Dénouement 2012: Part 2

By Shamus Posted Friday Jan 4, 2013

Filed under: Industry Events 257 comments

splash_2012.jpg

My 2012 retrospective continues. Remember that I’m not some giant review site. This isn’t a list of “THE MOST IMPORTANT GAMES OF 2012”. This is just a list of what I played, when I had time, if I thought of it, and if I happened to own a copy.

Sleeping Dogs and Far Cry 3 won’t appear here. That’s not because they weren’t worth a mention, but because I haven’t gotten around to them yet. I’m probably missing a few other games as well.

Super Hexagon

Super Hexagon

Chris bought this game for all his friends, and then proceeded to humiliate all of us with it. He’s so far beyond the crowd in terms of ability that comparisons become difficult.

Super Hexagon is a very simple game. You’ve got a little triangle in the middle of the screen, and you can spin it around to evade incoming geometry. The control scheme is two buttons. If you touch anything at any time, the game ends. No lives. No powerups. No second chances. No strategy. It’s purely a game of reflex and pattern recognition. At the end of the game, your “score” is nothing more than how long you survived. Your first game is likely to be less than five seconds. After some diligent practice, you should be able to top twenty seconds. After that the game begins sorting people into the can and can’t lists.

I am rubbish at this game.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2012: Part 2”

 


 

Fallout 3 EP2: Home Run Derby

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jan 3, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 84 comments


Link (YouTube)

In the original airing of this series, the drinking game didn’t appear until episode 17. But the series is more fun with it, so let’s retcon things and introduce the game here in episode 2. Rutskarn originally devised the drinking game, which he promised would be extremely entertaining.*

While watching Spoiler Warning, take a drink whenever…

  • Josh opens his inventory and consumes 3 or more things in the middle of combat.
  • Anyone uses the phrase “in the Original Fallout…”
  • Reginald becomes addicted to anything.
  • A new overpowered weapon or item is acquired.
  • An obvious bug or glitch is encountered.
  • All three of us are talking at the same time.
  • Josh tries ineffectually to kill bad guys with f-bombs.
  • The phrase “200 years” is spoken.
  • “STOP SHOOTING ME!”
  • Reginald dies.

It would be interesting to see a heat map of drinks per episode. My impression is that this number would gradually increase over time, spiking near the end. On the other hand, #5 is a bit of a wildcard. It’s probably low (by the standards of the game) when doing central story missions, and comes more into play when doing side missions or [especially] DLC. On the gripping hand, we had plenty of glitches here in episode 2, which is still part of the tutorial and ought to be the most polished section of the game.

* Specifically, he said, “It will be very entertaining when hundreds of viewers die of alcohol poisoning.”

 


 

Dénouement 2012: Part 1

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Jan 2, 2013

Filed under: Industry Events 153 comments

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I played a lot of games this year, but I didn’t get around to reviewing all of them. Here, at the turn of the year several days after the new year, I’ve decided to do a half-assed roundup to say all the things I should have said months ago.

I don’t know if it’s fair to say that we’ve had more false-choice this year than in years past, but we are having more conversations about what choices we valued, what makes for a meaningful choice, and which games were best or worst at offering them.

Damned if you do, Paragon points if you don’t…

The Walking Dead, Mass Effect 3, Spec Ops: The Line, and Dishonored all incited a lot of discussion about choice. I’m getting the sense that all the bitching we were doing three years ago about wanting more freedom in games has come back around. Developers have made games that turned around and said, “Okay. What do you mean by that?”

The games this year, in no particular order…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2012: Part 1”

 


 

Fallout 3 EP1: The Birth of Reginald Cuftbert

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Jan 1, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 97 comments


Link (YouTube)

It's the 1st episode. Of Spoiler Warning season 2. Playing Fallout 3. And suddenly Spoiler Warning is transformed into the show we know and tolerate today. Okay, this episode began a bit wobbly, but by the end we’d settled into the now-familiar rhythm.

I don’t know if it was Randy leaving the show, Josh taking over as player, our accumulated experience, or the addition of Rutkarn, but this show feels more like our current episodes than the ones directly preceding it.

I’m really glad to see these episodes again. Happy nuke year!

 


 

The New Years Stream is Live – It’s Over!

By Josh Posted Monday Dec 31, 2012

Filed under: Notices, Spoiler Warning 11 comments

Jarenth and Josh are here to rescue your new year’s eve parties by acting like morons!

Come check it out!

Edit: Well that was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone who showed up to cheer us on as I drove cars onto boats and boats onto land.

 


 

Announcing the Second Annual Josh and Jarenth Save the New Year Stream!

By Josh Posted Sunday Dec 30, 2012

Filed under: Notices, Spoiler Warning 83 comments

That’s right, you asked for it! The illustrious buddy cop duo/pair of idiots are back again to save and possibly ruin the new year! And you’ll be able to watch this terrible trainwreck in real-time tomorrow evening!

We’re not actually quite sure which games we’ll be playing or when we’ll be playing them, but if you tune in tomorrow, you might find us playing:

Sleeping Dogs – Wherein Josh attempts to take down a criminal empire by crashing into things and beating up street merchants!

Space Marine – Wherein Jarenth laughs at Josh because he doesn’t actually know anything about Warhammer 40k – or this game!

Hitman Absolution – Watch Josh guide Agent 47 through his most linear and poorly optimized adventure yet!

Tropico 4 – Josh achieves his dream of becoming El Presidente of a burgeoning banana republic – and then probably ruins everything!

War Thunder – Jarenth and Josh take advantage of the new year to go back in time and shoot down planes in the arcade flight sim you’ve never heard of!

And of course,

Borderlands 2 – Josh and Jarenth murder their way across Pandora to see how long it takes before they degenerate into five hours of car wrestling!

Currently, we plan to start at 6 PM Pacific and stream until midnight Pacific. And I know, that means we’re technically excluding all European New Years celebrations, but we really don’t think we can stream for nine hours straight and I can’t just go cutting it early. Look at it this way: You can have your real New Years Eve parties with all your cool friends, and then come back and watch Jarenth and I screw everything up.

The stream link will be posted tomorrow before we start. Feel free to give feedback about the games we might be playing or suggest others in the comments.

Hope to see you then!

 


 

Postcards From Linux Part 4:
Can You Hear Me Now?

By Shamus Posted Sunday Dec 30, 2012

Filed under: Personal 126 comments

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The Linux-ing continues. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to continue much longer. At the very least, we’re going to have to go into some kind of dual-boot scenario. Aside from gaming, there are a few tools that I need and can’t get in Linux. For example…

Vent

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This is the big one. I use Vent to hang out with my various internet friends, and we also use it to record Spoiler Warning. So I’ve been trying to run the Vent client under Wine.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Postcards From Linux Part 4:
Can You Hear Me Now?”