Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #121: Mario Maker, Metal Gear, Mad Max”
It’s been almost a year since I did one of these posts where I infuriate music nerds by explaining everything simply enough for you to understand, but just wrong enough to be really, really annoying.
As I’ve mentioned before, I am both a music snob and a music slob. Some people have deep, broad tastes. They appreciate everything from classical to metal, and know lots of obscure things about everything on the spectrum. My tastes are narrow and shallow. I basically only like electronic music, and I only like the catchy mainstream stuff. I’m not particularly knowledgeable. I can’t explain the musical roots and influences of an artist or genre. My talent for music appreciation begins and ends with, “This sounds catchy. I’ll listen to it until I’m sick of it.”
So reading music lessons from me is like getting lessons in movie production from somebody who only watches Michael Bay movies. It’s not that I can’t teach you anything, it’s just that there are literally tens of thousands of people in the world who could teach you orders of magnitude more.
But as luck would have it, I run this blog and not them, so you’ll have to settle for the flakes of knowledge I manage to glean from Wikipedia and my own misguided experiments. Today’s lesson – which has already been obnoxiously spoiled by the post title – is on the genre of “house music”. Here’s an example of the form:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Bad and Wrong Music Lessons, Part 6: “House” Music”
Link (YouTube) |
I don’t know what it is about this game that lets it get away with so much. The combat is wonky, the game balance is way off, the moral choices are both idiotic and frequently negated, the dungeons are long and repetitive, the first planet drags on forever, you’re not allowed be be a Jedi until you’re forced to be one, a couple of the characters are pointless, and the hats are humiliating. But I still love it.
I think it comes down to the same reason I love Mass Effect 1: They nail the tone I’m looking for, and a couple of the characters are outstanding. If you get those right, you can apparently fumble nearly everything else.
You know the drill. Just like last time, post your questions about Daggerfall below and I’ll go through and answer them.
But first, a sample of gameplay:
I’m not sure how long I’ve been in this dungeon for. A couple hours? It started out as a series of narrow sloping tunnels and then turned into a giant cavern…full…of…towers? Which is odd, because I’m relatively certain this was supposed to be a fort. Also I was sent here to kill orcs and this place is chock-a-bursting with werewolves.
Oh, it’s a room full of chains and torture devices. This can’t be that other room full of chains and torture devices–there were two half-naked female corpses in there from the assassins I killed–so this means I am, in fact, finding new areas. That’s a huge relief. Let’s check the map just for the hell of it.
Now, from this chunkily-rotating jagged 3D map of a winding multilevel dungeon with only one isometric angle that refuses to load anything but a very tight locus of content, I can conclude that I am currently in a dungeon. From this data point I can further induce that I am sick of the dungeon and that I want to leave.
I found a chain and clicked on it. Now I’m levitating. I’m not sure how that works, but I can use it to get down into this little pyramid thing. How will I get *out* of the pyramid thing? I couldn’t guess. It’s quite possible that I’ve just completely screwed myself and that there is no earthly way for my character to get out again. It’d be one thing if there was a vertical wall to climb, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
A monster type I’ve never seen before is shooting spells at me. I kill it. It would seem that it is not, in fact, an orc.
There is definitely no way out of here.
Hey, on the bright side, now I get to go back three hours ago. If I’m very careful, and follow my notes precisely, maybe I can get lost in the same direction as last time.
I am neither careful nor precise. I wind up down a different passage and end up in another big cavern. Across a giant gap I can see more towers, more tunnels. I am sick at the prospect of having another complex the size of the one I just clambered out of to explore, and begin to reflect on the many ways this game resents my not being a wizard who can teleport himself home immediately. Oh, and here’s a spider that I have to wrestle my camera to an awkward angle to kill. Interesting nature fact: spiders are not orcs.
You know, if I’m down here much longer, this quest is going to expire.
And now, your questions:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Altered Scrolls, Part 6: Combat and IPISYDHT#2”
Link (YouTube) |
We have a wookie with a life-debt. We have giant slug creature that’s named “Something the Hutt” who runs some sort of shady enterprise. Later we have a Jedi council led by a little Yoda guy. We have a doomsday space station, Jedi in brown robes, a spaceship named in the form of “Adjective Bird”Yes, ‘Millennium’ is clearly being used as an adjective in the case of Han Solo’s ship, even though the word is normally a noun. This is not a nit worth picking., a sidekick astromech droid that speaks in beeps, and yet another trip to Tatooine.
