I have written about the horribleness of Ubisoft’s UPlay system in the past. It’s pretty much the worst of the major digital “platforms” out right now. Even Origin pretends to have features and a digital storefront, but UPlay is nothing more than naked DRM with no sugar coating.
I last dealt with UPlay back in January, when I tried to play Far Cry 3. Here is that saga as I related on Twitter:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A Note from UPlay”
It’s February of 2013. The temperature is a bone-shattering 15°F today. (About -10°C.) It’s so cold my eyes are watering. Now, this actually isn’t that cold by the standards of a Pennsylvania winter, but context has a way of changing how we perceive temperature. In this case, I’m standing in the kitchen, and I don’t normally expect kitchens to be this cold.
“Aren’t you worried about the pipes freezing?” I ask the owner. All the utilities are off, which is why it’s so cold in here.
“Nah,” she shrugs. “It should be okay. It hasn’t been cold enough to worry about that.”
I nod. I’ve been sort of nervous about freezing pipes since January of 2008.
She’s named Jenny. She’s got her daughter with her today, showing us prospective tenants this apartment. I take another walk through the place. It doesn’t take long. It’s small.
“We’ll have all this stuff fixed before you move in,” she assures me.
I shake my head. The damage is extensive.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Twelve-Year Mistake Part 8: The Island”
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Wherein Campster reveals that he’s never actually watched Homestar Runner or anything related to Homestar Runner. I invite you all to throw rocks at him. Also: Pun wars, arrows, and making fun of my mom offscreen!
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I agree with the rest of the cast: The tomb puzzles are where the game felt the most Tomb Raider-y. It feels like a slice of the best part of the earlier games.
The game is at its strongest when it moves away from the shooter stuff and embraces the platforming and puzzles. It’s not that I dislike the combat, either. I just think the game would have been thematically stronger if we had, like, half the fights and a third the body count.
I also like this particular puzzle. It presents a timing obstacle and your first instinct is probably to assume you’re supposed to do it as fast as possible. But the timing is actually really slow. Open the shutters, wait, THEN act. It’s obvious once you see the solution and it’s not hard to execute once you get what you’re supposed to be doing.
Man I wish the game had more of this.
And then a few minutes later you get punched by a guy standing just off-screen and suddenly I hate the game again. I think this “captured in the cutscene” moment needs to count twice, since you get captured by one group in the middle of getting captured by another.
I feel like I’m in this tumultuous relationship with Tomb Raider. One minute we’re holding hands, laughing, and platforming and three minutes later we’re screaming at each other and she’s throwing things at me. I tell her we’re going to break up, for real this time. No seriously. It’s over. Then she starts talking about how she knows about another hidden tomb around here someplace and suddenly I go all spineless.
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As I said in the previous episode, I had to bail on our recording session this week. I’m sorry I missed this section of the game in our show. Here is the commentary I would have given you if I’d stuck with it:
If ships always get stranded here, then who climbed to the top of this crazy mountain and built a refueling station here? Also, why would anyone build a fueling station here? Did Lara really need to blow up ALL the fuel? Couldn’t she have made a smaller, safer, and less destructive signal fire?
Let’s imagine the rescue plane didn’t get struck by lightning. Where was it going to land? Why would an airplane be sent on a rescue mission where there is no known airfield? And as others have pointed out: We’re off the coast of Japan. Why is the rescue plane American?
Individually these are not horrible sins. I think the audience is mostly prepared to allow for a bit of slop in a pulpy adventure story. But I think a little attention to detail would have spared me from about five minutes of sustained eye-rolling.
Also, I think the rope arrows are a good mechanic in theory, but this looks ridiculous. Lara fires a rope arrow into a wooden structure and then pulls it down. I’m even willing to spot the game the hand-wave of arrows penetrating and holding unlimited loads. I’m even willing to spot the game a second hand-wave and allow her the unlimited supply of rope that’s always long enough and never needs to be recovered. (We can hand-wave this by saying it would just be tedious to have her reel in and re-roll the rope every time.) And naturally we’ll give a pass to the silly notion that these little arrows could still hit their targets while dragging that much weight.
But even with all of that duct tape applied to the bridge of disbelief-suspension, this is still pretty silly. Lara can’t be exerting force on these lines that exceed her weight. (If she did, she’d just fall over or haul herself up.) Which means these structures require less than her body weight to fall over. Okay, okay. Videogame rotted wood, etc. But if that’s the case, then she didn’t need the rope arrows. She could pull any of these objects over by grasping them and pulling. If nothing else, they should dump the doors that are reachable on foot but can only be opened with rope arrows. That’s just too preposterous.
I’m sorry Tomb Raider. I ran out of hand-waves for you.
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Mumbles crashed the show but then the game crashed just before the crash and so I had to go because I needed to crash. I will say that this game hates Josh’s machine. The strange framerate stuttering. The vanishing scenery. The terrible performance of TressFX. The CRASHES. I had a bit of trouble with the game, but nothing like this.
I was in need of sleep, so I’ll be missing from the rest of the episodes this week. Not to worry. Mumbles does an uncanny impression of me at the 15:30 mark. You’ll be fine.
Over the years a lot of people have asked me about this series, and so I’m putting this post here as a kind of catch-all. When these questions pop up again (like when Witcher 3 comes out) I can link back here and hopefully avoid repeating myself and having the same argument a dozen times.
I have a bit of a cultural bias in favor of the team behind the Witcher series. Being named Shamus Young, most people sensibly assume I’m quasi-Irish. Like a lot of Americans I’m a cultural mongrel, but if I can be said to have any cultural heritage at all it’s probably Polish.
The family culture was much stronger when I was a child in the 1970’s and my grandparents (and even a great-grandparent) were still alive. These were first or second generation immigrants and still had some attitudes and habits from the old country. (Particularly when it came to food.) Those folks are mostly gone now and my generation is about as Polish as Doritos and Mario Kart. But I still have a soft spot for the Warsaw-based CD Projekt.
Aside from my pro-Polish bias, I have a lot of reasons to like The Witcher. It’s a rare book-to-videogame adaptation that doesn’t just use the setting as window dressing on shallow, derivative gameplay. (As in the case of the Harry Potter games, for example.) It’s a fantasy RPG that isn’t just trying to copy Tolkien.
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On top of all that, CD Projekt is one of the most consumer-friendly companies in the industry. They run the excellent Good Old Games. We sometimes praise Valve for doing such a good job of lubricating / sugarcoating their DRM, but CD Projekt actually stands against DRM. They have released huge content patches for free in situations where just about any other company would charge money. They support PC games. They’re good people.
Good company. Literary approach to worldbuilding. No DRM. Fantasy RPG. Diverse mechanics. Gorgeous visuals. I have every reason in the world to love the Witcher series and beg people to play it.
Every reason except for the fact that I hate these damn games.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher”
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
T w e n t y S i d e d
