If you’re going to play Hotline Miami 2 and you want to avoid spoilers, then skip the segment between 44 minutes and 53 minutes.
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Hosts: Shamus, Josh, Chris, Rutskarn, Mumbles.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #97: Hotline Miami 2, Nintendo NX, Game Music, Battlefield Hard-On”
Chirpy is the fictional Twitter in the Skylines world. Through it, you can see what your citizens are saying and worrying about. The cool thing is that it’s part joke, part world-building, part brandingThe devs refer to players as “Chirpies”., and partly an effort to show that unlike Sim City, this game is set more or less in the present.
On the other hand, Chirper is awful.
Really awful. This is a bad and terrible feature, which seems to serve no other purpose than to reduce your enjoyment of the game. The design is so bad that it’s hard to nail down where it all went wrong. It has numerous problems that all combine and feed into each other to form a massive feedback loop of suck.
Yes, it’s a small feature in a big game. But that only makes it more mystifying how there are so many problems with something so small…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Cities: Skylines: Death to Chirpy!”
Link (YouTube) |
So we’ve now done a total of five assassinations in this game, four of which took place here in Chinatown. I like Chinatown and all, but that’s still pretty disappointing. Would have been nice to do some Hitman-ing on the train platform or any of the other locations we strolled through. The majority of our running time thus far has been spent just moving 47 from A to B.
Does Birdie send you to kill the three goons to delay you on purpose, or did Blake find Birdie on his own while his men were searching in the wrong place? The answer is: Who cares? It’s all crap.
I can’t be mad at this game anymore. So let’s be mad at reviewers. From the Wikipedia entry on Absolution:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hitman Absolution EP6: The Savior of Chinatown”
Warning: At the start of this episode we’re still raving.
Link (YouTube) |
Okay, so Birdie suggested that you take the girl and run. And 47 doesn’t want to do that. So instead we go and kill Dom Osmund. It really does seem like running is a foolproof plan, and 47 doesn’t seem to have a good reason for not following it. I’d forgive this for the sake of getting on with the story, but the next part of the game really makes it clear that once again the audience is right and 47 is dumb.
So on top of the cops storming the exploding hotel, the cops gunning down people on the roof, the cops searching the library, the cops doing the drug bust, and the cops locking down the subway, there are also cops patrolling the sewers? Maybe there’s a reason given for this, but right now we’re staggering around in the aftermath of a category-5 story collapse, and I’m not inclined to assume anything favorable on the part of the writers. So I’ll just assume this is more random stupidity.
The train platform is indeed a pretty cool sequence. It feels a lot like a “classic” Hitman experience. Too bad it’s not, and you don’t actually have a target.
This is it. This is why I agreed to cover this game. This very cutscene. Buckle up.
Link (YouTube) |
Thanks to Chris and Josh for letting Rutskarn and I monopolize the show. I know how frustrating that is. Thanks for playing along. Next episode we return to our regular format. This was a special occasion.
We skipped a lot of my gripes because the whole thing was dragging on too long. And I thought of some new ones while re-watching the episode just now. This really is a disastrously incompetent cutscene.
Think about how stuff like this is produced. The writer writes it. Then the voice actors – with guidance from the director – perform it. Then the mo-cap actors do their part. Then some artists take all those assets and create the cutscene, which involves watching it many, many times over. This thing is pure torture to watch, and I can’t get through it once without shouting outraged questions at my screen. How did the team get all that done without correcting any of the glaring problems here?
I find it hard to believe that so many people let the scene slip by without noticing any of these issues. Instead, I imagine this cutscene is the result of a writer in a position of power where nobody was allowed to question his bullshit. And that makes me mad.
This is bad. It’s not bad in a fun way. It’s not bad in a campy way. It’s not bad in a playfully subversive way. This is just horrendously sophomoric trash that’s been undeservedly elevated to the status of AAA movie-game.
It’s been a while since I gave one of these out, but you clowns earned it:
Shame on you IO Interactive.
For fun: Try to spot all the errors Rutskarn and I missed.
My column this week talks about why – barring some major changes in the way we deal with old titles – we most likely won’t be playing 2010 games in 2025, even though we’re still playing 2000 games in 2015.
As an extended topic: What games from the last five years will you still want to play in 2025?
For me: Arkahm City. Minecraft. Saints Row 3 or 4. Borderlands 2. All the Half-Lifes & Portalses. Maybe Skyrim? Maybe the Tomb Raider reboot?
Games I liked but that I’ll probably never play again: Deus Ex Human Revolution. (It just doesn’t have the emergent depth of the original. I’ve tried, but there just isn’t enough new or different to pull me through the game again.) Maybe someday I’ll go mad and feel like putting up with the Brotherhood of Stupid in Fallout 3, but I doubt it.
Although, it’s actually pretty hard to guess what games I’ll still value in 2025. Maybe I’ll go wild for Human Revolution again. Maybe new Minecraft-y games will come along that make our version seem shallow and redundant. Maybe I won’t care about Borderlands 2 because I’ll be playing Borderlands 5, and it’s basically the same damn thing. If you’d told me in 1998 that I’d still be playing Thief 16 years later I would have told you you were crazy and to leave me alone because I was busy playing it now. But I was playing Thief (original flavor) last year, and it was still pretty good.
Of course, in an ideal world all games would survive, be forwards compatible, go open source, or see re-release. But this is not an ideal world and we don’t know which games will make it and which ones won’t.
EDIT: Over at the Escapist, some people are suggesting using virtual machines to solve the compatibility problems. I’ve only dabbled with VM’s and don’t know everything they can do, but my first worry is getting that troublesome GPU driver layer to work right. (See the article for details on why that’s a nightmare.) Like, okay: You’ve got some kind of NVIDIA Windows XP GPU driver. You’re going to need some kind of feature in your VM to get that driver to talk to your 2025 graphics cards.
And now that I think of it, will you be able to properly install Windows XP in 2025? Sure, you’ve got your VM and an iso of the Win XP disk… but what about updates and service packs? What about all those Direct X runtimes that you need to run the games and that Microsoft doesn’t permit anyone but them to distribute. Just getting the final form of Windows XP running might involve several instances of “piracy”. Sure, it will exist. You’ll be able to do it. But it won’t be like running DOS Box. It will be a sketchy thing on the Torrents, not a turnkey thing on GoG.
Now I’m sad again.
When I started playing I thought, “This is the game Simcity 2013 should have been.” After a few hours I thought, “This is better than any Sim City game in recent memory.” At this point I’m thinking it’s probably the best city builder ever designed. It’s been years since I had a game engrossing enough that I was still playing it in my head while I was trying to fall asleep. It really is that good.
Skylines is by Colossal Order, the team behind Cities in Motion. It shows. Cities in Motion is a game about regulating, planning, mitigating, and profiting from traffic. That game was all about designing mass transit in a fixed city. Skylines takes all of that traffic-flow strategy and brings it to a city you design yourself.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Cities : Skylines”
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
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.
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
T w e n t y S i d e d
