Top 10 Spoiler Warning

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Jun 3, 2015

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 61 comments

No Spoiler Warning this week. Again. We spent so much time fighting with audio that when the video stream began flaking out we were too grumpy, tired, and frustrated to deal with it. But we should have it all hammered out next week. In the meantime, Mumbles has compiled a list of her top 10 favorite Spoiler Warning Episodes. Go read it. Number 1 will shock you! (It shocked me, anyway. Her #1 is the episode where I basically griefed the entire cast through incompetence.)

But if we’re doing easy-breezy “top 10 list” type contentBecause I got nothin this week, and I’m elbow-deep in the guts of Good Robot right now and don’t have time to make something intelligent. then the least I can do is pitch in. So here is my top ten list of favorite Spoiler Warning episodes:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Top 10 Spoiler Warning”

 


 

Experienced Points: The HairWorks Debacle Explained

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Jun 2, 2015

Filed under: Column 100 comments

This week I talk about the whole NVIDIA vs. AMD pissing contest as it applies to the Witcher 3 “HairWorks” feature.

I actually wanted to do a rant on how both companies are staggering morons when it comes to how they name and market their products. But to illustrate how bad they are, you have to explain the naming systems of product lines, and I can never remember how those work because my brain refuses to store large quantities of unmitigated gibberish. I keep trying to educate myself about it, but my eyes glaze over and Istart drooling on myself. Hours later I’ll regain my senses and find myself scrolling through cat pictures on Facebook. It’s so dumb and confusing that I can’t follow it well enough to explain it for the purposes of describing why it’s so dumb and confusing.

This is also why my graphics card is as old as it is. I kind of feel like, if you asking me to put down that kind of money, at the bare minimum you need to make it as simple and as painless for me as possible. People shopping for a new iPhone don’t have to worry about choosing the correct GSM frequency bands. For crying out loud.

Having said all that, I’m delighted at how much things have improved. Back at the turn of the century, I used to need to worry about graphics hardware every two years. Now graphics hardware has a sort of console-like lifespan where you can go four years or so before you need to go through the ordeal of buying a new one. Even nicer is that it’s less painful to be on the low end of the tech curve. Oblivion was a nightmare. I’m running the Witcher 3 on the lowest settings, and it’s all good. The grass ends about ten meters from me, but other than that it looks like Shadow of Mordor from last year.

 


 

Diecast #106: Witcher 3, Kickstarter, Guy Fieri

By Shamus Posted Monday Jun 1, 2015

Filed under: Diecast 205 comments

Like we said at the top of the episode, we recorded this session in Mumble, an open-source VOIP solution. It was pretty much a disaster, audio-wise. Chris spent a lot of the evening being unintelligible to us, and Rutskarn spent a lot of the evening unable to understand anyone.

So we can have Ventrilo and its stupid buggy clipped messages and idiotic lack of a chat window, or we can have Mumble and spend every podcast playing “What? Say th-t aga– I didn– —- -ou.” Please don’t bombard us with suggestions on how to fix Mumble. We played with every setting available and this was the best we could come up with after an hour of trial-and-error.

A shame. I’m really going to miss that chat window.

On a more positive note, high[er] grade audio equipment is on the way for Rutskarn and I. A mysterious benefactor has made sure we’ll have solid equipment. I’m pretty excited.

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Hosts: Shamus, Campster, Josh, and Rutskarn.

Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #106: Witcher 3, Kickstarter, Guy Fieri”

 


 

Witcher 3: First Impressions

By Shamus Posted Friday May 29, 2015

Filed under: Game Reviews 142 comments

I’ve stated before that I do not like the Witcher series. I played the first act of the first Witcher game and quit when I got sick of the dreary visuals, agonizing loading times, awful combat, cumbersome interface, and skeezy protagonist.

I played several hours of the Witcher 2. I liked Geralt more, the visuals were better, and the loading screens were fixed, but I still hated the combat. Worse, the world was so relentlessly dark that I didn’t care about it. “Which group of ugly, undeserving assholes do you choose to help at the expense of the other?” is not a choice I enjoy, and that was the only kind of choice I ever seemed to make. The combat felt like fighting a linebacker with a foam sword. It was time consuming and fiddly and more work than I was willing to put in.

But people keep telling me this series is amazing and fans keep being amazed that I don’t like it. So I’m back for the third installment. Will Geralt and I click this time?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Witcher 3: First Impressions”

 


 

Audio Editing for Podcasts

By Shamus Posted Thursday May 28, 2015

Filed under: Projects 87 comments

Once a week, I sit down with an hour of raw audio and Audacity and produce our weekly podcast. It’s a really annoying job to me, mostly because it doesn’t seem like it should exist. You record audio, you upload audio. What else is there to do? Why mess with it?

But no, apparently it takes a lot of work just to create the sort of medium-quality audio we have on our show. It’s like when I found out about foley artists, who painstakingly record all the everyday sounds to put in a feature film, because normal boom mics don’t pick them up and the world sounds mute without the footstep, clothing, and door-slamming noises we expect to hear. Tons of work goes into something I always assumed was effortless.

I’m not an audiophileI actually call myself an audioslob: I’m not very picky about fine-detail sound quality. I listened to all my music on cassette in the 80’s and the lack of quality never bothered me., I have no training in audio production, and I barely know what I’m doing. I’ve mostly had to figure this gig out on my own through trial-and-error, with some guidance from Josh.

Once in a while people ask questions about how this is done, so I thought I’d document the process…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Audio Editing for Podcasts”

 


 

Diecast #105: Zero Escape, Life is Strange, The Witcher 3

By Shamus Posted Wednesday May 27, 2015

Filed under: Diecast 113 comments

Note that this podcast and the previous one were recorded back-to-back. No, this isn’t a permanent music change. I just wanted to do something different since this is a special episode.

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Hosts: Shamus, Campster, Josh, Chris Franklin, Mumbles, and Mr. Errant Signal.

Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #105: Zero Escape, Life is Strange, The Witcher 3”

 


 

Experienced Points: 50 Shades of The Dark Knight

By Shamus Posted Tuesday May 26, 2015

Filed under: Column 187 comments

My column this week is a little talk about what Batman: Arkham Asylum and 50 Shades of Grey have in common and no that’s not a joke.

Really, this is just my swipe at the long-standing trend of condemning art because you think OTHER people are too stupid to enjoy it responsibly. “This art promotes [longstanding social ill]!” Now, the response to my sort of article is usually, “It’s just criticism! Don’t be such a butthurt fanboy! If games are art then they deserve criticism like all other forms of art!”

But we’re talking about really different sorts of criticism here:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experienced Points: 50 Shades of The Dark Knight”