You show up in a videogame, you end up in my comic. Those are the rules and there’s no sense crying about it now.
I’ve said before that I find the 3-panel joke to be one of the more challenging. I’m actually toying with the idea of doing a few, just for the sake of variety.
Part 2 of Michael Goodfellow’s game-building series is now available. He’s tweaking the site in response to feedback, adding RSS feed, making clear the goals of the project, and generally learning to blog while making a game.
This week he’s working on collision detection, one of my weak areas. (My other major weakness is animating skeletal meshes – making characters walk and such. Hate that stuff. It’s one of those jobs that is hard to break down into manageable bits of complexity.) It’s difficult to get it working, and even harder to get it really, truly right. A slight misstep can burn a ton of precious CPU time, and no matter how long I work on it or how well it works I’m always left with the nagging impression that I’m probably missing something.
Okay, I need to do some more work on my WoW series, so it’s time to get back into the game again. I should check up on my main character and see where I left off. And this is where I discover I have a Serious Problem. This problem leads me to Google, which leads me to forum threads. I think the behavior of WoW forum posters is well-known, but in case you’ve missed that particular aspect of internet culture, I will add some of that flavor to this post.
 |
The problem is this: Dalaran is the major end-game city. From there, you can teleport to any of the other racial cities in the game. The common wisdom among players was to have a high-level character teleport you to Dalaran, which you could then set as your home. You could then use your hearthstone to jump back to Dalaran at any time, and from there teleport to the city of your choice. It was a great time-saver.
But this weekend I logged in to find this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Postcards from WoW, Part 7”
Josh had his computer stop working on him this week. Something about a fan that stopped working, or overheated, or was possessed by demons, or whatever. You know how it is with 64-bit hardware. So now Josh is scrambling to get replacement parts and having them express-shipped to him so he can rebuild his machine. As a result of all this, there might not be Spoiler Warning this week. I know, I know. We just got the new season rolling and were getting into the groove.
While a week with no Spoiler Warning seem grim, I hope you’ll remember who the real victim is here: Me. I have no idea what I’m going to do for blog content this week. I suppose I could write more posts, but I’m way too busy playing World of Warcraft on my fully functional computer for that sort of business.
But thanks for your concern. I’m sure I’ll get through this somehow.
OK Go:
Link (YouTube) |
All one take. With animals.
I don’t know what made these men so insane, but I hope they’re never cured. Nice work guys.
The sad thing is, Microsoft rose to power partly because of their relative mobility. In the early 80’s, it was said that it would take IBM 9 months and millions of dollars to ship an empty box. Their internal bureaucracy and culture was so top-heavy and encumbered that they couldn’t spot opportunities and take advantage of them. Microsoft could, and David gave Goliath such a humiliating defeat that the story has served as a cautionary tale against companies becoming too entrenched. Which is exactly the lesson Microsoft needs to take to heart today.
The thing is, the Xbox is a pretty descent console. They do have smart people working at Microsoft, somewhere. But Games for Windows LIVE is such an amazing failure on so many levels. They entered the game way later than they should, they missed the point when designing the system, they made something buggy and cumbersome, and then they failed to adapt when it was clear their effort wasn’t nearly good enough.
I really don’t know what they’re doing. There is no way GFWL can beat Steam in its current state. (Ignoring all the bugs and crashes, this design has very little to offer the end user.) But they don’t seem to be making any effort to really improve it. They also aren’t interested in giving up or starting over. I really do suspect they’re just too big and clumsy to compete here. In the 80’s, IBM eventually realized they couldn’t win, and so they gave up the PC market. I keep hoping that Microsoft will do the same with GFWL.
To a lot of people, Poker Night at the Inventory was probably just a really cumbersome way to get a bunch of Team Fortress 2 unlocks for $5. We know how gamers get sometimes. But those who took the time to install and play the game were treated to some really engaging characters and fun table banter.
There are better poker games out there, but this is the only place you’re going to see Max, Strong Bad, Heavy Weapons Guy, and Tyco Brahe all together. Well, aside from my comic.
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
T w e n t y S i d e d
