Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 Why End the Diecast?

The Diecast was Shamus’ podcast, where he talked about stuff that he wanted to talk about. We figured it would be best to make a clean break, and close this out, instead of pivoting and keeping the name. There may be another podcast on this site, the discussion is ongoing, but for the Diecast, this is the end. Thanks for listening in everyone.

04:59 Mailbag: Encounters/intensity

Die Dearcast!

Wait, that sounds horrible in english!

In the last Diecast you mentioned “Encounters” and how you prefer shooters because they have them clearly defined, opposed to racing games which are all encounter, all the time. I have to disagree on the latter, and I will elaborate on it further down. But to get to the meat of the question(s): Are there any games/genres out there you enjoy despite them breaking the convention of alternating high and low intesity? And, if you had to chose, would you rather play a game that is allways high or allways low intensity? And can you come up with examples for both, if they even exist?

And now for the racing games: As a sim racing enthusiast, I find that racing has varying intensity. Ordinarily, you drive at about 95% of your quickest pace, which, is low intensity. High intensity for racing games comes in two ways: 1) fighting for a position, which usually doesn’t happen that often, or 2) navigating part of a track than one finds tricky. Which only happens once per lap per tricky section. And due to the repeating nature of driving multiple laps resulting flow state, I find that in racing sims, the high intensity parts are actually shorter and further between than in shooters.

And as a bonus: Dorfromantik is a prime example of an addictive allways low intensity game.

Kind regards,
Norbert ColeusRattus Lickl

13:10 Mailbag: Thinking like a programmer

Greetings Casters of Die.

I am currently tutoring someone who wants to program (to make games). We encountered the statement that there’s a difference between programming and programming well, and that it has to do with thinking like a programmer. I’ve programmed for most of my life, but I’m not sure how to describe that concept.

What mental habits or skills separate an excellent programmer from the merely adequate?

Also are there any games that you are better at because you know how to program?

Thank you,
Andrew

20:11 Mailbag: Sierra adventure game remakes

Dear Diecast

In the age of remakes and remasters, games often have extras to make them more palatable to modern audiences, like savestates, rewind etc. Sierra adventure games are known for the moon logic and sadistic designers. Imagine if those games were remade, but then with an option to have logical puzzles and no random deaths/softlocks. Then their creativity can shine through and be enjoyed by modern audiences.
What do you think?

With kind regards
Chris

25:41 Mailbag: Video Cable Formats

Dear Diecast,

Where do you guys stand on HDMI versus DisplayPort?

I usually don’t care about format wars, but this is lasting long enough to get under my skin.

I don’t like that new video cards offer one or two of each port and the consumer has no say in the configuration of a card.

I much preferred the days where I just needed and got two VGA or two Dual-DVI ports.

Thanks,

Will

31:12 Mailbag: Favorite Anime

Dear Diecast,

Are there any anime (Japanese animated works) that you like? If so, what are some of your favourites, and why?

All the best,
Andrew

36:05 Mailbag: Unique game

Dear Diecast,

Have you ever played a game that felt fresh and unique, only to later discover they were liberally ‘inspired’ by an earlier game? If so what was the game?

Best wishes
Thomas

38:47 Mailbag: Weapon of Choice

Dear Diecast,

I hope you both are well.

I was wondering, what is your favourite weapon in a video game?
A shotgun that booms like the God of Thunder slamming a revolving door?
An enormous maul hewn from a bone of the Demogorgon?
Some fancy multifunctional laser gadget that slices, dices, and makes waffles?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Vale,

– Tim

45:34 Closing thoughts

Thanks to everyone offering support to the Young family. I wish there was more to say. So long for now.

It’s been… a lot. I don’t know if anyone is interested in a wrap-up post, but I might do one of those.

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 Ren Faire

So, is there a hard line between Ren Faire and SCA stuff? Or do the two hobbies bleed into each other?

06:59 Summer Game Fest 2022

We use the term “punch drunk” to describe someone who’s feeling a little scrambled on account of taking a few blows to the head. I think we need an equivalent term for when you’ve just sat and watched 90 minutes of videogame trailers and their constant stream of screaming, strobing, rushing, flying, exploding, punching, dubstepping, climbing, crafting, and gunfire.

11:35 Diablo Immortal

Here I spend 8 minutes explaining why I’m not going to waste time on the topic? Anyway, here is the post I wrote a couple of years ago where I predicted the “lootboss” idea so a publisher can route around anti-lootbox legislation.

Here is an overview of the game’s monetization system:

Link (YouTube)

19:18 Amazing Cultivation Simulator

“Dwarf Fortress but based on wuxia instead of medieval fantasy.”

22:30 Midnight Fight Express

I still haven’t figured out which way this game is going to go. Maybe this game is like Batman and I’ll learn to master it with time. Maybe the game is about to ramp up the difficulty to insane levels and I should get out now.

26:59 Mythic Tier

What other bits of recent gaming jargon have you heard from children that don’t understand the original context?

29:47 Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

I can’t really fault the designers. They retained the vast open space and thoughtful pacing of the original games. But forwatever reason, that pace just doesn’t work for me in a ground-based game.

39:20 Cyberpunk spire

How unexpected.

41:20 Mailbag: Collectibles and Unlockables

Dear Diecast,

What do you think makes collectibles and unlockables satisfying or unsatisfying? Any Do’s and Don’t’s you have when it comes to video games putting in things to find and pick up, and/or for reward systems in relation to the player’s behaviour?

If you were designing a game and had to have collectibles in it, how would you know if you’re offering the player an engaging activity or a dull chore? How might you lessen the odds of the latter?

All the best,
Andrew

52:26 Mailbag: New experience increases appreciation of old thing

Dear Diecast,

Excitement tends to come from new, novel experiences but sometimes a new thing can show why an old thing is great. I tried Master of Orion 2016 out and found it slow and claustrophobic in its menu-heaviness. 40 minutes later I bailed out and hopped back onto good old MOO2…but with new appreciation for some things. Of particular note were the drag-and-drop interface and flexibility of the game’s systems. To put it simply: I realized that MOO2 was designed to be played. It facilitates play almost to the point of feeling tactile, like a physical board game. I hadn’t fully realized this.

Have you had an experience where a new game or software made you see something old in a new way?

Reinvigoratedly,
Chris P.

I’m not sure how I’m going to cover it. I’m not even sure if there’s going to be anything I’m eager to talk about. We’ll see.

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 An Hour-long video on Plain Text

Link (YouTube)

Like I said, this video is surprisingly interesting. And it managed to be educational, even for an old-timer like me. And the presenter has the same accent and emphatic delivery as the late Total Biscuit.

04:48 Invisible Inc.

Paul has some thoughts on this 2016 game.

06:39 Dropped V Rising

Warning that my angry tirade here is basically a preview of something I’ll post in the next couple of weeks.

18:00 Real-time Browser-based Ray Tracing:

Try it. It’s fun!

19:43 Surviving Mars

This game is here to say that if we work hard, if we work together, and if we use our resources wisely, then someday humanity will have what it takes to put a complete loser on Mars.

I think the takeaway here is that when we do eventually go to Mars, I shouldn’t be in charge.

31:12 Mailbag: Kids, Heartstrings, and Video Games

Hi Diecasters,

I think we’re all familiar with the ways threats to children can be used to jump-start pathos in fiction – and the ways it can be mis-used, as with the brute force or over-the-top usage in Prey 2006 and the infamous Sum Kidd of Mass Effect 3. Shamus, I thought one of your effective criticisms of the latter case was that the kid was conjured up out of nowhere, as an obvious cypher, without buildup, characterization, etc.

My question: What do you think of the famous/infamous Dead Island reveal trailer as it keys into this topic? It was (and remains) very well-received for its artistic and non-dialogic story – but, similarly, introduces a kid with no other characterization than as a fatal victim. Do you think that the Dead Island trailer is just a more slick application of the same brute force effort at pathos, or that it might operate on a different scale because it’s a trailer, and trailers are by definition low on characterization?

Thanks,

David F. Ellrod, Sr.

38:12 Mailbag: Perfectionism in a Coder

Dear Diecasters,

While listening to old episodes I heard Shamus self-identify as a perfectionist. How does this trait square with being a programmer? Is Paul a perfectionist too?

Within scanning distance of perfectly,
Chris P.

43:47 Mailbag: Racing Games

Dear Diecast,

I’m not much of what you might call a ‘racing/driving gamer’, but there are a few I’ve played and really enjoyed and I’d like to branch out in the genre some more. (Recently, I’ve gotten into “Distance” and that’s largely been fun.)

So I was wondering if there are any racing or driving games that you really liked, what you liked and/or disliked about them (and the genre), and if there are any on Steam that you’d recommend.

Kind regards,
Andrew

Link (YouTube)

01:35 Blizzard Sylph

I can’t believe I haven’t heard about Sylph until now. I’ll keep my eye out for one of those glossy mailers.

04:13 Sleep Transitions

I used to wake up sluggish, but in the last couple of months the transition between sleeping and waking is much more gentle. It’s so gentle that sometimes I can’t tell if I slept without looking at the clock. Weird.

Related: This now-ancient post from 2006 where I talk about being a warm starter vs. cold starter.

08:48 V Rising
I spent so much time complaining about the lack of pause that I forgot to mention the combat, which is the strongest aspect of the game. This isn’t another Diablo-esque clickfest. You get a dodge move and your foes get interesting abilities that punish careless button-mashing. The whole thing feels pretty good.

22:10 File Extensions

Microsoft Word is the Internet Explorer of word processors.

29:41 Deus Ex: Pandora’s Gun

I know it’s been a while since I posted anything meaningful. This Friday I’ll start the new series. I hope you like it.

31:55 Mailbag: Save Systems

Dear Diecast,

How important do you think save systems are in a video game?

Obviously, this will vary depending on the length of the video game. For instance, arcade games are so short that they seem like a redundant feature there. Whereas in RPGs, they’re generally considered a basic necessity. (I’d be interested to know if you can name one where it isn’t.)

Are there any other factors and examples you can think of that would inform/justify the decision to omit a save system, or include a particular kind of save system (e.g. checkpoints, limited anytime, unlimited anytime)?

And were there any games you played and thought, “Why does this NOT have a save system!?” or “Why is the save system like this!?”

Kind regards,
Andrew

43:16 Mailbag: Blogging

Dear Diecast,

Do you have any advice for those of us just starting out blogging (via WordPress)? Whether traction-wise, or to do with hosting options and precautions, and whatever else you think are important things to do and consider, I’d be interested to know what wisdom you have to share on the subject.

Kind regards,
Andrew

I did think of some advice once the show was over: I have generally avoided using the built-in WordPress system for uploading images. WordPress ends up storing the images in its own file structure. I dislike this because I want to KNOW where stuff is and how to find it. When I make backups, I want to be able to confirm I’ve got everything. I’ll often upload a dozen images in a week when the site is going strong, and if you multiply that by 52 weeks a year, and you’ll quickly have way more files than the WordPress media browser was designed to handle. For the curious, this morning I just uploaded the 9998th image to the site. It would be horrendous if I had to scroll through that ocean of images every time I wanted to add a screenshot to a post.

The WordPress tool is good if you’re the sort of person who likes to pretend that files exist in the ether and can be summoned by whimsey. But if you’re the sort who knows how to use an FTP client, then I suggest managing your own images.

46:26 Mailbag: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

Dear Diecast

Considering it just had its digital release last week, has become A24’s highest grossing film, is already a contender for movie of the year, and has become an all time favorite for a lot of people, have you guys seen “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once” and if you have, what are your thoughts on it?

Love Pumpkin

47:43 Mailbag: Boycotts

Dear Diecast,

I just realized that, with Microsoft having acquired Zenimax, I can purchase Bethesda/Zenimax games again! My boycotts:
Ubisoft and EA – single player games. Always-online DRM. Proprietary launchers.
Zenimax – Backstabbed and then tried to acquire a weakened Human Head Studios during production of Prey 2.
Diablo 3 – always online DRM for single player.
Do you guys practice boycotts that you want to talk about? Have you ever given up on a boycott? I’m beginning to feel that I’d have to boycott almost the entire gaming industry with my stance against always-online requirements vs. Google Stadia and Microsoft Xcloud. Might have to bend on that one eventually.

Curiously,
Chris P.

Oh well. Better luck next week.

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 No editor
Issac is better, although I think he used my joke as an excuse to cut some corners. We’ll see.

01:14 Tin Can

Link (YouTube)

08:53 Archive Arcade
I see a lot of people say thing like, “That was my childhood!” when looking at the Nintendo 64 or the Gamecube. But for me, this stuff was my childhood. I remember sitting at one of the tables at Village Pizza, hypnotized by the demo on the “1943” machine. How can the machine make the ENTIRE SCREEN scroll like that? That must take an unimaginable amount of RAM and processing power. Computers are getting so powerful these days!

Check it out: The Internet Arcade.

10:44 Planet Crafter

Link (YouTube)

20:29 Linux gripe, The alt-tab
Great. Another terrible shortcoming with Linux.

26:26 Mailbag: Game and Real Life Overlap

Dearest Diecast,

The appeal of video games is in how they intrigue human psychology with puzzles, competition, adventure, satisfaction, etc. When I’ve spent a year not gaming, I’ve always adapted by picking up hobbies. It was in these periods that woodworking became appealing. Perhaps this was because, like a game, a hobby offers possibilities, projects that progress to conclusions, opportunities to compare oneself to others (including aspiration to achieve what they achieve), and all that sort of thing.

Video games and hobbies have much overlap in how they tickle our monkeybrains. What do you think of this idea? Do you put gaming on hiatus when you need to get a big work project done? Does gaming artificially satisfy and pacify us, leading to a society of people who don’t know which end of a hammer is used to unscrew the staples?

Health and happiness to you,
Chris P.

29:15 Mailbag: Niche Game Interests

Darn Diecasters,

Once in a while gaming regresses. Perfect Dark allowed players to create customized bots to fight against, leading to some of the favorite memories from my teenage years. We felt joy and despair in our wars against the hyper-accurate glass cannon bot army.

Worse, FIFA Soccer games disposed of the control scheme that they’d used up through FIFA World Cup 2002 on Playstation 2. This allowed for the player to use the controller to intricately control:

a.) the power of a kick by holding the button to charge up power and release at the right moment (there were different buttons for different kinds of kicks)
b.) the angle of the kick with one of the joysticks. You could kick the ball to any of the 360 degrees
c.) the curve of the kick, modified with the shoulder buttons, allowed the player to swerve a ball around a defender or away from a goalie.

It was a skillful game, especially enjoyable if sharing a team with a buddy while making amazing plays. The ball went where we were skilled enough to put it. Every pass had to be aimed and weighted appropriately.

If you’re curious, here’s a clip with a timestamp. Every kick that you see the player implement here is sent to a spot on the field. If his teammate is at that spot, then he earned that completed pass. The game didn’t automatically aim passes for him. It was glorious. I miss it.

Is there a game, series, control scheme, or genre that you lament as being lost to the past? Something that was just OBJECTIVELY better and is inexplicably gone?

