T w e n t y S i d e d

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.

So… we’re watching a television commercial for a videogame. This television commercial is taking place within the context of a book, all of which is inside an actual videogame, and which is now in our Let’s Play. So I guess Alan wake wrote a Verizon wireless commercial into his book? So do we blame him?

You know, I don’t really have a serious problem with in-game advertising as long as it’s seamless and not mood-breaking. The television ad was not seamless, and it was mood breaking. By putting it in the middle of this scene that was (or aspired to be) full of tension, it yanked me out of the game and made me resent Verizon. I don’t mind if Peter Parker drinks a coke. I do mind if he drinks a coke while Uncle Ben is bleeding out on the sidewalk. Product placement should never conflict with the tone of the scene, or it will ruin both the scene and the advertisement.

This is especially egregious since we just finished a nice long segment where the ad would have been just fine, perhaps even a welcome novelty.

I’m not just saying this because its an ad for a giant corporation. Even if this had been for a small company, an indie developer, or even a charity – this was the wrong time. This particular ad was a mistake that was a detriment to the developer, the advertiser, and the consumer.

I know some people point out that it’s the job of marketing to get you to notice a product, even with a negative emotion. But that’s just saying advertisers don’t have to be good at their jobs, which is obviously not true. Yes, crappy little companies harass us with shouting infomercials, disingenuous half-promises, or ear-murdering jingles. But generally the big brands (like Verizon) try to keep it clean. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” only applies if you’re an unknown, fighting to be remembered. Once you’re a household name you’re not worried about coverage, you’re worried about perception. If someone is looking at two world-famous products, you don’t want to be known as the “irritating one” or “the stupid one”. I seriously doubt the market of “People who have heard of Sprint but don’t know about Verizon and happen to be in the market for a mobile phone” is particularly big.

A lot of this ties in with stuff Chris said in his retrospective on Sonic the Hedgehog and how Sonic was marketed next to Mario. Check that out if you missed it. Also Penny Arcade mentioned this last week, in relation to the brand placement in Draw Something. I’ve never played it myself, but I understand that this was a conversation that people were having.

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.

Josh is discovering an inordinate supply of haunted furniture. For the record, I have yet to see a single physics glitch or take damage from scenery. (Deliberately hostile items excluded.)

What episode was this again?

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.