We went to the Carnegie Science Center last week and visited their “Robot Exhibit”. This was one of the most deeply offensive and blatantly anti-robot exhibits I’ve ever seen. As a long-time advocate for the differently-brained, I was shocked at how backward and bio-centric the whole thing was.
It began with the predictable reinforcing of old, outdated stereotypes:
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Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Robots Are People Too, Except Not Really”
Some behind-the-scenes info: We generally forward news stories to each other all week. When Sunday rolls around, we take the headlines for the week, sort them out, and figure out which ones we want to talk about and which ones we don’t. Then we record the show.
This week we had nothing. Not one news story. I don’t know if we weren’t following the news or we didn’t care, but we had no stories and nothing to say. We just got together for our once-a-week blather session and Josh began recording halfway through. That means this podcast is even less structured than last week. Just so you know what you’re getting into. In any case, the choice was between this and nothing.
We’ve got a good slate of stories now, so the Diecast should return to normal next week. In the meantime, you’ve been warned:
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Hosts: Shamus, Josh, Rutskarn, Mumbles, Chris
Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #19: Scribblenauts, Skyrim”
Last week I mentioned BioShock’s thick-headed approach to tutorial popups. I decided to talk about the idea a bit more in this week’s column.
A lot of people have praised Half-Life 2, and while I don’t disagree that HL2 had a really awesome tutorial (it helps that the time is spent worldbuilding and setting a mood and not just bossing the player around) I wonder how much of the slack we give to HL2 is due to the fact that you can pick a chapter of the game. Just about every other game insists that you start over from the beginning. The train station is awesome, but I’d be a lot less patient with it if I had to do it every time I wanted to fool around with the gravity gun or mow down some metro cops.
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.
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
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.
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
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?
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
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