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You know, we had a long list of topics in the queue for this week. We really don’t want this to be an EA bashing podcast. But dangit, EA is just so busy making noise.
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Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #9: EA Wins, BioWare’s Integrity, Sherlock Sucks”
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How messed up does an industry need to be before your customers start clamoring for you to spend less money producing the products they buy? The $60 price tag is a foregone conclusion* so we’re not asking because we want lower prices. (Although, if that’s on the table, that would be nice too.) It’s just that we’d like to see studios stop financially destroying themselves. We’re at the point where saying, “We’ve got this elaborate new technology to make games!” is the equivalent to saying, “I’m gonna take a shower!” in teen slasher flick: Everyone knows you’re the next one to get the knife.
My column this week is about the upcoming Thief game, and how the developer has already gone into the steam-filled bathroom and begun toweling themselves with their eyes closed. As luck would have it, Jim Sterling’s video from yesterday is about the same thing. Also, we’re going to hit the topic again in the podcast this week.
In related by somewhat hypocritical news: I’m working my way through Thief 2 again, and I do admit these graphics have not aged well:
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I love the game as much as ever, but would I be able to get into it if I was playing for the first time? Still, I think there’s some room between where we were then and where we are now. We might haggle over where the sweet spot is between cost and benefit, but I think we’ll all agree we passed that point years ago. (For my money, it was around 2004-2006.) However, some of you might argue for MORE GRAFFIX!
* Offer void in Australia.
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It’s been a long time since I found a game this instantly engrossing. Kerbal Space Program is kind of like a… Sim? Sim NASA? That’s as close as I can come to describing it using pigeonhole genre labels. You’re given rocket parts, a space center, a solar system of planets and moons, and you’re left to find your own fun. Orbit the planet? Go to the moon? Throw a kerbanaut into the sun? Build a space-jet? Make a giant tower of fuel tanks and blow them up? Whatever.
The game devoured last week. I don’t even know what happened. I played the demo on Saturday, bought the game on Sunday, and the next thing I knew it was Friday and I was eyebrow-deep in orbital mechanics and rocket theory. I’m not sure where the time went. I don’t even think I accomplished that much. I put a guy on the Mà¼n. Put a group of them on the other, smaller moon. I threw a guy into the sun. This is pretty simple stuff. There are legends that some players have landed on other planets and then brought the Kerbals back again.
There’s a certain rhythm to the game…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Kerbal Space Program: Something Different”
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Re-reading the note at the start of this episode, I’m pretty sure we misinterpreted it. I assumed it was the reward for the non-lethal option. But now I think it’s just a reward for not killing all three of the Boyle sisters. It’s not a bug, it’s just confusing and really odd.
How did this woman get you this message? She’s an associate of the current regime. There should not be lines of communication going from there to here. Moreover, how did she even know that the conspiracy exists? And if you did the non-lethal option, then Lady Boyle vanished in the care of Mr. Creepy. He could have kidnapped her on his own. The point is, there’s no reason for her to know where her sister went, who was responsible, that they worked for the conspiracy, or how to contact them.
All of that aside, you killed or kidnapped her sister. And so she sends a gift saying, “Thanks for not pointlessly murdering the rest of us”. I can understand why the game designers want to pat you on the head for making the effort and not just shanking everyone, but the entire premise of this letter leaves a lot of goofy holes in logic and characterization. She shouldn’t be able to send this message and she shouldn’t want to.
In honor of Josh becoming a fish, I’ve composed the following cheat sheet for those of you scheduled to take your astronavigation exam this week:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dishonored EP15: The Dudeless Way”
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For the last two days people have been sending me messages in email, Twitter, and Facebook. These messages invariably come in one of two forms:
These messages are probably related.
Remember that a botnet is a bunch of hacked, trojan’d, malware-infected machines. The machines are in living rooms, in classrooms, in offices. Their owners probably have no idea they’re infected. Maybe they were on some skeezy porn site. Or torrenting things they shouldn’t. Or maybe they clicked on one of those “Optimize your PC” scams. Whatever. The owners shrug, “That machine is slow these days.”
This is a brute-force attack, which means thousands of different computers are going to thousands of different blogs and attempting to gain admin privileges using stupid, you-should-know-better credentials. My blog isn’t at any particular risk. While you can never say never, I shouldn’t be susceptible to brute-force over any kind of a reasonable timeframe. My password is what it should be: Long alphanumeric gibberish. It sucks to remember, but it ought to keep me safe for the next few hundred years or so.
This is a friendly reminder to encourage your less-savvy friends to keep their machine clean. Their ignorance and hapless surfing habits are now a danger to everyone. This attack wouldn’t be worth it if large numbers of people didn’t use horrible passwords, and it wouldn’t be possible if large numbers of people didn’t allow their machines to be compromised. The un-savvy are now providing the incentive and the means for their own undoing.
So yes. I know. Nothing I can do on my end. I could spend hours scouring logs and banning IP’s, but I’d just be banning individual members of an amorphous blob. The best solution is to complain until the whole thing blows over.
Link (YouTube) |
Why is it that everyone seems to know who Corvo is when he’s sneaking around in disguise? First Martin figures it out in half a second, not only that the creepy assassin in the skull mask that just choked/shot/stabbed/blew up the heckling guard is not here to kill him but to free him, but he also identifies exactly who the creepy assassin in the skull mask is. And now we have this guy at the party, who calls you on being the creepy assassin in the skull mask while in disguise as the creepy assassin in the skull mask…
Okay, I suppose there’s no complaining about that one. Still, it would have perhaps been more interesting if, somewhere along the line, someone mentioned that, yeah, basically all the nobles know that Pendleton and Havelock have some ace-in-the-hole super assassin they’ve been using to cause mayhem and further their agenda. But at this point, nobody’s going to dare call them on it for fear of starting a civil war, what with all the power the two have accrued.
Also, true story, I was talking to Shamus about this week’s episodes earlier, and he said, absolutely seriously, “I don’t remember this week being silly at all.”
No Shamus. Not silly.
Not one bit.
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It’s like the designers just wanted to establish that Piero was a creep, and it didn’t occur to them that the players would want to respond in some way. Once you catch him spying on Callista in the bath, you’re forced into a conversation with him. But you can’t really do anything.
You can’t blackmail him, even though he has something you need. You can’t wait until later and tell Callista that she ought to watch out for this sort of thing. (I talked to her later and didn’t get the option. I don’t know what your dialog options are if you barge into the bathroom.) You can’t even tell anyone else about the situation.
Even if you didn’t want to script a branching sidequest where the player might blackmail Piero and also might optionally betray him later once they get what they want, there’s still so much you can do with this setup. Just letting the player ineffectually tell people would make for interesting character development. Maybe Pendleton would think it’s just the most delicious gossip that such a brilliant man is taken to such base behavior. Maybe Havelock doesn’t like it because it shows Piero lacks discipline. Martin would be offended by the immorality of it and see it as a religious problem. Maybe all of them would urge you against taking action now, suggesting that they’ll deal with Piero once you kill the bad guy. There: A tiny sip of characterization, the illusion of player choice, and a foreshadowing of the coming twist.
Like the torture, like your alleged fatherhood of Emily, and like your supposed relationship with the late Empress, this is an interesting set-up with no delivery. This is why the game often felt so detached and emotionally vacant to me. The gameplay is fun, but even the characters themselves don’t seem to care about what’s going on.
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
T w e n t y S i d e d
