We’re going to spend this week playing Half-Life 2: RAVENHOLM!!!
Link (YouTube) |
Here is a link to the Guild Wars 2 Manifesto, which has the guy who posed as the face model for Father Grigori. (He appears around the one minute mark.)
Next week, we begin the new season with (assuming all goes to plan) Assassin’s Creed 2.
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1545: This is Sengoku Jidai, the Age of the Country at War. For 200 years, the Ashikaga Shoguns have ruled from Kyoto. Great power and splendor were theirs. But now, the over-mighty clans no longer obey. The time has come for a new warlord to become… Shogun!
When I look back at my growth as a gaming fan, I would be remiss to ignore the impact that strategy games have had on me. Before I played shooters, and before I played RPGs, there was Command and Conquer. I’d been introduced to the genre during a visit to my cousins’ many years ago, and my brother and I were both instantly hooked. When I lived in Western New York some eight or nine years ago, we convinced some of our neighborhood friends to get Red Alert 2, and we would play online multiplayer matches against each other all the time. Now that I think about it, that was probably the game that got me into online gaming.
But as much as I loved the old C&C games, and despite the countless hours of “one more turns” in Civilization, there’s one game series in particular that â€" ever since I discovered it several years ago â€" has stood above the others purely by virtue of its uniqueness. The Total War series demonstrates a meticulous attention to detail, and an enduring dedication to historical accuracy in presentation. They may not get everything right, and the series has always had to make some concessions from its accuracy in order to preserve gameplay, but the sheer volume of what Creative Assembly does manage to get right is astounding at times, especially considering the current climate of tightly focused, “cinematic” games that has weeded its way into the market. And its in that capacity that I am quite comfortable with calling the Total War games “simulations.” I mean, really, where else can you find such detailed reproductions of line-based warfare and tactics on a AAA budget?
According to Steam, I’ve sunk 222.2 hours (no really, that’s what it says at the time of this writing) into the latest release in the series, Total War: Shogun 2 (or Shogun 2: Total War if you have the series’ old naming scheme burnt into you mind as I do). And after throwing so many hours into it, I’ve worked up quite the urge to write about it â€" which brings us to this Let’s Play. Now this is a little new to me; I’ve read a lot of Let’s Plays, and I’ve edited a video Let’s Play non-stop for a year and a half, but I’ve never actually attempted to write my own.
Now, I’m not going to attempt to conjure up some sort of original fiction for this series â€" Shamus and Rutskarn are both much better at that sort of thing than I am â€" but I have something else I’d like to focus on. All of the Total War games are rife with historical context, owing to their creators’ attention to detail and accuracy. And while I wouldn’t quite characterize myself as a “history geek,” I love reading about it, especially when its on a topic I got very little exposure to at school (e.g., anything that’s not American History (argh) or beginning-of-civilization-era world history).
Without further ado then, let’s talk about the historical context surrounding Total War: Shogun 2, shall we? What is the Sengoku Jidai? Why are all of these people fighting? What does it all mean? And more importantly, what’s up with those crazy hairdos?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Josh Plays Total War: Shogun 2”
It’s the 1980-1981 school year. Mount St. Helens erupts. The Rubik’s Cube craze spreads to my corner of the world and I discover the pleasure of puzzling over one. Adults won’t shut up about “Who shot J.R.” Pac-Man fever is sweeping the country. I’m in fourth grade.
Things are not going well for me.
I’ve struggled a great deal with what to say about this time period. This is a very ugly stretch in my life. I don’t want this series to be a chore to read. I don’t want this to deteriorate into a long screed of complaints and self-pity.
I could skip these events, but that would leave a curious and continuity-breaking hole in my life. I could be explicit, but that would involve a lot of ugly stories that would, I think, be unfair to the adults in my family, and my mother in particular. The only way to avoid making her look like the bad guy would be to tell the whole story, which would be incredibly long, bleak, and not terribly compelling.
