Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #117: Mailbag, Text Plays, Licensed Games”
Hey, everyone, it’s Rutskarn. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with your farmer’s almanac, but the Time of Terror and Blood was recently upon us, and the Great Beast you know as Josh was briefly trapped inside the Southern California ley line. I took advantage of his psychic imprisonment to schedule an ad hoc game of Paranoia. Unfortunately for you, I recorded it.
Also starring: Josh’s brother Glitch, Glitch’s fiancee Madison.
Keep in mind that this session was planned, run, recorded, and in some capacity edited on the fly. I didn’t even know we’d be playing Paranoia when I arrived (I brought a suitcase and flash drive that contained about fifteen separate systems and let them decide). Despite that, we had a lot of fun, and hopefully you will too. I’ve cleaned the audio as best as I could and trimmed a few breaks, but I’ll warn you up front–it’s far from perfect. The Hellish winds that follow Josh like ashen cherubs have that effect on a recording suite.
(Note also that anyone who illustrates anything that happened in this session will earn my undying love.)
And below the fold, all notes and secret information that passed this session:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rutskarn’s RPG Tales: Paranoia (Full Session Recording)”
Link (YouTube) |
That joking around we were doing about how Silent Hills was going to be turned into a pachinko machine? Yeah. That wasn’t joking around. That’s a real thing that Konami is doing.
I know I make a big fuss over Silent Hill 2 and how developers keep getting it wrong, but the truth is I’m not really a Silent Hill fan as much as a fan of the concepts and tone. I wouldn’t want to play a knock-off Batman game with some generic faux-Batman lead. But Silent Hill? I don’t care about the name. I’m here for the dread, the art style, the psychological games, the twisted monsters, somber quiet moments, the sense of mystery and the focus on exploration over combat.
Amnesia is the closest thing we have now. That’s nice and all, but I really wish someone else would pick up the Silent Hill torch and run with it.
“Spoopy” is apparently a real word now. I learned it from my teenagers. That’s something of a turning point in the life of a parent, when your kids start teaching you new words. Spooy is apparently a twee sort of spooky. Dracula is spooky. Count Chocula is spoopy.
The first thing a player does in The Elder Scrolls I: Arena is give up on the game's story entirely (after approximately forty seconds of the intro). The second thing you do is create your character.
This means you pick a premade class that has its own favored skills, restrictions on equipment, and schools of magic allowed. These classes would confer scaling benefits as players kill monsters and gain experience. Anyone who's played a normal RPG was not going to be very surprised by thisâ€"unless they're from the future and have played the other Elder Scrolls games. For those of you who are but haven't, let me put it this way: it's like finding out Conan the Barbarian had an internship at a small family-owned dressmaker's shop. There's absolutely nothing wrong or shameful about it–it just seems like the sort of thing they'd deny violent at a cocktail party.
Every TES game after Arena rejects traditional classes, skill point allocations, and levels in favor of more organic systems that convince the player they're not just a stat block wandering a world of stat blocks, but a reasonable simulation of a person in a world of reasonable simulations of people. Levels and classes are more abstract systems entirely contingent on player choices, not on premade builds and abstract scaling. So why didn't Bethesda do it like that in Arena?
You might well argue they didn't know any betterâ€"and you'd probably be right. The intro of the game makes it clear that whatever its goals, Arena's texture and setting were not put together with a whole lot of foresight or deliberate vision. The game was very forgivably thrown together out of spare Dungeons and Dragons sprockets and all-purpose public domain fantasy pap. It's not fair to judge them for that; however, it is fair and by no means an accusation to point out that the less organic immersion-focused approach to character design is reflective of a less organic immersion-focused approach to the rest of the game.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Altered Scrolls, Part 2: Dungeon Sprawling”
Virmire is gorgeous. After the bland monotony of Therum and the frustrating monotony of Feros, it kind of feels like this game just isn’t interested in engaging you visually. But then you reach Virmire and you have vibrant greens contrasting with crashing ocean waves against a spectacular backdrop of lightning. You even get some scuttling indigenous life and some birds to give the place a little flair of verisimilitude.
There’s a lot going on here. The Wrex confrontation, the Salarian commandos, the indoctrination research, the meeting with Saren, and the Kaiden / Ashley choice. So we’re probably going to need to spend a few entries on this.
We arrive at Saren’s compound and find that he’s cured the genophage and is pumping out an army of Krogan. He’s also researching indoctrination. This guy has all kinds of hobbies.
Wrex finds out about the cure, and doesn’t like the idea of us blowing it up in the process of stopping Saren. So we have to talk him down. Now is a good time to talk about…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 8: Racists! In! Spaaaaaaace!”
Warning: The following video contains images that may cause extreme terror in some viewers that are Campster.
Campster discretion is advised.
Link (YouTube) |
We needed a a couple of silly one-off episodes before we start the next season of Spoiler Warning, which is still a secret that I can’t tell you and you will never figure out so you probably shouldn’t bother trying.
I want to stress that this is a free game, and I’m not even sure why or how it was made. It’s very likely that all of the seemingly dumb and goofy things here were done on purpose. The title screen makes it pretty clear this thing isn’t trying to be Amnesia. So while we’re laughing at the game in confusion, please don’t mistake this for some sort of mocking “CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW LAME THIS INDIE GAME IS?” shtick. These are just our honest gut reactions to unexpected content in an unknown game.
EDIT: Talking to my daughter Esther confirms my suspicions that this game was designed to exploit, mock, or comment on the fad of “Scream Streams” where people play through jump-scare games and over-react for the audience. Five Nights at Freddie’s is the most notable example of the genre. A game that’s made for streamers instead of the masses.
Hosts: Shamus, Pushing Up Roses, Campster, Rutskarn, and Josh.
Thanks so much to Pushing Up Roses for being on the show.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #116: Voice Acting, King’s Quest, Windows 10”
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
T w e n t y S i d e d
