{"id":17346,"date":"2012-10-02T14:09:39","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T19:09:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=17346"},"modified":"2012-10-02T14:23:12","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T19:23:12","slug":"mass-effect-ep5-failure-is-the-only-option","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=17346","title":{"rendered":"Mass Effect EP5: Failure is the Only Option"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Close your eyes and imagine a graphics card. Picture a nice, high-end card, <a href=\"?p=1636\" title=\"Hardware Review: Sapphire X1650\">preferably something in red<\/a>. Perhaps it&#8217;s inside a computer, humming along, the fan spinning, processing gig-pixels and rendering bling-mapped ray tracings or whatever it is those things do. Can you see it? Good. Now imagine the same card, except <em>on fire<\/em>. You will notice that the card no longer runs Crysis at max settings. You may also notice that your computer no longer works right and you can&#8217;t edit Spoiler Warning episodes this week. <\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what Josh did, but his graphics card is borked and he&#8217;s waiting for the replacement to arrive. In the meantime, we&#8217;ll just re-post old episodes from season one. Those are just as good, right?<\/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\/NlPIBxRncVM\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NlPIBxRncVM'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Note at the top of the episode, Randy and I had a little generational misunderstanding. He was talking about Battlefield, and I was talking about <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Battlezone_(1980_video_game)\" title=\"Battlezone - 1980 Video Game\">Battlezone<\/a>. You know, this thing:<\/p>\n<p><table   class=\"\" cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' border='0' align='center'><tr><td><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/battlezone.jpg' class='insetimage'   alt='battlezone.jpg' title='battlezone.jpg'\/><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>I could try to describe to you just how slow computers were in 1980, but by the time I was finished, Intel would have released the new Core i8 processors and I&#8217;d have to start over. To give a sense of scale, we&#8217;re talking about the difference between a sandal and a Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor. I still get dizzy when I think about just how fast things have changed in my lifetime. <\/p>\n<p>With regard to Mass Effect and the cutscene in this episode, I feel the need to point out a few flaws.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>The cutscene has you blundering into a trap&#8230;\n<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;along with the rest of your squad&#8230;\n<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;while holding the wrong weapon&#8230;\n<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;and staring into derpspace while the bad guys flank you.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Whew. I sure am glad they fixed <em>that<\/em> nonsense in the sequels. <\/p>\n<p>EDIT: After Randy&#8217;s death at thirteen minutes, I&#8217;m pretty sure we reverted back to the last checkpoint, which was the very beginning of the episode. We don&#8217;t usually edit episodes these days, but I&#8217;m pretty sure there was a great big cut between the death and &#8220;round 2&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Close your eyes and imagine a graphics card. Picture a nice, high-end card, preferably something in red. Perhaps it&#8217;s inside a computer, humming along, the fan spinning, processing gig-pixels and rendering bling-mapped ray tracings or whatever it is those things do. Can you see it? Good. Now imagine the same card, except on fire. You [&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":[71,208],"class_list":["post-17346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-mass-effect","tag-spoiler-warning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17346","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=17346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}