T w e n t y S i d e d
Link (YouTube) |
We got sidetracked a bit talking about Defense Grid: The Awakening. I wasn’t kidding about it using Gamebryo, either. Here is the splash screen:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning S5E10: Boone Comma Boom”
PSN Outage
 |
This story about the Playstation Network being hacked is huge. Just trying to draw a chalk outline around the thing is a major undertaking. The degree to which this will impact the behavior and attitudes of the rest of the industry is hard to judge. But you can bet the people in Redmond are letting out a slow breath and saying, “Thank God this didn’t happen to us.” And then they laugh and go back to brainstorming new ways to make Games for Windows LIVE even more horrible.
This is the worst-case scenario for Sony. Their entire network is down, it’s been down since last week, and they don’t even have an estimate of when it will be up again. They don’t have an explanation. And someone out there has all of the personal data of all of the PSN users, ever.
Here is an email from my brother Patrick, this morning:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “PSN Outage”
Stolen Pixels: A Hat for Every Head
You know, if the Portal 2 store sold one of these, I would totally buy it.
Spoiler Warning S5E9: No-Vac(ancy), No Problem
Link (YouTube) |
Yeah, so… two minutes into the next episode we realized that Josh hadn’t actually accepted the quest, which is why we couldn’t DO the quest. But we blamed the game anyway. Look, give us a break. There’s only four of us. We can’t possibly notice every tiny little detail, and sometimes little things like WHAT QUEST WE’RE ON get lost in the shuffle.
Yeah, we suck.
Experienced Points: DLC for Dummies
Here is a little bit about the Portal 2 review-bombers. The story so far is this: Last week, thousands of enraged, barely-literate people went to Metacritic and rated the best game of 2011 a zero because it has DLC which is less offensive and more consumer-friendly than anything that came before it.
Part of this is classic over-correction of opinion. A thing appears which you mildly dislike. Everyone else loves it. Their celebration of the mundane offends you, and their enjoyment of something you find distasteful breeds resentment. If they visit Metacritic and award it 10/10, then you feel the need to correct this. Since you are outnumbered, your only recourse is to give it zero out of 10, to bring the score down to the middle, where it “should” be. In conversation, it’s not enough to dismiss it as lackluster. You must vilify it. You must excoriate it. You must hold in contempt the armies of sheeple who are too stupid to see what is so manifestly clear to you.
I’m guilty of the same thing. I’ve calibrated my indignation with regards to DRM to compensate for the widespread apathy most people have regarding the issue. It happened to Halo. Avatar. The Wii. Farmville. Nothing is more detested than when it is both ordinary and celebrated.
But even this doesn’t explain the behavior of the Portal 2 protesters. I’ve read the comment thread at the Escapist (over 300 responses so far) and it is a madhouse of muddled concepts.
“The content is stupid and nobody wants it and it shouldn’t be in the game at all and therefore Valve should let me have it for free. Since they refuse, the entire game sucks.”
There’s nothing to refute or discuss. I can’t even figure out where these people stand or what they believe in. It’s clear most of them haven’t even played the game.
I suspected this was some sort of automated system, just like other publishers sometimes have their own people rate their own games 10/10. But the thread at the Escapist proves these people are real. Crazy. Incoherent. But real.
Stolen Pixels #253: The Playboy
Okay, I get why they put a Playboy magazine collection game in Mafia II. Although, if they’re such fans of the female form, then can someone explain to me why all the women in the game look like THIS:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Stolen Pixels #253: The Playboy”
Mass Effect 3 Preview
 |
You know what I think we’ll see in Mass Effect 3? How about: Aliens attack New York. Combat is more fast-paced and focused on hitting enemy weak spots. Commander Shepard has a new melee-focused character class available so he can punch and kick the Reapers to death. While all of this sounds like stupid stuff I would make up because I’m often a sarcastic crank, this is actually from an article at Eurogamer.
You know what I want? I want the next Gears of War game to come out to find Marcus Fenix has traded in his refrigerator armor for a uniform, and he levels up his abilities as he adventures around helping people. He spends most of his time having long conversations about Big Ideas, philosophy, and galactic history. Maybe at the end he will speak to some oracle that will reveal Great Truths about the nature of his struggle and put his previous discoveries in a new light.
RPG devlopers are few and far between these days. (Excluding online games, of course.) Of those that are left, nearly all of them are beating the dead, toothless horse of medieval fantasy.
Just one space opera. That’s all I wanted. I really don’t think I’m being unreasonable.
From The Archives:
The Best of 2018
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
The Best of 2019
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
The Brilliance of Mass Effect
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
Wolfenstein II
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.