Link (YouTube) |
I don’t really have more to say on this Geth section. Here is the Turd Ferguson skit Chris mentioned. Note that Norm MacDonald left the show in 1997, so that skit is at least fifteen years old. I’m not going anywhere with this. I’m just saying.
Link (YouTube) |
Remember that you can give Legion to Cerberus in the last game. Apparently Chris did this in his play-through. And yet Legion shows up here either way. It must be the same platform, since he has the same hole in his chest. The only way this can happen is if Cerberus let him go. I suppose it could also happen if they were incompetent enough to let a damaged deactivated robot escape even though it’s the first intact Geth to be captured in history. Actually, that sounds exactly like Cerberus. Never mind.
The Max Payne video we discussed is this one: A Day in the Life of Max Payne. It’s admirably funny.
We talked about the Saint’s Row 3 segment where you enter virtual reality. You can see that here. Comparing the two directly, I do have to say that once again BioWare’s efforts strike me as uninspired. The SR3 version has broader and more interesting visuals. It also has varied gameplay. In ME3 you just walk through a linear one-note orange and teal world and shoot a gun at passive orange blobs to activate exposition. It’s not that the Mass Effect 3 section was horrible. It wasn’t. It’s just that it could have been so much better. This was a chance to shake up the color palette, play around with the combat mechanics, and explore the big questions about sapience, intelligence, and a sense of self in a communal experience.
The question that keeps nagging me is this: Are the problems we’re seeing a sign that BioWare has well and truly lost their touch, or were they just not given the time to properly realize this game? If EA gave them a little more leash, would we see more of the same, or a return to form? I don’t think we can answer this question from the outside, but that doesn’t stop me from asking it.
Link (YouTube) |
Once again I have to applaud the game for letting you hang up on the council. What a fun idea. For a writing perspective, it’s actually easier than trying to give the player all the possible dialog options required to hold an argument. When the player objects, there’s always a question of why they’re objecting.
“Commander Shepard, I need you to board that ship and kill all the infected Elcor before the plague spreads further.”
Once you’re dealing with complex questions of morality and pitting idealism against pragmatism, it becomes impossible to offer the granularity players will need to properly express their views. Offering them the agency to make the choice on a mechanical level isn’t that hard. (They can board and shoot whomever they like, tell joker to destroy the ship, or fly away and ignore the mission.) But offering them the multi-branching dialog to express their intentions and argue their position becomes impractical. Letting them simply end a conversation like this is a clever way to escape having to write, record, and script the dozen or so possible conversation paths. You wouldn’t want to use it all the time, but it is a good “get out of difficult dialog free” card for game designers.
Randy said, “There probably wasn’t a right answer to the Rachni Queen [problem] anyways,” not realizing just how totally right he would be when Mass Effect 3 came out.
I’m still feeling under the weather. See, I was sick, I got better, and then I got sick again. This weekend I did very little in the way of writing or breathing, both of which are required for me to live a full life.
To patch the hole this will leave in the blog this week, here is a tribute / remix / parody of a 1975 song, about a 1985 game system. It’s really quite good.
Link (YouTube) |
I was never a Nintendo guy myself. I’m more the Atari generation, and while those first primitive efforts were sort of memorable as points in history, we never really had iconic characters the way the Nintendo kids did. By the time the NES rolled around in 1985, I’d gotten my hands on a computer and was learning to program. I wouldn’t play any console games until 2002, when I got my hands on a PS2.
Still, even without any first-hand experience I can see what a massive impact crater the NES made on our hobby, our culture, and especially on the kids that grew up with it. An amazing device.
Video spotted at Mary Sue.
The hangout is going up in the next few minutes. You’ll be able to see it at http://www.livestream.com/chocolatehammer once the stream is live.
The plan is: Josh will play X-Com in Classic (murder-hard) difficulty, and we’ll be naming our soldiers after people in the chat.
EDIT: Well, that was fun. Thanks everyone.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hangout 10/27 – It’s OVER!”
It’s been ages since we’ve done a hangout. Between Chris getting married, Josh moving, and me getting sick and dying, we just haven’t had time. We’re going to try one tonight, Saturday October 27 at 8pm Eastern time. For other time zones, check here.
The plan is for Josh to play X-Com. I don’t know who is going to make it. We’re kind of throwing this together at the last minute because up until yesterday I wasn’t even sure I’d be feeling well enough to do it.
I know this time is pretty much terrible for Europe. Sorry Europe. It’s just a bit harder to get a good time slot early enough in the day to work for Europe. Hopefully next time.
I’ll post the links to the stream when the event goes live.
Link (YouTube) |
What happened to the artists at BioWare? I can’t believe this is the same company that brought us Jade Empire. The orange and cyan metal base motif is way overdone in this game. This has been a long time in coming, and I know Mass Effect 3 isn’t the ugliest game they’ve ever made, but it’s a pretty big step down from where they were a decade ago.
You could argue that this isn’t the same company that made Jade Empire. A lot of the old staff is gone, and the ones that remain are vastly outnumbered by the people hired since the EA acquisition.
The art here goes against everything the game needs to be doing right now:
It’s really mystifying that they elected to make Rannoch a blue and orange rocky wasteland. Remember that we were already on a rocky wasteland when we visited the Turians earlier in the game, and the previous mission had us fighting Geth in a dark, blue and orange metallic area. I’m not insisting that Rannoch should look any particular way. I’m just saying it would have been better as almost anything besides what they gave us.
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
T w e n t y S i d e d
