Link (YouTube) |
Our re-posting project from 2010 continues. Here is the episode of infamy, where we decided to leave Kaiden on Virmire instead of Ashley, as originally planned. It’s true that his death was repealed for our Mass Effect 2 play-through, but it was re-instated for Mass Effect 3.
Looking back, I can’t help but think he was the lucky one.
EDIT: No, Kaiden is alive in our ME3 play-through. I forgot. I was confusing our Spoiler Warning run with my own play-through.
 |
On the upside, I lived, and will be able to continue to write on my blog. The downside is that I was incredibly sick and mere survival seems like a piss poor trade. I mean, I got my life. Big deal. I had that before I got sick.
That’s the thing with illnesses. There’s no justice. If you get bit by a wolf, you can get better and hunt down that son of a bitch. But you can’t go out and even the score with a pathogen. Well, technically I killed it in the process of getting better, but its progeny will live on, mutate, and infect other human beings. In fact, someday those twisted offspring will be back, and I’ll have to put them down again. Assuming I’m up for it.
I was the last person in the house to get sick, so I saw this coming a week ago. I saw the others get picked off, but there’s nothing you can do but wait for your turn. When I finally got sick, everyone else had pretty much recovered. I went around the house mocking myself saying, “I am suffering in a painfully unique way and nobody else understands what I’m going though!”
This particular illness is ridiculous. It’s some sort of multiple-personality disease that draws symptoms at random. It starts off with fever and intense headache. Six hours later those symptoms are gone, replaced by aching joints and stomach cramps. The next morning it’s a thundering heartbeat and extreme drymouth. Dizziness and congestion! A dry cough and a neck ache! What is this? Some kind of Whitman’s Sampler of esoteric symptoms?
The most interesting was the interval on Saturday where the only symptom was that my face hurt. Not my sinuses, my eyes, or mucus membranes. I’m talking about teeth, cheekbones, lower jaw, and nose. It literally felt like I’d been beaten and I was just waiting for the bruises to appear. I’ve never even heard of a sickness doing that. I’ve somehow caught a bug that can punch you in the face. Our science isn’t ready for this!
So that’s what I did on my weekend.
You might want to go wash your hands when you leave this site.
Link (YouTube) |
Brought to you one day late by Shamus fighting off hordes of influenza ninjas. Or maybe he’s just playing XCOM.
Link (YouTube) |
Look, I’m feeling really sick, I’m in a bad mood, and I’m right in the middle of an X-Com game. I’m in no shape to give you additional commentary. Just watch the show and don’t ask too much of me.
Link (YouTube) |
So Udina somehow contacted Cerberus to enact a plan that made no sense and could never work, even if Cerberus hadn’t stabbed him in the back, which he totally should have seen coming. Then Cerberus overcomes the Citadel defenses, gains control of the entire complex, and manages to do so in such a way that doesn’t leave any incriminating personnel or supply ships hovering around the place. You have a running battle then a car chase takes you to some other random location, and yet no matter where you go the place is filled with Cerberus mooks.
And then Kai Leng.
A good writer – like in Spec Ops – will make you feel like you were outsmarted, fooled, or out-maneuvered by your adversaries. A terrible writer will have his pet bad guy outsmart you by forcing you to be stupid. He’ll overpower you by taking away your powers and making you incompetent in a cutscene. The writers wanted to make Leng some sort of super-adversary, and their first plan was to bend the world and game mechanics to make him fit. Kai Leng has no personality, no world view, no history, no buildup, no connection to the setting, and no visible reason to oppose Shepard. What are the stakes for him? Why does he care? Why does he hate(?) Shepard so much? None of these things are established, because Kai Leng is an antagonist for the player, not for Shepard.
Yes, I know: “Indoctrinated”, the magical get-out-of-characterization-free card. Kai Leng is indoctrinated to some unspecified degree. Compare this to how Saren was portrayed. He was a complicated guy. I might pick at his plan, and not everything he did made perfect sense, but darned if we didn’t get a sense of who he was, what he wanted to accomplish, and why. Saren’s indoctrination was a tragic failing, a fall by a Turian who had more hubris than ability. Kail Leng’s indoctrination is a half-assed hand-wave offered to rebuff people like me who go around insisting characters need things like personality and motivation.
These are the things that BioWare fans love BioWare for: Characterization and world-building. Failing on these points is like a Mario game getting the platforming wrong.
The worst of all possible worlds is to combine BioWare style mechanics with Capcom style storytelling. At least in those games I’m not required to participate in the reason-destroying cutscenes. I can just go slack-jawed and wait for the stupidity to end so I can go back to the shooting.
So I finally got around to updating the Spoiler Warning page this weekend. The Half-Life 2 season should be complete, the Modern Warfare episodes are listed, the Mass Effect 3 episodes have been updated, and I’m setting the Mass Effect 1 season to point to the new episodes. I was going to link the new episodes to the old, but then I realized I’d have to do the same thing for the next 50 or so remaining Viddler orphans. After carefully reviewing my options, I have decided screw that.
Also, I’ve added YouTube playlists for Alan Wake, Half-Life 2, Deus Ex, Assassin’s Creed 2, and Fallout New Vegas.
So we’ve got that going for us.
So… what else? I hate to post these stupid “the site has been updated” posts without saying something worthy of discussion. It feels like using the PA system to let everyone know you did the dishes. I suppose I could mention that I have a super-gigantic post I’m trying to write about Guild Wars 2. I’m not sure when it will be done, but here is a bit of foreshadowing.
 |
Guild Wars 2 has the most interesting and sane economy of any MMO I’ve played. It is not without the occasional amusing absurdity, but that’s probably inevitable.
To show off how different this is, let’s just do a few comparisons between this game and you know who.
For simplicity, I’m not going to go around expressing large values as “1 gold, 23 silver, 45 copper”, or 1g 23s 45c. We’ll talk about everything in terms of copper, as in: 12,345 copper. Note that a proper apples-to-apples comparison is probably impossible, but for the sake of pretending this makes sense I’m only going to include stuff up to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, which is where I found the level 80 quests. This will let us compare WoW level 80 to GW2 level 80, which is the best we can do.
In World of Warcraft a level 1 quest pays 25 copper. There are a ton of level 80 quests, but this one – chosen basically at random – pays 132,300 copper. So you will make 5,292 times as much money at level 80 compared to what you were making at level 1.
 |
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Guild Wars 2: Economy”
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
T w e n t y S i d e d
