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Was this the first fast-forward instance in the history of Spoiler Warning? I think so. Anyway, this was a comedy of errors. First we cut the episode way, way early. Then we regrouped to record more footage and round out the episode, but we recorded too much. And the second time through, we forgot to turn off the vent push-to-talk sounds so we have beep-boop noises all through the episode.
Warning: The Internet Absurdity Review Board has advised that the following video contains high levels of folly, foolishness, improbability, inanity, irrationality, jive, ludicrousness, nonsense, ridiculousness, silliness, and flapdoodle. Viewer discretion is advised.
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Compare this DLC from Bethesda to the Old World Blues DLC from Obsidian, for Fallout 3 and New Vegas, respectively. OWB is longer, smarter, deeper, has a larger and more diverse environment, better and more interesting goodies, more characters, more dialog, more choice, more total plot threads, a more consistent tone, and is much less ham-fisted when it needs to railroad the player.
Both developers have a reputation for releasing hilariously broken games, but at least Obsidian has the good grace to not insult your intelligence before the game crashes to desktop.
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Back in my review of Rage, I talked about editing dialog down to the essentials. Ideally your dialog should always be delivering characterization, exposition, foreshadowing, establishing of goals, illuminating relationships between characters, and expressing the characters worldview or ideology. You can’t do all of those things at the same time, but doing only one makes for really bland dialog. Consider our exchange with Midea:
Alright, we can talk now but we shouldn’t take too long. They saw you come in here, so they’ll come looking for you if you take too long.
This went from a writer to a directer to a voice actor, and nobody thought to tighten it up a little? How does she know what the guards have seen and how they’ll respond? (Considering that you can either sneak, murder, or walk here.)
This is not a character. This is an exposition device and a questgiver. She knows all the things that the writers want you to know and has all the goals the writers want you to have. She’s a living textbox.
Compare her to the guarded suspicion of Aradesh, the naive exuberance of Tandi, the dim-witted false swagger of Butch Harris, or the simple and direct idealism of Killian Darkwater. We have several introductory conversations with Midea where she doesn’t seem to have any urgent needs, or ideals, or goals. She’s just another bland plastic-faced NPC. Her personality boils down to “friendly”, because she’s on your side.
Yes, she becomes slightly less 1-dimensional later, but this is a really terrible introduction.
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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.
Embedded using HTML5. It either works or it doesn’t:
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Discussion:
The odds of us making more of these is directly proportional to how many people are interested in this one.
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
T w e n t y S i d e d
