T w e n t y S i d e d

It’s always a bit of a gamble when we select what game we’re going to play next on this show. When we begin covering a game, we’re committing to spending several months with it. We don’t want to get three weeks into a series and find we hate doing it and the audience has mostly stopped watching. That’s bad for our morale, bad for the show, and bad for everyone else.

For a while we were shy of games we hated, because we didn’t want to be “too negative”. We had a few series end badly for us and descend into a dull slog of repeating the same four complaints again and again for five hours. (BioShock is the biggest example of this, and for years we’d say, “Ugh. That game would just turn into another BioShock season” when discussing potential games.)

But eventually we realized it’s not negativity that hurts the show, it’s the repetition. It doesn’t matter if we love a game or hate a game, as long as we have lots to say about it. Hitman Absolution is a great example. It was a stupid game that we all disliked on one level or another, but the brokenness was so widespread that we always had something fresh to discuss.

By that standard, KOTOR might just be too good. There are so many facets to this game that we’re interrupting each other trying to cover it all. Consider…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Knights of the Old Republic EP4: A Bib, for Tuna”

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.

That’s the OTHER reason people dislike Carth. If you stray from the light side, he gets sanctimonious and acts like he’s in charge. Okay, he kind of has a point, inasmuch as the “evil” choice is usually a blend of Zsasz-level sociopathy, Rimmer-level pettiness, and Doofenshmirtz-level stupidity. But it’s still a major killjoy when you’re trying to have some fun with the game and Carth cuts in like he’s your mom.

Of course, having him ignore your evil shenanigans wouldn’t work either. I think the problem here is that the writers gave you all of these idiotic villain choices in the part of the game where your only companion is a pushy boyscout with trust issues. If go go evil he’s a killjoy, and if you play it virtuously he’s still difficult. On top of that, he’s the only character available to pull exposition duty, so when he’s not judging you, he’s busy dumping exposition on you. He gets better later if you stick with him, but by then most people have started ignoring him and spending time with the rest of the team.

So I don’t personally hate Carth, but I do see why he gets a lot of hate from the fanbase. The deck is really stacked against him.

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.