NEWER POSTS

Merry Christmas

By Shamus Posted Thursday Dec 25, 2014

Filed under: Notices 43 comments
The InfectionPrevious Post
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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.

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43 comments

 

Jurassic Park Episode 2: Jurassic Jeep

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Dec 24, 2014

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 51 comments
Jurassic Park Episode 1: Where is Jeff Goldblum? Previous Post
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Link (YouTube)

Yes, we’re being awfully hard on poor Jurassic Park. Keep in mind that this is a goofy one-off series and not a serious look at the game. We did this specifically for laughs and not because we thought the game was some sort of profound title in the TellTale catalog. It’s just that the mistakes this game makes are hilarious mistakes. Like, the sequence where an unconscious woman manages to stop you from spraying her on the arm? That is both conceptually ridiculous and visually absurd.

This game is kind of goofy and awkward, but the thing that makes it special is that it’s by the same company that gave us The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands. That’s a pretty big step up in quality. This game is to The Walking Dead what Warcraft is to Starcraft. They took an idea and iterated on it until it was great.

It would be interesting to see what they could do with the exact same material today. What would a Jurassic Park game look like now that they’ve improved their craft? I’m guessing it would have a lot less “oops I dropped something, let me wiggle the stick to pick it up again” gameplay.

 

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.

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51 comments

 

Experienced Points: The 200th Column – You Asked For This

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Dec 23, 2014

Filed under: Column 34 comments
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Yes, I have written 200 Experienced Points columns. Here is number 200, where I answer reader questions. At an average length of 1,200 words, that’s about a quarter of a million words. If gathered into a book, it would be awkward and heavy. For comparison, Fellowship of the Ring is around 180k, and that thing is a pain in the ass to carry around.

I really enjoyed doing this. One of the things I dislike about this job is the search for topics worthy of doing a column. Will people care? Does this matter? Is this story going to be irrelevant, or fundamentally different, by the time this column goes live? I’ve scrapped a lot of columns and wasted a lot of hours digging for the “right” topic. Reader questions gives me a way to latch onto stuff that people care about, and it lets me cover smaller topics that might not be enough to fill an entire column.

So I hope this goes over well. My plan is that when I have one of those weeks where there doesn’t seem to be a worthy news topic, I can just dive into reader questions.

Of course, this was a terrible week to do this one. Christmas week is odd, traffic-wise. People change their browsing habits. So a tepid response might mean people are just busy Christmas-ing. I dunno. Maybe I’m over-thinking this.

 

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: DRM is OverPrevious Post
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34 comments

 

Jurassic Park Episode 1: Where is Jeff Goldblum?

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Dec 23, 2014

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 101 comments
The Last of Us EP33: Joel's Sporting GoodsPrevious Post
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Link (YouTube)

It’s the holidays, so all the rules have been thrown out the window! We’re playing a crappy licensed Telltale game! Chris is our player this timeInasmuch as anyone can “play” this game. Maybe it’s more correct to say he’s in charge of suggesting things for the game to do to itself?! Pushing up Roses is with us! And Josh is mostly sober! It’s chaos!

Following the example set by this game, I’ve decided to translate all of this for the benefit of the Spanish-speakers in the audience.

En espaà±ol:

It’s las vacaciones, so all the rules have been thrown out the window! We’re playing a crappy licencia Telltale game! Chris is our player this timeEl taco.! Pushing up Roses is with us! And Josh is mostly sobrio! Es un caos!

We’ll return to The Last of Us once the holidays are over. Or when we come to our senses. Whichever comes first.

 

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 Last of Us EP33: Joel's Sporting GoodsPrevious Post
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101 comments

 

Diecast #85: Old Computers, King’s Quest, Retro Games

By Shamus Posted Monday Dec 22, 2014

Filed under: Diecast 65 comments
Diecast #84: Team Fortress 2, Valve, Dragon AgePrevious Post
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This week we have a guest on the show. And since it’s December 22nd, I guess this qualifies our Christmas episode. Sort of. Not that we talk about Christmas. But, you know…. Merry Christmas. Or whatever.

