In the coming week we will pass the 64th anniversary of the apparent surrender of Japan to the Allied forces. It turns out that this was simply the longest Rope-a-dope in history. In truth, they tricked us in order to make us think that we had won World War II.
But we actually lost. Here is the proof:
Link (YouTube) |
I am sorry, but there is no defense against this kind of power.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show”
This article is what you get when you take ten thousand words of ideas and cut them down to 1,500 words. The article I didn’t write dwarfs the one I did, and even at that the final product is a bit too long and leaves too much out.
One thing I hopefully avoided was the usual arrogant tone of diversity scolds. Studies like this one begin by point out – as I have – that videogame characters trend heavily towards young white males, but then go on to have a “therefore the designers are sexist bigots” subtext, and blame designers for making the world a worse place. I think the most important thing to realize is that the current landscape has been shaped by economics and the tenancy for people to write what they know, and isn’t the result of anything insidious.
Still, I’m all for seeing a wider variety of characters to inhabit. If nothing else, I’d like to have a little moratorium on space marines and their variants for just a little while.
Now Travis gets to take a shot at the Langdell issue, which I mentioned last week.
For those of you who will want to squint to see the game in detail, I have the fully view of Travis’ game box below:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Stolen Pixels #112: Ready to Settle”
Ugo interviewed the team from Double Helix about their botched controls in Silent Hill: Homecoming.
I still can’t imagine the rationale for this. This wasn’t an accidental oversight, this was a design decision. A decision to give an option that makes no sense and is useless to both invert and standard style gamers. Why would anyone want to invert the controls sometimes?
This is exactly the sort of thing that ought to come out in testing. I know I make fun of Valve and their obsessive-compulsive testing loop, where they will take an already awesome game and work on it for months and months just to make it slightly more awesome. But Double Helix seems to have gone to the opposite extreme. The camera inversion, the difficulty spikes, the unclear and frustrating dodge mechanic, the game-killing three-nurse fight, the game-killing mechanic of a foe that can only be killed by bullets: All of these are things that would have been easily smoothed over with some very straightforward tweaks to gameplay. Just a couple more weeks in the oven would have translated into vast improvements to gameplay.
Double Helix is an odd developer, and I’m still not sure what to make of them. One of their current projects is the tie-in game for the upcoming G. I. Joe movie. The movie itself looks to be an awful bastardization, and movie games usually drop the quality meter a few points beyond that. This does not inspire confidence. (The movie looks less like an adaptation done with caution and love – Spider-Man and X-Men spring to mind – and more an adaptation done with greed and contempt for the source material – like LXG or Transformers.)
I’m not sure what to make of these guys. During their interview with The Escapist, I got the impression that they weren’t really Silent Hill fans. They didn’t hate it, but they weren’t passionate about the series either. Like the G. I. Joe game, they were given some IP and sent off to see what they could do with it. That’s not a crime, but it’s not exactly the kind of daring artistic endeavor that will excite the fan base. Or anyone else.
The thing is, I want these guys to succeed. Unlike Yahtzee, I don’t think the franchise needs to die. Silent Hill is traditionally not hampered by the need for canon-clogging continuity. Each game can take the premise (twisted other-reality ghost town) and do something fresh with it. There’s no reason you can’t just keep making them. This is in contrast to something like Resident Evil, where each new game adds to the rancid heap of nonsense and stretches the limits of disbelief as the Umbrella Corporation engages in ever-more destructive and unprofitable enterprises for no other reason than they need to make monsters for you to shoot. Double Helix doesn’t have this problem with Silent Hill. They have everything they need to make the thing work. Aside from enthusiasm.
A student emailed me, asking about what I do for a living. Not just my job title, but what specifically the job entails on a day-to-day basis. You know, that’s an interesting question, because I had the same question myself at that age. I loved programming. I knew I wanted to do it a lot, which suggested it might be a good career. But I didn’t have a clear picture of what a day at work would really be like. Certainly the job is more than just writing code, right?
The answer is, annoyingly, “it depends”.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Software Engineering”
This is an Overlord comic, but it’s not really about Overlord. It’s about a game which is not Overlord. If you want this to make sense, then you’ll just have to read it for yourself.
Ugh. Monday morning. I’m not a fan. Bad things happen on Monday mornings. For example, this:
Link (YouTube) |
Well, the week can only get better from here, right?
(“Thanks” to Leslee for the link.)
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
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?
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
T w e n t y S i d e d
