Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Nov 1, 2006

Concered, the Half-Life 2 webcomic, has ended. It ran twice weekly for a year and a half, and managed to keep a good pace and a steady supply of laughs. Christopher Livingston did an outstanding job. This was a fantastic comic and I’m sorry to see it end.

I think my favorite gag was this one, which had a very obscure movie quote in it. Given that most readers are probably in their 20’s, and that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out in 1986, I wonder how many people even got the joke.

That’s brave. I’d probably chicken out of a gag like that, but it worked and it made me laugh.

Now that the run is over I discovered that there are notes from the author at the bottom of each comic. You have to click a link to see them, and my brain just filtered it out along with the rest of the banner ad noise at the bottom of the page. Now that I’ve noticed I’m going through again and reading these comments. It’s pretty interesting, as I can see him learning his craft as he goes.

Great work.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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A Parent’s Guide to Halloween

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 31, 2006

Filed under: Random 12 comments

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Most towns have trick-or-treating end before nighfall, but don’t let that stop you from decking your kid out in reflective tape and glowsticks. Sure, it will ruin their Batman costume and make them look like a Christmas tree with a cape, but if you don’t then the other parents will glare at you and make you feel so guilty.
Explain to your kids: Never accept candy from strangers, unless it’s Halloween – when you should wander around the neighborhood begging for it.
Make sure your child has a nice, large sack or pillowcase for trick-or-treat, and avoid using hard containers like buckets. This makes it less obvious when you begin “skimming” their haul when they aren’t looking.
Don’t feel bad about dipping into your child’s candy when they aren’t around. You helped make the costume, after all. And even if you didn’t: all that candy isn’t good for them anyway.
You will see all levels of costumes. You’ll see one kid dressed as a shogun in authentic period garb, and another kid dressed as a ghost using a plaid sheet with a urine stain. For some reason, you’re supposed to give candy and compliments to both of them. I don’t know why either.
Just to mess with the trick or treaters who come to your door: Try dressing as Santa and giving out painted eggs.
It doesn’t matter if your kid is dressed up as Frankenstein, a zombie, or Idi Amin, the moment you hand them a flashlight they are going to start waving it around in everyone’s eyes and making lightsaber noises. Little brats.
To get revenge, make them wear their coats. Oh yeah. That will make their costume look real good.

Enjoy your Halloween. Save me a Zagnut.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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12 comments

The Site was Pulled Over

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 31, 2006

Filed under: Notices, Random 18 comments

 Friday SitRepPrevious Post

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Some of you may have noticed this site was down for most of the day today. I mentioned before that I was burning through the bandwidth this month. My provider is happy to let me do this, and just add the excess to my monthly bill as a sort of fine for not planning ahead. Apparently there is a point where they will stop doing this and – out of pity or mercy – shut the sucker down.

I hate the bandwidth exceeded message. It has a very ghetto, “GeoCities” vibe that just bugs me.

So the site is back up now. However, I need to take some steps or this thing is going to become an ongoing problem. I’m not looking to make money from this webcomic thing, but as things are, it’s going to start costing me some serious money and we can’t have that.

I’m enabling hotlink protection again. This will probably screw up the various site feeds people have set up for the express purpose of reading my comic. Sorry, but this is for the best. Hotlinking is a major drain at this point, and this is a quick way to slow the bleeding. This time the “no hotlink” image is very mild. Lots of nice people linked my comics on their blogs, and the last thing I want to do I blast them with the image of ocular affliction for their trouble.

If bandwidth is still an issue in November, I may scale back to publishing twice weekly on Tuesday & Thursday. This would suck, so I’m not going to do it unless I have to.

This webcomic thing is supposed to be fun. A lark. I don’t plan on turning it into anything more, and I don’t want it consuming the rest of the site. Someday it will end, and the blog will still be here. If the webcomic thing becomes too much of a pain then I will probably tire of it quickly, and it will no longer be fun. So let’s just see if we can avoid that.

