T w e n t y S i d e d

And now we reach the part of the season where I begin to run out of things to say. The puzzle here was good. (I liked it, anyway.) The climbing is great. The combat is too much. The mooks are preposterously numerous and aggressive. Sam is a useless sack of dumb who gets kidnapped from inside the camp by nerdy sleazeball Whittman.

And yet, I really hope they’re making another one. Even better if they’re making one with less mooks, more spooks. Less shooting, more looting! Less rescuing-Sam-because-she’s-a-boring-dunce and more platforming.

We’re in the home stretch now. This season will probably wrap up after another week.

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.

For the record, the parts where I seem to be talking over myself are instances where Josh lagged out. If I lag out, my messages arrive broken up, late, and far apart. If Josh (as the person making the recording) lags, then the audio piles up on the server and when he recovers they all arrive at once. I’ve had instances where I lagged out in Vent and had half a minute of everyone else talking mashed into ten seconds.

What I was saying about Prince of Persia:

The Sands of Time sequels are pretty much a textbook case of why games shouldn’t get so dang hung up on continuity. The first game was a beautiful, simple, and self-contained tale. The second game took all the character development of the first game and threw it away. The third game had to re-write Fara. Over time, characters get less interesting because their arcs end and leave them with nowhere to go. The setting gets less interesting because all the really great secrets have already been revealed and we have more things to explain to the newcomers.

Retconning things and stapling new ideas onto an existing lore is often messy and ugly. Leaving every story open-ended for a sequel is unsatisfying, since the audience never gets the closure they’re looking for. (Sands of Time would have been hurt immensely if they had hacked in a “BUT IT’S NOT REALLY OVER!” moment at the end.)

In a Prince of Persia game we need three things:

1. Climbing around Arabian-styled ruins.
2. A time-rewind mechanic.
3. Somebody in the story should probably be a prince.

It’s not like there’s a shortage of Arabian-themed stories and tropes to draw from. They should just let each game stand on its own. In one game you play as a prince. In another you play as a street rat who meets the prince. In another you’re a commoner who looks like the prince, etc.

Warrior Within would have been so much less offensive to me if this was a new prince with a new story. And besides…

Wait. What are we talking about again? Tomb Raider? Right. Anyway, I hope Tomb Raider won’t blunder into this same trap of plot convolution, character stagnation, and lore cruft. They left things open for a sequel, but they didn’t set up a sequel, if you can see the distinction. We don’t have a really strong, likable character to be Lara’s sidekick.

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.

No Mumbles this week, since she had important supervillains to punch in the face. No Rutskarn this week, because [insert joke about Rutskarn being eight years old]! But we did have Jarenth. On the downside, Jarenth caused an inordinate number of deaths. Like, I don’t know how he manages to suck at the game this bad.

I mentioned on the podcast that I tend to binge on games. When I don’t, I tend to have mishaps like the one we talked about in this episode. Back when Tomb Raider was still fresh, I took a couple of days off from it. When I came back, I misunderstood how rope arrows worked. I had it in my head that it was context-based and that shooting at rope-arrow surfaces with the standard attack button would automatically cause it to fire a rope arrow. (For the record, there’s a special rope-arrow button. On the PC, it’s middle mouse button.)

I thought the game was glitching out when it refused to shoot a rope arrow at the ladder/crane thing. Hey! The cursor is red, it should fire a rope arrow when I shoot at this. Am I at the wrong angle? Do I need to be closer? Maybe up on this platform?

Moments like this can really take the fun out of a game. This is yet another way in which Games Are Very Much Not Movies. If you pause a movie for a couple of days you might forget the plot, but you’ll never forget something in a way that makes it impossible to watch the rest of the movie.

So that’s why I binge on games. After you play a few thousand videogames, their various control schemes, conventions, and idiosyncrasies kind of blur together.

EDIT: So we can’t embed the video here. Looks like somebody is claiming they own a segment of this video. (The part where Lara ascends away from the ship.) And because we’re using “their” footage YouTube has nailed us with a copyright infringing claim. And now embedding is disabled.

This entire copyright system on YouTube is ludicrous. There is something deeply Kafkaesque about arguing with the YouTube robot about using content from an anonymous corporation. That’s a really good basis for dystopian fiction, right there. Thankfully it’s just a dumb claim against an internet video and not something dangerous, but still. This sort of thing is SO unjust and nonsensical it’s hard not to be outraged just by the sheer bloody-mindedness of it all.

Anyway. We’re working on it. Hopefully we can clear this claim and get back to normal.

EDIT II: Maybe the claim isn’t related to the embed lockout. I just managed to allow embedding without dealing with the claim. I have no idea. Apparently on an advanced options screen there’s a checkmark for allowing or forbidding embeds, and it was mysteriously unchecked. I’m mystified how it got that way, but whatever. Hopefully no more strangeness.

YouTube copyright matching system still sucks.

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.