NEWER POSTS

Project Button Masher: Phobos Phobia

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jan 1, 2015

Filed under: Music 56 comments
Bang the Rocks TogetherPrevious Post
Next PostProject Button Masher: Robo Miner AI Hotfix

Happy New Year, you gorgeous internet. Have you lost weight and/or become more educated and wealthy? You look sexier/smarter/richer. I guess your resolutions for the new year are really paying off. Good on you.

A couple of weeks ago I got all navel-gaze-y about making music, lamenting that my skills are writing prose and code, and not wasting my time with music that I barely understand.

But allow me to argue with me-from-two-weeks-ago: Ten years ago my only skill was coding, but then I wrote a book. Not because it would make me money, but because that’s where my creativity was taking me. A few years later I branched off some more, and it lead to this website. I seem to have pretty good luck with doing whatever seems fun at the moment. Not all of my projects pan out, but I certainly shouldn’t refuse to do things because I’m new to them. If I followed that line of reasoning I wouldn’t have any of the hobbies that make me so happy today.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Button Masher: Phobos Phobia”

 

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.

Bang the Rocks TogetherPrevious Post
Next PostProject Button Masher: Robo Miner AI Hotfix

56 comments

 

New Year’s Stream

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Dec 30, 2014

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 41 comments
Jurassic Park Episode 3: The Part Where We Skip Everything Previous Post
Next PostTwenty Minutes With Five Nights At Freddy's

EDIT: Well, that was fun. Thanks to everyone who joined in. We played Spintires, Far Cry 4, and some insane wagon game that I don’t even understand. Happy 2015 everyone!

Original message:

The year is about to change, which means it’s time to watch Josh stream a videogame while you curse at him. It’s like being on the cast of Spoiler Warning except Josh will ignore you because he’s drunk instead of ignoring you on purpose. It’s a magical time of friendship, laughter, confusion, drunkenness, and Murphy’s Law. I hope you’ll join usBecause I wouldn’t want to endure this alone.!

Josh claims we’ll be watching him play Spintires, so there’s at least a 10% chance of us playing SpintiresHe’s more reliable when he’s drunk. Also a better driver..

The stream will start around 10pm Eastern time in the USA. But rather than convert time zones and worry about stupid-ass daylight savings timeIs it active now? Is it active where I am? Where they are? just use this timer:

The stream will be here when the event goes live.

 

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.

Jurassic Park Episode 3: The Part Where We Skip Everything Previous Post
Next PostTwenty Minutes With Five Nights At Freddy's

41 comments

 

Experienced Points: How Lizard Squad Stole Christmas

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Dec 30, 2014

Filed under: Column 48 comments
Experienced Points: The 200th Column - You Asked For ThisPrevious Post
Next PostExperienced Points: In The Last of Us, Joel Had It Right

This week I try to explain the Lizard Squad attack on PSN and Xbox Live.

To be clear: We don’t know for sure if Lizard Squad really staged the attack. Or if they did, it’s possible that the guys claiming to be Lizard Squad weren’t them. Or if it was, it’s possible the “squad” is really just one guy. It’s all secrets and hearsay. But for the purposes of clarity we’ll just accept the events as presented and talk about them assuming everything is true.

This hackingThis entire attack involved both hacking and DDosing. is interesting stuff. What if you had the power to make international news without physically hurting anyone? What if you could do something that would get the world talking? I imagine this is a big part of the motivation for stunts like this. It’s the equivalent of being able to spray graffiti on a global billboard. You can’t take personal credit without going to jail, but you can watch the world respond to your actions.

Which is to say: Harsh penalties won’t be enough to keep people from doing this. People regularly risk their lives for thrills, or to prove a point, or just to see if they can do something. There will always be people willing to stage attacks like this, so the only thing you can do is build robust systems, secure them properly, and make them tolerant of attacks. So, you know, the exact opposite of what we’ve been doing so far.

I think it’s interesting that Lizard Squad went after both PSN and XBL. That certainly made the attack more difficult, since it required them to divide the botnet between two targets, thus halving its power. I imagine this was to make it clear that this wasn’t a protest attack. If they had gone after just XBL, people would have been speculating about their motives. Was this done by Playstation fanboys? Is this to protest Microsoft in some way? As it is, it seems like, “Because they could” is the most plausible reason for the attack.

 

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.

Experienced Points: The 200th Column - You Asked For ThisPrevious Post
Next PostExperienced Points: In The Last of Us, Joel Had It Right

48 comments

 

Diecast #86: Telltale Games, Christmas DDos Attack, Edutainment Games

By Shamus Posted Monday Dec 29, 2014

Filed under: Diecast 77 comments
Diecast #85: Old Computers, King's Quest, Retro GamesPrevious Post
Next PostDiecast #87: Batman Endgame, ToME, Stone Soup Dungeon Crawl

And here is the last Diecast of 2014.

Download MP3 File
Download Ogg Vorbis File

Hosts: Shamus, Josh, Jacob, and just normal Chris.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #86: Telltale Games, Christmas DDos Attack, Edutainment Games”

 

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.

