Link (YouTube) |
I have to say, the Miranda interview had a lot less fan service than I expected. I seem to remember that every time I visited Miranda I was treated to the boob-cam and the butt-cam whenever she spoke. Maybe it only does that if you’re male Shepard. Or maybe that happens later in the game.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning S4E14: Let’s Talk About Our Feelings”
Actually, that was a lie. It is, in fact, not remotely done. Which is good, since you can read about the steps being taken to correct the fact that it is not done.
In this entry Michael explains the z-buffer. Let me take a crack at the same thing, because I enjoy doing it…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Let’s Code, Part 4”
Link (YouTube) |
At the three-minute mark:
Hey, your videogame protagonist is so fat, she jumped up in the air, and got stuck.
Thank you, thank you. I’m here all week.
While BioWare games are always trope-filled, I think cataloging all of the tropes in Jack’s recruitment would be a lengthy undertaking. Jack herself is a few tropes, then there’s her breakout, the warden, his plan, his shield and boss fight, and the prison itself.
Having said all that, I actually enjoyed the gameplay here, even though the story is a bit bent. Later there’s Grunt’s recruitment, which is pretty good, story-wise, but which I thought was tedious from a gameplay standpoint. (Fight waves of Krogan in a brown industrial wasteland? Ugh.)
The latest installment is up, but I forgot to link it on Wednesday.
This series is an interesting experiment. I joke about it being “fanfiction”, but I think it’s actually true. This really is fanfiction, even more so than my Lord of the Rings Online or my Champions Online series. In those other stories, I stuck pretty close to the game. I made up dialog, but that’s about it. The rest of it was simply a transcription of the in-game activity. (Which speaks poorly of the writers, I guess.) But here I’m making up characters, backstories, and even doing a bit or world-building in imagining the how the demonic realms operate. I was pretty nervous when I set out in this direction, and very worried that I might get picked apart by WoW lore fans, but so far everyone seems happy.
Having played around on the Horde side, I think both the Blood Elves and the Undead would make for great Let’s Play series. The next time I’m having trouble finding an MMO for Shamus Plays, I might come back to WoW.
Interesting news: DC Universe Online is sounding very, very promising. I’m considering that for my next series. It launches in February, although I don’t know if we’ll be done with WoW before then.
Link (YouTube) |
I know yesterday we revealed that we’d used an editor to change our save. I think this was a good move, but I want to stress that this was an exception and we’re generally not going to change our stance on mods. We went to play games as they came out of the box. I don’t want a big debate over what mods we should use, and when a game bugs out I don’t want people to blame it on the mods we’ve installed.
I really dislike how they handled saves from the previous game. The default setup given to someone without a ME1 save is about the least interesting of the possible choices. And BioWare really should have let you (optionally) pick from the available choices. Kaiden or Ashley? Council live or die? Wrex alive or dead? Rachni Queen free or dead? Anderson or Udina? Letting the player choose at the start of the game would have added replay value.
I guess they were trying to sell copies of Mass Effect 1, but without knowing what those options were or that they even existed, I don’t think there’s any incentive for newcomers to go back and get the original game.
Rather than answer a dozen emails, let me do a kind of announcement roundup thing. And now that I think of it, I should make that the title to this post.
1) Our very own Mumbles has begun a blog, which she has thoughtfully placed on the internet where people can read it. People such as yourself. This means that 75% of the Spoiler Warning crew is now enbloggened. Mumbles does it. Rutskarn does it. I does it. But I have it on good authority that Josh will not be joining our proud cult of rambling blog-makers. But if he does start one, I strongly encourage him to name it “STOP SHOOTING ME DOT COM”. Just saying.
2) Gratitude and thanks to the benefactor who provided a graphics card for me. It’s a Radeon HD 5670. And for those of you who like the acronym stuff: 1GB 128-bit DDR5 PCIE 2.0 x16 HDCP with Crossfire who am I kidding nobody reads this crap. I was going to take some pictures of it, but I had work that needed to get done, and so I put it to work straight away. However, the card is red, which is what counts.
3) Stolen Pixels is on hiatus. This might be a long-ish one. I’ll come back to it when I can.
4) Work stopped on Project Hex while I worked on Drawn to Knowledge. We’ll hopefully get back to that after the holidays. For the last three years I’ve worked huge overtime over the holidays, and so I mean to make the most of this one.
5) Not so much an announcement as a question: I have discovered the fun of playing Horde side in WoW. I had the idea of leveling an Orc in the Blood Elf area, because that would be funny. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get there. I thought I’d go take a zeppelin, but none seem to go to Silvermoon. I thought to run there, but the Western Plaguelands are basically impassible at level 1. I’m sure you can get there, but it would be hours of corpse-running. Now that I think of it, I hardly ever see any non-elves in Eversong Woods. I’m guessing that you just can’t get there until you’ve got the levels to make the run? Or am I missing some alternate route?
It seems that we’ve finally gotten bored with all of the mindless shooting and awesome explosions, so with this episode we’re bringing you very special presentation:
Spoiler Warning: NOBODY DIES
Link (YouTube) |
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
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.
T w e n t y S i d e d
