T w e n t y S i d e d

We spent most of this week pointing out the ridiculous contrivances with regards to the Sierra Madre Gas Chamber & Casino. A few of you are offended because there are in-game explanations for some of these things. I’ve seen the end of the DLC now, and I’m not so sure. Yes, the place was designed to be a trap, but… this? Why were we gassed when we came in the front door? Why were we dragged to different areas of the Casino? Why weren’t we simply killed? Who dragged us? Where did they go? Why can’t Dean go through a curtain? Why didn’t he knock out that holo-emitter? Allowing for the fact that the vault itself is a trap, why is the rest of the building designed like Jigsaw’s summer home? Where do all these ghost men come from? Why does the “one collar goes off, they all go off” feature seem to come and go without explanation? And so on.

But since I didn’t play the DLC, I’ll allow that maybe all of these seeming absurdities are explained on a terminal or something somewhere. Josh was fairly thorough with the dialogs, but maybe there were characters we missed or questions that he glossed over somewhere. Even so, you need to have a heart of inert concrete to not be able to enjoy the supreme absurdity of the situation the player is in.

Mel Brooks once said: Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when YOU fall in a sewer and die. (paraphrase) If that’s true, then the Sierra Madre is a Fortress of Timeless Comedy. Even if it’s all explained, it’s still a hotel designed to lock the doors, gas everyone, and then send in holographic Tron guys to gun down the stragglers. If you don’t find that funny then we can’t be friends.

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.

I hate this episode. The rest of the week will be better, I promise.

Interesting note: The problem with the microphones cutting off? Yeah. That’s not due to us letting go of the talk key. Both Mumbles and Josh compared their recordings of our session with the episode audio, and found the clipping didn’t exist in the original. These last few weeks I’ve been going mad, trying to figure out why I keep introducing myself as “Sha-“, NO MATTER HOW LONG I HOLD DOWN THE BUTTON. I thought I was losing my mind.

Nope, looks like a bug in Ventrilo. When you export a session, it clips some messages. Sometimes. For some people. That’s just great.

We could move to Mumble or some other voice client. But that means paying for another server, getting everyone on the new clients, and discovering what shortcomings and bugs and annoyances await us with the new system.

Technology sucks.

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.