Will, Lucas, and Chris talk about what they’re looking forward to in 2010, mostly video games.
Download: Dork Shelf Podcast 15 (32 MB, MP3, 46:52)
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Listen:
Programme:
- 0:00 — “Casio Bossa Nova” by Holy Fuck
- 2:30 — Comics and Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire
- 9:00 — BioShock 2, Deus Ex 3, and ten-year titles
- 19:40 — Mass Effect, continuing game stories and characters
- 29:30 — “Go Shoppin’” by Bran Van 3000
- 33:00 — Melville and his narcissists
- 37:30 — Clash of Heroes and Dark Messiah
- 46:15 — “Boxcutter Emporium Pt. 2″ by Sixtoo
Discussed:
Oh, my God, you guys discussed ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ without me? We are no longer on speaking terms. Try to talk to me. I dare you.
I agree with whoever said that if you’re going to redo ASoIaF, an HBO series is the best possible medium. I really want to see them do this – for fantasies all over! If you say, “mheh, why do I need to see a video version of that fantasy book” you could say that about every sci-fi show. Except sci-fi has developed a strong TV following – and it’s time fantasy got its due and did the same. Only by way of HBO and Sean Bean – not Legend of the Seeker or Hercules. Something serious. Something with some meat on the bones. What better choice than a popular fantasy series wherein most of the action doesn’t require special effects? Whoo! Go green light!
Oh. Right. I’m not talking to you.
Uh…. bye!
I don’t want to put words in Chris’s mouth, but I think what he meant was that there was nothing about the books that made him want to see and hear it again on-screen. It’s not that he’s against fantasy television shows (though he may be), only that the series works well as books and doesn’t have any particular qualities that would make a TV adaptation seem necessary.
Joel, we can still be friends, right? If and when the pilot gets picked up, you’ll be the first on the mic with your thoughts, I promise*.
* Not a real promise
Well I for one cannot wait to see HBO’s Game of Thrones, should we be fortunate enough to have it picked up.
Just as an footnote to something I said re: Jean-Pierre Melville in the podcast; while he wasn’t technically part of the French New Wave, his films and his style heavily influenced many of those filmmakers. In fact Melville actually acts in Godard’s Breathless.
As for Melville’s other films, I saw Army of Shadows just after the podcast and it was fucking incredible, such an intense film.
lol – Lucas. You bet!*
*”bet” in this instance is used as a metaphor for gambling. “Gambling” is a metaphor for “no.”
Re: the state of downloadable content.
Perhaps I’m just coming at it from a different approach, but I don’t feel it necessary for DLC to enhance the story. My first experience with DLC was with Oblivion. Through this I eventually got into downloading user-created mods for the game. Everything from “fixes” to the menu, archery and barter systems, to new items retextures and quests. These mods did nothing for the story, but gave the game a second breath of life in terms of gameplay which allowed me to maintain interest in completing sidequests beyond the main story.
In that regard, I’ve come to look at DLC as something similar to these mods. As long as they’re integrated into the game organically (e.g. modded items are available for purchase at a store or via a small quest and not just dropped in my inventory) I’m happy to have the DLC solely enhancing the gameplay. If they have a sidequest associated with them which provides a bit of narrative, all the better! When I find myself wanting an extension to the main story is when I start looking towards full-fledge expansions. Maybe that’s just my tastes in general as I find myself putting less emphasis on narrative in favour of gameplay in my RPGs. Price also has an impact on this: I’d never pay five bucks to have my horse in Oblivion look pretty.
On a side note I’ve played through the Stone Prisoner DLC in Dragon Age and was actually surprised at how the acquired character, Shale, was integrated into the main quests of the campaign.
Will, can you believe it? I’m finally posting on Dorkshelf!
You mean you don’t want horse armour?!
I’m in the same boat for Oblivion; all the user-created mods really extended the life of the game and improved the overall experience for me. I love when the players do a better job of fixing the game than the developers do, if they’re willing to try at all.
Speaking to Oblivion, Dragon Age and other games like Mass Effect and BioShock… it’s really annoying when the PC versions suffer because the games are designed with consoles in mind. The user-interfaces for all of these games are perfect examples; they were designed to be used with controllers, the text was sized for a TV and in the case of Mass Effect and Oblivion the horribly simplified inventory systems were nearly unusable in the PC versions of the game.
Glad to see you’re finally posting on the site Adam, and thanks for listening to the podcast. We’ve got to have you on some time.