Yours,
Chris P.

32:53 Mailbag: Game AI

Dear Diecast,

Did cover shooters kill the good enemy AI in shooters?

What are some of the late 90s/early 00s game with the best AI?

Are there any games after 2010 that had great AI?

Thanks,

Will

43:23 Mailbag: AI Shamus

Dear Diecast

Since AI generated writing technology seems to be developing at a fast rate. How would you feel Shamus if in like 10-20 years, people could compile all your Twenty Sided posts and throw into an AI app or site that can write articles that seem like it was written by you?

Sort of like how we might still see old celebrity actors in 2050 movies because of improving deepfake technology. Maybe you could even do this with all the audio from the podcast and use it to make an AI Diecast? Eternal Shamus Young content!

Love, Bumpkin

46:18 Mailbag: Fantasy Epics

Dear Diecast,

On a friend’s recommendation, I’ve been reading Brandon Sanderson’s Storm Light Archive books.

Each of these books is over 1,000 pages, and there are 4 books out with 10 planned.

There are dozens of developed characters.

Do you like stories setup like this?

Or do you prefer when books are brief and the characters are mostly ordinary while the exceptional ones are left mysterious?

Thanks,

Will

Anyway, this is it. The mailbag is finally clear. If you still have unanswered questions now, it’s because you didn’t send them in.

Link (YouTube)

00:00 Uremia!
I do not recommend.

01:24 Mailbag: Prey

Greetings, Paulmus (Shaul?)

So, I assume you have already seen this video by Yahtzee on Prey, from a couple of days ago:

While you’ve already discussed this game and the possible reasons for its failing to find an audience, Yahtzee here introduces the possibility of it being too polished for its own good and as such not really having anything memorable to latch onto.

Weird West has now released (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1097350/Weird_West/), made by a few of the developers of Prey and being marketed as a non-first person immersive sim, and while first reviews were less favorable due to strange design choices and bugs, it has been garnering more and more positive attention as the days go by, seemingly giving credence to this whole theory, going by what the Steam reviews say.

Do you think it’s possible for a game to really be “too well crafted for its own good”? Have you ran into such a thing before (well, besides Prey, I guess)?

08:02 Mailbag: Modding vs Unity

Dear Mr. Young and Mr. Spooner!

I hope these lines reach you and your families in good health! To cut to the chase: you mentioned that Warcraft 3 spawned several genres, like Mobas and Tower Defense. That made me reminisce about the late 90ies and early oughts, where mods like the ones already mentioned, but also Counterstrike and Team Fortress and several others hade huge impacts on gaming. Often, that was attributed to the tools made available with the base games enabling the creation of mods.

But if it were only the tools, we should have a similar era of experimental games that might blow up into industry defining hits, due to the availablity of tools like Unity or the Unreal engine. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Now here’s my hypothesis on why that is, and I hope that might spark a little discussion:

I think it’s because mods already have had a congregated audience of buyers of the base games. If you played HL or WC3, you might seek out mods to either give you more of the same gameplay, or to check out what crazy different stuff people wrestled out of the mod tools to contrast with the original gameplay.
On the other hand, small, experimental games made in Unity or the Unreal engine kind of get thrown into a vacuum, almost impossible to be discovered or garner a growing audience.

The only time that felt somewhat similar were the early years of consumer level VR in 2016/17, where small teams would experiment what was possible, and there was a small target group of owners of VR hardware that were hungry for games and curious to try out anything.

So do you have any thoughts on that? And are you nostalgic for discovering mods?

regards
Norbert “ColeusRattus” Lickl

13:00 Mailbag: Character transposition

Dear Diecast,

I hope you are well.

If you could take any single character from any game and put them in another game, who would you put in which game?
You could put Seymour from FFX in Mass Effect 3 so he and Kai Leng can compete over who is the best villain.
You could put Duke Nukem in Silent Hill 2 so he could give Pyramid Head the mighty boot.
You could even put Mahbu in Nyan Nyan ga Nyan – Light Fantasy Gaiden, the possibilities are endless.

Looking forward to hear what you come up with!

Vale,

– Tim

22:13 Mailbag: Pro-Factorio

Hello Shamus and Paul,

What are your views on using a SAT solver to play Factorio? https://github.com/R-O-C-K-E-T/Factorio-SAT
Is this heresy, or is this a word from the gods beyond? Is this the advent of a dark age, or the new enlightenment? Is this an evil of the old world, or the virtue of a new future?

Take care,
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

27:02 Mailbag: Changing Moral Compass

Dear Diecats! (Yes, I’m gonna leave that amusing typo in!)

We all know the phenomenon of replaying player/moral choice heavy games and still always picking the same options we did on our first play-throughs. But me being on a bender of playing choice heavy games like “Yes your Grace” and “The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante” (which I can both recommend), I replayed Banner Saga. Now excuse my slight spoiler to a six year old game, but the end of the first game has you make a somewhat hidden decision which either had the main character Rook or his daughter Allette survive the final battle. When I played it first in 2016, I remember reloading an earlier save so Rook survived, since I identified stronger with him than with Allette, which was more of a side character in the story, and I didn’t want to “lose” him for the sequels.
Between then and now, I have become a father of two, and it became impossible for me to even entertain the thought of sacrificing Allette in my most recent play-through.
So, have you had shifts in your life that affected your moral compass in a way that made it perceptible via the moral choices in games?

Kind Regards
Norbert “ColeusRattus” Lickl

33:59 Mailbag: Star Trek Picard

Dear Diecast / Shamus,

It is surely low hanging fruit, and apologies if you have already mentioned this, but have you considered doing an analysis of the Star Trek Picard series? I have been indulging in watching reviews (by e.g. RLM) and it seems the writing issues and tonal shift from classic Star Trek are Mass Effect sequels levels of nonsense. I found myself wondering about what technically has been done to the type of story and its telling, vs TNG or other Trek, in terms of your ‘details first vs drama first’ and ‘character driven vs plot driven’ analyses. It occurred that it would be good to hear your story/writing-analysis on the series.

All the best
PPX14

40:20 Mailbag: More Rocketeer?

Dear Diecast,

I’m really enjoying the long-form critique from The Rocketeer on FFXII (despite having never played the game). Like Shamus’s retrospectives, it’s been a deeply interesting and insightful read that’s opened my eyes to/helped illuminate a number of useful concepts and mental models, clothed in highly amusing snark and wit.

So I was wondering if there were any plans or possibility that he’d do more write-ups for the blog afterward, Final Fantasy related or otherwise?

Hope Shamus is doing better and is getting what he needs to help recover.

Warm wishes,
Andrew

41:36 Mailbag: Moon Knight

Dear Diecast

Considering the season finale is this week and while I’m not sure when you guys record, what are your thoughts on Marvel’s Moon Knight show?

Love, bumpkin

46:47 Mailbag: The Blogosphere

Dear Diecast,

Does Shamus still read other blogs? If so, any suggestions? (Namely to do with gaming and storytelling, but other recommendations are also welcome.)

All the best,
Andrew

After recording the show, I remembered that I used to follow developer Jay Barnson. I’m not sure how I lost track of him, but it looks like his site is still going. So I’ve got some catching up to do.

49:24 Mailbag: SqEnix Yard Sale

Dear Diecast,

Hope you’re doing well! I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Squeenix just sold its Western franchises to the company that owns THQ Nordic and Saber Interactive – https://fortune.com/2022/05/02/square-enix-sells-tomb-raider-embracer-microsoft-activision/

Most notably, the deal includes Tomb Raider, Thief, Deus Ex, and Legacy of Kain.

The last name in that list is what I’m personally most excited about. In fact, it’s the only gaming news of recent years that’s made me excited! But what do you think? Did Squeenix do the right thing – especially at that low price point? Are you optimistic about the future of these series?

Keen being Awesome,
Lino

54:35 Mailbag: Worldbuilding

Dear Diecast,

I hope you are doing well.

I was just wondering what you think makes for good worldbuilding? Do you think there any fundamental principles or good rules of thumb for stories in general in this regard, if worldbuilding is to be taken seriously?

Also, I came across a video that used the term “silent worldbuilding”. From that alone, any idea what that means to you?

Kind regards,
Andrew

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

01:26 Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

Is this game an expansion, a sequel, a re-release, a remake, or a spinoff? According to the Narrator, “Possibly.”

06:30 NMS:Outlaws

It’s almost heroic how far the game designer is willing to go in pursuit of doing the wrongest thing possible.

27:48 The Batman

Bruce Wayne and The No Good Very Bad Town.

Like I said on the show: I prefer my heroes to be more heroic than this, but I still really enjoyed this one for the wonderful art design. The Christian Bale Batman movies were always so preoccupied with “realism” that they never really captured my imagination. But this dirty, twisted version of Gotham was captivating.

38:03 HyperRogue

Link (YouTube)

40:10 Dorfromantik

Link (YouTube)

45:00 The Universim

Link (YouTube)

48:06 Mailbag: Relationships with games

Dear Diecast… I mean, hi.

I noticed that I tend to have adversarial relations with games. Meaning that I usually put a higher difficulty (for some reason) and when the game gives an unfair challenge I get “oh, you want to play unfair? All right I’ll play unfair too” and start cooking up exploits or some cheap tactics within game rulesets. So it’ll become a battle of who can outcheat each other at this point as two bitter rivals. So what’s your relationships with games tend to be?

Best regards, DeadlyDark

55:01 Mailbag: Good habits

Dear Diecast,

I hope this early spring finds you in good humour.

I recently started my umpteenth playthrough of Neverwinter Nights 2 and noticed I have gained a new habit and lost an old habit.
Like most of us do in our daily life, I have started to close doors behind me in game.
There is no practical purpose for it, I just found myself doing so.
I have also stopped rifling through cupboards, desks, and so on for small change like the average video game protagonist.

Do you guys have any habits you brought to video games from real life? Closing doors, keeping things organised, and so on?
Do you usually rifle through drawers and closets for random loot?

Wishing you all the best.

Vale,

-Tim

59:16 Mailbag: Bonus Bugs

Hi Diecast,

Do you recall some bugs and glitches that were so funny/awesome that they made the game better for you?

Cheers,
Darek

For those of you who just want the health update: Surgery is over. I’m recovering nicely. If all goes well, then in about 2 weeks my health should really improve. I’ll have more details later.

I did this podcast because it was a nice low-effort way to produce some content and let everyone hear that I’m doing OK. In this podcast We talked Spider-Man, and I also give my 1-minute review of THE BATMAN.

Well, the streak had to end eventually. I managed to catch something and spent most of last week with chills, coughing swamp water out of my lungs. I’m on the mend now, but I wasn’t in a position to record a Diecast at the time.

Here are a few things that would have been featured on the show if I’d done one:

Microsoft-Mandated Mojang Migration

I finally got around to migrating my Mojang account so I can play Minecraft again. I’ve been putting this off for weeks because I suspected it would be a nightmare. Maybe the system would request an email confirmation that never arrives. And then after ten minutes of trial-and-error, ten different confirmations arrive at the same time, but then the system won’t recognize any of them. And then finally when I get through that I discover I can’t migrate because my existing password is too long to fit in the new system, and then it won’t let me reset the password during migration, etc. etc. Microsoft’s Games for Windows LIVE was diabolical at coming up with these long chains of connected problems, and I expected this process was going to be another dose of that bitter old medicine.

But no. It was fine. It took two minutes. All done.

Sorry to those of you who were looking forward to a tale of woe. I don’t know what happened. I’m just as disappointed as you are. I was looking forward to having something to complain about, but sometimes when you ask for lemons, life gives you lemonade.

Final Fantasy XII

Man, this was a stroke of luck. When I invited the Rocketeer to post his FF12 series to my blog, I was just looking to put some fun content on the site. I didn’t realize how much I was about to need that extra content. I have surgery coming up, and the end of the Final Fantasy XII series should make sure that new stuff is still being posted to the site during my recovery.

Back when I announced my health problems at the end of March, lots of people kindly told me, “Take all the time you need Shamus! We’ll be here when you get back. Take care of yourself!” I appreciated the gesture, but I also knew that this wasn’t strictly true.

I doubt it will shock anyone to hear that blogs aren’t as popular as they used to be. Most gaming discourse has moved to YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and other social-networky type places. Those places aren’t really likely to send traffic my way, so these days I’m very reliant on people’s existing reading habits to keep the site going. If this place went dark for several months, I’m sure many of you would pop back the moment I returned. But I also know that some people wouldn’t. Twenty Sided would fall off of people’s reading lists and the community would drift apart.

After the hiatus, I’d face the difficult task of trying to get the site rolling again from a cold start, and that’s going to be a lot harder now in 2022 than it was in 2006. I don’t know if I’d be able to hit critical mass again.

But thanks to Rocko, I don’t have to worry about that. We’ve got two months of content lined up now, which is about double what I think I’ll need. This means I’ll rest easier in the coming weeks, without the anxiety that comes from having the same post stuck at the top of the page for weeks on end.

Future Avengers

I was looking at the list of upcoming Marvel films and I noticed there aren’t any Avengers titles in the works. On one hand, this is probably a good sign. The MCU ran for four years before they did their first big team-up movie, and it makes sense to take the same approach here. The audience needs time to get to know these new characters before we’ll get excited to see them meet. *raises eyebrows, looks pointedly at DC Comics*

Having said that, Endgame was 3 years ago and I don’t think Marvel has any Avengers in the works at all. I guess the pandemic probably stole a lot of Disney’s momentum, so maybe they’re going to need more than 4 years to put this next team together.

I’m sure it’ll happen eventually. But I wonder who’s going to be on the team?

Sam Wilson’s Captain America: Obviously the new cap is on the team. I loved Sam Wilson in Marvel Phase 3, but I hated what they did to the character in the Disney+ series. A Captain America who refuses to oppose murderous terrorists because he likes their politics? A shy mope who doesn’t want the shield until the government gives it to someone else? An impotent, sanctimonious loser that lectures politicians without offering any solutions of his own? That’s not a superhero, that’s a Redditor. But! the Disney+ series was designed so that you didn’t need to watch it. I’m guessing you can just pretend the whole thing never happened. The Cap we we see in the opening Chapter of Avengers 5 will probably be the old Sam Wilson.

Spider-Man is obviously on the team. He’s probably the MVP as far as Disney is concerned.

Shang Chi has already been announced as an “Avenger” by Marvel, so I guess we know he’s going to end up on the team. I liked Shang well enough. My only real gripe is that I think his costume is horrible. The “dragon scale armor” looks like cheap red plastic, and isn’t particularly flattering. It sort of works against the fantastical backdrop we see in Act III of his movie, but if you drop that costume into a modern city then your superhero is going to look like a DIY cosplayer. I know Marvel loves to tinker with costumes between movies, and I have to imagine they’ll take another swing at this one. Without Tony Stark 3D printing suits for everyone, I wonder where the new costumes will come from?

Captain Marvel lives in space, so I wouldn’t bet on her joining the team. Like Superman in the Justice League, she’s so powerful that she makes the story hard to write. Any fight that she can’t win instantly is probably a fight that would kill Captain America instantly.

