So this came today:
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I mostly knew what to expect. Michael Goodfellow wrote pretty extensively about his experience with the device. I count myself very lucky that I’m not nearsighted like himI only need to wear my glasses when I’m going to be driving or otherwise leaving the house. so I don’t need to worry about cramming a set of glasses inside the headset. This process is complex enough as it is.
It works like this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Oculus Rift DK2”
Link (YouTube) |
Josh brings up a good point about magic: All spells seem to take 60% of your mana, so you can’t use them more than once without a refill. I haven’t played the game so I don’t know what I’m missing, but from a design standpoint I have to wonder why we bother with mana at all. Like, if we can use one spell and then we need a power-up (which totally refills the bar) then why have a bar? The bar could be replaced with a simple “charge” concept: You either have one or you don’t.
Spoiler: No need to shout advice at him in the comments. We’re done with the game now, and I don’t imagine Josh is going to be in any particular hurry to play it again.
So now that we’re just about done with this circus sideshow, I guess I might as well do some actual game analysis:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Marlow Briggs EP14: Marlow Briggs and the Montage of Sadmaking”
Jarenth tagged me with this meme on Facebook where you’re supposed to make a list of 10 books that “stuck with you”. I spent the better part of an hour hammering the list together when I realized that it would make for a half-decent blog post. And to be honest, I think Jarenth, my wife, and mother are the only people on Facebook who will careAnd they all read the blog, so….
I don’t read a lot of books. Not fiction, anyways. But I’ve read a few and some of them stuck with me.
Note that I’m disqualifying the Bible because I don’t think that’s the sort of thing that this list is about. That’s like if I asked you for your list of favorite cars and you listed the ambulance that took you to the hospital that one time and saved your life. Okay, but that feels… weird. I’m also disqualifying reference books, even though there are some that really stuck with me in a practical sense.
My list:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Top Ten Influential Books”
Link (YouTube) |
Migraine today. It really hurts to watch this. It also hurts to not watch it. Whatever. I can’t fulfull my usualy commentary duties because i can barely look at the screen. Just watch the episode and pretend I said something witty or interesting about it . Or write your own. I trust you.
Good luck.
My column this week attempts to offer a gentle counter-argument to the people sneering at Gone Home and calling it a “walking simulator”. I suspect this will go the way of all debates about this game, but you never know. Maybe the stars will line up and one person will see the game from a different angle.
I have no idea where this optimism came from. I hope it’ll pass soon.
This game had one of those situations where a single mistake threw the rest of the game into sharp relief. At one point I was reading a note ostensibly written in 1994 or 1995, and one teenager referred to someone’s dadIt might have been a teacher. The details elude me now. as a “tool”. I was instantly yanked out of the story. In my experience, “tool” didn’t come to mean “useless person” until almost a decade later. At that point I realized I read dozens and dozens of notes that had nailed mid-90’s lingo and I’d just taken it all for granted. Looking back, I realized how hard it was to get little details like that right.
Which makes it all the more disappointing that a vast majority of the audience won’t even notice the details because they grew up in the wrong place and time.
EDIT: So apparently the word “tool” was indeed in use for years before I ran into it. (I guess I’d have known about it sooner if I’d ever watched Beevis & Butt-head.) Interesting.
The Spoiler Warning cast (some of us, anyway) will be doing a hangout this weekend. Josh and Chris will be playing Destiny on their pagan consoles and I’ll be watching via Twitch with the rest of the peanut gallery. The event is this Saturday (September 13) at 11PM UTC. This page ought to convert the time into your local temporal region.
Also, here’s a countdown to the event:
Since we didn’t do a Diecast this week, we’ve gotten behind on our mailbag questions. So if things get slow I might do some of those.
The stream will be here when the event goes live.
As this series drags interminably onward, we reach the end of my musical knowledge. Actually, I guess we were at the end of it way back in part one, and now we’ve sailed off the edge of the map into a vast ocean of befuddlement and misapprehension. (It happens.)
You’ll hear music nerds talking about “chord progression”. It’s time for another one of my screwball images of keyboards:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Bad and Wrong Music Lessons, Part 4”
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What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
T w e n t y S i d e d