Download MP3 File
Download Ogg Vorbis File

Hosts: Shamus, Josh, Rutskarn, the other Josh, and Pushing Up Roses.

Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #85: Old Computers, King’s Quest, Retro 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.

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65 comments

 

The Gradient of Plot Holes

By Shamus Posted Sunday Dec 21, 2014

Filed under: Nerd Culture 172 comments
Trek Week: The MoviesPrevious Post
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A couple of weeks ago we talked about the JJ Abrams Trek movies. Actually we talked about ALL THE TREKS. If I had it to do over again, I probably would have made that a weekly series instead of doing a new Trek every day. There just wasn’t enough time to give each show the attention it deserved.

But talking about the Star Trek reboot got us talking about plot holes and contrivances, because JJ Abrams doesn’t like to burn screen time explaining why things happen when events seem to break the established rules of the world. So, his Trek movies frequently and flagrantly break all kinds of rules and are constantly having things happen simply for the sake of drama.

Pine, Hemsworth, Pratt, and Evans. We have an overabundance of guys named Chris in our blockbusters.

I’ve talked before about Story Collapse. That’s where you keep getting yanked out of the story by things that don’t make sense. The more it happens (and the more seriously it happens) the more you stop thinking about what you’re seeing now and the more you find yourself looking back, trying to figure out how this can all possibly fit together. If the story is a huge mess, then this sort of reflection will just reveal more problems, and trying to sort out those problems will uncover even more, until you have story collapse.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Gradient of Plot Holes”

 

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.

Trek Week: The MoviesPrevious Post
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172 comments

 

The Last of Us EP33: Joel’s Sporting Goods

By Shamus Posted Friday Dec 19, 2014

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 62 comments
The Last of Us EP32: Joel the WhitePrevious Post
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Link (YouTube)

We spent a lot of time making fun of the stupid church bell, mostly because we were in the middle of a six-hour combat section and had nothing else to talk about. But now that’ I’m thinking about it, what the hell is that bell for? I suppose it exists to let people know of danger, but I think the CONSTANT GUNSHOTS accomplish that. And how does the guy ringing the bell know what’s going on, or if he should stop ringing or start ringing? (Other than listening for gunshots, I guess?) How does this not attract ten thousand zombies?

The scene where Ellie escapes from food prison is so painfully contrived that I can’t stand it. They already have half a dozen dudes hanging up in the meat locker. Plus a horse. Plus a deer. Plus another thirty or so bodies thanks to Ellie and Joel. These idiots have more than enough meat.

But even if they’re going to butcher her now, are they really going to hack her up alive and clothed? Is that how they normally do it? Seems like that would be the messy and extremely dangerous dangerous way of doing things. And then her escape requires David to leave his cleaver where she could reach it, for both of them to fight like dumbasses, and for her knife to be on a shelf right outside the room. What is going on in this videogame?

I’m not even angry. This is just so goofy I actually find the entire sequence disturbingly funny. Two men are trying to chop up a young girl. I should not be laughing right now. I can’t believe all of this happens in the same universe as the tear-jerking scene where Ellie and Riley agree to lose their minds together.

And then at the end they turned David into this ridiculous psycho villain. He was so interesting in that first scene, and now he’s a cross between Hannibal Lecter and Snidely Whiplash. What a big dumb silly sequence.

Thankfully, the worst is now over.

 

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 Last of Us EP32: Joel the WhitePrevious Post
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62 comments

 
OLDER POSTS
From The Archives:

D&D Campaign

WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.

 

Dead Island

A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.

 

Twelve Years

Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.

 

Project Octant

A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.

 

Object-Disoriented Programming

C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.

 

Juvenile and Proud

Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.

 

Spoiler Warning

A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.

 

My Music

Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.

 

Marvel's Civil War

Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?

 

Starcraft 2: Rush Analysis

I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.