War Machine is an interesting character to consider. If War Machine is still in business, then that suggests that the world has figured out how to make Iron Man suits without Tony Stark. But then, wouldn’t that suggest that we’re about to be flooded with knockoff suits? Or maybe the writers are going to claim that Col. Rhodes is wearing the last operational suit and nobody can make more?

Ant-Man is probably on the team. Hey, remember the Sokovia Accords? Government oversight for the Avengers? I guess those went out the window when Thanos showed up, letting guys like Ant-Man off the hook to engage in freelance superheroism.

Moon Knight is still running on Disney+. I like the show well enough, I guess. But then, I’m a huge fan of Oscar Isaac and I think he’s carrying the show for me. His power levels fall into the Goldilocks zone for a super-team position. He’s strong enough that we’re not going to wonder why we brought him along (Hawkeye) and he’s not so powerful that he wins without trying. (Captain Marvel) On the other hand, his split personality gag is interesting in his show, but would require way too much screen time to explain in an Avengers movie that’s trying to introduce a new ensemble cast.

Scarlet Witch and Doctor Strange and Thor are all engaged in Cosmic Business these days, and they are worried about stuff larger than the Earth. They are probably too busy and powerful to hang around Avengers HQ, waiting for the next army of punchable minions to invade. I get the impression that the Thor mantle is going to pass from Thor Odinson to Jane Foster. If that’s what the writers do, then we would end up with a new Thor that’s from Earth. Jane Foster is just a regular person, not a cosmic being. If she were granted the powers of Thor, then I imagine she’d want to return to Earth and try to put them to good use. So Thor Classic is off the team, but this new Thor would be in a hurry to join.

I have no idea where Marvel is going with Hulk. He’s appeared in a post-credits scene recently so we know the actor is sticking around. We also know that She-Hulk is going to be a mini-series at some point, and current Hulk is going to have a supporting role in that. Maybe they’ll handle Hulk just like Thor: The actor will pass the mantle to a new performer before retiring.

In my mind, these take only a few seconds. But apparently we spend five to ten minutes on this sort of stuff. Weird.

Link (YouTube)

00:00 Leah’s Mojang Migration
It can be done!

02:17 Shamus Fixed his email
I’m still working my way through the backlog.

04:46 Sending request to Facebook.com
According to Linkedin, Facebook currently employs approximately 8850 software developers. And yet… when was the last time you saw a new feature? Those coders must spend at least some of the day coding. Where is the output of those 8k+ people going? What does their code DO? And how much of it needs to exist at all?

07:11 Oli Oli World
They added characters. And a story. And lore. And I have no idea why.

12:18 The Captain

Link (YouTube)

21:23 Coding is very hard now
Alas. Hopefully things turn around soon.

27:42 Mailbag: Which Minecraft is Best

Dear Diecast,

I hope you’re doing well! Recently, I exposed the joys of PC gaming to my 5 y/o sister. Up until that point she’d only played mobile games, and while there are some good ones out there, most of them are… well… mobile games.
On the PC we mostly play story games, but I know that she also likes watching Minecraft Let’s Plays. Which is why I want to show her how to play Minecraft.
But I’ve never played it myself, so I was wondering – which version of Minecraft should I get – the Java version or the Microsoft store version? E.g. I know that the Java version is free, and has all the mods. What’s the Microsoft version got going for it?

Anyways, take care, and keep being awesome,
Lino

32:29 Mailbag: Waiting for Windows (NICK)

Dear Diecast,

I admit I have no comprehension of program or operating system design. Despite this, I find it hard to comprehend why – in the year 2022 – I still find myself in the same dumb situation I found myself in during the 1990’s, where I would double click on an executable, and then must wait some arbitrary period from 5 to 30 seconds, waiting for any kind of response.

During those fleeting seconds my mind can play cruel games with my heart:

“are you sure you double clicked correctly? The computer might not have registered your input, and now you could be wasting time waiting for a program that will never start”.

But then, of course, if you were to double click again, you might risk opening the same program twice, simultaneously.

Even if modern technology did still require such extensive start-up times, couldn’t there at least be some basic signal from Windows to tell you that your computer is in fact doing something… anything?!

As I have no experience with Linux or Mac, do those platforms handle this problem any better?

Yours inconsistently,

Nick

42:55 Mailbag: Weird West

Dear Diecast,

Firstly, hope you guys are doing well. Have you seen Weird West by Devolver? I was tempted to get it, but it’s so outside of my usual wheelhouse when it comes to games that I didn’t know what to think.

Jennifer Snow

45:17 Mailbag: Quicker Quitting (NICK)

Dear Diecast,

TL:DR “Many gamers have busy lives where they may be required to drop what they are doing at a moment’s notice, to do something else unexpected (e.g. parents of young children). Yet many games still seem to lack a reliable way to quickly save and exit a gameplay session. Not being able to pause or re-watch a critical cutscene can also be frustrating. Could this be considered as a “quality of life” oversight?”

I’m sure you don’t remember when you answered my Diecast question in Episode 301 regarding my wife and I considering parenthood. Either way, your advice must have been good, because our son is due to be born later this month!

Whilst I am sure I have no idea what I have gotten myself in for, at the very least I am sure that if I still find the time to play videogames, then they ought to be the sort of games that can be paused or exited at a moments notice, when real life requires my attention. Which is why I am surprised that so many games these days do not seem to have a reliable way to quickly save and quit a gameplay session. I get that this would not be feasible for all games (online multiplayer being an obvious example), but even many single player games seem to dictate special circumstances for when and where you are allowed to save and quit.

If the rationale is that being able to save anywhere may result in an unfair advantage for the player (e.g. temptation to use “save-scumming” tactics), then my rebuttal would be that I have played games with an “ironman mode” like X-Com Enemy Unknown, where the game is perpetually saving your progress, but only allows you to load the most recent save.

As a side note, as much as we hate it when cutscenes are unskippable, I find it even more ridiculous when they cannot be paused or watched again later. Don’t game designers realise that some people may need to step away from their game quickly and at a moment’s notice?

Yours prenatally,

Nick

48:17 Mailbag: Cover Systems in Shooters

Dear Diecast,

Do you think cover systems ruined shooters? (Not trying to be dramatic, so feel free to interpret however severely you feel is appropriate.) Or elsewise detracted from the storytelling or experience of a narrative-driven game?

Kind regards,
Andrew

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

So about that award. Is it for some content that I made? Maybe the Portal 2 level I posted a few months ago? Or those Distance tracks I made back in 2016? Who nominated me? Who voted for me? I’m flattered, really. This is just so…

Oh.

Apparently, the award was auto-generated by the system because I posted a review that got lots of upvotes. So this isn’t an award given by people in recognition for an artistic creation, this is just some output from the social-media server because I did some bitching and moaning that played to the momentary mood of the crowd.

“Such poetry!” Steam tells me. Shit, Gaben. If you think THAT dashed-off whining is poetry, I got 186,000 words of bellyaching that will knock your socks off. I got nitpicks for days. I’ve got more grievances than General Grievous. I’ve got enough salt to make Canada drivable in winter. I do this shit for a living.

So… thanks for the 100 points, I guess?

Anyway, here are the show notes:

00:39 Aria

I forgot to ask Paul if Aria IS Omega. Missed opportunity.

04:06 Xbox for Windows doesn’t understand either Xbox or Windows

Game pass is financially a good deal, but it wouldn’t be a Microsoft PC gaming product without an imperial assload of jank and metric arseload of terrible UI.^[1]

09:54 Beautiful Desolation

Link (YouTube)

20:06 Penny Arcade Remix

How fun.

24:31 Mailbag: Migrating Mojang accounts for Minecraft

Dear Diecast,

Have any/either/all of you on the show this episode tried migrating your Mojang account to a Microsoft account so you can continue playing Minecraft, as required after March 10? Might make some great fodder for another of Shamus’s rants! (No fewer than five emails from Microsoft [including three different one-time codes], and the process got stuck on the final “yes I really do own this email address that was already tied to my Mojang account” verification step and had to be manually restarted…)

May your diamonds be ever plentiful,
Daniel “Philadelphus” Berke

29:13 Mailbag: Shooting in statsdriven FPS RPG

Dear Diecast,

In a statdriven shooter, some games make the guns deal little damage, leading to a situation where shooting someone in the head 5 times doesnt seem to do anything. Others give the player bad accuracy. But these systems can make the gunplay feel bad, which turns off a lot of people (which is why human revolution got better shooting than DX). And if you just have worse sway or something. A skilled player can compensate for it. In the end a character, supposed to be bad at shooting, can shoot very well because the player compensates for it.
How can you make a system where a character not skilled with guns cannot shoot well, but the guns don’t feel like toy guns?

With kind regards,
Chris

37:39 Mailbag: Diecast Listening Habits

Dear Diecast,

I know Shamus enjoys hearing about the weird ways we consume his blog content. With regards to the diecast specifically, the first episode I listened to was episode #200. At that point I decided to go through the back-catalogue, starting with the very first episode, whilst also listening to each new episode as it was released. Do many listeners consume Diecast content either out of order, or years late, like me? Does Shamus have access to any statistics?

Now, after listening to every diecast episode at least once, I feel qualified to summarise my entire diecast experience into the following 4 short questions:

After it was suggested to you on multiple different episodes over the years, by both Chris and Paul (and possibly also Josh?) did you ever get around to playing Frog Fractions?
Did the Satisfactory developers ever get around to patching in correct inverted mouse controls for driving vehicles?
Do you have Minecraft open in another tab right now?
And of course, the obligatory question… Hey Shamus, did you hear the RSS feed is broken?
Yours cumulatively,

Nick

43:04 Mailbag: Deliberately Subverting the Level Designer

Dear Diecast,

When playing a linear game with collectables or secrets to find on each level, it is not uncommon to find the path ahead split off in more than one direction. At that point I ask myself, “which path is the game designer most likely trying to direct me?”, and I then proceed to ignore that path at all costs until all other side paths have been searched. Just one of those things I’ve found that I have conditioned myself to do over the years, like always checking behind the character when a new level loads in, due to the occasional secret that level designers like to hide behind you at the start.

I find it funny that the intention of good level design is to subtly lead the player in the correct direction through the level, and yet so often I find myself actively fighting against the will of the designer in order to play the game in the optimal way. Have you gentlemen experienced a similar phenomenon?

Oh, and can we all please just agree that when a branching path inexplicably leads to a cutscene and checkpoint that won’t let you backtrack, that is a crime against humanity that should not go unpunished?!?!

Yours contrarily,

Nick

48:26 Mailbag: Videogame Logic in the Real World

Dire Deercast,

Have you ever caught your subconscious trying to use videogame logic in the real world?

The best personal example I can think of relates to Metal Gear Solid 5, which had shipping containers in the open world map that your character could capture for resources. For a while after playing that game, whenever I spotted a shipping container in real life, for the first half-second my subconscious would try to tell me to run over and capture it, before my brain would wake up and gently remind me that I am not – in actuality – a legendary soldier.

Another example would be me imagining the best way to rack up points by skating through the local urban landscape (Tony Hawk style), even though in real life I’m sure I would struggle to even stand on a skateboard.

Yours disassociatively,

Nick

Link (YouTube)

00:00 Terra Nil

Link (YouTube)

01:28 Stories that use Judeo-Christian ideas as worldbuilding details.

Oh no. Demons from a vaguely Biblical hell have entered our world. Again. Luckily, they seem to be vulnerable to swords / shotguns.

04:57 Ghostwire Tokyo

It’s not often that I get to say this, but I’ve honestly never seen anything like this before.

09:26:48 Hyperbolica

It’s not brilliant in terms of gameplay, but the non-Euclidian space really tickles my brain.

15:55 So many games!

Elden Ring, Tina’s Wonderland, Ghostwire Tokyo, Gran Turismo 7… a lot of big stuff came out this month!^[1]

18:26 The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

20:32 IXION & Startopia

What if we took an inherently fun and silly premise and took it super-seriously:

Link (YouTube)

23:18 The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why.

Brilliant analysis.

Link (YouTube)

31:11 MFA Redux: Updating Autopay

Why do they do this when there are better systems available?

33:56 OOP and PHP 8

I realize that the show notes this week are just a bunch of YouTube links, but here is one more:

CppCon 2014: Mike Acton “Data-Oriented Design and C++”

40:55 Mailbag: Protagonist Agency

Dear Diecast,

There was a lot of discussion on the blog over the past week about Protagonist vs. Main Character, and who is what, etc, Isn’t there an inherent problem with Video Games compared to other media in that the “Author” often doesn’t want the Main Character to have agency?

Although it doesn’t *have* to be this way, video game designers often choose to assign agency to other characters who tell the Main Character what to do. Shamus spoke of the player in NWN 2 as roleplaying the world’s biggest doormat. Gordon Freeman is constantly dictated to and doesn’t have an arc. The PC in WarCraft/StarCraft/C&C etc. is likewise a silent figure ordered around. MMOs are notorious for PCs barely being characters in the stories being told.

What would be the best games you can think of that *didn’t* go this route, and actually allow the player character to have agency in the game by not having an NPC order them around and that still told a good story at the end?

I guess mine would be Planescape -Torment.

44:55 Mailbag: The Game Theorists on Acti-Blizz Acquisition

Dear Diecast,

I hope you’re doing well! I remember Shamus talking about how he’s working on a piece about Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. I recently saw this video that he could use as part of his research – it brings up some good points I see a lot of people overlooking – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt1utYXzKqM

Fair warning – it’s by Game Theory, which means it’s excessively aggressively annoying. But as much as I despise MattPatt’s style, he’s been in the consulting gig for quite a while, and in these sorts of topics he usually has something interesting to say (his recent piece about TwitchTV is also interesting).

As far as turning this into a question for the show… I guess this isn’t really a question. Maybe I should rename this email. Oh, no, wait – I do have a question: What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?!

Keep Being Awesome,
Lino

47:32 Mailbag: Presenting probabilities

Dear Diecast,

High-profile tactics games like XCOM and Civilization have found that if you tell players they are 80% to win something, then they will feel like they should win basically all of the time and complain that the numbers are off if they lose one out of five times. To solve this issue the games lie: if your actual chance is 80% the game reports it as 70% and this feels about right to people. Similarly if you’ve lost several times in a row the game will cheat and give you a bonus to break your losing streak because perfectly normal runs of bad luck make players complain that the dice are loaded against them.

How do you feel about this practice? Is there a better way to convey information, and if players are persistently bad at probability, should designers give them fake numbers that line up with their intuitions?

Ninety-Three percent to hit

Is there a term for when the GM has you roll for stupid stuff?

I’ve never encountered it personally, but I hear about this often enough in anecdotes that I wonder if there’s a term for it.

