I think most software companies have a set of rules for writing and formatting code. This is often referred to as a “style guide”. This tells the programmers on staff how to make code that will fit together in a coherent system. For example, in C++ this code:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Coding Style Part 1”
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Check out Lee at the minute forty mark, where the game is daring enough to sell a joke entirely with body language and facial expression. I can’t remember the last time I saw a game try that.
At the end of the episode Chris points out how good the city looks. The framing of the city through the train window is really eye catching. Although, if you look back through the YouTube archives for this season, you can see that just about every video thumbnail looks like a hand-picked framegrab. I guess we have the strong cinematography of the game to thank for that. You’re always looking at a well-composed shot.
In keeping with tradition, here are my personal choices for Episode 3:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Walking Dead EP18: Ninja Zombies”
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Well well, here it is, finally back! You asked for it (over and over) and I’ve finally sat down to write another installment of Josh’s Valiant Quest to Conquer Japan (and steal their booze)!
I hope the wait wasn’t too unbearable for you guys, after all, it’s only been…
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…Eight months?!
Hah, uh… well I guess I let this fall to the wayside a wee bit there, eh?
If you’ll recall from the last post, the Mori â€" the most powerful clan on the map at the moment â€" not content merely to send massive fleets our way, have also dispatched a powerful force of highly-experienced samurai to attack our holdings in Yamato. Along with four generals for whatever reason.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Josh Plays Shogun 2 Part 20: Naval Warfare 101”
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Continuing the conversation we were having in this episode: The more I think about it, the more I think that “episodes” is a really good way to approach story games. Like I said, so far the approach to telling a story has been to:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Walking Dead EP17: Hobo Chuck’s Private Reserve”
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Sweet mother of Mutants, I forgot how unabashedly horrible the Three Dog dialog is. There’s this awful mix where the game is putting motivations and characterizations into your own dialog, the NPC makes all kinds of assumptions that you can’t challenge, and the NPC talks a great deal without saying much. The player’s attempts to direct the conversation are a futile struggle against the iron will of the author.
The Tasteful Understated Nerdrage guy did a video on the Elder Scrolls series and Bethesda Software, and he talked about how Bethesda is good at worldbuilding. (Alas that the guy stopped making stuff. He was doing really good work.) Giving Fallout to Bethesda is like giving DOOM to Peter Molyneux. It requires almost the inverse of the given skillset, preventing them from doing the things they’re good at and demanding a lot of they types of things they’re bad at.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 3 EP5: Glorious Chaos!”
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While re-watching the episode prior to writing this post, I found myself getting that gut-punch feeling again. Notwithstanding our talking over it and making jokes, this is a powerful sequence. It’s wonderfully written and acted.
For those asking what interactivity adds to a story: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Walking Dead EP16: Training Day”
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Here is a fun thing: Deadfast has been keeping a tally of the Fallout 3 drinking game. He’s got it in a nice spreadsheet with charts & graphs. It’s still a bit thin because we’re so early in the series, but I expect this to become very interesting once we’ve got a few more episodes behind us.
For new-ish viewers, when I mention Lulzy I’m talking about my LP of Lord of the Rings Online.
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A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
T w e n t y S i d e d
