidian vs. Other RPG Developers.

BioWare – especially pre-EA BioWare – really likes their black and white morality, their lighthearted adventure, and their happy endings. Obsidian is more of a moral quagmire / combative relationships / complex ending kind of place. Fans of either style have been slugging it out for years:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Knights of the Old Republic EP24: Great Paladin”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Knights of the Old Republic EP23: You Must Gather Your PartyPrevious Post

Next PostKnights of the Old Republic EP25: Lore Drop 

229 comments

Messing With the Site Theme

By Shamus Posted Friday Oct 23, 2015

Filed under: Notices 107 comments

 Kerbal Space Problems: It's over!Previous Post

Next PostHangout Friday Dec 4: Steam Controller! 

I spend a lot of time looking at this site. Statistically, you stop by once or twice a day, but I’m here all day, every day. On one hand, it’s really important to keep the site consistent, because nothing drives people crazy like change. On the other hand, every once in a while the monotony gets to me and I have to change SOMETHING.

Guess what we’re doing today?

Rationale:

Rutskarn is posting twice weekly now, and lots of people are missing the detail that some stuff is from me and some stuff is from him. So I need to make the author more prominent. This means adding author image and name and having it link to our respective Patreons.
I need to make the footnotesWhich aren’t really footnotes because they don’t appear at the foot of the article but you know what I mean. work better for mobile usersOr people on tablets, touchscreens, or using any other non-standard interface that makes precise selections difficult and small text unreadable.. Specifically, the default footnote size is much too small and hard to selectOr if you’re me, IMPOSSIBLE. I can’t even use the mobile version of most sites on my phone. My fingers are too fat and opaque and so I’m always poking the wrong stuff., and the text itself is a little on the small size. So for mobiles, I’ve expanded the size of both the link and the text to match the size of the rest of the article text.
I’m sick of the look of the site. So I want to change something, but I don’t want to cause trouble. Changing fonts is a good way of making things look fresh without moving everything around and causing chaos. I’ve been using the same fonts for almost half a decade now, and Google has greatly expanded their collection of fonts since the last time I messed with them.

So that’s what I’m doing / have done.

This post is just a catch-all for feedback so we don’t clutter up Mass Effect and KOTOR comments with discussions on typography.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Kerbal Space Problems: It's over!Previous Post

Next PostHangout Friday Dec 4: Steam Controller! 

107 comments

Knights of the Old Republic EP23: You Must Gather Your Party

By Shamus Posted Thursday Oct 22, 2015

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 178 comments

 Knights of the Old Republic EP22: DJ Jedi La ForgePrevious Post

Next PostKnights of the Old Republic EP24: Great Paladin 

Link (YouTube)

In this episode we talk about one of my great problems as an RPG fan, which is that the game style I like doesn’t actually exist, and so everything is a compromise. I’m picky about gameplay, and this genre really doesn’t have a lot of room for people who are picky about gameplay.

The preferred paradigm is the “turn-based realtime”, where you pause, issue orders to the whole party, then un-pause for a second, then pause and repeat. For me it’s like trying to play chess but stopping to watch five seconds of a movie fight scene after every move. It ruins both experiences. The action distracts me from concentrating on the strategy, and the pausing breaks the flow of the action.

Hate.

Hate.

HATE IT.

My ideal games commit to either one or the other. Give me full-on turn-based like Fallout 1 / XCom, or embrace the action gameplay of (say) the Witcher 3 or the later Mass Effects. And whatever you do, don’t ask me to control a party. I’m here because I want to play a character, not manage a murder committee.

Which… fine. So go play action games, right?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Knights of the Old Republic EP23: You Must Gather Your Party”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Knights of the Old Republic EP22: DJ Jedi La ForgePrevious Post

Next PostKnights of the Old Republic EP24: Great Paladin 

178 comments

Mass Effect Retrospective 19: The Importance of Peasants

By Shamus Posted Thursday Oct 22, 2015

Filed under: Mass Effect 216 comments

 Mass Effect Retrospective 18: There's No "You" in "Team"Previous Post

Next PostMass Effect Retrospective 20: Now Hiring for Unknown Position 

Before we resume talking about our new squad-mates, let’s back up and talk about the one that joined us at the start of the game:

Miranda

Sorry to butt in Shepard, but I'm really falling behind the rear admiral and it's bumming me out. I need to ass you for help before I get canned. Butts.

