I hope this doesn’t feel like I’m beating a dead horse. Elsewhere in this series I skipped over literal hours of gameplay in a sentence or two, so maybe it feels sort of weird to spend 7,500 words on these last three and a half minutes of the game.
But this is a pretty big switch-up that lands after gameplay is concluded and the credits have rolled. This is a very unusual move, and so I have a lot to say about it.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 21: Alex All Along”
I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. The Christmas Shopping season has begun, the Steam autumn sale is in full swing, award season is here, and it has begun snowing in my part of the world.
I just noticed that Christmas and New Years fall on Saturday this year. We normally record the show on Saturdays. Rather than try to schedule around this, I think we’re going to take those weeks off.
Link (YouTube) |
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #364: Wheel of Rust Potion”
Like I said last time, Prey ends with us either “saving” Talos-1 or nuking the station, and then we get a post-credits scene where we learn the entire game was a simulation. We’re actually a ball of Typhon cells that have been implanted with the memories of Morgan Yu, and allowed to experience a simulation of her struggles aboard the station.
This reveal creates an extra layer of possible confusion, because we now have an overabundance of characters named “Morgan”.
In this series, I’ve been referring to #1 as “Old Morgan”. To help us keep track of these different versions, I’m going to give the name “Morphon” to #4, the Morgan-Typhon hybrid.
If you’re still confused, I’m sorry. This is as clear as I can make it. The writer is really throwing us a curveball here. Again, I think that a reveal this big needs to appear BEFORE the credits, and we need to be given a little space to process it. This post-credits replacement of the plot is trying to fit too big an idea into too small a space.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 20: Judgement Day”
This is is about a DOOM mod I wrote. Except, not really. This post is actually about the the surreal and frightening sensation of getting old. Way back in 1995 I made a map pack for DOOM2 called “Slugfest”. As far as I can remember it was well-received, although I haven’t thought about it in years.
Last week someone posted a YouTube video where they played through that old map pack. Back in the day, I would have been giddy with excitement at the prospect of watching someone else play though my levels. But here from my vantage point at the tail end of 2021, I feel something very different.
Link (YouTube) |
So let’s talk about these maps…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “CRINGEFEST.WAD”
This week I learned that you can’t have a cough drop in secret. On the night of recording this show, my throat was scratchy and dry. I thought I could alleviate this with a cough drop, and would put it in my cheek when it was time to talk. Nobody would ever know!
And then I realized that the sound of talking around a cough drop was far more distracting than the hoarseness I was trying to cover up. Oops.
EDIT: Listening to the show later, I have to say that Issac did a really great job of editing around this. Everything sounds pretty natural on the show.
Link (YouTube) |
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #363: Dislikes”
So Talos-1 is enjoying the sweet embrace of a skyscraper-sized intergalactic horror. Thankfully, we already have a plan for this. Actually, we have a couple. We just need to choose one.
You can do what Alex wants and vaporize the Typhon with the nullwave device, thus leaving the station intact. Or you can follow January’s advice and blast the entire place into space-dust by making the reactor go boom. The latter is supposed to be for the hardcore Typhon haters who think that “man was not meant to meddle”, while the first option is for folks who just want to take a mulligan and have another go at taming the Typhon.
The thing is, I’m not totally comfortable with either option.Â
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 19: Going Out With a Bang”
On the podcast yesterday, we talked about the controversy with the GTA Definitive Edition. For the record, I have not personally experienced the games for myself, so my complaints are based on reports from other people.
This puts me in a really annoying position as a critic. On one hand, I’ll get Rockstar apologistsA dying breed, no doubt. But they do exist. insisting that the controversy is all blown out of proportion and that I shouldn’t be talking about it if I haven’t experienced it first hand.
But if I had bought the game, then I’d have a different group of people yelling at me: “What did you expect? If you were dumb enough to believe Rockstar’s lies and give them your money then you got what you deserved. If you’re dumb enough to fall for this, then I can’t trust you as a critic.”
So you can either be too uninformed to write useful criticism, or you’re unqualified to be a critic. In choosing between these two equally obnoxious fates, I took the one that didn’t cost me $60.
However, the situation is even worse than I reported yesterday.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Grand Theft Auto Trilogy: Derision Edition”
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
T w e n t y S i d e d
