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Hosts: Shamus, Josh, Chris, Rutskarn.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #102: Konami, GTA V, Degenerate Strategies”
Diecast #102: Konami, GTA V, Degenerate Strategies
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Non-spoiler stuff first: I’ve said before that I think most science fiction gets robots wrong by projecting human desires onto AI. So we end up robots with a Pinocchio complex that have daddy issues, self esteem issues, bad tempers, romantic hang-ups, and a dozen other neurosis and quirks that really make no sense at all outside of a Darwinian biological struggle to survive.
I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that Age of Ultron does not break from this tradition. If anything, Ultron is worse than its robotic-overlord predecessors in this regard. The entire movie is more outrageously “comic book”-ish about its science. People can invent world-changing stuff in the time it takes to heat up a Hot Pocket and science is mixed in with magic with no regard for genre boundaries.
This makes it a very hard movie to believe in. (Particularly near the end, when it feels like all the rules go out the window.) If you’re going to suspend your disbelief, you’re going to have a lot of stuff to suspend and the writer isn’t really interested in helping you out, because explaining the rules would devour endless screen time.
I loved it.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Avengers: Age of Ultron”
Hitman Absolution EP18:Absoludicrous
Link (YouTube) |
And so it ends. Here is Rutskarn’s Clod of Cthulhu series that I alluded to during the episode. As we announced in the credits, next season is likely going to be Arkham Asylum. I’m really looking forward to some positivity after so much bellyaching.
I know we already awarded this earlier in the season, but for the sake of people skimming the archives I’d like to remind everyone that Hitman Absolution is only the fourth game to claim this prize:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hitman Absolution EP18:Absoludicrous”
Hitman Absolution EP17: The Least Samurai
Link (YouTube) |
In a game brimming with stupid irritations, the scene where Victoria kills everyone but her captor is one of the most irritating and stupid. After building up her powers for an entire game, they finally reveal them just for the sake of a useless cutscene that accomplishes nothing. After failing to give our damsel any personality whatsoever, they finally give her a moment of screen time to reveal she’s stupid, useless, and overly emotional. I guess Dexter knew she was stupid, since he made no effort to protect himself from her and was completely unafraid of her even as she slaughtered his men. Apparently he knows he’s wearing plot armor?
It wouldn’t even be that hard to fix this: After she kills all the mooks, she fires a bullet right at Dexter’s cackling face without hurting him. The camera pulls back to reveal he’s on the other side of a bulletproof glass wall. It’s still dumb and contrived, but at least the damsel and villain don’t both need to behave like complete morons to make this scene work.
Look, I know it’s completely unfair to compare Hitman: Absolution to some dream game I have in my head. It can’t even succeed at the very shallow goals it set for itself, so asking for something thematically ambitious and mechanically complex is like asking Tommy Wiseau to come up with The Usual Suspects. It’s totally unreasonable and a recipe for disaster.
But you know what? This game is already an unreasonable disaster on many levels, so who cares? What are the writers gonna do? Have me stupidly captured by idiot villains in another dozen cutscenes? So let’s talk about what I wanted when the game started telling us that Victoria was a super-badass. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hitman Absolution EP17: The Least Samurai”
Hitman Absolution EP16: Judge Judy and Executioner
Link (YouTube) |
I have to admit I kind of lost it this week. This part of the game is so egregiously incompetent that I stopped analyzing the game and just got angry at it. The part where you’re captured in a cutscene (again!) is probably not quite as bad as the end of the Terminus mission in terms of “authorial blunders per minute”, but this one tries my patience a lot more.
Skurkey has his dominatrix here at work not because it makes any kind of sense in how people would behave, but because the writers wanted more of whatever this is. I can’t can’t tell is this is supposed to be fanservice or mocking BDSM culture, but it’s really confusing either way. Skurkey has been established as a pretty dim bulb, but even if you ghost this entire area he still gets you with this electrocution trap, meaning he’s both clairvoyant and way more clever than the writers have shown him to be. And then two seconds later it reveals he didn’t even know you’re the Hitman! So why did he leave that trap? Okay, I accept that this world has videogame electricity where exposing current to a puddle of water makes a knockout trap instead of, you know, blowing a fuse. But does the Sheriff just randomly make this shock trap outside his office for no reason?
And then we have yet another section where Dexter cackles over you and refuses to kill you for no good reason and instead leaves you in an easily escape-able situation. None of this makes sense or fits together. It’s just an endless chain of the very worst videogame cliches, repeated over and over again. This blend of “dark, serious, and edgy” with “willfully stupid, childish, and absurd” is contemptible. This is a game that’s trying to do some sort of introspection while at the same time lacking any sense of self-awareness.
For better or worse, this is our last week with Hitman: Absolution.
Crypt of the Necrodancer
Crypt of the Necrodancer is a fast paced top-down 2D dungeon crawler. Gameplay is solely based on the arrow keys. You go through dungeons and fight a mess of different monsters and bosses, much like Diablo and Fate. But in this game, you have to do it to a beat; dancing your way through levels in sync with the electronic dance music played all throughout the game.
Now, this isn't the first game of its kind. There are lots of rhythm based games out there and it's not the first to have rhythm and fighting in the same game. The game Rayman Legends, for example, has a very addicting musical level in which you fight trolls and avoid obstacles to the beat of various pre-picked songs. And Melody's Escape has an interesting hook with its running through the map in sync with any mp3 song you want.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Crypt of the Necrodancer”
Charging for Skyrim Mods Was a Horrendous Idea
I write the story on Sunday, the story changes on Monday, and it’s all moot by the time the story runs on Tuesday.
Ah well.
I still say letting us link a PayPal button to a mod and put it near the “subscribe” button would be a classy thing for Valve to do. Nobody takes a cut except PayPal. Yeah, the vast majority of modders will make nothing, but I think a few of the big ones might see a meaningful return.
But it doesn’t matter. Looks like we’re doing a return to the status quo.
So let’s talk about modding:
In my mind modding falls into two broad categories: Passive and encouraged.
Passive is when the developer doesn’t make any special effort to discourage modding. They just leave the image data, scripts, and audio files exposed in the game directories instead of obscuring them.
Encouraged is when the developer gives their developer tools away to the community specifically so they can mod the game. This is assuming that game-specific tools even exist. In a lot of games – particularly in the bad old days before Unreal Engine, Unity, etc. – artists just had to edit text files and run obscure command-line scripts to put their assets into the game, and the process was too involved, buggy, and technical that offering the tools to the public would just create a ton of additional work for the devs.
Good Robot will probablyCan’t make any promises. Anything can happen during development and I don’t want someone come back saying I LIED to you if we change our minds. allow modding (nobody on the team wants to discourage it) but it will very much be a case of passive modding. Every change will be either trivial or impossible. The game rules (robots, movement speeds, damage, colors, level ordering) are stored in dead-simple text files, and the game textures are regular PNG files. You can add a new robot to the game. You can add new textures to the sprite sheet. But there’s no way to change the game logic. You can’t add a companion robot, or a new AI behavior, or a timed game mode.
Exposing game logic to non-coders is powerful, but also a ton of work. You need to make an interpreter for some sort of sandboxed scripting language. I’ve been reading Game Programming Design Patterns lately and it has a chapter dedicated to the topic. It looks like fun, but it also looks like something I don’t want to mess with on something designed to be a low-risk, straightforward design.
From The Archives:
Bad and Wrong Music Lessons
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
What is Piracy?
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Quakecon 2012 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
The Gameplay is the Story
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
The Gradient of Plot Holes
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
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.
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?