T w e n t y S i d e d

We haven’t worked out what game we’re doing next. I’m sure you have a game in mind, and I can promise you it has numerous drawbacks. I know this because that’s all we’ve been talking about for the last couple of weeks: “Which of these ugly scenarios is the least unpleasant?” Some games are difficult to record for technical reasons. (KOTOR) Some have severe pacing problems. (Dragon Age: Origins: The Deep Roads.) Others present logistical problems. (The timed dialog in in Alpha Protocol making it impossible to have conversations about choices because the game won’t wait for us.) Some of these problems can be solved with extensive editing, but there actually is an upper limit on how many hours a week Josh can spend on this, and it’s already a lot. Also, just about every game under consideration has at least one cast member who doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. So, it’s complicated, is what I’m saying. You’re free to shout “DO MY GAME OF CHOICE. DO IT!” in the comments below, but it will have the same impact as shouting coaching advice at the television when you’re watching your Sports Game of choice. Our problem is not lack of choices, but in weighing the various trade-offs. We need to make sure we can live with our selection for the next couple of months.

HOWEVER: While that conversation plays out, I am kind of curious why people watch the show. This question is too complex for a brute-force solution such as a poll, so here are a few questions. Answer as seems best to you:

1. Do you enjoy the show more when we’re making jokes, or when we’re doing more analytical commentary?
2. Do you prefer unseemly gushing (as with Half-Life 2) or unhinged ranting (as with Fallout 3)?
3. Do you prefer to watch the show when you have played the game in question, or when you haven’t?
4. Have you tried to watch the Fallout 3 episodes at all? Because they are broken for me, and have been for weeks.
5. And just because I know you’ll say so anyway: What game do you wish we would do next?

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.

Here it is! The stupid finale! Remember, if you can’t win, making sure everyone loses is the next best thing.

I have a few more thoughts on New Vegas, but I think the discussion on the finale needs to stand on its own.

Thanks for watching!

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.

And so we enter the endgame…

Sorry to those of you who have been hoping we’d cover Old World Blues, but the crew was unanimously in favor of moving on. (And we never unanimously agree on ANYTHING.) While Old World Blues is excellent, it’s not exactly ideal for an interesting let’s play. It would begin with more than a solid episode of nothing but clicking through a single dialog, followed by three weeks of episodes of Josh looting stuff. You want to know what the Spoiler Warning coverage of Old World Blues would be? Just stare at a picture of the pip-boy inventory screen and have people take turns yelling in your ear to stop carrying so much stuff, stop using weapons for which you have no skill points, and stop not using hotkeys.

We’re starting to get New Vegas fatigue. We’ve said our piece with the game, and from here on we’re going to just be driving the drinking game into the ground. This is what happened at the end of BioShock, and I’m sure you remember how that turned out.

In yesterday’s episode I said I’d never played with Wild Wasteland enabled. This is not true. In my latest play-through, I’ve sunk dozens of hours into a Wild Wasteland-powered game. I managed to fill in over 80% of the world map. I hit my level cap of 40. I amassed almost 200k in caps. I did Honest Hearts, and Old World Blues. I did quests and sidequests and achievements and built massive collections of objects. I even did the Sunset Sarsaparilla quest. In all that time, I never really noticed Wild Wasteland. (Although, I would have noticed if those aliens had showed up.) I liked the idea of Wild Wasteland. It was a good way of trying to please the people who liked the more gritty, grounded world of Junktown versus the people who liked the crazy gags and pop-culture references that permeated Fallout 2. I think it just needed to be a little more wild.

BTW: I loved recording this episode in particular. Lots of fun.

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 has spent the entire game hauling around a great heap of clutter and stashing unwanted items in various places. Those of you who have played the game will know that this is like refusing to take out the garbage. You are not avoiding work, only postponing it. Sooner or later, those items need to be rounded up. Sorted. Schlepped to various vendors. Sold. The resulting bottlecap bounty must then be invested in upgrades and equipment, which requires additional travel time and inventory-scrolling. Usually you do this a bit at a time as you play, but Josh has been on a non-stop bender of murder and item acquisition since he staggered out of Doc Mitchell’s house.

So this is it. This episode is the Great Inventory Reckoning. Half an hour, with several fast-forward sections. I can’t imagine what compels you people watch this show. Sitting in on this session caused acute boredom trauma to my frontal lobe.

As an added bonus, Josh has begun griefing us outside of the game, through the magic of editing. In this episode he cut huge sections of commentary, and then left in sections that we specifically said should be left out.

I will say that the interface in this game is just shockingly, shamefully, willfully horrible. In the lineage of Morrowind » Oblivion » Fallout 3 » New Vegas, we see a clear progression taking place. At the start, the interface is clunky and awkward. It degrades rapidly from there, until it finally blossoms into a crime against usability. New Vegas has the dubious distinction of being the first game in the progression where the interface didn’t get significantly worse.

It’s been suggested that the interface problems are the result of “consolization”. While we might blame console-porting for the excessively large fonts, excessive scrolling, and wasted screen space, that doesn’t explain everything that’s wrong here. One thing console games usually have going for them is clarity. PC games do have a tendency to start looking like a spreadsheet, but consoles are generally more focused about what information is being presented and what the options are. But here the thing so terribly cluttered and counter-intuitive that a lot of your options end up being obfuscated. I’ve sunk over 100 hours into this game, and I just recently found a new page of info that I didn’t know existed.

They keep releasing new screenshots and trailers for Skyrim. (I don’t know why I bothered linking them. The official Skyrim site is an idiotic flash-based monstrosity that demands to know your country of origin (hint to the Bethesda web devs: you can actually get that info without needing to trouble the user) and birthday before it will move on to being useless. It’s a sort of, “How many things can you find wrong in this picture?” of web development.) I’d love to see just one of them show us what the interface is going to look like. I know this won’t happen, but that’s where my curiosity is focused.

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.

Well that was fun. Honest Hearts is over and we return to the Mojave wasteland.

I’d apologize for us spending half an episode selling vendor trash and juggling inventory, but I think I need to save that apology for tomorrow. Things are about to get much, much worse.

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.