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We talked a bit about the Bethesda art style, which is kind of like discussing the flavor of a glass of room-temperature water. For comparison, here is the art style of the original supermutants:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 3 EP21: Guy Fawkes Day”
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We have reached the point in the crisis where the gaming media is dangerously close to running out of lede paragraph puns and jokey article titles. Sham City? Sim Shitty? Sim Sleazy? SinCity? There’s only so much we can do with the phonics we’re given. If this crisis continues we’ll run out of lame-ass jokes entirely and be forced to come up with proper headlines.
The SimCity story continues to be a mess. Just to outline the basics for those of you who get your gaming news by jogging past people discussing old IGN threads, the story so far is thus: The new SimCity “reboot” released with this always-online stuff that was either DRM or social networking and multiplayer, depending on who you asked and how cynical they were. The servers couldn’t keep up with the player demand, nobody could connect, the game was broken and crashed a lot, cities would revert to some hours-old state without warning, blah blah blah. It’s the same stupid crap that happened when Diablo III released as a multiplayer-only title, only much worse.
We got a few patches, and then more, and eventually Maxis disabled a lot of the multiplayer features just to give the servers a break. Most painfully, they disabled “cheetah” speed, meaning players that run out of money need to spend more time doing nothing while waiting for the next in-game hourly payment to roll in. All of this brought stability at the expense of making the entire online system completely pointless. (But still mandatory!)
But let’s look at some public statements. Keep in mind that this stuff is a couple of days old at this point. If you need up-to-the-minute news then you should know better than to read my blog. I just got around to playing Max Payne 3 this week, for crying out loud.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Sim Sickly”
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Since I played as a good character, I always cleaned out Paradise Falls. Because that’s what virtuous people do: They murder dozens of evil people and loot their corpses for money. While tripping on drugs. It’s how we make the world a better place.
I like how the slaves can just wander off once their owners are dead even though they have bomb-collars that oh who cares. It’s all written on drool-soaked construction paper and there’s no point in enumerating all its faults.
I know I’m guilty of bouts of hyperbole. Activision, EA, and Ubisoft are capable of some truly infuriating behaviors, and it’s really tempting to just throw around words like “evil” and “greedy”. EA is a huge, dysfunctional organization that takes in billions of dollars and employs thousands of people. But I think it’s worth noting that their desire to make money isn’t what makes them a bad company. Their problem isn’t greed, but shocking ineptitude.
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This blog is a very unusual beast. I don’t say this to brag. It’s unusually big for a WordPress blog. (Once sites get this busy, they often move away from blogging software.) There’s an unusual level of “engagement” for a personality-driven blog. (If you’ve got a big blog based around a single person, it’s common to have the comments aimed not at the subject matter of the post itself, but at the author.) But here we’ve got long, detailed discussions between people on all sorts of topics. The comments are busy enough to be interesting but not so busy that you feel like you’re shouting into a hurricane. On top of all this, the whole thing is shockingly civil for an open-comment discussion thread where anyone can join without creating an account.
The point is: We have some sort of delicately balanced ideal here, and I’ve been slow to change things because I don’t want to disturb the mysterious alchemy we have. For years people have been asking me to create forums, and I’ve resisted because I don’t want to harm the blog or make it less fun. This blog has been a big part of my routine for 7.5 years now. It works well and I’m very reluctant to mess with it in a way that might make the thing less fun.
But Shamus, why can’t we have some optional side-forum, just for people who want to talk about other stuff?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Thinking About Forums”
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Thanks again to Jarenth for filling in while I was moving. I’m glad he did such a good job, although I’m kind of disappointed that he did such a good job that nobody missed me. Also, I’ve decided to blame him for the rash of puns on my name, even though I think he’s the only person who was blameless in the matter.
A few things to note because I wasn’t there for the recording:
Samuel still reminds me of Al Pacino.
Anyone notice how Havelock’s pistol is somehow a semi-automatic?
You know, I used the zoom feature all the time at the Hound Pitts, and it never once dawned on me that I was doing it with the mask off. Derp.
I think the problem with the mission briefings is that it doesn’t feel like these guys have enough going on. Running a conspiracy ought to keep you busy. It feels too much like these jokers are hanging out while they wait for you to overthrow the entire country for them.
It kills me that the game gives us audiologs of people that we know and can speak to directly. Audiologs are usually a hack for when direct communication isn’t possible. It’s like the game was afraid of going for too long without the player shanking someone, so most of the characterization was dumped in this non-gameplay ghetto of exposition dumps. Since Corvo has a quasi-dialog wheel, it would have been much better to take some of these audiologs and move their contents into conversation branches. It would still be optional for the impatient, but it would round out our conversations with them and allow the exposition to happen more naturally. It would also fix this layers-of-emotional-removal problem that Chris was talking about.
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This is the first time I’ve ever felt the impotent frustration of being a viewer. When Josh walked away from Campbell I found myself shouting, “The book, Josh! Pick up the book!” at my monitor. Spoiler warning: It didn’t help.
Josh is actually incorrect when he says that the demonstrated path is the only way to reveal yourself to Curnow without having to fight him. However, I can’t really blame Josh. There are many ways for this to play out, and his method was completely new to me.
Since I wasn’t around for this recording, let me do all the nitpicking I’d planned to do for this quest.
The non-lethal path for dealing with the High Overseer is ludicrous. You zonk him, strap him to a chair, and brand him, marking him as a heretic. And everyone just accepts this?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dishonored EP6: You’re a Chicken Now!”
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T w e n t y S i d e d
