Twenty Sided

By Josh Posted Thursday Mar 7, 2013

Filed under: Diecast 148 comments

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With Shamus out for the week, I host and Jarenth guest stars on this exciting installment of the Diecast!

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And now for the show notes, complete with the oft-requested timestamps!

00:15 – We talk about what we’ve been doing for the past week. Shamus is a zombie, Chris is a Tomb Raider, Rutskarn is Homestuck, Jarenth’s lost in Echo Bazaar, and I’ve been set on the Path of Exile.

15:55 – Everything and more about the Playstation 4 announcement, and in particular, the implication that “more polygons = stronger emotional connection.” And if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, VideoGamerTV made a helpful abridged version of the conference that has basically everything that’s important in it.

33:00 – We discuss the closure of Civilization World and what it can tell us about the state of Social Games, and how it compares to a similar collapse of the MMO space.

48:00 – Crytek jumps on the free-to-play bandwagon and is also very bad at naming things. We also talk about Cevat Yerli’s statement that “…the notion of a single-player experience has to go away.”

1:02:15 – Round Table Discussion: Are the Elder Scrolls games getting better or worse?

1:18:00 – We round out the podcast with the Assassin’s Creed 4 announcement. I hope you like pirates, because… uh… well I’m not really sure where the hell they’re going with this. Assassins and pirates? Are we going to finally see a video game about pirates versus ninjas? I don’t know, but here’s the announcement trailer.

Josh Viel is the primary editor and producer of the Spoiler Warning video series. You can support the show by backing the Patreon.

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148 comments

All Moved In

By Shamus Posted Thursday Mar 7, 2013

Filed under: Personal 95 comments

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January 1st 2001 to March 5th 2013. That’s the longest I’ve ever lived in one place. I will say that I am curiously just as able-bodied at 41 as I was at 29, although I find that the after-action muscle pains are much more crippling. I spent yesterday dragging my carcass around the house and wondering if I’d seriously damaged my knees. “Lift with your legs, not your back” people tell you. That’s all well and good, but once my legs are spent, what do I lift with then, huh? Tell me that, Mr. Smugface chair-sitter, with your healthy back and your intact knees. I don’t see YOU dragging YOUR worldly possessions up a flight of stairs in the snow.

Yesterday morning was The Trial of No Internet while we waited for the cable company to show up and turn the valve that controlled the internet pump. He had to run new wire from the telephone pole, because the existing line was only good for television but was too old to contain the precious internet juice. That means this house has never been graced by the blessed electrical impulses of broadband internet, which is a radical thought.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “All Moved In”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Dishonored EP5: Secondary Explosions

By Josh Posted Wednesday Mar 6, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 106 comments

 Dishonored EP4: Grandma's HousePrevious Post

Next PostDishonored EP6: You're a Chicken Now! 

Link (YouTube)

As a result of Shamus’ GRAND MOVING ADVENTUREâ„¢, he was unavailable for… basically everything this weekend. As a result of this, and an intense market research study that cost nearly as much as Rutskarn’s yearly salary (!), we’ve decided to bring in a replacement for Shamus with someone that we estimate will be significantly more successful in virtually every way. So much so that we’ve pretty much just decided to permanently replace Shamus altogether, or at least until such time as he finishes moving his things and returns to smack me upside the head.

So give a rousing welcome to Jarenth, hailing from Blue Screen of Awesome, and enjoy this mostly Shame-less week of Twenty Sided.

Josh Viel is the primary editor and producer of the Spoiler Warning video series. You can support the show by backing the Patreon.

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106 comments

Dishonored EP4: Grandma’s House

By Josh Posted Tuesday Mar 5, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 124 comments

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Playing through Dishonored again, it really does feel like something is missing from the game. The game clearly has this whole, fleshed out world, but there never seemed to be any hook; anything to pull me into it or encourage me to explore anything but the most cursory of background information. The main storyline is all exposition about events that are happening right now, with little explanation for what happened before or why any of this is important. It really was, as I touched on in the episode, like I’d missed the first few chapters of the story somewhere.

