T w e n t y S i d e d
Link (YouTube) |
In this exciting episode, we finally lay down the law to our boss and… um… sell some stuff. And resolve some sidequests by… letting the guy we were trying to catch get away.
Huh.
Well, at least we didn’t hack anything!
Josh Plays Shogun 2 Part 13: Realpolitik
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With the Murakami defeated, the east now looks fairly secure. Though I’ve not had the time to fortify the castles along that border, I have on the order of 45 units in the area split between three different armies. I’m now fairly confident in saying that the first phase of my plan is complete â€" it would take an absolutely massive assault or a series of tactical blunders on my part for any clan to mount a successful offensive against us on the eastern front. Now, I can turn my focus to the second phase â€" building a new army to take the capital region to the west. But before we get to that, let’s take a quick look at the minimap:
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At this point, the field has been reduced to four major players: The Date to the east, shown in dark blue, our own clan, the Oda, in gold near the center, the Hatakeyama in green just to the west of us, and the Mori in bright red to the far west. Of these, the Mori clan controls the largest area, with 11 provinces, and we are close behind with our 10. The Hatakeyama control 8, and the Date control 6 of the largest provinces far to the northeast.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Josh Plays Shogun 2 Part 13: Realpolitik”
Game Boss – Rematch
At the suggestion of others, I’ve watched a few episodes of Game Boss. I would say that the previous clip did indeed employ editing that bordered on deception. Now, I did caution that we were seeing the results of double-editing, but I should have checked to see how bad it was. Given that my major problem with reality shows is that they manufacture conflict through aggressive editing, I would say that the person who put together the earlier highlight reel is more guilty of that crime than IGN. Disgusting. And I am now a rube for passing it along.
Let’s be clear here: This does not excuse the awful things that were said in the show, but it does show that IGN wasn’t nearly as depraved or as cynical as the video led us to believe. This editorializing is a shame, since it pretty much sabotaged the important conversation that could have taken place here about the direction and content of this show.
I’m not going to sit down and watch all of the available episodes just so we can sort out the nature and the degree of the editorializing done by the YouTube poster. I no longer want to stand with either side of this exchange. A plague on both their houses, and a heaping helping of humiliation to me for swallowing the story as presented.
In the interest of fairness, here is a full episode of the show so you can judge for yourself. This doesn’t change my opinion of IGN or reality shows, but it does show that Game Boss is not anywhere near the circus of hate and stupidity that it appeared to be.
Link (YouTube) |
Even after watching this episode, I still get get that creepy I-need-a-shower vibe that I get from reality shows. Videogame development is interesting stuff, and you don’t need to construct a narrative of conflict through gossip-mongering and trash-talking. For someone wanting to look inside the sausage factory of game development, I highly recommend Season 2, Episode 12 of How it’s Made, which is available on Netflix. It gives a (fleeting) look behind the scenes of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
For the people producing Game Boss: You’ve got a good concept. I’d suggest you leave out the “here is what team A’s members say about Bob when he isn’t around” crap. Let us see the technical and logistical challenges of making software under pressure. Knowledge itself is entertainment. You don’t need the interpersonal cock-fighting to make this good. You just need to let us go on the journey with these people.
Game Boss
Warning. This video is really hard to watch. See how far you can make it. This is a series of highlights from the IGN reality show Game Boss.
Link (YouTube) |
For those of you who didn’t watch, here is the gist: This is a reality show where a bunch of college-age kids (a female or two is shown in the intro, but in the rest of the presentation it’s all males) are offered free office space and tools. They’re given the chance to compete against each other for a prize which is never mentioned or explained. In this segment, their teams are tasked with coming up with a concept for a boss fight. The cameras are rolling in their brainstorming sessions and we see them say a lot of crude, sexist, or obnoxious things, interspersed with some of their painfully juvenile gameplay ideas.
