Oh. My. GAWD. I hope they make it for consoles, and I hope they make it local co-op. My wife and I played the heck out of Baldur's Gate I and II. Diablo III was a promising successor but fatally marred by its terrible, single-threaded inventory "management" system and UI.
Posted January 11, 2015
Another old bookmark about how D&D was feared as a gateway to suicide and devil-worship, but now informs a ton of pop culture we love so yay, we win!
It sounds crazy in our world today, where there are Dungeons & Dragons movies and a rich game industry full of titles inspired by those old paper-and-dice games we played back in the twentieth century. One of the most popular shows on television, Game of Thrones, features plots that my friends and I might have cooked up back on that playground at lunch. Somehow, the popularity of epic fantasy and role playing overcame America's fear of young people making up stories about monsters and gods.
I played a ton of D&D as a kid. I miss it. The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim was a great return to that kind of world.
Old D&D town map I made long ago for a long-forgotten campaign. pic.twitter.com/gTS3PXdKkY
— Scott Andrew (@scottandrew) April 27, 2014Posted January 8, 2015
Ask your doctor if Fedora™ is right for you.
Posted January 8, 2015
I bookmarked this post over a year ago, but it seems particularly relevant now. A long, eviscerating read about the cowardice of videogame reviews:
It’s exactly a reviewer’s job to speak for the minority. A minority of one. How could a reviewer speak for anyone else? They aren’t elected to stand in for some demographic, and the review community is not a representative democracy. Every time I see a reviewer try to speak for the average player, the fabled everygamer, I see a dodge. An unwillingness to put himself out there and state his values, an attempt to hide in the crowd and submit to the majority. I see not a reviewer sensitive to his audience but a reviewer cowed.Even for those who have the sense to speak for themselves, there is a more pervasive problem. This is the call, posed a thousand different ways, for objectivity. Isn’t BioShock Infinite objectively a good game? Doesn’t it have good graphics and sound, play well enough, provide interesting characters and themes? I mean, let’s be reasonable here. Let’s be fair. Irrational put a lot of time and money into this after all. Most of your criticisms are just based in your personal biases. They’re just your interpretations. At least you have to admit it’s a lot better than most games out there.
Here’s what I’ll admit: many boys have a really hard time with subjectivity. To grapple with your own subjectivity is to grapple with the subjectivities of others. It’s to see the world not as legible, stable, conquerable but as resistant, shifting, and fundamentally unknowable. It diminishes your certainty and authority. It leaves you vulnerable. This is a human problem, being a person among persons, but one that many boys have trouble admitting even the basic tenets of. And so they call for an objectivity that has no foundation except received opinion, that seeks to diminish individual experience, and that turns out to not even exist.
Objectivity is very convenient for the straight white middle class male gamer. Videogame culture encourages him to see his own subjectivity as the standard, as objective. He’ll invoke science, economics, statistics, and all manner of folk wisdom to defend his little kingdom. He’ll decry any challenge as ‘politics’ or ‘bad business’ or ‘whining’ or ‘here we go again’. He never considers how often objectivity is a cover for a dominant subjectivity, for a subjectivity that stays in power by not being recognized as such. He fears what will happen if the established order breaks down and the Vox take control.
This cult of objectivity has it exactly backwards. They want it to be one way. But it’s the other way. A good review is openly, flagrantly, unabashedly subjective. It goes all in with the reviewer’s biases. It claims them for what they really are – not tastes, not mere opinions, but values. It is a full-throated expression of one person’s experience of a game. This is the authority it claims – the player’s. And how could it be any other way? How can a reviewer get outside him or herself?
(Count me among those who feel Bioshock Infinite wasn't worthy of it's high standing.)
YOU GUYS I FINISHED BIOSHOCK INFINITE AND HAVE NO ONE TO MANSPLAIN THE ENDING TO
— Scott Andrew (@scottandrew) July 4, 2013Posted January 7, 2015
Why don’t you try fusing a bunch of completely disparate music genres together and writing six number one hits if you think it’s so easy, haters?
The article needs more citations but I want to believe.
Posted January 6, 2015
Buried in this year's 24 Ways is this very personal account of dealing with RSI and thoracic outlet syndrome. I've dealt with wrist and arm pain since my first dotcom job back in 1998 and experienced the same aches and scary hand tremors described here. Vertical mouse: ordered.
Posted January 6, 2015
Dug up this article as a companion to the Phil Tippett story. A little-known fact: Spielberg was going to use stop motion dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. And then… (Don't miss the video.)
Posted January 4, 2015
A great long read about the guy who created the monster chessboard scenes from Star Wars and the dragon from Dragonslayer, and how the rise of CGI made his consulting gig for Jurassic Park nearly his last.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a creature effects artist so bad. But I was more interested in monsters than movie-making.
Posted January 4, 2015
As I paid the additional $25 that Register.com extorts charges for the privilege of updating an expired credit card, two thoughts occurred to me: 1) I gotta get the hell away from Register.com, and 2) I haven't posted here since last July.
It's cool. As I age, I'm finding myself increasingly disinterested in writing blog posts and more focused on making stuff. Here's an update on stuff I've been making.
Both Explone and Kirby Krackle have new records coming out in 2015. The Explone release, Suicide Fences, will come out on CD, digital and vinyl-yes-vinyl sometime this spring. Patrick's motivation for releasing on vinyl, as far as we've discussed it, can be summarized thusly as f**k yeah vinyl! It'll be the first time either of us have had music released in turntable-compatible format. I don't own a turntable, so this is probably going to go up on my wall.
The new Kirby Krackle record (which has a title but it hasn't been officially announced yet) will likely come out in March around the same time as our annual Kracklefest show during Emerald City Comic Con. Kyle has also been releasing goofy one-off tunes as part of the Kirby Krackle Patreon. The latest of which, a holiday single entitled "I'm Stuck In A Human Centipede For Christmas" was part of the super-popular Cards Against Humanity Holiday Bullshit 2015 and even worked into their annual super-brainy crypto-puzzle. Sooo there's that.
Kin to Stars is still on ice, although I still yearn to record at least two of our songs for posterity. Just haven't made the time.
I have another handful of Car Trouble songs that exist only in my head at the moment. I got a really great response from those songs, including passing interest from a legit indie label. There will probably be more Car Trouble in the near future.
I spent about six months teaching myself iOS app programming, stealing Objective-C snippets from StackOverflow to create Metafilter Radio, an audio player for listening to songs and podcasts posted at Metafilter. Here's why I can't be an app developer: since I started that project, there have been two new major iOS versions, two new phones, a new programming language (Swift) and so many OS X and Xcode updates I'd have buy a slew of new phones and laptops to have any hope of keeping up. I think I'll leave app development to the folks with money, and make my next project in AngularJS or whatever.
Finally, I soft-launched a webcomic called Neat Hobby, back in August. More on this later, but the takeaway here is I started drawing again and it is probably the thing I am most excited for. I don't care if it's not funny or the art is bad or if no one reads it. Perfect.
Thus ends the bi-annual update/humblebrag. See you in July!
Posted January 3, 2015
