Link (YouTube) |
I have to say this gimmick section where the game does Batman / Joker role-reversal is charming and funny. Unlike the actual beginning of the game, it doesn’t wear out its welcome by belaboring the point.
The last episodes of this game have been recorded, and we should finish the game up next week.
For the last few years I’ve half-jokingly suggested that there is no upper limit on how much people are willing to discuss the Mass Effect games. This series is going to put that idea to the test. This series is going to run for the next eleven months, and by the end it will be the length of a novel. This is not a joke.
Yes, I have discussed this series to death over the years. In Spoiler Warning our group covered all three games, in excruciating detail, over the course of 36 hours of running commentary. You’d think there would be nothing left to say at this point.
But we played and commented on those games in their time. Today I want to look back and examine the series as a whole, now that we’ve seen it through to the end. The white-hot nerdrage has cooled, the reflexively defensive fans have moved on, and we have a couple of years of perspective between our expectations, the results, and where we are now. Mass Effect: Andromeda has been announced, and so I want to take one last look back over the whole trilogy with an analytical eye and (hopefully) without so much rancor.
Also be warned that since we’ll be discussing and contrasting all three games at once, there will be no spoiler tags for anything whatsoever. Use your head.
So much of the discussion of Mass Effect focuses on the ending of the trilogy. That seems to be where a majority of the audience checked out and stopped trusting the storyteller. But while the ending is the source of the controversy, I don’t think it’s the source of the problem, and it’s not where the interesting changes take place.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 1: The Ages of BioWare”
My column this week is a little bit about why Robin is often overlooked in movies and games, and why now is a good time for the Arkham games to start using him.
I was really disappointed in how limited the team fights are in Arkham Knight. You team up with Catwoman in Riddler’s stuff, you team up with Nightwing to fight Penguin, and you very briefly team up with Robin somewhere in the middle of the story. That’s a trivial slice of the overall game. There are more predator encounters than team fights. More Ubisoft-style towers to clear than team fights. There’s way more tank fights, more Batmobile races, and more puzzles.
It’s a shame that the strongest and most promising feature in the game was left as sort of an afterthought.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #112: Wii U, Marvel Movieverse, Mailbag”
A few weeks ago Peter H. Coffin asked how many people downloaded the podcast as MP3 compared to the number of people who chose OGG. Normally these numbers are greatly distorted by the fact that Google Chrome (and possibly other browsers) will auto-load the MP3 whenever the page is viewed, even if the user doesn’t explicitly try to download or play the file.
But the following week I used a quick work-around. The embeded player used a different file name, so we can have a proper apples-to-apples comparison. We can compare people who downloaded each file by clicking on the link, and filter out everyone who used the embedded player. Of people who deliberately clicked on the download links to save Diecast #109, 9,244 chose the MP3, and only 240 chose OGG.
If you’re curious, OGG files use an open-source file formatMP3 is licensed or proprietary in some way that I’ve never bothered to investigate. and it usually has a much smaller file size for the same audio. In this case, the MP3 version of Diecast #109 was 57MB while the OGG was just 31MB. That’s a pretty huge savings for what audiophiles assure me is “the same quality”.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Network Effect: MP3 versus OGG”
Link (YouTube) |
I’m not sure why this game is so obsessed with making sure that the people you rescue end up dead a few minutes later. I guess they were trying to show that Joker was a serious threat, but they just ended up making Batman look careless and dumb. The number of survivors of this night must be pretty small. I could accept a few deaths, like the initial burst of guards and the death of Dr. Young, but this “everyone dies” thing feels like an accidental theme. It’s this ongoing problem that nobody recognizes or talks about.
Paul Dini wrote this game, and he also worked on Batman: The Animated Stuff. I have to wonder if he intended this, or if this is a side-effect of Batman inhabiting a videogame. Once Batman saves someone, their purpose in the story is concluded. In a show, they can just stop appearing in scenes and the audience can assume they’re just off-stage someplace, still safe. But in a game, there is no “off stage”. So then the game developer starts thinking, “Wait, what happens if Batman comes back? I don’t want to have to add more lines of dialog, and it makes no sense to have them always repeat their “You just saved me a second ago!” dialog. Bah, I’ll just kill them off. Easy solution.
I don’t know. I’m just trying to make sense of what seems like a very odd design decision.
Remember that for simplicity I’m just talking about Arkham videogame Batman. Also, when I say things like “Batman is all about…” I’m not trying to make a definitive statement about what THE BATMAN means to all people, in some final and authoritative way. I’m not saying you’re enjoying Batman wrong if you like it for other reasons. Don’t make me cover this in footnotes and disclaimers. You know how this works. I’m just talking about my personal perception of Batman, under the assumption that if I feel this way, there’s a good chance a lot of you do too.
 |
Assuming that you’re like me, then you want your Batman stories to deliver your escapist fiction on a very particular wavelength. Twilight is contrived and engineered for a particular type of gratification, and Batman is aimed at another.
Yes, it’s a power fantasy. But power fantasies come in many forms. Some power fantasies are about saving one person, or about a super-being that has the power to stop natural disasters. Or a spy that can unravel plans that threaten the world. Or the galaxy. This particular work is a power fantasy about bringing criminals to justice.
The Batman power fantasy has silly costumes, absurdly on-the-nose character names, and a hero in a rubber suit with pointy ears. It’s outlandish and fun, but it’s also grounded in some very pedestrian fears and frustrations. It has a lot of appeal for the sort of person that might watch the news, hear about some horrible monster that committed a crime, and wish there was someone out there who could bring them to justice – preferably in a way that lets us vicariously enjoy smashing them in the face. His foes aren’t so much criminals as the embodiment of crime itself, a punching bag with the face of today’s horrendous criminal-of-the-week taped to it.
So we want a hero that can bring down the bad guys that – in the real world – get away with it. Maybe they cover their tracks too well. Maybe they bought off the cops. Or they’re hard to apprehend. Or they’re just really slippery in court. Whatever.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Why Batman Can’t Kill People, Part 2”
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
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.
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
T w e n t y S i d e d
