Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #122: Drew Karpyshyn at BioWare, Destiny, Assassins Creed, D&D”
“DAW” stands for Digital Audio Workstation, and is a somewhat sloppy term used to refer to all the various programs people use to make music. It’s sloppy, because the term “audio” can efer to a lot of non-musical work. Or it could be the program you use to mix all the sounds of the real-world instruments you played with your fleshy human hands. Or it could mean – as in my case – the program used to make all the instrument sounds, map their notes, and mix them together. In any case, for our purposes here when I say DAW I mean “the thing I use to make a song on the computer”.
In the past few entries I complained about Magix Music Maker, my DAW of choice. Several people suggested I give LMMS a try. I did, and now I’m really conflicted.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Bad and Wrong Music Lessons: DAWs”
EDIT: Thanks for watching. We’ll hopefully upload the whole thing to YouTube later this week for those of you who missed it.
Original post:
Today at 6pm Eastern US time, we’re going to play Kerbal Space Program. Well, Josh is going to play KSP, and I’m going to watch. And so are you. Yes, because this will be his first time playing the game. If you’ve never played the game before, it will be an instructive experience to help you get started. If you have played the game, it will allow you to to experience the feeling of smug superiority you get from watching someone else fail at something you understand.
KSP was one of my top picks of 2013, and I still come back to it once in a while. I can’t wait until Josh uncovers all the problems that explain why the game is probably actually horrible and everyone should feel bad for liking it. Because that’s his job. The stream will be live here when the event starts:
http://www.twitch.tv/spoilerwarningshow
If you are irresponsible and have Flash enabled then this countdown timer should show when the event starts:
If not, you’ll have to do the math yourself. Good luck!
As I discussed last time, the series' abstract dice-rolling combats feltâ€"with the advent of more precise graphics and more engaging action-game contemporariesâ€"increasingly alienating and unsatisfying. There was always something reasonably abstract about a failed sword swing in a crudely-rendered 2D game, something that took the sting out of a wimpy failure, but players could now see that they were holding up their end perfectly; when they clicked the mouse, they saw their spear go right the enemy's bean, dead on the money. Hearing that damnable teeth-grinding whff that signaled a wasted attack felt like getting punished for something that was the character's fault, not the players'. As far as cardinal RPG sins go, creating a deliberate and hostile disconnect between player and character ranks highly.
Morrowind was just about the last videogame that hadn’t learned this lesson: if you're gonna roll dice, roll dice. Asking players to successfully perform a task and then rolling to see if it succeeds is just frustrating and obnoxious. This mishandling, compounded with the game’s rather stern beginning, makes for a very unpleasant and ragged start to the game.
There’s only one reason this combat is bearable at all, and it’s this: the game provides the tools to make failure rare or nonexistent. Let's talk about all the level scaling Morrowind didn’t have.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Altered Scrolls, Part 8: No Fair Fights”
I don’t hate Mass Effect 2. It’s not a horrible game. I know people find this hard to believe, because I’ve spent so much time complaining about it. People look at the sheer volume of negative words I’ve put out and assume I’ve got this burning vendetta against the game, or that I think it’s the Worst Thing Ever.
Often when I do this sort of long-form analysis people will respond with “Why are you so angry?” and “Why did you write a book-length tirade about this?” I think this is a side-effect of the common “nerd rage” shtick that some critics do. People see something critical and they just assume it’s supposed to be performed in the voice of a spittle-spewing madman.
But if you look you’ll notice this series isn’t filled with outraged hyperbole, profanity, or personal attacks against the developer. I’m not making demands, claiming that I’ve been wronged, or accusing anyone of fraud. Yes, it’s negative, but it’s not outrage. If your mechanic tells you that your alternator is busted, he’s not saying you have THE WORST CAR EVER and that YOU ARE DUMB FOR OWNING IT. He’s just telling you why it doesn’t work.
That’s what this series is. We’re opening up the hood on Mass Effect 2 and finding things that don’t work.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 15: Change Happens”
It’s been almost three months since the last update. This is unfortunate. I’d really like to post these on a weekly basis, but I couldn’t afford to take time away from working on the game for talking about the game.
This week Good Robot is headed to EGX 2015. Pyrodactyl will have a booth on the show floor and will be letting the public try the game for the first time.
On one hand, it’s nice that the public is going to see the game. On the other hand, it’s a shame that trade shows are the deafening, crowded, sensory-overloading marathons. In an ideal world, we’d get to put someone in front of the game, watch them play, and then interview them afterwards to see what worked and what didn’t.
This is how Valve does playtesting, and I think it’s the way to go, particularly if you’re unsure of your mechanics. If you’re just making a cookie-cutter shooter, then you probably don’t need to have playtesters try the game while you observe them. But if you’re doing something new – even if it’s just new to your team – then it’s invaluable to be able to make sure that the experience you envisioned is the one they’re having.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot #33: Good Robot at EGX”
This Friday at 6pm eastern AMERICA TIME’America time’ is like ‘regular time’, except it occasionally moves forward or backward an hour according to a system that’s harder to understand than American Football. (Handegg.) we’ll be having a hangout where Josh will play Kerbal Space Program for our amusement. This will be his first time playing the game, so I hope you aren’t squeamish about watching adorable little Kerbals die in a violent conflagration of steel and burning jet fuel.
Here’s a countdown to the event, which SHOULD be localized to your timezone so you don’t have to do the conversion yourself:
I’ll have a post with the links to the stream as the hour approaches.
Wear a seatbelt. And a helmet.
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
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.
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
T w e n t y S i d e d
