Link (YouTube) |
Towards the end of the episode we wonder about the fidelity of this downtown Savannah set. I did a search for the Talmadge Memorial Bridge and here’s what I turned up:
Here is the building that’s across the river and slightly to the right of Lee as seen in the game:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Walking Dead EP20: There is no Plan B”
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As I mentioned in the last post, I read the Office document that describes the internal coding conventions of id Software, and I thought I’d go over it. This will be pretty familiar stuff for coders, but if you don’t program this might give you a glimpse of how strange and fussy this discipline can get.
I’m going go go through the standards guide and offer my own comments / explanations on why I think they’re interesting or important. The stuff in bold is from id, the rest is from me.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Coding Style Part 2”
Link (YouTube) |
I agree that Episode 4 seems to be the strongest. It’s got a strong theme, interesting choices, quite a few tense scenes, and the gameplay feels a little more polished. They even mess around with some very mild shooting. We’ve shed the adventure game mechanics of the earlier episodes and the characters have more going on than pointless bickering.
The cast is stronger now that Larry and Lily have been replaced with less crazy people. Larry and Lily were really great for making DRAMA, but it was cheap, stupid, frustrating drama that never led anywhere and always left me feeling angry. The moment where you have to get Clem out of the jail cell was far more emotionally rewarding and rang more true than any of our arguments with Lar & Lil’. And that fight featured lazy-writer ninja zombies. I hated them, but they weren’t villains. They were a chore to be around, but having them die didn’t feel like an accomplishment or a victory. It was just more wasted life.
Maybe I’m just mistaking my antipathy for the show for an improvement in design, but now that we’ve moved on from “surrounded by assholes” to “working with reasonable people who don’t always agree”, I find the world and the story much more interesting. I care about Omid and Christa, and I’m invested in seeing them survive.
Kenny is more interesting now that he’s lost his family. As the only guy who still had a family, he was the richest man in the apocalypse. Now that he lost it all in a single day, his personality quirks are a lot more tolerable. He’s driven. He’s got a plan. It’s not a good one, but it’s all he has left.
I don’t know if it’s fair to say that every episode is objectively better than the last, but I do see an overall improvement as we progress.
At least, until we get to episode 5. Then all bets are off.
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”
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
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.
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
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.
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.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
T w e n t y S i d e d