Diecast #85: Old Computers, King's Quest, Retro GamesPrevious Post
Next PostDiecast #87: Batman Endgame, ToME, Stone Soup Dungeon Crawl

77 comments

 

Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot

By Shamus Posted Sunday Dec 28, 2014

Filed under: Nerd Culture 108 comments
The Gradient of Plot HolesPrevious Post
Next PostThe Future is Here!

Dear Hollywood:

Since you guys are re-making, re-booting, and re-imagining everything, I assume you’re going to have a go at MASH sooner or later. And you should. And sooner would be better than later. Whoever owns the rights to the show is an idiot.

I subscribe to Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix, and I can’t watch MASH on any of them! I guess they want me to buy the boxed set, but… no. I like MASH and all, but I want to watch two or three episodes from different eras of the show, not the entire ten-season run. And I don’t want to pay a hundred freaking dollars for that.

Keep in mind that I’m what’s left of the core audience for MASH. Everyone else is basically dead. (Give or take a decade.) So if I’m not going to buy the disks for a show I remember fondly, you can bet your ass that millenials aren’t going to put down money for a physical copy of a show they’ve never seen. Yeah, some of them caught the show on TV Land or whatever, but most of them just watch stuff online, and that’s where the future is.

Sooner or later my generation will die, and that will be the end of MASH fandom. So you need to reboot this thing while I’m still young enough to make it to the theater on my own. Just find whoever owns the rights to this show and explain how stupid rich they will be after a reboot.

MASH is such an ideal property to reboot that I can’t believe this hasn’t happened yet. It’s a story about war, yet is anti-war. That’s a good setup for having your cake and eating it too. You can have your fun action scenes that make audiences happy while still hitting all those “war is hell” themes that critics like so much. It’s set in a war, so you have an excuse when you need danger or blowing things up, but it’s also a comedy about the boredom that comes from waiting around for war to happen, so you don’t need wall-to-wall action set-pieces. You can squeeze in some trailer friendly action scenes but spend 80% of the movie cracking jokes, which is really cheap to film.

Convinced? No? Willing to listen? Okay then. Let’s do this… Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot”

 

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.

The Gradient of Plot HolesPrevious Post
Next PostThe Future is Here!

108 comments

 

Jurassic Park Episode 3: The Part Where We Skip Everything

By Shamus Posted Friday Dec 26, 2014

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 103 comments
Jurassic Park Episode 2: Jurassic Jeep Previous Post
Next PostNew Year's Stream


Link (YouTube)

Thanks again to Pushing Up Roses for joining us on the show. Everyone had fun and we’re all open to doing this again in the future. We’ll see what happens. Be sure to give her channel a look. I mean, where else are you going to go for smart, informed, long-form analysis of twenty-year-old adventure games? IGN?

I think we’re done with Jurassic Park, though. Actually, Chris said some smart things in the comments and they deserve to be in a post, so I’ll let Chris have the last word on Jurassic Park:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Jurassic Park Episode 3: The Part Where We Skip Everything”

 

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.

Jurassic Park Episode 2: Jurassic Jeep Previous Post
Next PostNew Year's Stream

103 comments

 

Merry Christmas

By Shamus Posted Thursday Dec 25, 2014

Filed under: Notices 43 comments
The InfectionPrevious Post
Next PostNew Site Theme

Have a great holiday everyone. I hope Santa brought you something cool. This post is brought to you by my latest present: A couple of hours of peace and quiet while everyone else visits people and stuff. I’m going to use my gift to work on my end-of-year posts.

Coming in the next few weeks:

  1. My usual end-of-year Dénouement posts.
  2. A series of music posts where I attempt to copy the styles of game soundtracks that I like, as a way of learning more about music.
  3. I’m reading Game Programming Patterns, which was a gift from a friend. (Thanks friend!) I might do some posts about it. The first section in particular is filled with stuff that had me nodding my head.
  4. I still want to comment of Jon Blow’s language proposals. I have a few thousand words on it already. I just need to clean them up and post them.
  5. Pictures of cats and girls in swimsuits. Thousands of them.
  6. Good Robot is not forgotten. It’s been a year since the project stalled. I’ve just upgraded to the new version of Visual Studio. I might restart the project. Or do a code review. Or open source it. Who knows? We’ll see.
  7. One of the items on this list is a lie. (Not this one.)
  8. Added to the list just now: Apparently splash imagesLike the one at the top of this post, which is a picture of me from 1978. that aren’t the proper aspect ratio will get squashed or stretched. I guess I should fix that.

There’s one last episode of Dino Jeep left, which will go up tomorrow.

 

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.

The InfectionPrevious Post
Next PostNew Site Theme

43 comments

 
OLDER POSTS
From The Archives:

Grand Theft Auto Retrospective

This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.

 

In Defense of Crunch

Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.

 

Games and the Fear of Death

Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.

 

MMO Population Problems

Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?

 

Seven Springs

The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.

 

Trekrospective

A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.

 

Silver Sable Sucks

This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.

 

Tenpenny Tower

Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.

 

Charging More for a Worse Product

No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.

 

Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction

Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.