Link (YouTube) |
I made fun of the whole exchange between Kenny and Ben, but it was actually a much-needed resolution to the tension that had been building up. A lot had happened since Ben’s confession at the end of Episode 4, and it was about time their animosity was updated to reflect current events.
Since I brought it up in this episode, let’s talk about the converging choice at the end…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Walking Dead EP27: Busted!”
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Notice in a lot of games where you are directly piloting your character, players will balk at the limitations the game presents. Why can’t I jump this gap? Why can’t I climb over this chest-high wall? Why can’t I scale this fence? Why do I die from a simple three-meter drop? This is true even if you’re at 2% health and supposedly clinging to life. We don’t complain when Corvo or Garret slings a grown man over one shoulder and glides silently across the room at a light jog. We don’t complain when our character soaks up bullets, much less object to them being able to engage in strenuous exercise for hours without ever showing signs of fatigue, overheating, hunger, thirst, or loss of focus. We resent it whenever the game tries to convey these things by shaking the camera or fading the edges of the view to red.
I’m not saying these complaints are wrong or bad. I’m just saying that there’s something about inhabiting or piloting a character directly that creates the expectation that our avatar should operate at peak performance forever without experiencing pain, confusion, or faltering morale. It’s not always the case, but we historically have a hard time getting us to accept things that stand between us and the controls.
Now we have the Walking Dead, and suddenly we’re making the opposite complaints. By removing direct control of Lee and placing us in the position of a guide and not a pilot, we’re suddenly able to accept and even insist on Lee’s physical limitations. He shouldn’t be able to do this after losing so much blood. Where is he carrying this stuff? No way should Lee be able to break through that thing! How come Kenny isn’t dead from that gunshot? No way could he make that catch!
It’s very interesting how moving to a TV presentation creates TV expectations with regards to character ability.
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Recap from last time: We’re living in a small cluster of houses, beside a farm, by a river. The sparse population means we won’t be getting mobbed by millions of city zeds. We’re just close enough to civilization to be able to drive to the city, forage, and return home before dark the same day. (Assuming it turns out such a thing is worthwhile.) This location also means we don’t need to build as much wall, since we’ll be protected on one side by water. In this rural setting, we’re probably using a septic tank and don’t need to dump our sewage in the river.
We begin in late-ish summer (mid August) and begin working the farm, figuring out how things work, and preparing to harvest whatever they were growing here.
So now we have a place to live and work to do. Let’s get down to the details of running this place…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “My Zombie Plan, Part 2”
Link (YouTube) |
And so Episode 4 is over, and we’re already spoiling stuff for Episode 5. Let’s just make the rest of this series a live-fire exercise. No more spoiler tags, no more being coy about what’s coming. Feel free to discuss any part of the game now. There’s a lot to cover between here and the end of Episode 5, and we’ll never cover it all if we have to tiptoe around.
Here are my choices for Episode 4:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Walking Dead EP25: Axe Queen McZombie Killer Ninja”
And so at last we reach the end of Operation: Anchorage. Something interesting I learned while watching this episode two and a half years after recording it: Apparently, I played through this DLC twice? Why did I do that? I have no idea. That was not a wise use of time.
On the upside, I’m sure I’ll never play it again. I can never imagine a scenario where I’d be willing to put up with the horror of Games for Windows Live, which is required to use this DLC. Heck, I wouldn’t put up with that crap for a good game.
Link (YouTube) |
Why is Jingwei’s sword here in this vault, attached to a training simulator? Why do all the buildings, computers, equipment, and furniture in the simulator look identical to the same crap as it exists 200 years later?
Why were the Brotherhood willing to chop the arm off a wastelander to open the door, and then willing to let you take everything? Can you imagine bank robbers pointing their guns at a teller’s head, “OPEN THE VAULT NOW OR YOU’RE DEAD!” And then once the vault is open they let the teller take as much as they want? This is particularly egregious when we’re talking about pre-war tech, which the Brotherhood thinks they should own by default. Their entire mission is to look for new tech and reverse-engineer it, and they’re letting you walk off with it even though they (correctly) think you’re a savage that’s just going to drag the equipment into battle.