It really didn’t help that I didn’t figure out the Heart could reveal background information about the NPCs if you pointed it at them until I was nearly finished with the game. I’d tried it early on, but apparently none of the people I’d tried to learn about were interesting enough for me to distinguish the Heart’s dialogue about them from everything it was saying about the general area. Also, it totally doesn’t count if the only way to learn about the background of the setting is to point an item at everything I see.

And yes, the brightness problem will be fixed next episode. Patience!

Josh Viel is the primary editor and producer of the Spoiler Warning video series. You can support the show by backing the Patreon.

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Experienced Points: Why the PS4 Doesn’t do PS3 Games

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Mar 5, 2013

Filed under: Column 106 comments

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The recently-announced PS4 is getting a bit of bad press lately because of the lack of backwards compatibility. My column this week explains why this was inevitable.

While reading up on how the Cell Architecture works for this article, my eye began to twitch s I pictured just what I complete mess it would be to emulate this beast. The cell lets a bunch of processors share different levels of cache. There’s all this stuff governing when memory writes are performed and it’s basically a bunch of distributed computers shoved in the same case. That’s awesome if you’re doing brute-force cryptography or building a render farm, but as a system for making interactive games it comes off as… weird.

I’ll repeat the borderline conspiracy theory I’ve floated in the past:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experienced Points: Why the PS4 Doesn’t do PS3 Games”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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106 comments

Fallout 3 EP19: Stop Calling Me Mungo

By Shamus Posted Monday Mar 4, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 140 comments

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In this episode we discuss games where you’re given a friend / companion / family member in a game, only to have them killed off two minutes later. It’s interesting because we were just talking about this in relation to Dishonored.

So here we are, in the very depths of the bowels of the pits of the dungeons of the bottom of Fallout 3’s barrel. This is the part of the game where the writers thumb their noses at the player while blowing raspberries and taunt, “Stop degrading yourself! Stop degrading yourself!” This is the most ludicrous, poorly-justified, aggravating, lazy railroad job in the entire game.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 3 EP19: Stop Calling Me Mungo”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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140 comments

Do Not Panic

By Shamus Posted Sunday Mar 3, 2013

Filed under: Notices 169 comments

 The New Years Stream is Live - It's Over!Previous Post

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Yes, the site theme has changed. No, this is not a permanent change. I’m just mucking around trying to figure out why the site is so ridiculously slow. I’ve fussed with the database, I’ve turned off all my plugins, I’ve checked the error logs, I’ve scoured the WordPress help pages, and I’ve said swear words in a loud, authoritative voice. I’m basically out of ideas at this point.

SOMETHING is making it incredibly expensive to show pages. It gets bad when lots of people are commenting. It gets horrible to the point of uselessness when I add a new post. We’ll see what this does.

EDIT: Initial test: Inconclusive. I’m going to let this sit for couple of hours and watch performance as comments appear and I edit posts.

EDIT: Well, I stripped the site down to the bones. Default theme, no plugings. (And then, just plugins to rebuff spam.) The site loaded fine, but posting comments still takes over a minute. Actually, the comment goes up right away, but the person leaving the comment gets stuck waiting for the page to refresh. The same thing happens when I dd a new post or update an old one. Basically, submitting a form results in an epic page load for no reason in the world. It could be the form. It could be modifying the database. It could be rebuilding the affected pages. I don’t know.

There are 235,000+ comments on the site. That’s a lot, but in the grand scheme of things they shouldn’t clog up the works that badly.

I really am at a loss. There’s no reason for this. I contacted my web host and the machine itself seems fine. No rogue processes eating CPU/memory/bandwidth. It’s just another stupid WordPress blog.

EDIT: On the advice of the tech support guru at my host, I dropped the Super Cache plugin and switched to W3 Total Cache. The difference is pretty stark. I’m hopping around the admin pages with a speed I haven’t seen in over a year. Comments seem to be working well. We’ll see how this goes.

Thank you for your continued patience.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 The New Years Stream is Live - It's Over!Previous Post

Next PostThinking About Forums 

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