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:
00:00 Intro

00:16 Minecraft

04:28 Townscaper

06:10 Voltron

08:05 Everspace 2 Demo

13:22 Hyperbolica

15:20 VR Games

16:43 Nandgame

22:55 Scribblenauts Unlimited

25:00 Minecraft Again

27:02 Mailbag: Question for Paul

Door Dipcast,

Hi Paul. Of all your experiences as a freelance 3D modeler (if that description is accurate?), what is the most interesting/unusual request you have been commissioned to produce? or the most interesting/unusual intent for your finished product?

Yours geometrically,
Nick

Here’s the 3d stuff Paul has made.

35:58 Outro
Outro Music is Metroid “Kraidzy Dance” OC ReMix by Dirty Delay

At least I don’t lose an hour of sleep like most people. What a dumb system. Anyway, here’s a podcast about videogames…

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 Aperture Desk Job

Link (YouTube)

04:39 New Vegas Mod: The Frontier

I’m not sure how I missed the buzz surrounding this thing when it came out.

19:41 Mailbag: Spider-Man: No Way Home

Did we answer this one before? I can’t find it in my list.

20:16 Mailbag: FIFA vs Andrew Wilson

Hey Diepals,

So, it might be negotiating posturing, but Andrew Wilson seems to be open to gutting the most profitable sports franchise in history.

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/eas-ceo-tells-staff-its-been-impeded-by-the-fifa-brand-its-four-letters-on-a-box/

I know sports games aren’t your cup of tea, but FIFA is by far the best selling video game sports franchise. According to Wikipedia, it’s sold more copies than Minecraft.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game_franchises

The stated reason is FIFA is “holding EA back” from implementing other game modes and making the franchise somehow more popular.

This seems to me like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs yet again by not understanding your customers. In my experience, the reason people buy annual updates to sports franchises is the latest stats and players, not “gameplay innovation.”

Thoughts?

ContribuTor

25:09 Mailbag: Stupid Premise

Dear Diecast,

If you make a game with a deeply stupid premise, is it better to spend lot of narrative time and effort trying to make the premise seem less stupid or to do nothing and just quietly hope that people don’t think about it too much?

Also, which one of these two things does Batman: Arkham City do?

Thanks a bunch,

John

32:36 Mailbag: Home TV & Movies

Dear Diecast,

What home theater setup do you have for TV & movies?

Do you think there will ever be a need for anything over 4K?

If not, how can we improve our viewing experience?

I am just now getting around to buying blu ray versions of my favorites that I currently own on DVD.

Thank you!

Will

43:36 Mailbag: Accessibility in Games

Dear Diecast,

How would you define “accessibility” in relation to video games?

People generally seem to discuss it as ‘considerate options for people with physical impairments’, such as colour blindness, deafness, etc.

Do you agree with this narrow view of the term, or would you extend the meaning further? If so, to what end?

Kind regards,
Andrew

55:00 Mailbag: Nested Loops in DSP

Dear Diecast,

Have you ever had interaction in a game that turned into a
logic/programming problem you could not shake?

I know you both have tried Dyson Sphere Program since you talked about
it back on Diecast369. Paul posting about it is what introduced me to
it. A recent update added the ‘Automatic Piler’ which stacks cargo.

This addition has created a nested logic gate programming puzzle in
the game. I’d love answer to that if you have one, but my Diecast
question is:

You are both programmers. Has a game ever put a pointless logic bug
into your head in way that crashed your brain?

– Steve C.

BTW The puzzle in DSP that has stuck in my head is; If it is possible
to output a fully saturated belt stacked to 4 with fewer than six
Pilers using nested loops?

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 Valheim

It’s the classic conundrum when a new update comes out: Do I use my existing endgame save, and thus stroll through the new content overpowered? Or do I start a new game and spend hours grinding my way to the midgame to experience the content as intended?

Paul chose the first one for Valheim, while I chose the second when returning to…

01:53 No Man’s Sky

I want to stress that I’m not complaining about broken promises. I’m basically in agreement with Internet Historian that the last five years of free expansions have cleared Hello Games from the charge of being liars and con artists.

However, that doesn’t change the fact that this is a horribly designed game with a monstrous interface, a self-defeating gameplay loop, and a progression system that was designed by an alien that’s never played a videogame before.

It’s not a con. It just sucks.

22:18 Elden Ring

Link (YouTube)

A new Dark Soulsian game is out, so it’s time for another cultist recruitment drive. This time around the general public is apparently asking for a quest log. And like everything else they ask for, they’re being told that they’re trying to ruin the game and shut up you just don’t understand git gud.

I totally get why you wouldn’t want a Ubisoft-style quest log and waypoint markers cluttering up the HUD. I agree that modern games are way too eager to vomit a to-do list onto your screen. I can totally see how putting a waypoint marker in Elden Ring is like putting markers in Portal to show you where the portals should go.

On the other hand, I can also understand why someone might ask for a journal screen or whatever. Jason Schreier suggested keeping a pen and paper handy while playing the game. That’s a great idea! Only instead of paper, I want to keep track of things in a text document. And hey, rather than pausing the game so I can alt-tab over to my text document, wouldn’t it be cool if the game could just populate the text document for me? Let’s call it a “log” of quests. And wouldn’t it be cool if there was a button I could use to quickly look at this log from within the game? Wouldn’t that be more immersive than putting down the controller and turning away from the screen to consult a notebook?

On the other hand, there’s value in the player not knowing something is a quest. If someone mentions praying at a “fiery door”, I might think they’re just sharing their backstory. But if my quest log suddenly gains an entry for “Find the fiery door and pray at it” then I know this is a quest. And maybe having that entry would deny me the chance to make the connection on my own.

It’s an interesting debate, but like all Dark Souls criticism it quickly devolves into a weird sort of orthodoxy where it’s assumed that only True Fans understand the game well enough to criticize it, and the only people who are true fans are the ones who recognize the game as unassailable perfection.

Also worth noting is this video on Returnal, which I mentioned during this segment.

Link (YouTube)

As someone who would find the game too frustrating to play, I really appreciated this all-spoiler breakdown. Highly recommended.

35:57 Mailbag: Shades of Colourlessness

Dear Diecast,

I hope this mail finds you both hale and hearty.

Continuing my old man spree I dug up some games that I used to play a lot on Windows 3.1 (e.g. Hocus Pocus).

I was struck by how differnt they look in colour. Maybe this is just the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia talking, but when I used to play them on my old black-and-white monitor they looked far more striking.

Do you guys think games look better in black-and-white compared to in colour? How do you feel about games with dedicated B&W modes, like L.A. Noire and Tsushima? Am I just being an old curmudgeon yelling at clouds?

Vale,

-Tim

43:12 Mailbag: TV shows

Dear Diecast

Two new and popular TV shows ended fairly recently, The Book of Boba Fett and Peacemaker, have you seen them and if so then what are your thoughts?

Best regards from Bobby T.

50:54 Mailbag: Save Scumming

Dear DieCastles,

The practice of save scumming is pervasive in video games, and is a problem for any game designer whose game has a save system. What measures do you think that designers should take to deter players from (ab)using the system? Can you think of any examples of games that you’ve played where you you were tempted to reload after dealing with some adversity, but you avoided doing so, and why? Or do you think that save scumming is an acceptable practice, and not worth worrying about from a design perspective? Curious about your thoughts either way.

Regards,

Zeta Kai

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 No Man’s Sky?

Oh well. Maybe next update.

00:53 Tough as Nails Minecraft

I really do think that “Don’t Starve, but in Minecraft” is a good idea. But I haven’t found it yet. Several mods have tried, but balancing Hunger / Thirst / Temp / Sleep systems is tricky. Make it too easy, and caring for your needs becomes routine busywork. Make it too hard, and it dissolves into comical nonsense. Stuff like, “I finally got some food, but then I starved to death because I fell asleep before I could eat it.” Or “I ate ten grapefruit and then died of thirst because the fruit only fills your food meter, not hydration.”

Part of the problem is the reliance on the standard “fill the bar” style mechanics. When it comes to consuming stuff, you can’t just use a single bar. With just one bar, you can go from “starvation” to “fully nourished” in a single meal by just clicking on a lot of food. What you need is a sort of two-stage system where you have a cap on how much you can absorb at once. I think the biggest challenge is communicating all of this complex state^[1] clearly to the player without adding too much clutter to the HUD.

I’m sort of tempted to take a swing at it myself,^[2] but I really don’t enjoy programming in Java.

11:14 The Mushroom Village and Paste Security

Here is the site, if you want to try it yourself.

I realize my take on this might be kind of controversial. “You can’t save ignorant people from falling for scams.”^[3] And yes, I realize that when one rube gets duped into installing malware, we all suffer because their machine joins a destructive botnet.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try to help people make smarter choices, I’m just saying that that locking the user out of their own operating system and haranguing every user with endless warning messages is a lousy way of dealing with this problem.

17:59 Dreaming About Games

I tried to make this as minimally cringe as I could. Still, we’re talking about dreams, so a little cringe is likely.

I’m sure I’m not the only one. Who else has dreams where the dreamworld seems to run on videogame logic?

25:50 Mailbag: Hard to play games (for story reasons)

Dear Diecast,

I hope this February finds you well.

I find myself with a bit of a conundrum: I love the gameplay of Breath of Fire IV.

Now, this may not seem like much of an issue, if I like the game, I can just play it, however…

I can’t play Breath of Fire IV.

There is a scene later into the game where (spoilers), the bad guys shoot a magic cannon at the emperor and it is the saddest, most heartbreaking event in any game*.
Not satisfied with that utter gut punch, from the time the emperor (he’s fine, by the way) reaches the imperial capital the game drags the player through one tragedy after another.
Merely thinking about it gives me a stomach ache.

So I was wondering, are there games that you guys love playing but simply can’t bring yourself to play because something the story does?
This can be something the game does very well that you simply don’t have the bearing to withstand, or something the game does very poorly that ruins the experience for you.

Vale,

– Tim

P.S.

Warning: tragedy lies ahead.

* The way said magic cannon works is by drawing power from someone with strong loving feelings towards the target.
Preparing the… “ammunition” for the procedure involves torturing them to near-death. They tend not to survive the experience.

32:06 Mailbag: Video Game Worlds

Dear Diecast,

What are some of your favourite fictional settings in video games, and why?
What distinguishes them from other ones in the medium that you do not look so favourably on?
And are we greedy or too demanding for wanting rich settings without a whole bunch of jank and inconsistencies souring the experience?

Have a wonderful day.
– Andrew

37:12 Mailbag: Logic Artists

Hi Diecast,

There is this game company that I liked, Logic Artists. They are known for their Expeditions series (tactical RPGs) and have recently released the third title of that series: Rome (after Conquistador and Viking). When the game was released, they announced that they won’t be doing any RPGs anymore and instead will focus on creating NFT games. So here are my questions:

1) What the hell?
2) Do you think there will be more companies that will do the same thing?
3) Could you make them stop? Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
Darek

Here is the video I mentioned in this segment:

Link (YouTube)

Like we said on the show, Paul and I disagree with this video (at different points, and for different reasons, I think) but I think we both agree that Dan’s eventual breakdown of NFTs is pretty good.

If he’s right, then this is a problem that should solve itself. Sooner or later the pyramid collapses. And once enough of them collapse, new ones won’t have any way to get off the ground.

I normally wouldn’t care. I don’t mind if wealthy folks devise bizarre new ways to try to hustle each other with new financial technologies. I can just not buy NFTs and it doesn’t really affect me. But now Ubisoft is putting NFTs into their games, and suddenly it’s something I have to worry about.

49:00 Mailbag: Age Math

Dear Diecast,

I hope you’re doing well! Do you ever forget how old you are? I know, it sounds weird, but as I’ve gotten older I sometimes find myself in a position where when I tell someone my age, I have to quickly do the math in my head to make sure I didn’t lie to them. I’m embarrassed to admit that last year on my 28th birthday for a minute or two I thought I was actually turning 29, until I actually did the math!

So, my question is – has this ever happened to you, or am I just really weird (I mean, people always tell me I have a great memory, but maybe I’m just surrounded by even bigger freaks)? And if it has happened to you, is it something you’ve grown out of?

Keep Being Awesome,
Lino

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 Cave Story

To answer the question I asked on the show: The original Cave Story came out in 2004, several years before the indie revolution began.

02:06 Minecraft 1.18

For the curious, I’m playing Better Minecraft [Forge] 1.18.1. Although I had to add a few mods to get what I wanted. I prefer to play with fancy shader packs that do real-time lighting, and I also insist on having tools for mining 3×3 blocks. I really miss Tinker’s Construct, but that mod hasn’t made it to 1.18 yet.

10:50 Minecraft Server Shenanigans

Again, I don’t want to link the video because I’m not looking to shame anyone. But apparently there’s an entire genre of YouTube channels where kids spend dozens of hours grinding away to build giant complicated lag machines in order to “punish” heavily monitized pay-to-win Minecraft servers.

17:18 NMS update 3.8

What do Paul and I think of the latest No Man’s Sky versions?

29:13 Mailbag: Death and Relationships within Games

Hey Shamus and Paul,

After recently suffering a couple of losses in the real world, it got me thinking about death within video games. I know a lot of people will probably pop in some Mass Effect and Final Fantasy answers, but what are some games that actually treat the death of a character with the respect it deserves, and have it serve as more than a mere plot device? What are some of the deaths of characters in games that actually affected you? One that hit me, even though it is from a game that doesn’t serve as a stellar example of writing is Dom’s death from Gears of War 3. The music, the dialogue, the cinematography all combine to hit me in the feels.
To go along with that, relationships as well very often serve only as a plot device for our protagonists. What games would you say have included good examples of relationships? Very rarely do we see marriage, children, parental, or even friendly relationships that feel complicated enough to be real. Garrus from Mass Effect would probably be an easy example of a well written friend, I would be bro’s with him irl. Anyway, thank you for fielding this two-parter,

Thanks,
Chris/Gautsu

Heads up: Spoilers for Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Also, we once again beat the dead horse that is Mass Effect 3. Because I have no self-control.

40:51 Mailbag: Japanese Spider-Man

Thoughts on Japanese Spider-Man? How does he compare to the original?

https://youtu.be/LFYIRZoyavw

Here you will learn why I am not a drummer.

46:19 Mailbag: Detention Video Game

Deeeeeear Dyecast!

Have either of you watched the movie Detention?
It is based on the Taiwanese survival horror game of the same name and I think it is one of the best and most faithful video game movie adaptions
while also being the best Silent Hil movie we’ve ever had!
It works on it’s own, but for fans, scenes and iconography are taken directly from the game without feeling forced or jarring,
and it has that wonderful blend of dread and melancholy that defines this type of horror!

Thanks for reading and have a pleasant day,
Jolt

48:47 Mailbag: Dream Anime-ified Game

Dear diecast,

I was going through the archives and found shamus’s top 64 games. He mentions that tetris was not for sale on steam in any way or form (well at the time of writing I assume). So i did a quick search and found you can buy tetris on steam now. Including anime tetris.

So wondered, what anime-ified game would you like to see? COD modern warfare, anime edition? anime lord of the rings?

With kind regards,
Chris

For the curious, here’s that Top 64 Games series.