On top of all this, that final exchange between the Brotherhood guys was so cliche it could be mistaken for satire in a smarter context.
It’s just… this is so lazy it hurts. Even if we ignore the mechanical problems with Anchorage, the bugs, the shallow gameplay, the repetitive combat, the narrow weapon selection, and the sloppy visuals, this is just shamefully childish. You could make massive improvements to this entire script in under an hour. This is a half-assed first draft with nothing to say and nothing to add to the game except toys. And that would be fine if this was just some random shooter, but this is supposedly Fallout. Stupid, vapid, tone-deaf stories here is like having crappy platforming mechanics in a Mario game. It’s weak in exactly the way that the series is expected to be strong.
So I’m glad it’s over, is what I’m saying.
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A couple of weeks ago I asked people how they would survive the zombie apocalypse. Afterward I wanted to try my hand at post-zombie-apocalypse survival, but my answer ended up being too big for a comment. So now you get a 5,000 word post series of posts. Lucky you.
For the purposes of this exercise, I’ve sat down and tried to make this plan just based on what’s observed in The Walking Dead game. I’m not mining Wikipedia for answers or scouting locations using Google Earth. I’m assuming I’m being dropped into the Zompocalypse without any foreknowledge or preparation, aside from whatever trivia I’ve accumulated over the last 41 years of diligent breathing in and out. The only time I’ve gone to the web is to get reference links for the benefit of the reader.
I’m building my answer around the central question of “What would you do if you were leading a group in a Kirkman-esque zombie apocalypse?” In my case, this requires some hand-waving, because I’d likely die of asthma. Or if I lived, I’d have to be very careful to avoid strenuous activity, which would include basically everything that a post-technology society would need to do. I’d be a mouth to feed. And once we brought in animals for protection, labor, and food, I’d be dead for sure.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “My Zombie Plan, Part 1”
Thus continues our ongoing saga of self-abuse and childish griping in the face of Bethesda’s shoddy DLC. I highly recommend checking out this link before you watch the show. It will provide some much needed context on the mechanics being demonstrated. This goes double for Rutskarn, who was specifically asking about this stuff.
Pssst. That’s actually a link to the Sid the Science Kid movie which has mercilessly vexed Rutskarn during our last four shows. But don’t tell him! See, Rutskarn and I watch Josh play the game via Livestream, and at the time of this recording Livestream was showing Rutskarn the same ad again and again, every ten minutes.
Link (YouTube) |
What a cavalcade of bugs. Josh tried to shoot the enemy with his rocket launcher. Then the game switched to a close-up of the foe encased in a pure black spherical shadow and being shot with small arms from behind. As far as we can see, no rocket was fired. And when we came out of VATS the view was inexplicably pointed straight down. Having the player running around with no torso, giving us combat kill-cams of unrelated rocks, and the subsequent crash were just icing on the cake. I don’t even know how to count those. Are they all the same bug? Different bugs? What is this broken piece of software and why did people have to pay money for it?
Remember a few episodes ago we talked about a particular fallout shelter in the game? Well, I managed to stumble across it later on:
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If you’re the sort of guy who has always dreamed of meeting a naked double amputee as she hails a cab and then spending a romantic evening in a coffin-size nuclear bomb shelter, then tell me your next two wishes, because the first one is granted! I like how the guy who set this up brought two glasses and got a “sexy” nightie (the pink pillow-shaped thing is actually sleepwear which acts as a nightgown if you’re a female or pajamas if you’re male) for his plastic date. He may be lonely to the point of being deranged, but he’s still clearly a hopeless romantic. Sadly, it looks like the mannequin got stood up (sorry) because the wine is unopened and the sleepwear hasn’t been put to use. Alas for unrequited love. The wasteland is full of such tragedies.
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
T w e n t y S i d e d
