Link (YouTube) |
My favorite part of the episode is where we had to kill a guy to open a door to get a slave outfit so we could pretend to be a slave but the guy’s body vanished so we couldn’t open the door but it was okay because you can just jump the fence.
I’d forgotten this episode entirely. When we got to the bit where we were going to skip over the long march, I got excited thinking we were going to get a travel montage. I was very disappointed when it was a hard cut. Boo.
I’ve been seeing this a lot over the last few years: People claiming some game isn’t actually a game because it doesn’t contain some supposed virtue. This usually isn’t done as a exploration of what games are and how we think of them, but instead it’s used as a cudgel to denounce some despised trend or title.
My column this week is a hilariously pointless attempt to stop this brand of rhetorical shenanigans. It won’t work, but it’s a fun exercise anyway.
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Here we are at the end of this series. This began as a single 2,000 word post where I made some notes about how dumb your average zompocalypse-inhabitant was. Then it grew and I split it into two posts. Then more. The final tally is over 10,000 words, which would have made a pretty good start on a book. Perhaps there were better ways I could have spent this time.
A lot of people made some really sensible / inventive suggestions that were better than what I’d come up with. I didn’t borrow those ideas here, because it felt like cheating. Still, this is just another example of how more people = more better odds of survival.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “My Zombie Plan, Part 5”
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There’s this long-running joke among the Spoiler Warning cast. When we’re getting ready to record the show, we frequently get sidetracked talking about other stuff. Sometimes for hours. Then eventually one of us will say, “You know what? We should do a podcast.” This joke ran so long that we actually went and did it.
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The odds of us making more of these is directly proportional to how many people are interested in this one.
Link (YouTube) |
You know what would be great here? Seeing as how this is a Fallout game, we have a great opportunity to offer the player lot of different things to do. Maybe they can hack the simulation from the outside, without needing to go in. Maybe they could use lockpicking to reach the master controls. Maybe they could try to reach the core and cut the power, which would require them to fight a lot of tough robots. Maybe they could use the repair skill to bust Dad out of his relaxation pod. So many possibilities!
“But then the player would miss out on tranquility lane! We put so much work into that!”
Yeah, see. This game isn’t exactly starved for content. I think you can afford to miss a bit here and there if it means the player can make interesting choices.
“But they DO get choices! After getting stupidly trapped in the simulation, they can escape the stupid good way or the stupid evil way.”
Sigh.
And then after you escape the Matrix there’s yet ANOTHER instance of a conversation where someone asks you why you left vault 101, and you can’t answer it truthfully or sensibly. Arg.
For those of you keeping score at home: This is the second vault Dad has ruined.
As many of you guessed, Spoiler Warning’s next season will cover Dishonored. If all goes to plan, we’ll record this weekend and the first episode will appear next week.
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It was basically a horse race between this and Skyrim. The main problem with Skyrim is that it completely failed to grab Josh. He never even finished the main quest. When discussing the game, we really couldn’t come up with any particular part that we had a burning desire to discuss. The game isn’t stupid and broken like Fallout 3. It’s not emotionally engaging like Walking Dead. It’s not atmospheric and mechanically varied like Half-Life 2. It’s not a tragic failure like Alan Wake or an over-hyped pile of crap like Assassin’s Creed 2. Bethesda played it safe and the result is a fun game that doesn’t leave us with a lot to discuss.
We’re not ruling out Skyrim forever, but it’s fallen into that strange space that Alpha Protocol occupied for so long: Good enough for us to play, but not interesting enough that we’re clamoring to talk about it. For me, The Walking Dead was our best season so far. Not because we liked the game, but because we constantly found ourselves wanting to talk about it and compare notes.
In the meantime: Dishonored. I’m on my second play-through now. Also I forgot how fun it was to photoshop the Spoiler Warning title onto random screenshots. We’ll be doing that again this season.
Link (YouTube) |
While you’re watching, don’t forget about the glorious Fallout 3 spreadsheet of fun and alcohol poisoning, which is derived from the Fallout 3 drinking game. It even has charts! Note the new section at the bottom. Given the astounding number of drinks being imbibed, there’s a new section that will keep track of the blood alcohol of the current theoretical drinker. When their BAC reaches lethal levels, they are pronounced dead and a new drinker is brought in. The game has killed two people so far, with most of the damage happening in Operation Anchorage.
Also, the author of those charts (Deadfast on this site) should totally put some kind of self-credit on there someplace.
Allow me to phone in the rest of this entry with a little copy & paste action from 2010.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 3 EP12: Memorial Memorandum”
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
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