Miranda is a disaster of conflicting purposes. We’re supposed to believe that this lady is a brilliant medical researcher, and a badass merc, and a super-biotic, and the leader of the research project that CURED DEATH, and a natural team leader, and she barely looks thirty. Even Wesley Crusher wasn’t that big of a miracle child. And then on top of this she’s got this ongoing sob story about growing up fabulously rich and having high expectations placed on her. So on top of her amazing abilities and her insufferable smugness, she’s got this horrible case of daddy issues and first-world problems.

And then she has the nerve to be an asshole towards Jack, who was literally tortured as a child by Cerberus. The moment Jack gets on the ship, Miranda starts antagonizing her in the most childish, highschool-drama-bullshit kind of way. If Miranda is so smart, then why would she support the idea of recruiting an unstable psycho killer for a serious mission? And even if we buy that, how stupid and childish is it to deliberately provoke and taunt her like this? If Miranda is such an awesome leader, then why is she doing the thing most likely to make Jack freak out and cause problems? (And it does indeed cause problems later.)

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 19: The Importance of Peasants”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Mass Effect Retrospective 18: There's No "You" in "Team"Previous Post

Next PostMass Effect Retrospective 20: Now Hiring for Unknown Position 

216 comments

Knights of the Old Republic EP22: DJ Jedi La Forge

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Oct 21, 2015

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 139 comments

 Knights of the Old Republic EP21: You're Totally Ship-facedPrevious Post

Next PostKnights of the Old Republic EP23: You Must Gather Your Party 

Link (YouTube)

Waaaugh ga graaaahu awagh gr gruuuh. Grah wuuuuuuhhh rowr. Graaaahu awagh rowr grah. Woough gruh aowu gruh gruh wuuuuuuhhh! Awagh rowr grah awagh groogh gruuuh rowr grah. Wuuuuuuhhh woough gruh aowu gruh gruh ngooooow. Hgaaaooowuh graaaahu awagh gruh gruuuh ngow awagh nguh wuuuuuuhhh awagh. Graaaahu ga graaaahu awagh groh gruuuh wuuuuuuhhh awagh rowr grah.

Translated:

These Wookie audio samples are too long.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Knights of the Old Republic EP21: You're Totally Ship-facedPrevious Post

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139 comments

Half Time CH4: Pastrami of One

By Rutskarn Posted Tuesday Oct 20, 2015

Filed under: Lets Play 44 comments

 Half Time CH3: Kill it with ShirePrevious Post

Next PostHalf Time CH5: Cut Short 

The following anti-elf epithets are authored by myself and available for free and unlicensed personal and commercial use.

#1: Dandelion botherer

The locker room smells like inspiration and perspiration; an improvement from only yesterday, where it smelled like putrefaction and losing factions, gauche malaise and roach buffets, halfling reek and unpaddled creek. Air fresheners work wonders. So does enough dwarf scrumpy to trick the nose into thinking I’d died and gone to purgatory.

“You may be wondering why I called you here today,” I say. My two assistant coaches nod slowly. “That’s handy, because I was wondering in a more general sense why you were here.“

This arouses further confusion. Or something. It’s hard to tell with their baseline expression.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Half Time CH4: Pastrami of One”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.

 Half Time CH3: Kill it with ShirePrevious Post

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44 comments

Experienced Points: The Survival Horror Genre is a Mess

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 19, 2015

Filed under: Column 80 comments

 Experienced Points: Game Developers Don't Know How to Scare UsPrevious Post

Next PostExperienced Points: SOMA is Something Unique in Gaming 

My column this week is about how the genre label of Survival Horror is completely meaningless and nobody agrees what these games should be.

Although, this isn’t the only dysfunctional genre in the industry. In fact, I’d say every time we see someone call a game an “X clone”, we’re seeing an example of a genre without a proper name. People still sometimes call Torchlight a “Diablo Clone”, despite the fact that this genre is old enough to vote and features many disparate titles.

An example of a good genre label is shmup. It’s easy to rememberIt’s short for “shoot ’em up”., it’s a unique word, and there isn’t a lot of “is this game a shmup or not?” confusion along the margins.

I’m not sure why some genres got useful names and some didn’t. Perhaps it’s that the medium is just growing too dang fast. It took movies over half a century to go from technological novelty to cultural ubiquity, and games covered the same distance in about 20 years. Maybe we’ll have more useful genre names once the medium settles down a bit.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Experienced Points: Game Developers Don't Know How to Scare UsPrevious Post

Next PostExperienced Points: SOMA is Something Unique in Gaming 

80 comments

OLDER POSTS



From The Archives:

Miranda

I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3

The Best of 2019

Autoblography

Trashing the Heap

What Does a Robot Want?

What is Vulkan?

Shamus Plays WOW

The Best of 2012

The Game That Ruined Me

Batman: Arkham City