Spoiler Warning S4E28: CSI: Illium

By Shamus Posted Friday Jan 21, 2011

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 165 comments


Link (YouTube)

Rutskarn made a good point about the car animation giving the place a sense of scale. The old fast travel kiosks on the Citadel in Mass Effect 1 were supposed to be taxi stands. They even had a car parked beside them. (Sometimes.) But I never felt like “I am going to take a taxi to my destination” when I used them. I always felt like “I am going to push the teleport button”. I suppose it would have helped if we had been able to see cars flying around even when we weren’t going anywhere. Having a cut showing you flying away in a car makes the city seem more like a living place and less like a series of corridors with connecting teleporters.

I don’t know why the USB thumbdrives of the future are the size of hand grenades and covered in flashing red danger lights. Can you imagine how annoying it would be if you had several of them? Maybe you got one for games, another one for school, and another couple for your Asari porn. Then you open the drawer to get one and it looks like a pile of flashing Christmas lights.

 


 

Shamus Plays WoW #13: Crime and Punishment

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jan 20, 2011

Filed under: Column 96 comments

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Welcome to Norman’s wacky adventures and hi-jinks in Westfall.

Good news / bad news time.

Bad news: This series will end in the next couple of weeks. Bit sooner that I’d designed, but I’m doing this in order to make more time for…

Good News: Stolen Pixels will return after the WoW series ends.

Also, you should be reading Rutskarn’s Let’s Play of Oblivion. It’s dumb, contrived, ill-designed, and poorly written. Oblivion, I mean – the LP itself is delightful fun.

 


 

Spoiler Warning S4E27: CHALLENGE THE SUN TO A STARING CONTEST

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jan 20, 2011

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 121 comments

I’d have to say that a room full of freshly murdered people is an odd place to have a job interview. Also, “how long can you stare at the sun” is a pretty unconventional interview question.


Link (YouTube)

Thankfully, the writers showed us that we can just dismiss Nasana’s (I’m sure you’ll let me know if I spelled that wrong) entire personal guard as animals worthy of butchering. Shepard gets to her office and admits she gunned down everyone just so she could get here and talk to Thane. This had to be an awkward moment, being told that the person who just killed your entire workforce isn’t even here to talk to you. Imagine how the conversation would have gone if Thane hadn’t dropped in at that moment. What do you do in that situation? Talk about the weather?

“So… did you try that new Elcor seafood place downtown?”

“No actually we just got here. Haven’t had time to… you know how it is.”

“Oh. Tried it last night. Good bread.”

“Yeah. Elcor always have good bread.”

“Although, they do that just so you’ll fill up.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“So… you said this guy was coming to kill you? Do know when he’ll… no, I guess you wouldn’t. I wonder if we should go, and come back later, or? Are you going to be here all night? I mean, assuming you don’t die horribly?”

This is one of those situations where it’s fun to look at a quest setup in an RPG and play “what did this place look like yesterday?” You know, before the player character marched in and began their aggressive headcount reduction: There would have been fifty dudes with automatic weapons and rocket launchers, all clanking around a posh office tower comprised entirely of corridors and warehouses. Nasana had a headache from trying to do office work in a dark room, again. Maybe installing the red lights in here was a bad idea. Sure, it gave the place that certain… severity that she liked to project, but it was murder trying to read the daily reports about the new and dangerous enemies she’d acquired. And the sun! Every time she looked away from her amber monochrome monitors she wound up staring directly into the sun. Sometimes it made her so angry she thought about hiring a council spectre to assassinate one of her close relatives. Downstairs, her Salarian minions sat around the unfurnished warehouse, talking about how much they loved their job. Sure, the hours were crap and there was nothing to do but stare at the sun all night (?!?) but they never had any responsibilities and nobody ever tried to kill them.

And yes: We’re doing the Shadowbroker DLC. We actually did the entire DLC in one long session, and the episodes will run to the end of next week. We usually only do one week at a time, but we were compelled to keep going and unravel the mystery. That, and we were in the middle of a firefight at the end of every episode and couldn’t stop to save the game.

 


 

Spoiler Warning S4E26: The Best Plan in the Universe

By Josh Posted Wednesday Jan 19, 2011

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 210 comments


Link (YouTube)

All the joking about the insanity of shooting our way up a tower just so we can meet Thane in the middle of a job aside, this is totally a Cuftburt plan and therefore I am 100% behind it.

It’s just too bad I can’t steal absolutely everything on my way up.

 


 

Spoiler Warning S4E25: Climactic… Battle?

By Josh Posted Tuesday Jan 18, 2011

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 86 comments


Link (YouTube)

It’s funny, I seem to remember more happening in this episode. I mean, not that I’m opposed to the idea of more dialogue, but most of this episode wasn’t even really meaningful dialogue, it was just “Oh hey you have to talk to this person so you can get the quest hook to go and do some stuff that the Illusive Man said you should do or something.”

Oh well, at least we get a little more interesting (and less Lawful Stupid!) dialogue with Samara. I hope she doesn’t mind that Shepard is the galactic Candy-From-Baby thief.

 


 

Downtime: I hope you can read this

By Shamus Posted Monday Jan 17, 2011

Filed under: Notices 103 comments

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Welcome to 1996. Please enjoy your internet.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that my site tends to go down a lot. It turns out this blog is a resource pig. According to my webhost, I had an entire machine to myself and it was still going down on a regular basis. About two or three times a month the machine would be overwhelmed for a few hours and the site would vanish. I could never get a definitive answer out of them if the cause was bandwidth or CPU usage. Bandwidth seems unlikely – this site isn’t that popular. I’ve survived simultaneous links from Slashdot and Make. But if the cause is a PHP script that runs amok, I’m at a loss to find it.

But last week they moved me to a new server, in hopes that this would improve things. I also installed supercache, which might help lighten the load. I’m very disappointed that web hosts track bandwidth usage but don’t give you any way of tracking CPU usage. It means I’m working blind and have no way to really look for problems.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Downtime: I hope you can read this”

 


 

My First Teenager

By Shamus Posted Monday Jan 17, 2011

Filed under: Personal 161 comments

When I was in high school I used to do this thing where I’d walk up to someone, lean on them for a minute or so, and then casually inject into the conversation, “You know, you’re supporting a teenager.” Sigh. At least I grew out of it.

Rachel, my oldest daughter, turns 13 today. Thirteen was when I got my first computer. So that’s kind of a big deal for me. It also marks the onset of the whole “teenager” thing, although she’s not yet suffering from any of the symptoms.

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She passed her mother in height last year. Now she’s only a couple of inches below me. (I’m 5’11 – 1.8m) She’s enthusiastic about being tall, which is good, seeing as how she doesn’t have much choice. Some tall girls are embarrassed by their height, but Rachel seems excited at the prospect that she could pass me.

I turn 40 later this year. Time seems to be passing alarmingly fast. At the current rate of acceleration, I’ll be 60 in about an hour and a half.