Also: I looked it up after the show and discovered that Robotech and Macross Saga are two different things! Robotech re-used the Macross animation to tell a different story. Actually, three unrelated OVAs were mooshed into a single story, because you needed to have 65 episodes in your series to fit the syndication schedules in North America.

You know, I really loved Robotech. I kind of forgot just how much I was into it until I did the above research and it all came flooding back. I’m willing to bet this had a big impact on how I connected with JRPGs. When I think back on The Third Robotech War, main characters feel sort of like a proto JRPG party.

So anime fans: What’s the consensus on the Robotech Saga these days? It was mind-blowing 1984, and came off as a hundred times smarter and more sophisticated than western shows that ran in the same block, but I don’t know how it holds up today. Do people even remember it?

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:
00:00 Shamus Making Content on the DL

This Thursday, I’m launching my Final Fantasy XII webcomic!

I kid, I kid. We’re going to do something totally unrelated to JRPGs.

01:56 Unity Whitepapers

I’m such a serious programmer that I even read whitepapers in Dark Mode.

13:18 Endless Space 2 on Linux

Gaming on Lunix is here! Partially. Mostly.

You’re comfortable downloading and compiling code, right?

17:24 Darksiders 2: Deathinitive Edition

18:42 The Tale of the Invalid Verification Codes

I’ve used several banks over the last couple of decades, and it seems like they’re all terrible at electronic banking. It’s like they just want to go back to the days of talking to tellers face-to-face.

Also, here is the skit Paul mentioned.

37:06 Wireless Headphones and the wrong way to do battery mounting.

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Can’t do anything about it. That’s a hardware problem.

42:53 Patreon Census

That’s it. You’re done. You built the service, and now you just need to keep it running and avoid bloat.

This is something that’s obvious when your business is small and local. A restaurant owner isn’t going to stand there in the kitchen thinking, “What’s my next move? Do I sell furniture, or branch out into contract landscaping?” But tech companies often suffer from this weird need to expand in odd ways that don’t build on their core business.

I can understand why some get-rich-quick techbro might do this. If you don’t care about the business and you’re just looking to cash out with an IPO, then you’re probably just going to throw random ideas and buzzwords into your mission statement until you attract investors.

But Patreon founder Jack Conte isn’t a slimy tech bro. My take on him is that he’s an adorably idealistic hippie artist who created Patreon because he needed it to exist, not because he wanted to be the next Elon Bezos.

But Patreon still flails around quite a bit. My guess is that Jack – a 37 year old keyboardist / guitarist / bassist / drummer / songwriter / YouTuber – has perhaps filled his years studying something besides business management. Thus he isn’t totally sure what he should be doing, and he’s probably taking a lot of advice from guys who did study the techbro playbook.

If he were to ask me, my advice to Conte would be this:

Relax and let Patreon keep doing what it’s doing. It doesn’t need to expand or transform. Ignore the techbros. The line doesn’t need to go up forever. Pretend you’re running a restaurant and not a global corporation. Keep your overhead low so you can’t be sniped by an eager upstart, and keep an eye on the books to keep everyone honest.

One hand on the wheel. Steady as she goes.

49:12 Mailbag: Favourite RPG Choices

Dear Diecast,

What’s one / some of your favourite choices that you’ve made in a
role-playing game? And what do you think are the best games of the genre in
this sense?

All the best,
Andrew

56:49 Mailbag: Games you have Slept on

Hey Shamus and Paul, I recently got around to playing through Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. I have owned it for a couple of years, but there was no real reason for me not playing it any sooner, other than a gigantic backlog of games. I really enjoyed it and can easily understand all of the accolades the game received when it came out. Are there any games, either critically or socially well received, that you found your way to after all of the hype had died down, that actually lived up to said hype?

Thank you,
Chris/Gautsu

(Although I suppose you could argue that this ENTIRE WEBSITE should fall under that category. In which case this week is more of the same, only moreso.)

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:44 Endless Space

I didn’t get into it, but apparently Paul had some fun with the sequel. For me the game was SO similar to Master of Orion that it felt like the same game with a new UI. I don’t have any suggestions on how the game should distinguish itself, but I feel like it needed something to set it apart from the 4X titles of the past. As it stands, I think there’s more variety between the versions of Civilization than there are differences between the major franchises in the 4X genre.

17:26 Making a Spaceship in Blender

On the show I talked about an interview where Adam Savage talks about creating stories for the little greeblies you’re adding to a movie model. That bit is at the 5 minute mark in this video:

Link (YouTube)

29:38:27 HeroForge

If it sounds fun, you can try it for yourself.

37:47 Penny Arcade

It’s been ages since I read PA regularly, but I don’t think the strip has declined in quality. It’s as funny as it ever was. I just stopped clicking on it back in 2012 or so and I don’t know why.

Anyway, here is the strip Paul mentioned.

39:54 Shamus Doesn’t Understand TikTok

Old man yells at cloud.

46:31 Mailbag: “Big Idea” flops

Dear Diecast,

I am not sure how to exactly explain this, but I am wondering whether either of you have any stories about games (or game adjacent products) you remember that were also ill-fated, but earnest efforts at being ambitious “big idea” projects. One example for Shamus would of course be Active Worlds, who was always selling itself to investors on what it could be.

For me, I used to play the “Creatures” series of games (you can find them on GOG or be familiar with their Active Worlds town “Albiaville”).

The idea behind Creatures was basically like a complex Tamagotchi. You raised digital creatures from newborn to old age. You taught them to speak, helped socialize them, taught things to avoid, bred them, etc. The breeding mechanics were fairly complex, I believe. And you could even do everything deliberately poorly like teach them to speak entirely in UWU language as well as more malicious things like feeding them to piranhas or breeding them to love booze.

The thing is, the developer, Cyberlife, was originally founded as a research focused enterprise. It eventually changed to a game dev company which then went bankrupt, but the idea was that it was originally going to be this big thing: Artificial life on a computer! but was ultimately just a game.

Thanks for your thoughts,

Mark

50:24 Mailbag: Simulation Hypothesis

Deeeeaaaaar DIEcast,

I am sure that Shamus and Paul are familiar with the popularized “Simulation Hypothesis”: a philosophical theory that would imply that we are statistically more likely to be living in a lifelike computer simulation, rather than living in the actual real world.

As a podcast/website devoted to videogame criticism, do you have any critical opinion regarding our simulated reality? (e.g. graphical fidelity, narrative issues and plotholes, bugs and glitches, romance options…)

…Is our universe procedurally generated?

Yours existentially,

Nick

(P.S If you asked for my answer, I would say that – in a similar vein to the brown color palate of first person shooters in the 1990’s – I would have preferred if our simulation included a wider range of colors than just the blandness of the physical light spectrum).

54:36 Mailbag: Will There Be Another Game Like This

Dear Diecast,

What are game concepts you wish the industry would make more attempts at?
Do you have any hopes that they will do so anytime soon?
And why do you think it is that we don’t get games like Mass Effect or Jade Empire anymore?

Kind regards,
Andrew

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 Uh oh

The good news: It’s not COVID.

The bad news: I’ve caught something.

Yuck. Hopefully this passes soon. I have videogames I need to complain about, and I can’t complain about those if I’m busy complaining about my health.

03:30 Risk of Rain 2

In some games, you find yourself groping around for the one proscribed and predetermined way to win. In RoR2, it feels like you’re trying to see how many different ways you can beat the game.

“Wow. I played as an engineer and stacked bonuses to boost my turrets and it worked really well. Now let me see what happens if I use the all-melee class and go for things to boost my mobility to insane speeds.”

A lot of people praise the soundtrack from Chris Christodoulou, and for good reason. It really is amazing. However, after an hour of play it can be… bit much? Imagine listening to an entire album of guitar solos. That’s what it’s like. After a while I feel like the dim-witted Emperor Joseph II in the movie Amadeus, complaining that the genius composer is playing “too many notes”.

Reflecting on this a little more, I’ll bet this has to do with how I’m playing the game. Instead of spending 6-8 minutes on each stage, I’m playing with modifiers where it makes sense to hang around for 25 minutes or so. The end of a stage is when the music resets, calms down, and switches to a fresh track. So the real problem is that I’m spending too much time on a stage and the music is trying to maintain “maximum epic” for long periods of time.

Like I said: Great soundtrack. It’s just a bit much when you play like this.

06:58 Dyson Sphere Project Update

Okay, so Paul’s base puts out a Terrawatt of power. I wanted to know the scale of a terrawatt in the real world. Is that a single city? A country? A continent?

We tried to work it out, but after half a minute I realized we’d just nerd sniped ourselves. So we got back to doing the show instead of doing the math.

15:53 Mailbag: Genre Tensions

Dear Diecast,

In Shamus’s Mass Effect retrospective, he mentions how the series always had a tension between its elements of Trek-y sci-fi (quest for knowledge) and elements of Lovecraftian horror (quest toward doom), and would inevitably have to commit to one over the other.

So, I was wondering if there are any other examples you might know of where there is any similar stark blend of genres/story types or tension between big genre conventions, in video games or other mediums? And what are your thoughts on how to handle such complex storytelling? Do you think this kind of setup unavoidably makes promises that cannot be kept, or does it just require really sophisticated writing to account for such a risk/issue?

Kind regards,
Andrew

26:59 Mailbag: Steam Workshop Integration

Dear Diecast,
I’ve been playing a game called Escape Simulator. The base game is a great virtual escape room simulator. The amazing part comes from the steam workshop integration. There are tons of AMAZING user-created maps that are just as good, and often better, then the base game. As a player, this is amazing, I get tons of content for a low price point. How do you think this will play out for the developer? When they release new content, will people buy it when it has to compete against free maps?

Thanks,
Rob Lundeen

29:17:04 Mailbag: Archiving and Preserving Gaming

Deeeeeaaaaar DIEcast,

Previously on the podcast, Shamus has mentioned his wish that videogame publishers would release their source code for commercial games once they were done selling. However, he also acknowledged that – even if this were attainable – the result would be “the release of an enormous code base that nobody can compile”.

What are your thoughts on archiving and preserving gaming?

Do you worry about the extent to which many games are tied to an arcane infrastructure of hardware and software that impede the likelihood that such games will still be playable in the distant future?

If so, do you believe that the videogame industry ought to have more of a moral imperative in simplifying or archiving this infrastructure in the interests of preservation?

Where do you think most of this responsibility would sit?

• The videogame developers and publishers?
• The extraneous software: makers of the drivers, operating systems, or online stores/services?
• Or the extraneous hardware: Graphics cards and consoles?

Yours historically,

Nick

40:55 Mailbag: Spiderman Movies

Deeeeeeeaaaaaar DIEcast,

In an earlier podcast Shamus mentioned that he felt like Avengers Endgame was an appropriate jumping-off point from the MCU. However, since then I have heard him mention snippets about the recent MCU television shows (Wandavision, etc). Does that mean that you have fallen off the wagon, and are back on the… bandwagon?

Over several weeks in the leadup to watching “Spiderman: No Way Home”, my friend and I re-watched every Spiderman movie since the very first Sam Raimi one. This came to 8 movies in total (including Venom 1 and 2) with an apparent total runtime of 21 hours and 1 minute.

So was it worth it? I would have to say… yes!

No Way Home had many little nods and winks, even just the reprisal of simple musical cues from the earlier movies, that wouldn’t have landed anywhere near as well for me otherwise. It was rewarding, if not least of which because it finally gave me the push to see some of the movies I had previously missed (into the Spiderverse being a personal standout). I was a teenager when the very first movie hit cinemas, and it was nice to see some genuine love for the previous continuities and their narrative conclusions.

From one long-time Spiderman fan to another, has Shamus seen Far From Home or No Way Home yet? If so, what did you think of them? Any thoughts on the various Spidermovies?

Spider-sensing your reply,

Nick

45:38 Mailbag: The Anacrusis (2x)

Hey Diecasters!

In case you haven’t noticed, “The Anacrusis” dropped recently in early access (in short: L4D but in 70ies Sci Fi). My first session left me sweating: a few random players and I barely, and I mean barely, managed to beat the first episode, almost, but not quite wiping at the finale (and a handfull of times during other crescendo moments). It left me so exhausted that I had to take a break after the one and a quarter hour it took to finish.

Later, I stumbled upon this blog entry: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1120480/view/5679596996296063978 by Chet Faliszek. Looks like that intensity is by design, and boy oh boy does it seem to hit the mark.

Now for my question, in case that blog entry isn’t enough for a discussion: Why has noone done something like that for a single player RPG? Imagine Oblivion tailoring it’s difficulty and gameplay to the way you actually specced yopur character and how you played rather than with the broken enemy levelling it has.

Kind regards,
Norbert “ColeusRattus” Lickl

Sorry to disturb a second time, dear Casters of Die!

Not having had time to play for a week or two, I noticed that the Anacrusis is pretty much dead in the water, despite being oretty good. Marketing has been next to nonexistant. With the success of Deep Rock Galactic, another 4player coop horde shooter, one would assume that there’d be a market for games like The Anacrusis. Any Idea how and why it is invisible to the gaming community?

Kind regards,
Norbert “ColeusRattus” Lickl

And here is the video I talked about on the show. The difference really is stark when you compare the two games (Back 4 Blood and Left 4 Dead) side-by-side.

Link (YouTube)

Some of the shortcomings – like the lack of mo-capped death animations, lack of facial animation, and lack of musical score – can be attributed to lack of budget. But other things are inexplicable. Survivors don’t cast shadows in flashlight beams? Furniture and clutter are static and can’t be moved by explosions? As I understand it, these things should be completely turnkey in Unreal Engine 4.

As for the Anacrusis, the footage I’ve seen makes it look like a more serious version of the same problem: A game that compares poorly with its predecessor, because the original was made by Valve in their heyday.

I don’t know. I might make a video about it.

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:
00:00 Phishing attacks getting worse, or better?

06:39 Jimmy Webb’s Deluxe Space Looky-Loo

This is the real time tracker I’ve been following since launch.

14:13 Google has Concerns about BitBurner

So Paul told me about BitBurner, but I forgot to ask what the “Google has concerns” thing was about.

22:57 Mailbag: Watching Instead of Playing

Dear Diecast,

What are your thoughts on watching no commentary playthroughs of a video game to get its story, whether the watcher has played the game entirely, partially, or not at all?

All the best and a Happy New Year,
Andrew

26:06 Mailbag: Plot Holes

Dear DieCastles,

When looking back on the history of this site, one could make the argument that the most prominent content is the analysis of plots, with a strong focus on identifying and questioning the existence of plot holes.

What plot holes do you find to be the most annoying? Those which are easily avoidable? Those which are most obvious? Or those which are less noticeable, but risk the complete breakage of immersion in the story once discovered, the kind that once seen can never be unseen?

Regards,

Zeta Kai

32:35 Mailbag: Question for Paul

Dear Diecast,

I hope you’re doing well! As I was watching a stealth section in the latest stream of Batman Arkham Origins with Chris and Shamus, I realized how integral vents are to a lot of action franchises. From the vents of Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard, through the numerous vents found in Half-Life, all the way to the vents Batman crawls through while sneakily downing mooks. Indeed, the moment I see a vent in real life, the first thing I think about is how I can pry it open and sneak undetected through the whole building!

