T w e n t y S i d e d
Here are the show notes for part two of of this ordeal / episode.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #100: Alignment, Batman v. Superman, Star Wars, Mortal Kombat”
Diecast #100: Alignment, Batman v. Superman, Star Wars, Mortal Kombat
Will Fight for Food: Super Actual Sellout: Game of the Hour
You know that moment in Mass Effect / Skyrim / Fallout / Deus Ex / The Witcher / Dragon Age / Assassins Creed / Grand Theft Auto where you’re doing a sidequest for that man / woman / kid / alien / robot and you suddenly realize, “This person is an asshole. I don’t want to do this quest for them. Actually, what I’d really like to do is bash their face in, but the game doesn’t offer me that choice!” That moment? Yeah. We’ve all been there.
May I suggest you try this game:
Link (YouTube) |
Will Fight For Food: Super Actual Sellout: Game of the Hour, is from Pyrodactyl games, the folks who are working on my videogame. Don’t think of this post as a conflict of interest, think of it as a brazen and unapologetic plug for people with whom I am in cahoots.
In case the trailer doesn’t make it completely clear, the story and dialog are by Rutskarn. In the game you play as Jared Casey Dent, a wrestler in a down-and-out bloodstained middle American town. He lost his own tournament in disgrace and vanished into the night. Now he's back, and he's going to set his life straight by sidequesting for random strangers.
The game launched all official-like yesterday, so now the team is 100% committed to working on Good Robot and getting paid for Will Fight For Food. But probably not in that order. People who are against videogame violence are encouraged to get WFF and then refuse to play it in protest. People who love videogame violence are encouraged to buy the game and then play through it using only dialog, as a sort of remedial corrective therapy for their violent tendencies. You psychos.
Diecast #100: Elder Scrolls Online, Bloodborne, Life is Strange
For our one hundredth episode, we’ve recorded an extra-long Diecast. Here we have three solid hours of whining, arguing, cross-talk, confusion, stupidity, and also the occasional mention of videogames.
For the purpose of the comments, I’m breaking the show notes into three posts. Below are the show notes for the first hour. You’re free to discuss any part of the show you like, but my hope is that we can discuss hour #1 today, and then cover the next two hours on Thursday and Friday.
Download MP3 File
Download Ogg Vorbis File
Hosts: Shamus, Josh, Chris, Rutskarn, Mumbles.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #100: Elder Scrolls Online, Bloodborne, Life is Strange”
What The Heck is a Fractal and How Does It Apply to Games?
This week I’m changing things up. Instead of complaining about pontificating on the state of AAA games, I’m doing a faux-educational bit on fractals and programming. This will be pretty remedial if you already know about fractals, but some people don’t and I’m hoping they’ll find it interesting.
Let’s talk about the Mandelbrot set:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “What The Heck is a Fractal and How Does It Apply to Games?”
The Creativity Cycle, Part 2
Last week I talked about my rollercoaster-style creativity cycle. Some people said I sounded pretty abnormal. Others said my behavior sounded pretty familiar. It was an interesting discussion on what makes some people tick. (And sometimes why they stop ticking.) But there’s a bit of family history that I left out of that discussion on purpose.
My grandparents on my mother’s side were Virginia and John. I’ve posted a picture of them before:
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Virginia is the short woman on the right, in the white shirt. John is to the left. Both of them were stable people with no mental peculiarities as far as anyone knows. They were teens in the great depression and had their kids during or just after world War II.
They had three children: Bruce, Sharon, and Larry. All three of these kids had some sort of mental, uh… irregularities? All of them exhibited signs of what is generally called bipolar disorder and all of them had discernible psychotic episodes. Nothing tragic, thankfully. They all had basically healthy families and held down jobs, but all of them experienced periods where either their reasoning or emotions were completely out of touch with reality. (From delusions in some, to paranoia in others.) These episodes were rare: I think my mom had perhaps four in her entire life. Larry had two that I know of. Bruce lived far from the rest of the family and spent a lot of his years alone, so nobody is really sure about him. (And he’s gone now, so we can’t ask him.)
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Creativity Cycle, Part 2”
Hitman Absolution EP15: Fists of Judgement
Link (YouTube) |
What should our Hitman game be about? Hitman against a billionaire industrialist? Hitman rescues a young girl who is also a science experiment? Hitman enters into a plot with Diana to betray the agency in order to restore it? Hitman is outsmarted by an intelligence agent pulling strings behind the scenes? Hitman plays cat & mouse with a detective? Why choose? Let’s just throw all those ideas into a blender and call it a story!
Birdie is amazing at gathering intelligence. Even when he’s stuck in a parking lot in South Dakota he apparently knows what the agency is doing, what the Hitman is doing, what Dexter is doing, and what a random cop in Chicago is doing. And also he can somehow get untraceable handwritten notes to all of them. Too bad he doesn’t seem to have a goal. Like, how does telling Cosmo about Blackwater Park advance his goals? If he’s an information broker, then why is he giving all his information away for free?
Also, for those of you following the “list of stuff the developers don’t understand” in the comments: I think the list will get a lot longer after this one.
Honey Lemon and Aunt Cass
My wife and second daughter Esther are headed to Tekko today. As a sort of last-minute thing, they decided to cosplay as Honey Lemon and aunt Cass from Big Hero 6. They have a habit of only cosplaying as stuff that won’t be a pain in the ass to wear.
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I have decided to cosplay as Sir Not Appearing In This Film by staying home. I love how the costumes turned out, so I thought I’d share.
From The Archives:
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
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.
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Project Octant
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
Philosophy of Moderation
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
The No Politics Rule
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
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.
Netscape 1997
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.