Thanks again for reading.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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18 comments

Caring for your mutant child

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 31, 2006

Filed under: Movies 23 comments

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Lileks nails my #1 gripe with X-Men:

[…] never really loved the franchise, to use that horrid word. The entire mutant-as-a-metaphor was insulting, anyway â€"if you know anything about kids you know that a teen with the ability to shoot fire out of his ears would not be shunned as a weirdo freak but elected class president on general principle: dude! Awesome! I can understand parents getting upset if their kid was blue and covered with hairy nodules, but the idea that parents would consider their kid “sick” if she had the telekinetic ability to raise every car in the neighborhood nine feet in the air â€" please. We have parents who will go across the ocean to adopt a Down's Syndrome baby; are we to believe that the majority of American parents reject their kids because they can levitate or cough up gold by the quart or exude perfectly formed Neapolitan Ice Cream bricks from their hindquarters? Far from persecuting them, they'd get their own reality shows. Storm would be a TV meteorologist in New York. As for your morning commute, I'll see what I can do. Stay classy, Manhattan.

The second movie made me nuts. In a movie with people who can turn into metal and control the weather, the most unrealistic part was when Bobby went home. His parents did not act like real people. They way they rejected him way very un-parent like.

It is in the nature of parent to claim that nothing is wrong with their kid, even when there obviously is. Once in a while you’ll see one of these stories about some sicko serial killer / mass murderer who gets caught killing / raping / eating young women, and their parent(s) will end up on the news saying they still love their kid and believe he’s a “good person”.

In the real world you’d see bumper stickers:

Proud parent of a mutant honor student

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Uwe Boll vs. The Movies

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 30, 2006

Filed under: Rants 8 comments

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I tossed some insults at Uwe Boll the other day, but Cineris has a better idea than boxing Use Boll: Challenge him to a movie-making competition, which would be a contest where he could not possibly win.

He hasn’t made any movies about games that I care about. I’ve never seen BloodRayne before. I played Alone in the Dark, but I was never very attached to the game itself. Far Cry was already a stupid game when it came to the story and characters, so I don’t know how much worse he’ll be able to make it. Dungeon Siege was more or less a plotless game of stats building and loot harvesting, so I don’t know how anyone could make a movie based on the game in any meaningful way. If you can make a movie from that, then Microsoft Flight Simulator: The Movie can’t be far off. Postal is stupid on purpose for comedic effect. I wonder if he realizes that.

So he hasn’t wronged any titles that I care about. My real fear is that he will. Sooner or later he’ll get his grubby mitts on the rights to some game close to my heart, and there won’t be anything I can do but watch my beloved story get turned into a single-digit scoring movie on the Tomatometer. System Shock, Myst, Dues Ex, and The Longest Journey come to mind.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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8 comments

DM of the Rings XXIII:
Happy Halloween

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 30, 2006

Filed under: DM of the Rings 35 comments

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Are We There Yet?Previous Post

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Loot of the Rings 

Fellowship of the Ring, Legion, Happy Halloween

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Loot of the Rings 

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Virtual Villagers

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 30, 2006

Filed under: Game Reviews 6 comments

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This weekend Virtual Villagers caught my eye. I remembered The Rampant Coyote mentioning this game back in August, and so I grabbed it more or less on impulse.

The tech ladder. My one quibble: FISHING is more advanced than FARMING?!? That is very, very backwards, particularly for island natives.

It’s an interesting game. I was expecting a sort of “Sim City on a micro scale”, but that isn’t what I got. This game is a lot like the “take care of your pet” games, a style that is common enough that there ought to be a genre name for it. You start off with a group of a half-dozen villagers and a few huts, and you must guide them into a flourishing community. There is no save / load system, where you could go back and correct an earlier mistake. The game just runs. If you exit the game and come back later, time will have passed in the game world.

I can see how these sorts of games are intended to be played: You’re supposed to check in on them periodically, and spend maybe five minutes playing every hour or so. I don’t usually care for this sort of thing myself, but it’s a popular game type and I can understand why some people find it appealing. It’s more nurturing than managerial, and more casual than in-depth. My problem is that after five minutes I want to keep playing but there really isn’t anything left to do.

There is a simple tech system, where you can research better ways of living to make larger populations possible. The first group of villagers start off in their early 20’s with little job knowledge. The more a person does a particular job the better they get, so it makes sense to specialize. Eventually they get old and die.

There are also a number of goals, or landmark events that you can reach, but you don’t know what they are ahead of time. This sounds annoying, but it’s actually pretty engaging. There are bits of the environment you don’t know what to do with, and goals which you know are there but don’t know what they are or how to reach them. I found myself experimenting with the environment, trying to get the villagers to examine different things and see how they might be used.

It’s an amusing game.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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