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I’ve been really looking forward to this part of the game. We wrestle free of the cutscenes and the writer-mandated derping. We have a bit of stealth. Some exploring. A tomb. A little puzzle. More exploring. Lots of variety and not too much shooting. (Particularly if you manage to ninja the flashlight fight.) Also, no dumb-ass quicktime events.
Also there’s singing in this episode. Just thought I should warn you about that.
I’m pretty proud of the conversation we had about game journalism. We had a lot of different views, we looked at it from a lot of different angles, and I think some smart things were said.
In other news: Someone suggested that putting the fully qualified URL to the audio in the RSS feed would help the Diecast show up for podcasting software. I have done this. I’m sure you’ll let me know if it helped.
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Hosts: Shamus, Josh, and Mumbles, Chris but not Rutskarn.
Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #22: Videogame Journalism, Pacific Rim, and Comics”
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Last of Us is a PS3 exclusive, which means I won’t get to play it. Still, I’ve read the synopsis and it sounded pretty interesting. I’ve also seen the gameplay and I don’t feel like I’m missing much. This strikes me as being a subset of the Tomb Raider mechanics: All my least favorite parts. So I’m happy to spoil the thing for myself.
While I can’t comment on the game in detail, I was really interested in Chris’ idea that this was a perfect execution of a flawed design. The cutscene » gameplay » cutscene » gameplay school of game design is ubiquitous in AAA games and I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon. Shooters are the superstars of AAA games. Big-budget shooters need story or they’ll just be endless violence with no context. The easiest and most straightforward way to put story into a game is with cutscenes. Cutscenes make for great trailers. Trailers drive buzz and buzz drives sales.
This is a rut so deep it could be classified as a canyon.
This game is not remotely fair. The constraints under which it was developed were unfair, and that unfairness is passed along to the player in the form of brutally unforgiving and occasionally impossible gameplay. The game isn’t mean or sadistic. It’s just indifferent.
Receiver was developed as part of a challenge to make an FPS in just seven days. For reference, that’s like trying to teach yourself Portuguese over your lunchbreak. Whatever faults the game might have, I have to give it credit for rising to an absurd and arbitrary challenge.
FPS games are routinely the most ambitious and expensive titles produced by the industry. The first-person view means the camera will be close to the scenery, which necessitates lots of detail. The genre is both insanely popular and deeply entrenched, meaning gameplay needs to be carefully designed and meticulously polished to even have a chance at standing out from the crowd. The violence creates a desire for context, which leads to cutscenes, which leads to outrageously expensive motion capture and model design, along with professional voice acting. Too much constant shooting gets to be numbing and monotonous, so you break up the firefights with set-piece stunts, moments of visual spectacle, and diverting vehicle sections that basically end up being a mechanically distinct game. (Which must also be carefully tested and balanced.)
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Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Receiver”
I have realized that I need to change the way I think about “reviewing” games. For years my habit was to buy a AAA game, play through it a bunch of times, digest it, and then write thousands of words over the course of many weeks as I analyzed the experience in exhaustive detail. I didn’t always do that, but it was kind of the ideal. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that this writing style was completely at odds with my playing habits.
It used to be that I’d buy five or six big AAA games a year. I only played a few because they were so expensive, and I played them so deeply because I wanted to wring value out of them to justify the price tag. Damn it, I’m kinda tired of Deus Ex: Invisible War, but I can’t get another game until March so I might as well play through it again.
I don’t play games like that now. Games are cheaper. Games are shorter. I play more indies. I play more games casually, or in short bursts. I’m more picky, and less inclined to stick with a game when I stop having fun. I have gifts, review copies, and Steam sales dropping titles into my queue, so I’ve always got something promising over the horizon. Tomb Raider is the first game in ages where I consumed a game in an absolute sense, exhausting its possibilities and fully exploring it mechanically.
I’ve been clinging to my old review paradigm as I shifted to this new approach to playing games, and the result is that I rarely review games now. I’ve been stuck in this mindset where you can’t review a game unless you’ve beaten it. It’s a natural reaction to the fanboy lineup of defense against critical analysis:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Reviews: Now With More Shortness”
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I berated Prince of Persia: Two Thrones because I hated its time-pressure platforming sections. I ended up fumbling around, trying to figure out what the game wanted from me and where I was supposed to go. This section where you run through the burning compound is a much better execution of the same idea. (I’m aware it’s been done elsewhere, including Drake’s Fortune, but I haven’t played those games.) It presents a frantic, high-speed run through a crumbling structure, and yet it’s pretty clear where you’re supposed to go. The visible threat is intense, but the actual time pressure is fairly low-key, allowing you to fumble a bit without leading to instant death.
Also: I’m disappointed with everyone who allowed Josh to die repeatedly. I need you folks to step up your game next week or we’ll have more of the same.
RUN YOU BASTARDS! I’m coming for you! Again! And this time I might not die right away and I might even live long enough to hurt some of you, so really we’d all be better off if you ran away. Actually why aren’t you running away? Isn’t this place on fire? What’s the point in this firefight again? In fact, why don’t you guys ju… Oh. I’m dead again. Well, only one thing to do now. RUN YOU BASTARDS! I’m coming for you! (etc.)
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Yes, this bit is ridiculous. Let’s get that out of the way. We can defend this part of the game against many things, but against the charge of being flagrantly and excessively silly we must plead no contest.
You’re blowing up pockets of natural gas just two meters from your face so you can shatter metal and stone to open the way to your friends, who are imprisoned in an impractical container suspended off the ground. In the process of freeing them you obliterate the floor to reveal a lake of magma that – if it really existed – would have long since heated this chamber to uninhabitable temperatures. You’re doing all of this just to fling the prison cage around the room, rather than just using whatever existing equipment is used to load and unload this cage.
Having said all that – I don’t really mind all that much. We’re definitely operating in a universe driven by Nathan Drake / Indiana Jones physics. You can get away with balderdash like this as long as the game doesn’t linger on it too long. In my mind, none of this silliness is anywhere near as offensive as the previous cutscene.
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
T w e n t y S i d e d
