Link (YouTube) |
I love Josh’s final fight with Havelock. I like to imagine a movie version where they play the first 1.2 seconds of Duel of the Fates and then cut off abruptly. It was certainly a fitting end for this short and emotionally muted game.
As a writer, I found some of the shortcomings to be really frustrating. I mean, look…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dishonored EP21: The Fight at the End”
Come and hang out with the Spoiler Warning all-stars as we play Monaco. Multiplayer! The stream is right here, which will follow Josh’s P.O.V. You can also watch the game from Randy’s perspective.
EDIT: Well, Steam died and so the game ended. A shame. Also, since we were all playing the game we didn’t get to interact much with the viewers, which made it kind of an odd hangout. Ah well.
Monaco is really fun. I can’t wait to try it in single player and find out what we were supposed to be doing and how the game really works.
Link (YouTube) |
True story: The YouTube page for the owner of this video offers a popup that says, “We detected your video may be shaky. Would you like us to stabilize it?” It’s amazing that they not only have software that can fix shakycam shots, but that they can also detect such shots and they automatically scan for them in every single video that gets uploaded.
Foolish YouTube. You can’t stabilize Josh!
The next episode will bring this season to a close.
Link (YouTube) |
Another episode of fun mechanics, rich environments, and bland characters. To expand a bit on the question that Rutskarn posed: What do you think of games that allow you to skip or miss content?
Allow me to refine the answer I gave in the episode: We’re really talking about three different types of content:
If there are only one or two nuggets of optional content, then I find it slightly annoying. I don’t want to play the whole game again just to see the five minutes I missed. However, once you get enough optional content it starts to justify a second play-through. And if I am going to do a second play-through, then I want as much alternate content as I can get. So I guess my answer is that when it comes to optional content, I want “Nothing or a double helping“, as Pippin Merry says.
But that’s just my thoughts. How about you: What do you think of games that allow you to skip or miss content?
Also note how this ties in with the save-game stuff we talked about yesterday. Some people like to save, go down one path, then re-load, and take the other. This is often difficult or impossible with checkpoint saves.
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Here’s a little discussion on why making save-games is harder than you’d think. Based on the comments so far, I’m kind of wishing I’d gone into more detail. Since I don’t get to say nice things about Mass Effect very often these days, I will say that the franchise did a pretty good job of balancing save complexity against player convenience. The game allowed you to save outside of combat, which fixes 90% of the problem. It still leaves you with the problem of being unable to save if one of the bad guys goes on walkabout and leaves you stuck in combat and unable to save, but it’s a massive improvement over the checkpoint-only system.
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Josh couldn’t make it this week. My USB headset broke and my backup evidently has a white noise generator built into it. I did the editing. We forgot to do the mailbag segment. So basically, this episode features the usual level of polish and professionalism you’ve come to expect from us. Enjoy!
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Also! We we be doing a hangout on Thursday, April 25 at 7pm Eastern Time. (Which works out to midnight on Friday morning, GMT.) I’ll post links and give a heads-up when the show is ready to go live.
Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #10: SimToothpaste, MMO Permadeath, and More Graphics”
You know, I was fairly positive about Deus Ex: Human Revolution during our Spoiler Warning run. I was really impressed with how large and opened-ended it was by the standards of the day. But then I spent this evening watching a Deus Ex speedrun and I was reminded just how staggeringly massive the original was, and just how many ways you could accomplish something. Human Revolution was proud of itself when it gave you two ways into a base, but the original game often had half a dozen, some of which were impacted by decisions you’d made earlier in the game.
I always love a good speed run. Here it is, the entire game in 43 minutes! That’s amazing. I think I usually spend longer than that doing the first mission.
Link (YouTube) |
Lots of deliberate glitching and other shenanigans. My favorite is how he skips the entire first mission. If you’ve never played the game:
You’re supposed to cut through the NSF terrorists that have taken control of the Statue of Liberty. You make your way in, rescue a fellow agent in the basement, then fight or sneak to the top and arrest or kill the terrorist leader. Once that’s over, you go back down and visit your headquarters, which is near the statue.
In this run, totally ignores the mission and tosses a gas grenade over the wall so that it lands beside headquarters. The cloud reaches INTO the lobby, where it injures one of your fellow soldiers. He gets pissed off and comes out to get you. In doing so, he opens the door that’s supposed to stay locked until the first mission is over. The player then runs him over and enters headquarters, where all the scripts behave as if the first mission was complete.
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?
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
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.
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
T w e n t y S i d e d
