T w e n t y S i d e d

In this video we mention Push the Button, which was one of my early YouTube efforts.

So that’s this week of episodes. We’re hoping to wrap this series up next week. We’ll see how that goes. Now that the plot is moving, we’re engaged, we have a goal, and we care about the characters, it’s time to… what? Maintain the tension and pacing? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s time to bring everything to a halt with even more combat! I don’t know if the rest of the game will fit next week, but we’ll see what we can do.

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.

I would like to nominate, “There are 65 billion cows and pigs in the world!” as the worst combat taunt in the history of the medium. Does anyone have anything to counter it? Competition is fierce in this category, but I think cows & pigs has what it takes to win:

1. Reference to docile barnyard animals.
2. Delivered by a farmer whose only distinguishing feature is that he’s hard to see.
3. Delivered straight, in a menacing voice.
4. Non-sequitur.
5. No hidden meaning that might redeem it as satire or parody.
6. Lighthearted, ephemeral trivia with no bearing or meaning on the situation at hand.

Any other nominations?

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.

For those that asked why my audio is so exceptionally awful: So my old headset died. Well, the headphones died. The microphone still worked. Then I got a new one. And it was horrible. It sounded like I was shouting through a megaphone to broadcast over AM radio to a PA system in a concrete warehouse.

This may very well be the worst headset I’ve ever owned. We picked it up at the dollar store and I still feel like I was ripped off. Even the speakers are terrible and tinny. How can headphone speakers be tinny? I’ve never even had that problem before. If you asked my to make headset speakers that sounded like this I wouldn’t know where to begin. I’d need a bunch of expensive audio equipment to deliberately isolate and block out selected ranges.

They’re even uncomfortable. They manage to push too hard on my ears, they feel ridiculously flimsy, and yet they still manage to slide off my head somehow. Do you realize how hard it would be to engineer something to behave this way? If it’s lightweight and grabs the head, then it shouldn’t have any problems staying in place.

I hate them, but at the same time I can’t help but admire the dedication and ingenuity that went into making them this bad.

To mitigate the awfulness of the new mic, I wore the broken headset around my neck to use that microphone and the horrible headset on my head to use the earphones. As a result, I couldn’t hear myself properly and my mouth kept moving relative to the mic. The result is so bad you’ll almost wish Rutskarn would sing loud enough to drown me out.

Also, we’re at the slump section of the game, where the story has run out of energy and the game is force-feeding you a double helping of combat. You might remember that the “slump” in our BioShock series was when things got ugly.

So, between the late-game slump and the audio problems, this is going to be a rough week.

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.