January is over, and suddenly there’s gaming news again! And it’s all bad! Just the way we like it!
Download MP3 File
Download Ogg Vorbis File
Hosts: Shamus, Josh, Chris, and Rutskarn.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #92: Nintenduh, Evolve, Life is Strange”
Nine and a half years. That’s how old this blog is. And since day one, I’ve always used a theme where the text was 600 pixels wide. At first I used a stock theme. Then I got into coding my own theme. But the column width stayed the same. Partly this was because I didn’t want to disrupt the layout of old posts where images floated to the left or right. Partly it was because mobiles were getting popular and I wanted my site to be readable on a mobile without (shudder) horizontal scrolling.
But the day has finally come. The old small-image posts now represent a tiny percent of the site content, and I’m okay if they look stupid. Mobiles now have 1080p resolution, so we have more pixels to work withI have no idea how anyone is supposed to read text that small, but apparently people do it all the time. Dang kids.. So the blog is getting a little wider, which will hopefully waste less screen space on the 3-meter jumobotron monitor you’re probably using.
Over the years I wasn’t diligent about documenting the appearance of the site. For the record, this is what the site looked like yesterday. And for those of you reading this in the future, here is what it looked like after the change.
Changing the theme is pretty disruptive. This is a big, complicated site with deep archives and lots of features. Let me know what I broke.
Link (YouTube) |
I’d like to see how everyone answers Rutskarn’s question, “What’s the WORST section of Half-Life 2?” Try to give your answer before you read everyone else’s.
In contrast to Rutskarn, I kind of think the whole sand traps (“The Floor is Lava”) section of Half-Life 2 is fun… ONCE. It’s basically a really long puzzle with lots of fiddly physics busywork, and puzzles lose their appeal once you know the solution.
That said, I usually cheat past the mines, but sprint through the sand traps. It’s actually pretty easy once you realize it won’t spawn more that four antlions at once, and once you get ahead of them they’re a small threat.
Link (YouTube) |
Just to be clear: All of my complaints in the episode were really trivial. Maybe it sounded like I hated this game. I don’t But this is what I would have said if the designers asked me for my analysis during development. The energy spheres are too random and unwieldy, and the explosion sound effect doesn’t really satisfy.
But for all my whining, this is making me really sad we haven’t gotten Half-Life 3 yet. They just don’t make games like this anymore, and they should. They really should.
For the curious, here is Ivan the Space Biker:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Half Life 2 Episode 1 EP2: How to Win at Physics”
I’m holding to my goal of doing one of these every week, and of posting my failures along with my successes. Success generates warm fuzzy praise, but failure often generates more useful advice.
So last week someone mentioned the Mass Effect music. I love the original Mass Effect music. I mean, everyone loves the menu theme, but I dig a lot of the in-game music as well. So I wanted to take a crack at it.
Specifically, I was aiming for some of the low, understated combat music you hear on Eden Prime. There’s a nice bit when you get to the train where there’s a strong pulsing electronic beat underneath the music. So I figured I’d aim for that.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was doing. Instead of listening to the soundtrack, puzzling over it, and picking some ideas to work with, I just sort of started smashing notes together. I got sidetracked on this little project where I’d forgotten all about Mass Effect and I was just coming up with a bunch of different variations on the same theme and chord progression. Eventually I had six or seven different parts all layered together in a huge pile. None of it was bad, but none of it really stood out.
In an effort to make lemonade from lemons, I pulled the different bits apart into distinct sections and stuck audio clips from the game between them.
The result is… hear for yourself: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Button Masher: The 7th Geth”
Link (YouTube) |
We’re still debating about what game we should cover next. So we’re returning to our old standby, Half-Life 2.
Since I didn’t talk about it in the episode, let’s talk about it now: This is probably the clearest example of what Valve was shooting for with their “Episode” idea. It’s probably around four hours long. It has minimal graphical enhancements. The end boss is just a single instance of a monster we’ve defeated a dozen times before. It basically takes the existing gameplay and adds a few variations on the existing ideas. A dark level. The zombine. A few new ambushes. Some three-way Gordon/Combine/Zombie fights.
If this episodic idea had worked out I think I would have enjoyed it. Sure, nothing much happens in the story. But if we got something like this every couple of years, then the story doesn’t need to go through giant leaps.
This column was really tough to write. The whole time I felt like there was this pull drawing me towards talking about #GamerGate, like playing pool on a crooked table.
But I really don’t want to talk about #GamerGate. And I also don’t want to moderate a discussion with other people talking about it. (Hint, hint.) It’s just that it’s pretty dang hard to talk about games journalism without talking about GG. Do your best!
And in response to the question I posed in the column: I don’t care if you call me a journalist or not. I usually call myself a “pundit” to sidestep this very issue.
Edit: Two days later. Well, we weren’t supposed to talk about it, but that was probably the calmest and most civil conversation on #GamerGate that’s ever taken place. Thanks to all of you for being so cool. I’ve closed the comments. I think now is a good time to move on. You folks are awesome.
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
T w e n t y S i d e d