All that being said, though, I really want to ask Paul’s opinion as an engineer who’s actually worked in HVAC: how realistic are the vents we see in video games and action movies? E.g. what do you think of the ones in the Batman games (if you’ve seen them, that is)? Are vents really the Achilles’ Heel to every single security system in the world, as they seem to be portrayed in media?

Keep Being Awesome,
Lino

44:44 Mailbag: Respecs

Dear Dicecast,

How do you feel about respeccing, the process where RPGs let you reallocate all your ability points/perk choices/whatever else? It seems like all points on the spectrum of respec availability have drawbacks (respecs too liberal and you lose the satisfaction of making long-term decisions, too conservative and your build ends up unfixably suboptimal) so where do you prefer things fall?

Ninety-Three

50:07 Mailbag: Mess Effect Audiobook

Dear Diecast,

I’ve been trying to get my friend to read Shamus’s retrospective on the Mass Effect series, but he refuses because he’s one of those audiobook over reading types. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be an audiobook alternative for him. So I was wondering if Shamus had any plans of ever doing one for his Mess Effect book? Or have someone else do it? And if so, if there is any estimation on when it might become available?

All the best,
Andrew

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 Wreckfest

This was kind of amusing. I liked the damage modelling. I did find the loading screens to be sort of mystifying, though. These tracks aren’t that large. Fifteen seconds might not sound like much, but I know how much data you can move in fifteen seconds on a modern machine.

This problem isn’t unique to Wreckfest. Lots of modern-ish games have loading screens for things that ought to be close to instant. Unity game engine has an asset management system that adds tons of wait time to simple asset loads. Wikipedia doesn’t say what engine Wreckfest uses, so I don’t know if the engine is to blame.

Still, it’s one of those curiosities of modern gaming.

00:38 Deep Rock Galactic

Link (YouTube)

02:46 Linux updates

05:24 Mailbag: Christmas Games

Dear Diecast,

I hope you are both well.

The idea of “Christmas movies” has been around for a while. Titles like Home Alone, Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, and Die Hard are standard fare around Yuletide.

I was wondering, are there any games that you would consider to be “Christmas games”? Either games that have a direct link with Christmas, like Merry Gear Solid, or games with a looser connection, like Icewind Dale… or perhaps even games that aren’t linked to Christmas at all, but you associate with Christmas because of some other reason.

Happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year.

Vale,

-Tim

11:38 Mailbag: Be Evil

dear diecast,

do you have any single player games you really like where you play as an evil character?

games like hitman and mafia have you playing an anti-villian

you are doing bad things just trying to survive and make a buck fighting against people who are worse than you

in tie fighter, you’re just a grunt following reasonable orders to keep the peace and enforce the law

the motivations of your character and the people you kill aren’t even addressed

and then there are games with morality systems such as knights of the old republic

the justifications for the evil path and choices is shallow; the motivations are just selfishness, power, or cruelty

this makes the pc tough to relate to, and is why i never play evil paths even on replays

can we make a relatable evil character, or are people too conditioned to be good boys and girls?

thanks,

will

17:34 Mailbag: WoW Classic Transfer Shenanigans

Greetings, Shamus and Paul!

Recently, WoW Classic had a bit of a snafu in which people were able to transfer their geared vanilla characters from the Classic servers to the new, separate progression Season of Mastery servers.

To put a long story short, someone transferred in a character with raid gear that wouldn’t be accessible on one of these servers for the better part of a whole year. Needless to say, they went around causing havoc in battlegrounds just destroying everyone effortlessly.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/r7yqbq/som_naxx_geared_characters_being_transferred_to/

While I’m no longer into WoW, this got me thinking about all the other times in history that silly exploits broke MMOs. Someone assassinating Lord British in Ultima Online, the in-game Corrupted Blood pandemic in WoW- all sorts of things like that.

My question to you two is what’s your favorite example of these game breaking exploits, if any?

~ Starks

21:24 Mailbag: Artillery Games

Dear Diecast,

What are your favorite artillery games? Were you a ‘Worms’ or ‘Scorched Earth’ household.

Sincerely,
Bobbert

23:43 Mailbag: Full Game to Mechanic

Dear Diecast,

So, I have to say, I find golf to be extremely boring. I’m not a sports guy in the first place, but there’s something about this particular one that I find relentlessly sleep-inducing. But I’ve realized that when golf is turned into a game mechanic for a different kind of game, I find it extremely satisfying.

Two games come to mind as an example: “What the Golf?” (https://store.steampowered.com/app/785790/WHAT_THE_GOLF/) and the upcoming “Cursed to Golf” (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1726120/Cursed_to_Golf/), both of which use the mechanics of this game to solve physics-based puzzles.

My question is, does this kind of thing happen to you? Is there some sort of game that you don’t enjoy when it’s the full experience but you do when it becomes a mechanic in a different style of game?

Best wishes,
Pablo

29:09 Mailbag: GMTK

Dear DieCastles,

Mark Brown of Game Makers ToolKit has an ongoing series where he discusses the challenges & learning opportunities inherent in making a video game (link to playlist: Developing). As an indie game developer who has shipped a game, does Shamus have any thoughts on his observations thus far? Have you watched his series? Do you agree with his process so far?

Does Paul have any response to Mark’s approach to making a game? Would you recommend making a game in the way that Mark is pursuing thus far? Have you thought about making your own game, & how would you deal with your own admitted challenges (IE: the dreaded Feature Creep)?

Best Regards,

Zeta Kai

33:39 Mailbag: Unnecessary Mechanics

Dear DieCastles,

My son was replaying Super Metroid recently, & we were discussing the Reserve Tank system, & how unnecessary it is. For a brief recap on how Reserve Tanks work, for those who are not familiar with the game, they are related to Energy Tanks (IE health upgrades), but they start off empty, need to be manually activated (or toggled to Auto-Replenish), & are generally just more cumbersome in every way possible. We concluded that Reserve Tanks could have been entirely scrapped & replaced with additional Energy Tanks, with no loss to the game or its world, & was generally a solution in search of a problem.

Have either of you encountered a video game mechanic that was just there for its own sake, contributing little or nothing to the game as a whole? Have you ever played a game & thought “this just doesn’t need to be here”? And do you find that this is common, even in games that are otherwise considered masterpieces, as Super Metroid is often regarded within its genre?

Best Regards,

Zeta Kai

41:36 Mailbag: Level Up Systems

Dear Diecast,

By the law of the Rule of Three, I suppose this is the last time I may use the same source for inspiration to throw a question your way. (Unless you say it’s okay otherwise.) Yes, another Design Doc video compels me to ask you your thoughts on something video game-related! What do you think makes a good/bad level-up system?

Kind regards,
Andrew

49:17 Mailbag: Vampire Plague

Dear Diecast,

I have a bit of an unusual question this week.

How do you think society and its systems would change if vampires (that burn up in sunlight and have an insatiable appetite for blood) succeeded in turning everyone into one? How might they adapt? Could they adapt? And how long might that new nocturnal society last?

Cheers,
Andrew

During this segment I mentioned that I recently watched a vampire show that I really enjoyed. However, I realized that one of the things I loved was that the whole “vampire” angle came out of nowhere. So if I say the name of the show, then I’ll be spoiling it for others.

At the same time, some people are going to be annoyed because they don’t care about spoilers – they just want to know what I’m talking about. For those people, this video is what got me interested in the show to begin with.

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 Quarantine!
Like I said on the show, my wife is stuck in quarantine 300 miles away. Although she ought to be home in time for Christmas.

Also, she’s visiting our kids in Indiana, not Illinois. This blunder wouldn’t be so bad, except this is like the 10th time I’ve made it. I knew all my states back in 1981, but 40 years later I find that Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois all blur together in my mind as a single mass labeled “middle-ish states that start with I.”

06:39 Albion Online and the mystery of the FPS Limit
I’ve thought about it some more, and I’m still baffled.

17:10 Matrix Awakens

Link (YouTube)

Yes Games Industry, that is all very impressive. Well done, etc etc. But please don’t assume that the resulting adulation indicates we’re hungry for graphically intense rail shooters built around shooting car tires.

21:17 Xbox Game Pass … on Linux?
Once again the megacorps seems to be ravenous when it comes to gathering user data, and incompetent when it comes to using the data.

24:24 Guardians of the Galaxy – QTEs and Linear design

After the show I did find an option to turn off the obnoxious QTEs. It was filed under “accessibility” and not under “difficulty” as I originally expected.

This game is… a lot. I can tell I’m in the home stretch now. I think the game will weigh in at around 20 hours when all is said and done. That’s not particularly long by modern standards, but most 20 hour games are content to leave you alone with the gameplay for a few hours at a time between story beats. But in GotG, the story beats are non-stop. This is a very talkative game.

I’m not saying the dialog is bad. In fact, if we rate it against its AAA contemporaries it’s farking genius. It’s just that I find it sort of exhausting to go on an adventure with these four manic motor-mouth murderers.

36:22 Mailbag: Hub Worlds

Dear Diecast,

Once again, as inspired by Design Doc’s coverage of the topic, I ask you, what do you think makes a great hub world in video games? And what makes a bad one?

All the best,
Andrew

40:40 Mailbag: The Metaverse

Dear Diecast,

I remember reading on older blog post of yours where you wrote about your experiences in the dot-com era, where companies were trying to create things like virtual reality shopping malls and such, and how that was kind of a dumb idea for a whole bunch of reasons.

I’m curious now what you think of Facebook’s Meta stuff and whether or not you feel like history is just kind of repeating itself? I actually work as a 3D developer for a company that’s trying to take advantage of the “virtual reality brick and mortar store,” type idea and that old blog post just plays on endless loop in my head whenever I work on it lol

– Zach

For those of you curious about my history with this topic, check out Crash Dot Com Part 1: A World Gone Mad.

So… that’s a new scheme. I was really surprised to find that PayPal didn’t have a mechanism to say “I do not recognize this invoice as valid”. It did let me refuse to pay it, of course, but it didn’t give me a way to express concern or suspicion. A single report like this wouldn’t be a big deal, but if a new user sends out 1,000 invoices and 600 are ignored, 4 are paid, and 396 are marked as suspicious, then that might be really useful for detecting and combatting fraud.

I wonder if this is a one-off, or if this is going to be part of the meta going forward.

Link (YouTube)

00:00 Social Media and Automated Caring

As part of a discussion on Reddit, my wife listed a couple of songs that she was into at the moment:

• Everything I Love Is Going to Die
• If You Ever Leave I’m Coming With You

The moderator bot saw that text and thought they were indicators of depression or risk of self-harm, so it sent her messages on how to get help. I leave it to you to decide if this is innovative and helpful, or Orwellian and creepy.

What interests me is coming up with other song titles to freak out the automated systems. Something like:

• Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)
• Happiness Is A Warm Gun

I thought to use Let the Bodies Hit the Floor, but like a lot of songs the title isn’t what the lyrics would lead you to believe. The title of that track is just “bodies”, which is a far less interesting title. Imagine if “Sweet Child O Mine” was just “child” or “I Shot the Sheriff” was just “Sheriff”. If you’ve got a strong image in your lyrics, you should use it in your title. It’s not like radio stations charge you by the word.

Anyway, feel free to come up with pairs of well-known songs that would trigger moderation systems to attempt to help / ban you.

04:16 PyCharm

We talked about IDEs for almost half an hour, but it wasn’t until now that I’m writing up these show notes that I finally get it. The name PyCharm is a snake-charmer pun. It’s the tool you use to charm Python.

I’ve seen a ton of “haha our programming language is a snake” jokes on r/ProgrammerHumor. You’d think I would have caught on by now.

28:46 Book of Travels

This art is amazing.

Link (YouTube)

39:58 Mailbag: Sound Design & Soundtracks

Dear Diecast,

Listening to great video game scores got me wondering, What would Shamus and Paul think are the best games when it comes to their sound design, scores, and the alchemical result of their fusion with the visual design, gameplay, and/or game’s subject matter?

Halo’s weapons tend to be appropriately punchy and zappy for both verisimilitude of the world and player satisfaction, and the soundtrack usually hits the mark in enhancing the scale of the epic journey the Chief/player is on, as well as ramping up excitement at the right moments throughout the game. And the music for the first Mass Effect beautifully boosts the sense of awe and wonder at this fascinating new universe in front of the player’s eyes, in addition to heightening the more tense and action-oriented moments, without breaking from the general tone of the setting.

Any games that stand out as particularly impressive or bewilderingly incongruous to you in these areas?

All the best,
Andrew

48:25 Mailbag: Hardware Shortages

This one is a two-fer:

Dear Diecast,

With all of the hardware shortages and no end in sight, do you think the big studios will have to start reigning in their bloated game dev costs? How can they afford to keep making a HD++ games when nobody has the hardware to run them?

Sincerely,

Craptop user & late gen adopter

And the second one…

Dear Diecast,

between crypto mining and certain global crises the price of graphics hardware is currently rather high, and the same goes for RAM.

Between the high costs and the opaque naming schemes, I feel like building your own gaming hardware is not very accessible.

Do you think this will cause PC gaming to lose out in popularity compared to consoles?

Of course neither can hold a candle to mobile gaming, but I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Vale,

-Tim

I just noticed that Christmas and New Years fall on Saturday this year. We normally record the show on Saturdays. Rather than try to schedule around this, I think we’re going to take those weeks off.

Link (YouTube)

00:00 Veloren

Link (YouTube)

06:11 Rust Drama

I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know anything about this community or how it works. But the resignation of the Rust Moderation Team contains juuust enough details to create curiosity and rubbernecking.

10:03 Batman Streams!

This week I’ll be teaming up with Chris from Ramblepak64 to stream Batman: Arkham Origins. The stream begins at 8pm Eastern Time on Tuesday November 30th. This link should give you the time in your local time zone. We’ll be streaming the game on Twitch.

12:10 Potion Craft

Link (YouTube)

22:11 Wheel of Time

As someone who hasn’t read the books, I’m kinda on the fence. As of Episode 3, I’m less interested in the overarching plot and more interested in individual scenes, situations, and locations.

But what I really want to know is: What do book fans think of this show?

33:41 Mailbag: Violent Games

Hello, Shamus and Paul.

There was an interesting thread on Twitter about how games are a very young medium, and we are still exploring all the possibilities to represent the real world or create new ones. TLDR of the thread: 1) most games are violent (having big and visible change on the game world) because it is easy to create an immediate feedback loop (shoot stuff – get points – monkey brain happy) 2) and because we are on 20th iteration of 3d shooters, 3rd iteration of photo games, 0th iteration of anything else possible.

What are your thoughts on that? Do you have some ideas what some non-violent games could look like? Paul, do you filter games you let your kids play based on how immediate/violent the response they get from the game?

Best regards, Ilya.

And here is the Errant Signal video that I think sums up the situation really well. Chris Franklin has created a lot of great essays, but this is one of my favorites.