This culminates with a group of kids who pitch a game based around the “feminist apocalypse”, where men have been lured into prison camps with promises of beer and sex and are ruled by their angry feminist overlords. The boss fight is against a woman in menopause. There’s more to it than that, but you’ll have to watch it yourself if you want to get the full picture. You have to hear them pitch this idea with a complete lack of self-awareness and without a hint of irony before you can begin to map out the awfulness.
Now, keep in mind we’re looking at this through multiple layers of editing. IGN cut this to make their show, but then this YouTube user came along and did a certain degree of editorializing through editing. They looped moments where people laughed at awful, cringe-inducing misogyny. They no doubt left out moments that undercut their point. Still, I think the tone is unambiguous enough that we can make some broad statements about the show.
When I first saw this clip, I was initially horrified at the kids who came up with these ideas. But as I’ve thought about it more, I’ve come to suspect that the real rage needs to be directed at IGN.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game Boss”
Experienced Points:Copyrights and Copycats
My article this week is tangentially about a couple of high-profile copycat games. Actually, it’s more about how this isn’t as dire as it seems.
I didn’t get into it in the article, but this will always be a problem for mobile games. For AAA games, the expense in making the game is in producing the content. Even if you have the perfect game design that you know will delight players, you still need dozens of people hammering away for months to produce those models, animations, and game environments. Even if you want to make a complete mechanical copy of Call of Duty, you still need millions of dollars to do it. This is not the case for Facebook games. In those games, the most valuable thing is the R&D that went into finding the optimal balance of social sharing, micro-transactions, and gameplay feedback to make the game fun, viral, and profitable. With that data in hand, you can re-create a successful game in a couple of months. Maybe even a few weeks or days in the case of the really simple games.
So a certain degree of design-poaching is inevitable. Still, I can’t help but shake my head at a company like Zynga. Over 2,000 people in that place, and not one of them has the will or authority to add a twist to their blatant knock-off? As a consumer, I dig the idea of a bunch of companies making constant gameplay re-mixes, taking the most popular mechanics and combining them to make new creations. After all, it doesn’t take much to make something new.
It’s just depressing how lazy they are in their plagiarism.
Deus Ex Human Revolution EP14: A Brush With Glitch
Link (YouTube) |
Wow. A whole week of fumbling around, tranq’ing guards, hacking computers, and juggling inventory. And then in the last half of the last episode we have a boss fight, an important conversation with Pritchard, a major glitch, we meet Bill Taggert, and we’re introduced to the whole anti-aug side of the argument.
Deus Ex Human Revolution EP13:Shoots & Ladders
Link (YouTube) |
A side note: I’ve updated the Spoiler Warning page. Hopefully this will make it easier to surf the archives. I know I get lost looking for particular episodes, and I’m thinking maybe being able to see the titles will help.
As I mentioned in the episode, the “vast underground complex filled with guards and control rooms” is pretty much a required component of the Deus Ex conspiracy-driven story, but it flies apart if you do something foolish like think about it. Having fifty or a hundred people all pile into an abandoned building every morning would be a pretty big giveaway. At lunchtime a half dozen people would file out, grab huge piles of Starbucks and take-out food, and disappear into the building again.
You could fix this by saying the people live in the base, but then you have the problem of needing to bring in truck loads of food every couple of weeks. You’d need laundry infrastructure, dorms, and a plan for getting rid of all the trash. There would be little bits of traffic every couple of weeks as personnel rotated in and out of their six-month shifts. Again, people would notice.
Which brings up the question of why this base needs to be in a city at all. What is this place for? I understand they were spying on Sarif from here, but certainly they didn’t need ALL of these people for a job like that. And those people could have worked out of an office tower downtown without really raising any eyebrows. What is it that the bad guys want to accomplish that requires a sprawling, Dwarf-like warren under the earth?
EDIT: For the record, I’m not saying these are plot holes or anything. I’m just musing.
From The Archives:
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
If Star Wars Was Made in 2006?
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?
PC Gaming Golden Age
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
Seven Springs
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
Gamers Aren’t Toxic
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?