Welcome to the next installment of, “Shamus complains for twenty minutes, starring Shamus and other people who might be trying to get a word in edgewise.”.
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So now for commentary on the commentary…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect 3 EP2: Now I Have A Machine Gun”
This is the 300th episode of Spoiler Warning. Seriously. We’ve made three hundred of these things. That is a lot of spoiled stuff. This seems like a great time to begin our long-delayed Mass Effect 3 season.
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I should probably apologize for this start to the series. Often people accuse us of “just looking for stuff to nitpick”, which isn’t really fair or true. We’re usually looking for stuff to talk about, and sometimes those things are positive and sometimes they’re negative. But in our first block of episodes, I seem to remember spending about two hours hating the game and whinging on about Every Damn Little Thing.
What happened is this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect 3 Part 1: We Fight or We Doy”
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And now for the elusive Sunday episode. Of course it wasn’t planned this way, but we recorded these right before I moved with the intention of posting them when I could. On the upside, I’m now completely moved in to my new house, which is better than your house, and we’ll finally be doing Mass Effect 3 this week.
Naturally, as this is the last episode of our unplanned look at Modern Warfare 3, we spend most of the episode talking about unrelated things and end by complaining about Borderlands 2. We’re awesome like that.
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And so our impromtu romp through Modern Warfare 3 continues. For those of you wanting more complaining and merciless mocking of the game, you might be happy with this episode.
For the record, we’re not going to do thee whole game. This is a one-off thing. I think it yielded a lot of interesting conversations that dovetail nicely with what we’ve been saying about Spec Ops.
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At the risk of repeating myself: Here is the full presentation. My comments with timestamps follow.
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“You have paid the price for your lack of vision!”
He’s talking about the interactivity of Doom 3 versus how static Rage felt.
In Doom 3, there were moving lights and machinery all over the place. In every room it seemed like there was a set-piece industrial machine doing machine-stuff. If you love watching little assembly-line movies like I do then these were fun to watch. Lights moved. The computers were interactive. The televisions had shows on. There were in-world videogames. There were physics objects and other dynamic items.
In RAGE, very little moves. He said it feels “stiff”, but for me it felt “dead”. Gorgeous, but dead. The thing is: We’ve got this astounding megatexturing system, and a lot of times I think we wound up with it acting as a very expensive form of skybox.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “John Carmack 2012 Keynote Annotated:Part 3”
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You know the drill by this point. Here is the full presentation at Quakecon 2012. My comments with timestamps follow. Note that I’m just watching the video, pausing to comment at points that I think are interesting or could use some clarification for the masses.
YES.
I’ve said before that this era was pretty much a turning point in graphics technology. Doom 3, Half-Life 2, World of Warcraft, Thief: Deadly Shadows*, and Far Cry. We can argue a bit about the true high point. Maybe you want to move it back to 2002 so you can include NOLF 2. Maybe you want to move it forward a year or two to include the likes of Half Life 2: Episode One, or Quake 4, or whatever. But the point stands that right here we hit a magical spot on the visuals vs. cost trade-off. Games could still be produced in two-year intervals, and they had just enough graphics that characters could emote. But they hadn’t yet dropped into the uncanny valley of photorealism or become so expensive that nothing short of mega-blockbusters could hope to turn a profit.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “John Carmack 2012 Keynote Annotated:Part 2”
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
T w e n t y S i d e d