Link (YouTube)

42:12 Mailbag: Chet Faliszek on Designer Notes

Dear Diecast,

Have you heard the recent interview with Chet Faliszek? (https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/chet-faliszek) I thought it might be relevant to your (i.e., Shamus’s) interests. My favorite part is the secret origin of Old Man Murray as a grey-market games reseller.

–John

This podcast is amazing. A must-hear for anyone interested in the goings-on at Valve Software.

54:54 Mailbag: Good Design, Bad Design

Dear Diecast,

I recently watched Design Doc’s latest video on “Good Design, Bad Design” to do with UIs in video games. I thought it was very interesting and wondered if you had your own best and worst picks for game UIs? Do you have a preference for UI type: non-diegetic vs diegetic? And any other thoughts on the topic, if you feel so inclined?

Kind regards,
Andrew

And then I realized that the sound of talking around a cough drop was far more distracting than the hoarseness I was trying to cover up. Oops.

EDIT: Listening to the show later, I have to say that Issac did a really great job of editing around this. Everything sounds pretty natural on the show.

Link (YouTube)

00:00 My advice to Kotick

My advice is, “Get out now. It’s only going to get worse for you.”

Although I would also accept, “Fall in a well and die.”

16:23 Paul’s New PC and Linux Gaming Report

27:43 Dislike Button

Apparently the dislike button is being changed one region at a time, which is why some of us see the change and some of us don’t. Here is what YouTube co-founder Jawed said about the removal of the dislike button:

Watching Matt Koval’s announcement about the removal of dislikes, I thought something was off.
The spoken words did not match the eyes. The video reminded me of an interview Admiral Jeremiah Denton gave in 1966. I have never seen a less enthusiastic, more reluctant announcement of something that is supposed to be great.

Calling the removal of dislikes a good thing for creators cannot be done without conflict by someone holding the title of “YouTube’s Creator Liaison”. We know this because there exists not a single YouTube Creator who thinks removing dislikes is a good idea — for YouTube or for Creators.

Why would YouTube make this universally disliked change? There is a reason, but it’s not a good one, and not one that will be publicly disclosed. Instead, there will be references to various studies. Studies that apparently contradict the common sense of every YouTuber.

The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform. Why? Because not all user-generated content is good. It can’t be. In fact, most of it is not good. And that’s OK. The idea was never that all content is good. The idea WAS, however, that among the flood of content, there are great creations waiting to be exposed. And for that to happen, the stuff that’s not great has to fall by the side as quickly as possible.

The process works, and there’s a name for it: the wisdom of the crowds. The process breaks when the platform interferes with it. Then, the platform invariably declines. Does YouTube want to become a place where everything is mediocre? Because nothing can be great if nothing is bad.

In business, there’s only one thing more important than “Make it better”. And that’s “Don’t fuck it up”.

32:18 LudoNarraCon

It’s not a joke. This is a real convention.

33:41 Mailbag: Nethack

Dear DieCast,

What are your favorite Nethack memories?
Also, thoughts on getting in trouble for playing immoral games.

Sincerely,
Bobbert

Here is the end-of-game text from Paul.

42:07 Mailbag: DRM Again

Shamus,

Good evening. I know it’s almost certainly too late for the next Diecast, but there’s always another! Would you be able to comment on the recent failure(s) of DRM as seen here? Do you think these problems might actually turn the tide, given the relative lack of utility to a DRM scheme now?
(1) https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/11/faulty-drm-breaks-dozens-of-games-on-intels-alder-lake-cpus/
(2) https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211109/09064247908/denuvo-games-once-again-broken-paying-customers-thanks-to-drm-mishap.shtml
(3) https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/denuvo-drm-removed-from-upcoming-strategy-game-dev-blames-performance-impact/

50:04 Mailbag: Remasters

Dear diecast,

Recently there have been a number of remaster/remake failures (WC3 reforged, GTA remastered (3/VC/SA)). I, as a non-programmer am quite confused about this. Aren’t modern game systems easier to code for? Arent there more readymade tools to make game coding easier? Why does it take a team years to remake a game (where they already know exactly what the end product should look like. Its not like they have to develop it as they go) and end up screwing up? Shouldn’t “make that but with bigger resolution, modern system support and better textures” be trivial to do?

with kind regards,
chris

Here are the images I talked about on the show. The first is the version of Denise where she looks like a Mii:

These three different images represent different versions of the game. Rockstar pulled the first one from stores and unleashed their legal team to make sure that the third one got taken down, all so they could sell us the second one.

The original game didn’t use bump maps / normal maps. San Andreas pre-dated the point where that sort of thing became common. And that’s fine. But here they added bump maps. Well, they added one apparent bump map. And got it wrong.

And here’s one more image that I didn’t show Paul, but which is fairly instructive. Here are some screenshots of the in-universe pornographic actress “Candy Suxx”.^[1]

Now to be fair: Yes, the original 2002 version of this character (left) is still atrocious. I was making 3D characters in this era, on an earlier version of this same graphics engine, with the same apparent polygon budget. I was always a pretty crap artist, but I promise you I was able to make things much better than this.

The shoulders are all wrong, the neck is a disaster, and her overall proportions are off. Way too many polygons were spent on making her boobs very round, when the rest of her is conspicuously jagged. I realize that the oversized bust was part of the joke of the character and I’m not suggesting it should be made smaller. I’m saying you could reclaim quite a few triangles from the breasts and make them look slightly less round, and spend those polygons elsewhere for massive improvements to the overall silhouette.

Having said all of that, it’s obvious that the Definitive Edition is miles worse. In fact, a running theme in the Definitive Edition screenshots is characters with bizzaro-world proportions.

Here is what I think is happening:

Somehow, these old models are getting mapped onto skeletons with different proportions. The “definitive” image of Candy is exactly the sort of outcome you should expect if you carelessly stick a male skeleton inside a female mesh. The shoulders will get wider, the torso and arms will get longer, and the legs will get shorter.

In the world of animation, the skeletons come with the animations. (Sometimes. It depends on the engine.) So if you’re lazy and you don’t want to make male and female versions of all animations, then the female models might end up playing male animations, which will deform them to fit male proportions. If you’ve got a “stylized” figure with exaggerated feminine proportions, then the resulting deformation is going to look freakish.^[2]

12:17 Guess which component failed!
I’m going to guess… the operating system?

20:11 Barotrauma
I am reminded of Sunless Sea, another vaguely horror-ish game with cool art and delicious atmosphere that wasn’t particularly fun to play.

26:21 Mailbag: Villains

Dear Diecast,

Who do you think are some of the best written villains in video games, and/or what do you think makes a great (video game) villain? Would you say there are constraints or stumbling blocks that exist in video games for making well-written villains that aren’t an issue in other mediums? Do you think villains in video games need to be tackled in differently when writing them? Who are some of your favourites, and why? Any examples you would use as a “Don’t do this, never do this” piece of advice for future games? Are there any villains you think were close to being great, but ruined or held back from achieving their full potential?

UnKind regards,
– Andrew

34:32 Mailbag: Blog to Video

Dear Diecast,

I’ve noticed Shamus has a lot of interesting and incisive blog posts, particularly the retrospectives. I’m sure the thought has crossed your mind and there must be a reason for not having done so yet (barring simultaneous blog/video releases), but I was curious as to why you (or your editor) don’t turn those blog posts into videos. I imagine it’s because acquiring all the relevant footage, getting the recordings right, and having it edited together properly is very time consuming and would take away from your other work.

But you have put together a number of videos from scratch (as in scripting), it seems, and you have said you’d like to do more videos in the hopes that your success there will take off. So I was wondering if you had any plans to make the script part a lot easier by recycling old content and making videos out of them, perhaps even gradually on the side as you focus on the work you deem more important? For instance, would you ever consider turning your Mess Effect series or retrospectives on the Arkham games into videos? Or even smaller, more singular pieces, like The Cost of Spectacle, and The Plot-Driven Door?

All the best,
– Andrew

38:22 Mailbag: Refterm

Dear Diecast,

you may have heard about Casey Muratori’s Refterm, a terminal emulator for Windows that vastly outperformed the standard Windows terminal.

Are there other applications you think could be vastly improved by implementing lessons learned from game development?

Vale,

-Tim

P.S. If you haven’t heard about Refterm, the developer made a video highlighting it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg

Link (YouTube)

52:00 Mailbag: Playing Games WRONG

Dear Diecast,

Have you ever tried playing Cities:Skylines wrong? Throwing roads around willy-nilly, applying the “eh, wherever” philosophy of zoning, taking the SimCity Monster Hates Your City video’s city design as a How-To Guide, and generally YOLOing everything until the resultant monstrosity nears collapse… and then trying to fix it?

May the day find you well,
Cilba Greenbraid

Link (YouTube)

00:00 2-Factor Authentication

On one hand, I understand: Some people use the same username & password for everything, so if their account gets compromised then so does their email. These people generate tons of support headaches when they get hacked. These people create cascading security problems that can threaten the entire platform.

On the other hand, Google bears quite a bit of guilt in this mess. It’s pretty hard to have your email login be different from your YouTube login when they are, by design, the same account. Gmail, YouTube, Adsense, FitBit, Google Earth, Stadia, Google Maps, and Chrome profiles are all the same thing.

At the very least, Gmail should have been isolated from the others in a way that encouraged the user to have two distinct logins: One for email, and one for “everything else”. In Gmail your login has an @ symbol, and Google could have forbidden the @ and period in usernames for the “everything else” login. This would mean that one stolen set of credentials wouldn’t automatically escalate to identity theft, and email could be used for account recovery.

Barring that, how about you let us use an alternate non-gmail address for 2FA? Because my phone number is for my friends, and I’m not friends with giant disorganized apathetic corporations.

12:12 Meta Trubs

Here is the video I mentioned in this segment: Happy Brandwashing, Facebook!

20:50 Playing Hitman 2 Wrong But SO Right

I’m nowhere near the skill and tenacity of Big Mooney, but I’m having fun ruining 47’s reputation for discretion and precision. But if you want to see a pro do it, then here is Big Mooney trying to clear the absurdly dense population of the Miami map:

Link (YouTube)

23:42 Satisfactory Update 5

So did they fix any of my gripes with the game, including the trivial-to-fix usability problem that is now 3 years old? Paul has the details.

30:27 Mailbag: CPU or GPU?

Dear Diecast,

if you had to choose one, would you rather have a PC with:
A: a great CPU but terrible GPU, or:
B: a terrible CPU but great GPU?

Vale,
-Tim

35:19 Mailbag: Challenge Modes

Your Excellency, Podcast for Life, Grognard Commander Al Hadji Doctor Diecast, VC, DSO, MC, FBI, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the Hosting Services in Cyberspace in General and 1And1 in Particular,

What’s your favorite challenge mode in a game, either self-imposed or as a mutator you can toggle on? More broadly, what do you look for in a challenge mode and what drives you to seek them out?

I mostly look for challenge modes when I love a game and want to play more of it, but I’ve already beaten the main campaign and replaying regular mode would be too much of a dull retread. My favorite ever challenge mode was trying a “No ranged plants” run of Plants Vs Zombies. I loved it but the game was very easy so to spice things up I picked an insane challenge analogous to “beat this FPS without guns, knife and grenades only”. It turned out to be a difficult but doable challenge that forced me to invent all kinds of weird strategies and a bunch of what I learned ended up being transferable to improve my play outside of the stupid challenge mode.

Ninety-Three

42:09 Mailbag: Interesting Developers

Dear Diecast,

with Bioware, Blizzard, and Obsidian releasing very underwhelming fare lately, I was wondering if there were any new developers you guys are keeping an eye on?

For example, I am keeping an eye on ConcernedApe, who is working on Haunted Chocolatier now that he is mostly done with Stardew Valley.

Vale,

-Tim

49:25 Mailbag: Babylon 5 Reboot

dear diecast,

about a month ago, a reboot of babylon 5 was announced

the original ran along side star trek ds9

i was a fan of the series in my last years of high school into university, and I even bought the dvd sets

did you watch b5, and would you watch the reboot?

also, when a property has a fandom, is it possible to reboot the property while respecting the fandom?

thanks,

will

The Breakdown

Here is (roughly) the waveform for this episode:

The above image is 1024 pixels wide. This Diecast is 70 minutes long. So a minute of show equals about 14 horizontal pixels. Blue pixels are Paul talking, and I’m red.

Uh… Happy Halloween, I guess?

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 Happy Halloween

I suppose going door-to-door to meet the neighbors and beg for candy is not really a great idea during a pandemic. I guess the kids would rather show off their costumes on TikTok anyway.

I wonder if Trick-or-Treat is going to change / die off permanently because of this?

01:59 Audacity

Link (YouTube)

02:52 Windows 11

The only thing I remember from the previews is the way W11 centers the start bar, which strikes me as being a ridiculously frivolous change for the sake of change.

12:38 Dune

This movie is really sticking with me. I’m serious that I might take a swing at reading the books.

How do the book fans feel about it? Is it a good adaptation? A hack job?

19:42 Wildermyth

Link (YouTube)

Man, these AI-generated stories are getting really good!

23:54 Sable

Link (YouTube)

27:06 Mailbag: Analog Horror

Dear Diecast

Not sure how you feel about Youtube web series but a new genre known as “analog horror” had been popping up recently and this one really grabbed my attention, was wondering if you have any thoughts or feelings on it?

Love, YEKNOD

28:53 Mailbag: Game Scores

Dear Diecast,

In reading comments about your GTA IV analysis https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=43438 the topic of reviews is raised. As usual, there is no consensus about the topic. Some people accept an A through D system where everything grades out somewhere between 6-10 / 10. Some think it’s strange that a 65 is bad but a 75 is good. Some think scores are meaningless because experiences are subjective. I THINK it’s interesting that the topic hasn’t been resolved enough to have a reliable system. I need research to ascertain that one publication’s 50% score means “Average” while the other’s means “Worst game of 2021”.

So I got to thinking about your article about the Myers-Briggs test and I wondered if the confusion correlates with personality differences. Perhaps what people value differs and is as deeply ingrained as personality types. Some people want a mechanical analysis of the systems. Some want to know how a game made the reviewer feel. Some want to know about the writing. Some want to be lied to, to justify their preconception. Maybe personalities are too disparate to ever come up with a useful system for this.

In my music player I rank on a 1-5 scale but, like converting AM/PM to 24 hour military time, it actually means “6-10”. Anything worth a score should be, at a minimum, good. A 1/5 is a compliment. Scores are then a matter of how good something is. Isn’t that the point?! Why grade a crappy game or listen to bad music? Why do I care to what degree something is bad?

-Chris P.

39:02 Mailbag: Mallory Archer

Hello Shamus and Paul,

Earlier this year, Jessica Walter who is famous for her roles on Arrested Development and of course, voiced Mallory Archer on Archer, passed away.

Season 12 of Archer wrapped up last week and they paid tribute to her in a very touching scene:

(link if you haven’t already seen it. I love that she is reunited with her (IRL) husband)

Did you guys watch season 12 of Archer? How did you think they handled Ms. Archer leaving the show?

