We waste a bunch of time looking up a safe combination in this episode. It’s not bad, unless you know ahead of time that the code is 4-7-3. If you knew that, then it would be really frustrating to watch. My advice? It’s probably best to not know that the code is 4-7-3 when you watch it.
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I looked. I couldn’t find the bridge dive video Chris mentioned.
EDIT: Here’s one!
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On the upside, the podcast is proving to be really popular. On the downside, we seem to be slipping on our production of Spoiler Warning videos. Oops.
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Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #7: Piracy, APB Reloaded 2, and Activision’s Face”
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My column this week is a rant about Samantha, the damsel in distress of the new Tomb Raider game.
It was really temping to contrast Samantha with Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite, but I was afraid of doing cross-game comparisons that would likely get sidetracked into a frustrating “game X is superior to game Y” debate and confuse rather than illuminate the issue.
My other major issue with the new Tomb Raider is it fondness for cutscene incompetence. Just about every cutscene involves Lara doing something really stupid or reckless. The writers also LOVE the use of off-screen space to poof in bad guys. There’s more than one situation where Lara seems be be alone, then a cutscene happens and someone punches her unconscious from just offscreen.
Having all of your cutscenes deliver setbacks by having the player character perpetrate awful blunders is a great way to make the player hate either the writer or their avatar. I realize these problems are nothing new to videogames, but they are problems that really grate on me because they seem to be the offspring of laziness and bad habits.
Dear people of the future: This was originally posted on April 1st, 2013. For about 12 hours, the site was decorated with a My Little Pony background. In fact, the site looked more or less like this:
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Ha ha.
But a lot of people really liked having some color in the background there, which had previously been some low-contrast abstract grey rectangles. I like it too. Ironic pony-placement aside, it does add something to the site. Of course, maybe I like it just because it’s new. I get the same thing with my desktop wallpaper. After a few weeks of the same image I get sick of it, and whatever replaces it looks “better” simply because it’s novel, not because it’s objectively a better image.
So I’ve put some color on the background in the form of more thematically-themed dice. You know, as a nod to those tabletop games I’m always writing about on this site.
Some other modest adjustments have been made to the format. Let me know if I’ve created any usability problems.
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We talked about running a tabletop game in this episode, which means I’ve paid the topic my annual lip service and can therefore go on calling this site “Twenty Sided” with a straight face. So that’s our obligation to tabletop coverage for this year. Tune in next year when, in a moment of distraction, I mention that I’m using my D&D 3.5 manual to prop up a crooked table leg.
In which we spend about two-thirds of an episode lost, stuck, going the wrong way, or unsure of what the game wants from us. On the upside, we spend some of the time passive-aggressively insulting the Bethesda art design by praising this DLC.
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Just two episodes left. If you’re following the drinking game, then you’ll remember that we’re keeping track of how many people the drinking game would have killed. (Every time the drink count is high enough to produce fatal alcohol poisoning, a fresh player is introduced.) As of the start of this episode, victim #6 is just reaching the point of severe motor impairment. I’m really hoping we can kill them quickly and perhaps kill one more before this season ends. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I’m pretty sure the final episode is an extra-long one.
My hope is that through perseverance and virtuous industry, Josh’s potty mouth can end the life of that sad seventh bastard.
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Yes, not much content this week. I’m writing a book, Josh is sick, things are busy, and I’m dealing with a lot of technical site performance issues. Also I might have snuck in a few minutes of videogaming. Like, I beat BioShock Infinite, which is NOT a short game by modern standards.
I installed W3 Total Cache about a month ago. At first it was a miracle, but over the month the site seemed to slow down again. Very confusion-making for my brain.
Last night I began mucking around, trying to figure out what was going on. I messed with some W3TC settings and suddenly I couldn’t administrate the blog. The machine on my web host slowed to a crawl and I couldn’t do anything. I eventually gave up and went to bed. When I got up this morning, the problem had resolved itself and my site was fast(ish) again. It STILL doesn’t pop the way it did a couple of years ago, but it was a huge step in the right direction.
While investigating all this other stuff, I came across CloudFlare. Looks like it’s a content delivery network for small-fry sites. In the past, if you wanted to distribute you content to servers all over the world to balance your traffic load, it would cost huge money. You basically needed to pay for top-shelf hosting in a lot of different places and then pay (or develop) some software to spread the content around. (This is how YouTube handles their ridiculous traffic load. Obviously there no machine fast enough or pipe wide enough to serve all of YouTube from a single source.) CloudFlare looks like it can give small-to-medium size sites the same kind of deal.
According to the site, this can be done for free. I’m still reading the fine print and looking for the catch, but if you’ve got any experience or knowledge in dealing with this sort of stuff I’d love to hear your take on it. I considering signing up, but I don’t want to do anything I’ll regret tomorrow. Or now. Or at some other point in time. I’m trying to avoid regret in an absolute sense, is what I’m saying.
I’ve never known what to do with the front page of this site: www.shamusyoung.com. For a while it was a splash page, but that seemed sort of pointless and self-aggrandizing. Then I replaced it with a simple redirect to the blog. HOWEVER, some people reported that it led to a redirect loop. Somehow, a page at / redirecting to /twentysidedtale/ was a “loop” in the mind of some web browsers. (With no evidence, I’ve chosen to blame IE. Because, you know, IE does have an established history of stupid-making.) But rather than deal with these error reports I just replaced the front page with a stupid, 1999-style “click here to go to the thing” type deal.
Some people are asking for an RSS feed for the podcast. It’s pretty easy to give you a feed for the podcast POSTS. That would be this. But I get the sense that’s not what people are looking for. The problem is, I don’t really use RSS, and I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts. So I’m not sure what this feed needs to have or how I can automate it. Can someone give me an example of the kind of feed you’re looking for?
Anyway. The point of all this is that whatever your complaint is, I’m working on it very, very slowly.
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
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?
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
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.
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
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.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
T w e n t y S i d e d