Here is the best I can do:
Some adults entered our lives who were no good for us. As a result, my brother and I ended up spending a lot of time under the care and influence of some very rotten people. Just to assuage your worst fears: I wasn’t seriously beaten, I wasn’t molested, nobody died. Nobody gave me illegal drugs. (Although given the witches’ brew of prescription medication I was on, I was arguably higher than the adults in my life.) This isn’t anything that serious. This was a time of neglect, not abuse. Lots of people had home lives that were far more dangerous than the one I knew in these years. But it was rough, and it hit me in an area where I had very few coping mechanisms.
So instead of belaboring things in a litany of complaint, I’ll just pick through the anecdotes of the time and we can move on. Sound good?
I feel like I have very little control over my life. I don’t decide where I go, what I do, what I eat, or who I associate with. This is normal for kids, but it doesn’t feel normal to me.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 8: The Dark Year”
Link (YouTube) |
Watching the “perfect” play-through of a Hitman level can be a strange experience. The player walks into a room, grabs a random item for no reason, walks into another room, changes clothes, goes upstairs, puts the item down, crawls out the window, stands there for two minutes, then goes to the basement, flips a switch, and vacates the premises. Then they get a message that they’ve killed three people and successfully stolen the microfilm.
If you’re foolish enough to ask the player what the hell just happened, they will begin a long, rambling explanation that ends with, “Nevermind. You kinda have to play the game yourself to get it.”
Still, I think Rutskarn did really well on this one. He ought to hire a lawyer and see if he can’t get that “Hoodlum” rating overturned.
Rutskarn has meticulously compiled a list of who is naughty, and who is nice. And then decided to kill everyone in both groups.
Link (YouTube) |
Here is wishing you and your recently departed, a very Merry Hitmas.
Two doors up from us lives an eccentric fellow named John. He’s married, and his children are grown. He’s a large, wild-looking fellow. Big black beard. Thick black curly hair. Thick glasses. He’s also amazingly gentle and soft-spoken, as well as enormously humble and polite. In all my years knowing him, I would never once hear him speak ill of anyone.
My brother Pat – two years younger and about a thousand times more outgoing – talks to Neighbor John now and again. Eventually John discovers that Pat doesn’t know his states and capitals. He quizzes me, and finds I am similarly deficient. He insists that This Won’t Do, and asks our mother if he can help us learn them.
I am skeptical. This sounds like school, and I do not like school. School is the place with bullies (the teachers) and jerks (the other kids) who disapprove of me and let me know how much they don’t appreciate me or my scholastic efforts. It’s a constant assault on my sense of worth and my sense of agency. I spend all day watching the clock and waiting to escape, hoping I can make it home without experiencing any major humiliations. I spend my non-school hours avoiding thinking about school, and trying to ignore the dread that tomorrow, or Monday, or next fall, I’ll have to go back again. There is no end to this punishment, and the best I can do is put it out of my mind for a few hours.
So I do not like this idea of a neighbor showing up and giving me MORE school during non-school time. However, he’s very different from my teachers and his approach is very different from their fetish for bureaucratic paperwork. I humor him.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 7: Neighbor John”
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Third grade. The teacher is explaining adjectives. She offers an example sentence and invites us to add one or more adjectives to it: “The corn is cooking on the grill.”
I zone back in from whatever daydream world I’ve been exploring. This actually sounds a bit interesting. There is a lot of room for adjectives in there. I uncharacteristically raise my hand, “The delicious golden corn is cooked quickly on the scorching hot iron grill?”
She looks at me in stunned silence. I guess she was expecting, “The yummy corn is cooking,” or somesuch. “That’s better than the example they give in the book.” she tells me, referring to the teacher’s guide in her hand. She is genuinely shocked.
When it’s clear she’s not going to give me any more sentences to decorate, I go back to daydreaming. She hands out worksheets later. These have more of the same sort of work, but completing it would mean half an hour of cramp-inducing writing, and who needs that? If she wants more adjectives she can just ask me and I’ll give her all she wants, but I’m not wasting time filling out paperwork.
Some of the kids make fun of the way I’m dressed. I’m wearing brown slacks and green dress socks. This subject comes up again and again in their teasing.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 6: Happy Halloween”
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
T w e n t y S i d e d
