{"id":11602,"date":"2011-05-10T09:20:17","date_gmt":"2011-05-10T14:20:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=11602"},"modified":"2011-05-10T09:21:22","modified_gmt":"2011-05-10T14:21:22","slug":"spoiler-warning-s5e13-ring-a-ding-bang-baby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=11602","title":{"rendered":"Spoiler Warning S5E13: Ring-a-Ding Bang, Baby!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Spoiler Warning returns in partial triumph! <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d just finished re-installing Windows in time for recording this session, and I&#8217;d neglected to balance my audio levels properly. Josh does what he can post-production, but this week I&#8217;m still going to cut out and sound crappy.  Sorry about that.  The interface on my sound card is this awful, proprietary gizmo with enough sliders to govern three soundcards, and making simple changes sometimes involves calling NASA for tech support. <\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll have that ironed out next week.  In the mean time, enjoy the sound of me shouting sentence fragments over a PA system with blown speakers. <\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/eS950kr2k7o\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=eS950kr2k7o'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>So last week we canceled Spoiler Warning.  Some people wanted us to post the crappy episodes.  Others just wanted to know what happened.  For the curious, here is what you &#8220;missed&#8221;:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<div class=\"dmnotes\">We went charging into the casino and tried to speech-check Benny into a situation where we could fight him one-on-one, but came up several skill points short.  So we jumped him. But without his weapons, Reginald just couldn&#8217;t beat Benny and all of his men.  After trying and failing that fight a few times, we took to roaming around the casino looking for weapons.  This search took a while and produced nothing of value.  So Josh took us back outside and tried to get holdout training, which he&#8217;d wanted to do at the very beginning.  After tracking the guy down and explaining what this guy was and what we were hoping to accomplish, Josh tried to get the training and found we were <em>two<\/em> skill points short. So then we went back to the casino and beat Benny by abusing the save system. <\/p>\n<p>The end of the fight was less of a victory and more the sense of relief you feel when you finish your taxes. We reported back to Mr. House and Josh tried to speech-check him into coughing up some extra money.  Not quite enough skill points. So we had a conversation about speech points and rummaged through the inventory, looking for buff items.  We found some drugs, a book, and put on Benny&#8217;s suit.  After all the screwing around, we were still 5 points short of doing the speech-check.  We&#8217;d blown five minutes trying to pass a speech check that didn&#8217;t matter for money we didn&#8217;t need. We also realized that the episode had run four minutes long. <\/p>\n<p>It was long, boring, and it would have frustrated players who could see the mistakes before we made them.\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Spoiler Warning is an interesting project. Like a lot of this sort of long-form review, you&#8217;re really dealing with two audiences: The ones who know the game and the ones who have never seen it before. <\/p>\n<p>For those who are already familiar with the game, we try to show them something new.  Different ways of solving quests, amusing details, obscure bits of dialog, overlooked character builds, and out-of-the-way locations.  Ideally, people who own the game should watch just to see it from another angle. <\/p>\n<p>For the uninitiated, we really do strive to show the game as players are likely to experience it.  We don&#8217;t use mods, or cheat, or go out of our way to reveal obscure glitches.  We play on default difficulty. We use an exploit if we encounter one by accident, but we don&#8217;t want to go through a game save-scumming and abusing brain-dead AI. <\/p>\n<p>And while we&#8217;re trying to meet the needs of both groups, we still have to make sure that we&#8217;re doing something worth watching.  Last week, we failed at that, which is why we threw it away and started over. <\/p>\n<p>There are a lot of Let&#8217;s Plays out there, but I do think we&#8217;re a unique sorta thing. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Spoiler Warning returns in partial triumph! I&#8217;d just finished re-installing Windows in time for recording this session, and I&#8217;d neglected to balance my audio levels properly. Josh does what he can post-production, but this week I&#8217;m still going to cut out and sound crappy. Sorry about that. The interface on my sound card is this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}