T w e n t y S i d e d

You know those little moments when you leave the ship? “Logged. The Commanding officer is ashore. XO Presley has the deck.” I loved those. You know what else I liked? Leaving the ship. Man, I really missed that airlock. I can’t explain why. I mean, it was just another loading screen, but for some reason the quasi-seamless travel from ship to shore really made the ship feel like a craft that went somewhere, and not a really large menu for selecting the next mission. I know I whined and bellyached about that airlock scanner. (And to be fair, it was kind of annoying.) But I really missed it when they switched to using the dropship.

I appreciate the little touches of quasi-military. The really odd thing is, so many videogames embrace the “explosions, bullets, and shouting” military stuff. They model real-world weapons and vehicles. They take you to real-world locations. But they skim over nearly everything to do with military culture. People salute at the wrong times, handle their weapons in the wrong way, address each other incorrectly, forget about the chain of command, and you never get any of the nuances of military culture. In the United States military, there’s a pretty big divide between the officers and the enlisted. There’s also a bit of sneering condescension between the various branches. Then there’s the wall of divide between the military and civilians. This is mostly lost in videogames, where you just have a bunch of young guys running around screaming “sarge!” all the time.

I understand it’s a game, and meticulous simulation would be just as tedious as the real thing. But the little touches of military culture and formality really made me happy. I’d love to have a game where someone would shout “Captain on the bridge!” when you entered the bridge. I guess I’m not asking for a game that gets it all right, I’m just suggesting that a game that sprinkles these details in will be able to make their military seem more lifelike.

Then again, it just might drive people bonkers if they’ve served in the actual military and all they see are all the little details the developers got wrong. So there’s that.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Remember back in Mass Effect The First, when BioWare made annoying characters and then gave you the means to show your disdain for them? You could try to reason with the council, or you could hang up on them and laugh. How much better would it have been to be able to hang up on The Illusive Man in Mass Effect 3? You have a few annoying conversations with him, but it’s obvious the writer has just pinned you in place so you can listen to TIM talk about himself for a couple of minutes. If they’re feeling really generous, the writers give you a chance to say, “Nuh-uh!” every once in a while.

Gah! Now my Mass Effect 3 complaints are creeping into our Mass Effect 1 series. Someone help me!

Okay. As a way of reconciliation, I’m going to name one thing that ME3 does better than ME1: There’s no sadly excused Tower of Hanoi puzzle.

A small housekeeping matter: Does anyone remember the title of the next episode? Josh titled all of the episodes in Viddler, but at the time I was posting them here as “Episode N”, probably due to laziness. Now Viddler is holding our videos hostage for $lolnowai, and we don’t have the title for the next one. It’s no big deal. We can just give it a new name if we want, but if anyone remembers the original feel free to post it in the comments.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Close your eyes and imagine a graphics card. Picture a nice, high-end card, preferably something in red. Perhaps it’s inside a computer, humming along, the fan spinning, processing gig-pixels and rendering bling-mapped ray tracings or whatever it is those things do. Can you see it? Good. Now imagine the same card, except on fire. You will notice that the card no longer runs Crysis at max settings. You may also notice that your computer no longer works right and you can’t edit Spoiler Warning episodes this week.

I don’t know what Josh did, but his graphics card is borked and he’s waiting for the replacement to arrive. In the meantime, we’ll just re-post old episodes from season one. Those are just as good, right?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect EP5: Failure is the Only Option”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.