T w e n t y S i d e d
Link (YouTube) |
I really love these Errant Signal videos. They’re a lot of fun.
Half Life 2 Special EP21:Time, Dr. Freeman?
Link (YouTube) |
And so we come to the end of Half-Life 2. I know I joke about this show being a podcast with a quasi-related video feed. That might be particularly true here. This series has been fun. We’ll probably just roll on into the episodes as time allows, although the plan now is to cover Mass Effect 3.
Annotated:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Half Life 2 Special EP21:Time, Dr. Freeman?”
Half Life 2 Special EP20:
The Kinaesthetic Pastiche Buffet
Link (YouTube) |
Enjoy this latest installment of Spoiler Warning, now with 50% more snobby art-game theory! (I kid. Sort of. I love me some snobby art-game theory.)
I make reference to Gordon Frohman near the end of the episode. If that reference went right by you, then check out Concerned, a Half-Life 2 fan comic. I consider it akin to my own comic. It was a finite series by design, based on screenshots, where a lot of the humor was derived from subverting a story already understood by the audience. Both series start out a little wobbly, but get to be really funny once they have the concept nailed down. Both are a good way to blow a couple of hours. They also ran at about the same time.
Tomorrow we hit the thrilling conclusion to this series. Are you excited? I’m excited.
Star Wars the Old Republic:The Game is at the Bottom
Remember back when Star Wars the Old Republic was still new, and there was a bit of a debate about whether it was The New Awesome, or a poor execution of a fundamentally flawed design? Often there were comparisons drawn between SWTOR and Guild Wars 2, which was interesting since the latter game wasn’t (and still isn’t) yet released. Now that I’ve played both games, I think I get why.
On Twitter, I took SWTOR to task for not having a mouselook-toggle. If you want to look around, you have to hold either mouse button while you move the mouse. There is no setting or option that will let you click to switch between “looking around” mode and “clicking on stuff” mode. Some people thought I was being petty for complaining about this, but it’s an important aspect of the game and it goes way beyond “my hand gets tired holding the button down all the time”. By making the interface default to a mouse-pointer mode, the game is telling you that the normal interaction is to click buttons and menus. This isn’t just about how the game plays, but about what kind of game you’re playing in the first place. Or to put it more accurately, it tells you how the designers intended for you to interact with the game.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Star Wars the Old Republic:The Game is at the Bottom”
Spoiler Warning Hangout: Guild Wars 2 Edition – Ended!
In case you missed it, Guild Wars 2’s final beta weekend started Friday. So we figured, why not let you all in on the magic as Josh drives everyone else who actually shows up completely insane by talking about Guild Wars while playing Guild Wars? Everyone wins!
See it here:
http://www.livestream.com/chocolatehammer
Edit: And we’re done! Thanks everyone for coming out!
Spoiler Warning Hangout: Guild Wars 2 Edition
In case you missed it, Guild Wars 2’s final beta weekend started yesterday. And according to all my friends, all I ever talk about when I’m not on camera recording Spoiler Warning is Guild Wars. So I figured, why not let you all in on the magic as I drive everyone else who actually shows up completely insane by talking about Guild Wars while playing Guild Wars? Everyone wins!
We’ll be streaming the beta tomorrow (Sunday) from the usual ‘liberated’ Rutskarn Channel at 4 PM Pacific. That’s 7 PM on the East Coast of the United States, midnight in London, and 1 AM in the Netherlands and Sweden, and probably a bunch of other countries I’ve failed to mention. I’ll be there, Randy will be there, Shamus will… probably be there, depending on how masochistic he’s feeling. We’ll probably be able to rope Chris into showing up, he never seems to realize what’s happening until it’s too late.
Shamus will probably demand we play some PvE content, but rest assured, Randy and I will no doubt quickly hijack things and go try to kill each other in PvP. Or something equally absurd.
See you there! Or, not, if you’re a reasonable, well-adjusted human being. But when has that ever gotten anyone anywhere?
Half Life 2 Special EP19:
Set Piece – The GAME
Link (YouTube) |
This is a good spot to end for the week. Next week the plan is to have the final two entries, which will end Half-Life 2. After that, we’ll have the second half of 8 by Zombies.
The timeline of Half-Life 2:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Half Life 2 Special EP19:
Set Piece – The GAME”
From The Archives:
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
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.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
What is Vulkan?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Control
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.