As an exclusive PC gamer for the last 4 years or so I agree that these “consolized” PC ports are really detracting from the gameplay experience (though in its defence, I think Dragon Age has made the best attempt to rectify this). Despite the clumsy controls of these RPGs, EA Sports takes it all one step further (we are allowed to discuss sports games on this site, right?). Aside from the clumsy controls which make a gamepad essential (have you ever tried to play FIFA on a keyboard and mouse?) they port the game using the PS2 engine, loosing lots of the eye candy, player animations and even career-mode elements that make the current console’s ports fantastic.
Will, out of curiosity, what platform are you Playing Dragon age on?
I understand how frustrating it can be to play a game that has been sloppily ported or has design concessions that work against the expectations of a PC gamer in favour of a making it more console-friendly.
That said, I don’t think that you’ve chosen the right games to get upset over, Will. BioShock, as I’ve argued, didn’t really seem to be any less effective for having chosen to avoid the grid-based inventory system and obscure character stats of System Shock 2. Fallout 3 also did a good job of making the game accessible to a gamepad-using player while not hobbling PC players. Mass Effect‘s inventory system was pretty shit on the 360, but they changed—improved—the interface on the PC to take advantage of the mouse (something they’ve also done in Dragon Age).
Though there are still ways in which developers trade-off certain features in favour of the consoles, I think that, in large part, the worst cases of consolitis come about not because developers put all their efforts into the console version, but because they don’t really know how to design for the console. I’d like to think that the worst consolitis is behind us (see the period around 2002–2004), because BioWare and Valve and other developers that have gone from the PC to consoles are getting better and better at making games for the 360 and etc. and that means that they better know how to accomodate the consoles without sacrificing the PC experience. I think that games like Left 4 Dead 2, Dragon Age, and BioShock show that consolitis is disappearing (especially when you consider past stuff like Deus Ex 2 or Half-Life 2 for Xbox).
Adam: I haven’t played Dragon Age yet, but I figure I will probably play it on my PC when I do. I assume you played it on the PC and it was an enjoyable experience. I’m glad to hear that the DLC has been pretty seamlessly integrated… that’s tough to do and was probably thought out well ahead of time. Kudos to Bioware.
And feel free to discuss sports games around here… nothing is off topic in the comments.
Lucas: You didn’t have to suffer through the PC version of BioShock.
My argument is that BioShock for PC is port of an Xbox 360 game that was dumbed for the console audience. It’s not about grid-based inventory system versus no inventory or a deep point based skill tree versus straight plasmids; there were myriad other issues that caused me to not enjoy the game on my PC as much as I should have.
Between the awful user interface that only worked well if you were using a 360 controller; the oversimplified everything (I don’t need SS2 levels of depth, but give me something to work with in it’s spiritual successor) and the obscene load times that even the most powerful computer still faces… you quickly begin realize how much PC players were shortchanged by BioShock.
That doesn’t even begin to address the hardware issues I had with the game. I experienced awful lighting and graphical glitches on my first play through on my last PC. My video card was a 2 year old ATI card at this point which sadly did not support Shader Model 3.0. Like the newer nVidia based cards did, ones like the video cards in all Xbox 360′s. Every other game based on the Unreal 3 engine to that point supported full Shader Model 2.0 support… the engine is perfectly capable of doing that. But the designers didn’t even bother to include support for SM 2.0 because the 360 could do SM3.0, so why worry about it!
Thousands of people were shit out of luck, and it took a huge fan community to devise fix after fix, patch after patch in an attempt to rectify it.. and even then it didn’t fix the problem. This is what BioShock looked like the first time I played through… on a 2 year old PC at the time. If you google “shader model 2.0 bioshock” you’ll see what a huge issue it was.
*breath*
Those technical issues, well, I can understand how they would be frustrating—but that kind of oversight and incompatibility happens with PC-only titles too.
Do you still have BioShock installed on your PC? I’d like to give it a try sometime.
Will: I guess it’s just as hard now as it was back then to publish on the PC platform. Striking a balance between the best graphics and accessibility is extremely problematic and will always leave at least one group of people unhappy.
Luke: I had a case of consolitis once. I was popping Pepto Bismols for two weeks.
But in regards to BioShock I felt let down by the time I beat it. What was new and challenging in the beginning wasn’t quite as difficult in the end. To me the game’s difficulty peaked too low and too soon. For example: I beat upwards of 90% of the enemies (including the final boss) with the wrench. I will admit that there were powerups that made this style of play more viable and that I consider myself a veteran of the FPS genre… but 90% with a freakin’ wrench? Come on!
Thinking back on it I find myself wondering if part of the problem was that the AI wasn’t designed with the precision of a keyboard and mouse in mind.
On an interesting side note I have yet to play System Shock 2 as it has continually crashed during the character building sequence on my last 3 rigs (and, yes, I did change the compatibility mode before anyone asks).