They call this the “Expanded Universe” but in a lot of ways it’s more like the “Expended Universe”. All the ideas are worn out and used up. They take something done in the movies and simply repeat it. Why invent new planets when we can keep going back to Tatooine? Why invent new crime bosses or new designs for Hutts when we can just make a never-ending series of Jabba knock-offs? Why create a new alien sidekick when we can repeat the “Wookie with a life-debt” gag?
Having said that, I admit it’s a difficult problem to solve and I think KOTOR actually does fairly well. Yes, they lean on some really iconic, trope-y ideas, but they also invent new stuff. Manaan, Selkath, Juhani, and HK47, are new. The Malak / Revan dynamic is nothing like Vader / Palpatine. Canderous feels Star-Wars-ish and he’s not just a lame copy of Han Solo. The Ebon Hawk looks and feels just right without being a lazy copy of the famous Corellian freighter. Calo Nord looks a bit doofy, but he feels like he belongs in this universe and he’s not a stupid Boba Fett knockoff.
Writing Star Wars is hard. You need to come up with something new and different, but it also needs to nail that particular tone and style of Classic Star Wars. That’s not easy. Partly it’s hard because actually expanding on the work of other writers while maintaining a consistent feel is challenging workIt’s probably more difficult than simply writing something original. Not only do you have all the normal obligations of pacing, plotting, and characterization, but you need to be able to understand and mimic the sensibilities of another author.. The other reason it’s hard is because nobody really agrees on what ingredients give Star Wars its identity. Which explains why so many authors copy the obvious superficial elements of the universe and then totally whiff on the tone.
You could make the case that KOTOR is both more original and yet more true to the original trilogy than the prequel movies are. I realize that sounds sort of heretical to claim that KOTOR is somehow “more Star Wars-y” than real, official, actual Star Wars, but that really is how it feels to me.
Before we move on to Mass Effect 2, let’s talk about what what we might expect to see as someone who just completed the first game and had no idea where the sequels were going to go.
In the past I’ve said that BioWare’s problem was that they didn’t have a plan for Mass Effect. After re-playing the first game and looking back at the arrangement of plot elements, I have to say it’s pretty clear I was completely wrong. Somebody did indeed have a plan. No, they didn’t know the secret behind the Reapers or how the heroes would stop them, but they did have a framework to build on. They had clear direction for the story. The first game spent a lot of time establishing a very particular arrangement of elements and characters to facilitate the quest-driven nature of this series. It was ideally suited to explain why a squad of three people on foot was the best way to solve the problem of genocidal machine gods.
Reapers are an unbeatable race of machine gods that are coming to wipe out all life. However, it’s completely up in the air as to how long it will take them to get here. More importantly, we have no means to fight them. This creates questions in the minds of the audience, and those questions perfectly line up with the needs of the plot and the motivations of the central characters. Shepard’s last line in the game drives this point home, “The Reapers are still out there. They’re coming. And I’m going to find some way to stop them!” The final line of the game explained what the sequel would be about.
Prothean ruins are scattered throughout the galaxy, and they hold secrets that can advance the plot. They can have technology which grants us new weapons. They can have a VI like Vigil that can bestow explicit information, or they can have beacons that dispense vague hints. They can have hidden mass relay jumps to secret locations. They can appear on distant uninhabited worlds, be found near colonies, or be hidden beneath existing cities. Most importantly, they can hold as much or as little about the Reapers as the plot requires. Basically, they give the writer the excuse to send us anywhere. They can design a variety of fun quests, set pieces, and locations, and then just stick a Prothean ruinBy “Prothean ruin” I mean any item from any of the previously reaped races, even if it’s not necessarily Prothean in origin. or artifact nearby to give the plot a reason to go there.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 13: Plan B From Outer Space”
Link (YouTube) |
What is the deal with BioWare and making stat-boosting items in the form of ludicrously ugly and ridiculous headware? Dragon Age had a bunch of floppy jester hats that looked like they were stolen from a sad clown, and this game has random household appliances you can strap to your face, “improving” your vision by poking you in the eye for hours on end.
“On one hand, I really want all these stat bonuses because the half the game is discovering and maximizing your combat advantages. On the other hand, it completely ruins the look of my character and makes every dialog into a farce, thus harming the roleplaying stuff that makes up the other half of the game.”
They toned it down quite a bit in Mass Effect. The headware is less comical, and the bonuses are so slight it makes most gear decisions a question of cosmetics.
But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hat in a BioWare game that looked awesome or cool. They’re always somewhere between “tolerable” and “hobo doing Geordi La Forge cosplay using things they pulled out of the dumpster behind Best Buy.”
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
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.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
T w e n t y S i d e d
