The next installment of Sam & Max & Strong Bad are hijacked by Shamus Young for his own selfish purposes is now up at The Escapist. I do not promise that there will be laughs, or insight, or meaningful revelations. What I promise is this: Five panels and some word bubbles. I’m afraid you must take it or leave it.
Chris’ survival Horror Quest has a brilliant post that examines the sales performance of PS2 games against their metacritic scores. He’s looking to see how much quality affects sales. He charted 1,281 games and shows us the breakdown in a number of very interesting graphs.
The only nitpick I have is that I’ve never thought scores were all that useful for determining quality. The way the review system works, a critic usually sits down and pushes through a game in less than a week and then hammers out a review. (And the whole system is a sham in the PC realm, where the reviewer is likely using a top-end PC and a review copy that might not have the DRM found in the retail version.) The process suffers from the same problem that movie reviews do, which is that the reviewers are voracious consumers of games, to the point where they make “hardcore” gamers seem “casual”. Add in the marketing “tilt” effected by big name publishers (which we caught a glimpse of in the firing of Jeff Gerstman) and you have a system where scores don’t have a lot to do with quality. I trust scores to filter out the really horrible stuff, but beyond that I rely on demos and word of mouth. I’ve seen many big-name, top-rated games that turned out to be “meh”, and I’ve seen some real gems that were given modest scores by critics.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game Sales vs Game Quality”
As this site has moved away from its origins (tabletop games) and become a site more about video games, the categories have gotten skewed. It’s gotten to the point where cramming all of my videogame-related posts into a single category no longer makes any sense. To combat this I was offloading some of them into rants, even if the thing I was discussing wasn’t really rage-worthy, but instead just an interesting annoyance. This made the site seem a little more angry than it should. (Not that I have any shortage of stuff to get incensed over these days.)
The “Random Thoughts” category has become a big hole into which all sorts of things get thrown. This weekend I’m shuffling posts around and re-categorizing them. I now have a category just for my commentary (my so-called “reviews”) on single games, and another for talking about videogames in general. I’m going through the “Random Thoughts” archives and seeing if I can file those posts someplace useful. I mention all this not because I think you care about the minutiae of running this site, but because I know some people read through those series in chronological order, and this is going to make a hash of that if you’re trying to do so while the whole thing is in flux. Sorry.
Also, I’m going to shelve my survival horror series for a bit. October is a better month for that. So this weekend I jumped into Tabula Rasa. We’ll see where this goes. Will it enslave me like Wow, or underwhelm me like Hellgate? Will my inevitable criticism draw an army of irate Tabula Rasa fans to let me know that I “just don’t get it”?
I guess we’ll find out.
Here is a rap song video about the Large Hadron Collider, in which you can see pictures of the massive facility, as well as view footage of white people dancing very badly.
T w e n t y S i d e d
You’re welcome.
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| Schools. They don’t make ’em like they used to. Staircases are like rollercoasters: The fancy metal ones just don’t have the charm of their wooden ancestors. Note the textured wallpaper in the upper right. The level designers did their homework for this game. |
The school of Leafmore High is wonderfully realized. There is something deliciously bleak about antique institutional buildings. With their former ornate glory reduced to scuffed woodwork and peeling paint, those buildings take on a hunted quality even in broad daylight. At night their dim, jaundiced lighting and flaky electrical systems can spook you well before the monsters crawl out of the woodwork. I spent a couple of my pre-highschool years in buildings from roughly the same time period, and they were every bit as hollow and dreary as Leafmore High.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “ObsCure: Final Thoughts”
Thus begins my tribute the the recent excellence of episodic gaming. I don’t like the idea of big-name developers that put out a game with no ending and then hold the story ransom until they can get funding for the next installment. (And I’m looking at you, Assassin’s Creed and Dreamfall.) But Telltale Games is doing this episodic thing right.
This is the first in a five-part series that will chart my course from here to self-indulgent irrelevancy. (So we’ll basically be going full circle.)
A good question from Galen in the earlier post on Spore DRM:
I’m just curious now, from the other perspective, lets say you made the game. What would you do as DRM assuming your game was good enough to sell… a lot. I’m definately not siding with EA here. I’m just noticing that when you review games you say how you would do it (FPS trackball, Survival Horror posts). So what would you do if it were your money and time that will be pirated?
That depends on how much control I had. If I was working for any normal publisher, then I wouldn’t have any choice at all. I’d have to use whatever system they told me to.
But if I was making an indie game, or if I miraculously had the clout to dictate terms to a publisher, then I’d take my own advice:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “If I Ran the Show”
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.