Also ,what is your favorite Mallory Archer quote?

Do you think the show can go on without her?

Sincerely,

Leendert

44:04 Mailbag: DnD Thought Experiment

Dear Diecast,

My brain works in mysterious ways. Sometimes a silly idea enters my mind, and no matter what I do, I invariably drift back to thinking about it. The latest such idea is this: what if a Lich had Twitter as his phylactery? One step further – what if the entire Internet was his phylactery?! I’ve thought an embarrassingly long time about this, so I’ve decided to try and loop you in as well! I’ve boiled it down to two pivotal points:

1. Given traditional fantasy rules, would that even work, especially with websites as massive as Twitter or Facebook? Or the entire Internet for that matter! Which part of a server would need to be his phylactery so that an entire social network/the Internet serves as a phylactery?
2. And if we manage to solve the issue above, how could we kill him without bombing humanity’s infrastructure back to the Stone Age? Barring that, could we maybe hide from him somehow?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this :D

Keep Being Awesome,
Lino

Here are the rules regarding a Phylactery. I really think we should try the “blowing up Twitter” thing, just to be sure.

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 Filament

Why was this game not called String Theory?

15:29 Mailbag: New World Drama

Dear Diecast,

So, the Syndicate faction (purple) on my New World server just had their first bit of major drama today—the guild leader of The Olympians, the guild that has held Everfall since the game started and thus was a very rich, popular guild, took THE ENTIRE guild treasury and switched factions with some of their guild officers, then immediately used that treasury to declare war on Everfall.

Faction chat is blowing up with the story, the guild—now led by someone who hasn’t been on in days, so there’s no one to pull the group together—is hemorrhaging members, and my guild may just wind up the new premiere area controlling guild as a result.

It’s an interesting server—there’s a major PVP Syndicate guild that doesn’t go after territories on their own. What they do, is they hire themselves out to the guilds that DO have territories to fight in their wars. From what I’ve seen, they haven’t lost one yet. We actually just hired them to defend OUR territory, because we’re getting attacked by a major PVP guild and don’t have enough high-level players yet.

The drama kinda reminds me of what you were talking about with your Goldshire post, and makes me think New World is, indeed, going to be pretty successful.

Have you seen any drama on your server(s)?

I’m on Argadnel btw if you’d like to come join in the fun.

Jennifer Snow

A small gripe: This game only allows you 2 characters per server. I already have 2 characters playing on the East Coast, which means I can’t make more. The excuse is that you don’t “need” more than one character because there aren’t any classes and any character can do any job. Which sounds nice, but you have to respec your skill points and get a whole different set of gear to switch from (say) healing to damage-dealing. That’s a huge pain in the ass, and I’d just as soon keep different characters.

Maybe I want one character to play with family, another to play with friends from work, and another for solo, because I want each group of people to stay in the same level range.

Maybe I want one character for PvE content, another for PvP, and another for weird experimental solo play.

Remember when games would let you create a dozen different characters? I notice our allowed slots began shrinking about ten years ago, right when free-to-play was really taking off and they realized they could sell us character slots.

I hate this. The future sucks.

20:21 New World Currency Crisis

Money is leaving the economy faster than it’s being created, which means money is scarce. Which means the game is suffering from a deflationary crisis.

Normally people trade goods using the in-game auction house, and the auction house takes a little cut. Sure, you could spam chat, trying to sell your goods without giving a cut to the AH, but that’s a lot of hassle to save a few gold, which you could raise in a couple of minutes of grinding.

But now that money is precious, the AH cut represents a lot more value. Maybe you’d need to work for half an hour to make it back. So now it’s worth the time and trouble to sell goods manually.

Which leads to the question: Why is this only happening now?

On the show I theorized that this was the result of towns having more upkeep. All the city infrastructure has been upgraded, which means that it costs more per day to keep the city going. Maybe this is draining money out of the economy faster than a few weeks ago?

Or maybe the constant PvP warfare is draining money? I don’t know how the large-scale stuff works so I don’t know what it costs or who pays for it. Still, if war was a money-sink then it seems like people would stop spending money on war. Yes, I realize we have this problem in the Real World™ too, but in the real world lots of people make money from war and there are real resources at stake. In the game, war is expensive, there’s no money to be made, and controlling a region doesn’t give you anything except bragging rights and a second job running the damn place.

Or did one of these recent patches throttle back on how fast money enters the economy?

In most MMOs, your income scales with level. A quest might pay (say) thirty cents at level 1, 3 dollars at level 10, and 300 dollars at level 20. But here in NW, income seems to be very linear, and perhaps even flat. I did some grinding last night, killing level 20 foes. Most of them dropped no money, but once in a while^[1] someone would drop 5g. Then I did some grinding of foes that were level 30, and got similar results. Then I found an area with foes at level 7 and repeated the experiment, and found that foes dropped ~3.7g.

This creates some weird incentives. If I want money, it’s more efficient to run around one-shotting zero-threat foes than it is to engage with level-appropriate content. Is this intentional?

I don’t know. It’s weird. All of this began just as I started playing a faction-less crafting maven, so I’m having trouble following the problem because I’m disconnected from half the economy.

32:27 Mailbag: Tech Ahead of its Time

Dear Diecast,

I hope you’re doing well! Recently, I watched a video about Sir Clive Sinclair (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwJqOt2SOls) – a British inventor who made micro-computers and other electronics in the ’70s and ’80s. His company ultimately went under, because they made an electric scooter that was just too ahead of its time. This made me wonder – have there been any products – could be both hardware or software – that you think were too ahead of their time, and – had they been made a decade or two later would have killed it?

Keep Being Awesome,
Lino

Here is the vlogbrothers video I mentioned:

Link (YouTube)

45:35 Mailbag: Evolving Tastes

Hm. I seem to have messed this one up. I got caught up talking about the opening paragraph and forgot to answer the question. Oopsie.

Dear Diecast,

I was wondering if any of you have already watched the currently newest popular series, called ‘Squid game’. It’s the type of realistic-ish sort of anti-utopia (dystopia?) Netflix seems so fond of making. I’d love to read a series on its worldbuilding too *wink wink*

I was also wondering, since both of you have been gaming for a while now, if your tastes in what kind of games you like best have evolved over time?

Kind regards,
Galad_t

47:48 Mailbag: Cosmetic Appeal

Dear Diecast,

lately I have been distracted in my DS2 100% run by a dreadful enemy: Fashion Souls.

In short I have succumbed to the appeal of dressing up my character in a mix-and-match of the various pieces of armour and clothing the game offers. In Dragon’s Dogma I also succumbed to Fashion Dogma, as it’s called in that fandom.

Do you guys have games where playing dress-up with your character or customising your car/plane/submarine/… can become a time sink? I believe some people like Skyrim for that, but I’d be interested in hearing your opinions.

Vale,

-Tim

I thought of more examples of good writing after the show, but I don’t want to keep amending the list forever. I’m sure if I missed anything crucial you’ll tell me about it in the comments.

Link (YouTube)

00:00 I am Iron Man

As this post goes live I’ll be at the hospital again, getting another dose of iron delivered directly to my bloodstream. It’s going to be totally metal.

07:42 Dyson Sphere Program

I wish I’d spent time with this game instead of trying in vain to squeeze some fun out of (un)Satisfactory.

09:26 New World

I’m playing on the Trapalanda server. (East coast.) How are things elsewhere? Is Fisherman’s Bend the Goldshire of New World?

I’ll bet it isn’t. These folks take the game pretty seriously right now. Maybe once a bunch of people hit the level cap they’ll get bored and come to Fisherman’s Bend to dick around, but for now everyone is all business. Chat is currently filled with discussions of:

1. Leveling
2. Gear
3. Combat
4. PvP
5. Endless recriminations regarding the faction wars and why we (purple) aren’t winning.

37:59 Signed copy of Mess Effect?

It helps if I do these in batches. Drop a comment if you think you’ll want a signed copy of my book. Once I figure out how much interest there is, I’ll order a few and we can get the process rolling.

39:05 Mailbag: Shang-Chi?

Dear Diecast

Have you guys seen Shang-Chi? Or more specifically, did you guys go outside to the cinema to watch Shang-Chi? I admit that I’m miffed that Hollywood is rushing to pretend everything is back to the old normal while a new delta variant of the plague rages across the country, just to keep theaters open for their “prestige value” compared to home streaming.

Love,
Mule

45:54 Mailbag: Foreshadowing and Payoff

Dear Diecast,

in Final Fantasy VIII (that’s 8 for readers unfamiliar with Roman numerals), there are several ways to access the game’s lore. Aside from the obvious (NPC dialogues) there is also Squall’s PC in the Balamb Garden classroom. A number of lore entries can also be accessed through the in-game menu.

Now one of those lore entries talks about how Guardian Forces (what summons are called in the game) have a detrimental effect on their users’ memories. Later in the game this detail pays off in the plot by the main characters finding out that they have forgotten some important stuff.

That plot point has been criticised for coming out of nowhere, which made me wonder: do you think that all foreshadowing of important plot points needs to be done in mandatory dialogue and/or cutscenes, so players don’t get blind-sided?

Vale,
-Tim

55:01 Mailbag: Good Writing?

Hi guys,

Shamus’s most recent article on writing in video game writing sparks an obvious question: What are a few of the games you both regard as the most well written titles out there? Furthermore, how many of those are relatively new, versus being ‘old classics’?

I’m not trying to spark an old grognard argument there, mind you. :) All of my favorite game stories were classics for almost the entirety of the last decade, but these last few years smaller studios and indies have produced many tales that I’ve found to be truly exceptional.

-JMobius

And another one:

Dear Diecast,

Last week you covered bad writing. What about good writing? What are your top 3 best written games? Not simply good, but the best by your own standards?

– Steve C

1:03:01 Mailbag: Annoying Messages

Ok, so I was playing Elder Scrolls Online, ran into a quest where I get “You must gather your party before venturing forth,” and it was all I could do to not throw my mouse into the wall. Apparently, I have some unresolved issues with Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. So, is there a type of game message (or a particular one) that just drives you guys up the wall?
Thanks,
Melfina (Mel-feen-ah) the Blue

On the show I said “Spawn more overlords” was the message I hated to see. But I think I should have picked “Whole article on the front page, boss.”

1:10:53 James Webb Telescope

Link (YouTube)

The James Webb telescope! Just two more months, and our astrophysicists will FINALLY have the tools they need to search for James Webb.

Does he exist? What does he look like? Does he mind us looking at him? We’re finally going to have the answers to some really big questions.

Also, check out the reverse mailbag question below. I’d love to hear your answer, even if you don’t listen to the podcast.

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:
00:42 Death Loop

11:34 Dyson Sphere Project

16:19 New World: Amazon’s new MMO

I need to correct what I said on the podcast. I’ve hopped around and played with a few alts, and now I can see the game isn’t nearly as dynamic or player-controlled as it seemed at first. The town locations and layout are 100% fixed.

That being the case, I need to curse the developer who decided the Marauder faction leader needed to be on the giant ship in the middle of town. Was it completely necessary to make players climb ALL THESE STEPS just to turn in the next stupid fetch quest? The Syndicate faction is usually overpopulated and dominating on the servers I’ve visited, and I wonder how much of that has to do with the fact that the Syndicate faction leader is right there between the crafting stations and the player storage, while the Covenant is at the end of a pointless dead end street and the Marauders are at the top of fucking Machu Picchu.

Location, location, location.

37:50 Reverse Mailbag: Favorite Gun

Dear Diecast Listeners,

What’s your favorite videogame firearm? If you could take a gun from an old game and have it in a modern one, what would it be?

Also, MOST people are going to answer the Doom2 shotgun or the Half-Life 2 revolver. That can be your answer if you want, but see if you can come up with any other amazing examples.

-Shamus

39:17 Mailbag: Bad Writing is Bad

Like I said on the show, this question is going to get an article of its own later in the week.

39:44 Mailbag: Sympathy for the Publisher

Dear Diecast

Recently I’ve been reading Jason Schreier’s book named ‘Press Reset’. First chapter is about Warren Spector, who needs no introduction (just in case, he’s mostly known for such titles as Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, Bad Blood and of course CyberMage: Darklight Awakening. Also something called ‘Deus Ex’, but who knows what that even is).

The chapter describes many ups and downs of his career, but suffice to say that the man is a veteran of the industry. What striked me, however, is how he described his approach to creating games – that in order to make a great game, you have to go over-budget and over-time. Otherwise, it’s simply not possible. To quote: ‘Can you name one game that has shipped on time and on budget that anybody cares about?’.

Now, I know it’s a common thing to point at publishers and accuse them of being incompetent, greedy nincompoops. And many times it’s probably true. There were many cases in that chapter that described exactly that – great games were crushed, because publishers had no idea what they were doing (my favourite example was when Eidos marketing told Spector that they won’t let him do a western game, because that genre is dead and is never going to make any money… and then Red Dead Redemption was released).

But, at the same time, I can understand them a little – imagine if you hire someone who openly admits that he will go over-time and over-budget because, well, that is how he rolls.

Just to be clear, I love pretty much everything that Spector was involved. The man is a genius, no doubt about that. But, I mean, that attitude must be infuriating to work with. I wonder how many devs share his beliefs.

I don’t have experience with making games, so I want to ask: do you think it’s true? That in order to be truly great, the game needs to go overboard and be done under pressure? Or it’s simply a matter of proper organization?

Cheers,

Darek

PS: This question supposed to be only three sentences long. But tell me guys, can you name one question that had appropriate length that anybody cares about?

44:24 Mailbag: The Trilogy

Dear Diecast,

Trilogies! Who doesn’t like the anticipation of an excellent game getting a sequel, having the sequel change everything good from the first to bad, and having the third piss on the first’s grave. Messy Effects aside, I wonder whether the trilogy is actually a great opportunity to iterate and improve game concepts. One particular example that jumps to mind is the Creeper World series. The first was fun, but especially from a production value perspective, not much more than a playable prototype. The second changed almost everything and I like the gameplay quite a bit less than the first. The third stays more true to the concept of the first, yet still uses many good ideas from the second, and has much better production value. (but still pretty basic, it’s pretty clear the dev is a programmer, not an artist. Which is fine.)

Are there other games that used their trilogy to iterate and improve? Or do any notable missed opportunities come to mind?

With kind regards,

Marvin “can also write questions shorter than a novel”

51:07 Mailbag: Star Wars Visions

Dear Diecast

Have you guys seen Star Wars Visions? I know it’s a bit of a meme nowadays that anything that’s not the sequel trilogy is the greatest Star Wars thing since the originals but Visions felt genuinely fresh and fun in a way that the fanservice-ridden Mandalorian season two wasn’t and it isn’t even canon!

Love, Donkey

The Filibuster

As promised, here is what the podcast looks like in our audio editor:

The top bar is Paul’s audio. The one below it is my audio. You can see that my audio is mostly an unbroken blue line. Paul’s audio is mostly a horizontal line (no sound) with occasional vertical lines where he might jump in with an “I see” or an “Oh, yeah. Right.”