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Apologies for the late post, but the insanity of these episodes seems to be spilling over into all aspects of life at the moment. We’ll be working to contain the localized Cuftbert distortions in the space time continuum to minimize such disturbances in the future.
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And now we bring you the greatest Spoiler Warning episode of all time. We’re sorry.
We finally have a tentative release date for my upcoming novel. It should go on sale on Friday, March 2nd. We’re just waiting on the arrival of the proof copies. If those are good, we can throw the switch and you can finally get your hands on this thing.
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I will say it’s murderously difficult to come up with blurbs that aren’t spoilers. I mean, what constitutes a spoiler? That the droids are carrying secret plans? That Luke ends up with the droids? That Obi-Wan knew Luke’s father? That the secret plans are for the Death Star? That Vader and Obi-Wan duel? If you’re cutting a trailer, how much do you give away? You need to explain what the story is about without giving away any details. The blurb above is nominally a spoiler for the first section of the book. (The book is divided into six sections. Is that a spoiler? Is it a spoiler that “six sections” itself could be a spoiler? Am I over thinking this?)
To answer the basic questions I’ve been getting in email:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witch Watch: Release Date”
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It’s pretty common for games to use the “the bad guy shows up at the end of the tutorial to murder your family / village”, and I’m usually very critical of it. It’s a brute-force approach to the problem of making the player care about the villain. It’s a cheap and easy tool for writers who aren’t deft enough to wield the more subtle tools of world-building and characterization. I might not know how to make a victim NPC that you will care about or relate to, but I bet I can provoke some sort of response from you if I make the NPC victim YOUR MOTHER!
RAGE does not have this problem. RAGE has the opposite problem. RAGE never bothers to make us care about the bad guys at all. The bad guys in this case are called “The Authority” and they are opposed by “The Resistance”. Now, RAGE (You know what? I’m done typing the name of this game in all caps. Correct or not, it’s just too shouty.) takes place on a wasteland Earth after an asteroid apocalypse. The world is smashed and most people aren’t even literate. It’s completely valid to have simplistic names for your factions like this, provided they’re suitably interesting. But the agendas of these two sides are just as generic and shallow as their names.
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Continue reading ⟩⟩ “RAGE: Not Enraging Enough”
The setup for this story: A few months ago, I got a virus. Not bad, nothing dangerous. When it was over I was pretty sure I had it all, but “pretty sure” wasn’t good enough. I needed to be able to trust this machine again, so I re-installed Windows. I put the new install on the D: drive and left the C: drive alone. This was also an experiment: How much stuff from C: will I miss or need in the long run? (The answer: Almost nothing. The only thing I ever bothered to recover from C: was my Minecraft saves. All of my programming, writing, and video projects are either saved on other drives or online.) And so our story begins…
It’s Thursday night. I’m looking at my C: drive and thinking that it’s probably about time to format that sucker and reclaim the wasted space. I mean, it’s been moths and I’ve never needed any of it. I boot off the D: drive now, so it should be safe to just nuke C: and use it for… I dunno. I don’t even have a plan for it. I’ve got a pretty good system where I keep the operating system on one drive, my work on another, and games on a third drive. I don’t have a plan for C:, but I might as well clean up that old mess, right?
I right-click on C: and hit “format”…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “An Evening of Failure and Stupidity”
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And a late, extra long, fourth episode of the week for you guys. Enjoy.
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Rutskarn does make a pretty good point about all of the internet culture references in this game. They’re less ham-fisted than similar attempts in other games to give a nod to the supposed “internet demographic” were, but they still feel a little artificial, don’t they?
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
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.
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