I’m really sorry, but I failed to filibuster Paul this week. I unforgivably allowed him several minutes of talking where he was able to say smart and interesting things. See the end of this post for the breakdown.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #361: Make New Stuff”
Like I said last time, Walther Dahl showed up for some mustache-twirling villainy just as the main story was getting good. So then the plot of the game slams on the brakes and we spend the next hour or so fighting the same boring enemy robot over and over.
There are a couple of different ways that Morgan can deal with Walther Dahl. She can give him a good old-fashioned murdering, or she can knock him out. And knocking him out isn’t just for bleeding-heart hippies doing “no kill” novelty runs like in some games. Here, sparing Dahl’s life serves an immediate practical benefit: It gives us a way off the station.
Technically, we shouldn’t need additional transportation off the station. On Talos-1 there are three escape pod bays. Each bay holds six pods, and each pod holds 8 people. So what we have here is a Titanic-type situation where we only have a lifeboat capacity of 144 for our 260 personnel. If we want to be charitable,I don’t want to be charitable. we could assume that the original crew size was supposed to be less than 144, but the station has grown in the last few years and nobody’s gotten around to adding more escape pod bays.
Either that or everyone on the station is bad at math.
It doesn’t matter, since none of the pods work anyway. I found an audiolog where Alex Yu specifically directed a member of the maintenance staff to not repair or maintain the escape pods. But I never found a rationale behind the order, and the wiki doesn’t seem to have anything to say about it either.
The unfavorable explanation is that Alex is a much more cartoonish villain than I’ve been giving him credit for. He discontinued the maintenance because he wanted to save money, or because he thought nothing could possibly go wrong. If this is the reason, then Alex is actually kinda dumb.
The more favorable explanation is that Alex realized that the escape pods represented a huge threat to Earth. In the event of an emergency, the Typhon would most likely break containment. If they did, then having 18 different escape pods leave the station would represent 18 different ways for the Typhon to reach Earth. The odds are that at least one pod would end up with a mimic inside, and from there the Typhon can jump to Earth and it’s game over for humanity. So perhaps Alex effectively sabotaged the pods in order to protect the Earth.
It should be noted that Alex has his own private pod at the top of the Arboretum, and that one works just fine. Make of that what you will.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 17: Dealing With Dahl”
I recently got an email asking about the footnotes I use on this site. These sorts of questions pop up pretty often. People ask things like: Is there a plugin I can use? Did you come up with the idea yourself? How do you create them? The answers to which are No, No, and “It’s complicated”.
As many have suspected, I stole the idea for the footnotes from the XKCD “What-if?” series. I don’t remember when I first started using them. I just did a quick scan through the archives and found a footnote in a post from 2014, but I’m not sure how much further back they might go.
Over the years I’ve become so used to footnotes that I find it annoying to write without them. If I find myself writing a long email, I’ll usually end up with lots of awkward parenthetical statements that I wish I could turn into footnotes.
Before I had footnotes, I sometimes wrote nested parenthetical statements. They were fun to write, but they’re ugly as hell and very hard on readability.
There weren’t any footnote plugins available back when I first introduced this feature. I cobbled it together myself by stealing some javascript from the What-if page and making my own version. To get a footnote system working in WordPress you need to do what most modern web developers do and string a bunch of different systems and languages together into a big Rube Goldberg machine.
First is the syntax. You don’t want to clutter up your articles with tons of complex HTML. So I use a fairly minimalist shortcode that looks like this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “About The Footnotes…”
The good news is that I got my second dose of vaccine, so I’m a little less likely to die of the plague. The bad news is that I was feeling kind of run down, sleep-deprived, and cranky. I didn’t really realize how bad it was until I listened to the show and heard how often I tripped over my words.
Uh… Happy Halloween, I guess?
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #360 Noscope”
Morgan (presumably) wants to blow up the Talos-1 space station. To do that, she needs Alex’s arming key. To get it, she needs to fly around outside the station and get mauled by six different breeds of alien tentacle monsters while she tries to scan bits of their neuron-like coral that now envelop the station.
The thing is, this scanning is part of a plan to obliterate the Typhon and leave the station intact. With the scan data, we can tune our contrivance generators to the right frequency and atomize the Typhon. Then, once the station is no longer in any danger whatsoever, Alex will hand you his arming key, which you will no longer have any use for.
You will actually get to choose which way you want to go at the end, to nuke or nullwave the station. I’ll come back to this choice when we get there.
The more immediate problem is that Player 3 has just entered the game.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 16: Cartoon Bad Guy”
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #359:
Mailbagging is Considered Unsportsmanlike Conduct”
It’s been a long road, but I think we’ve finally reached the part of the game where Morgan can finally begin having agency within the story. Up until now, Morgan has simply been opening doors so she could open the next so she could reach the next door. While this was going on, she was gradually learning the story of Talos-1. She knew all of this stuff at one point, but the neuromod stripping robbed her of the knowledge and context to make sense of things. Now that she’s opened up the station and Alex has promised to stop opposing her, she’s basically all caught up on current events and is now in a position where she can start making informed decisions about things beyond her immediate survival.
Actually, not quite. There’s one last piece to the puzzle.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 15: Building a Better Morgan”
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
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.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
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.
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
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?
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
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