I run a YouTube channel over at https://youtube.com/r4nneko where I post videos of the games I play. In general I try to have new lets play posts up every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Sometimes I write about other things too.
I was really glad to leave the Burning Bush. I found it much more uncomfortable than I was expecting because I was recording. It is a completely different context to be dealing with that kind of content. It is completely different wandering around a space like this in private and doing so in public. To me it is the different between watching a really pervy show in private and watching it with a group of friends. Sure some people enjoy doing it but I am not one of them.
It also really doesn't help that my parents know about this blog and while I don't link these particular posts on Facebook, friends and family are likely to be the ones reading these posts and it feels much less comfortable showing them this side of my hobby. Hey guys this is the kind of thing I like to do in my free time...
In any case, I certainly don't object to sex being depicted or alluded to in games, but I don't think that Duke Nukem Forever handles it in a particularly fun or entertaining way even in the best of contexts, let alone during this one. I did like the opportunity to wander around and explore a bit without combat looming over head but ultimately that section was much less cool than the Duke training facility.
Now that the guy the DLC is named for is dead we need to get to the Moon! First step find teleporter. This involves shooting waves of enemies and driving a school bus to a whorehouse in the desert. That makes sense right?
I don't really understand Duke Nukem Forever's obsession with the aliens, they just aren't actually a very interesting enemy they are pretty much all mechanical. Their motivations aren't ever made clear, there is never any attempt at communication from them they literally just seem to exist so you have someone to shoot.
The key great decision they made with this DLC was to reintroduce a villain with a face, one that talks to you and taunts you, someone that they could have Duke quip with and banter back to. But at some point they decide that the aliens have to have yet another giant enemy bad guy for you to kill in order to win the game.
I guess they have Dylan in there to serve as a kind of conversational foil, pity that he is just such a painful character really.
To be fair to Duke the lasers aren't explicitly called out as a security system in the game but I honestly have no idea what other purpose they would be intended to serve and the trope is pretty well established in gaming anyway.
In games, especially video games, security systems are designed completely differently from real systems. They are designed to be penetrated and often this isn't even handwaved. No effort is spent to justify why on earth you would keep a man sized gap in your laser array, your duct system to be human sized and navigable, all of your windows alarmed save for the roof entry, etc.
In real life security systems are built according to a mix of priorities, ease of implementation, price, convenience of use, expected risk of burglary etc. They aren't expected to be impenetrable, just to deter most attackers. I guess I would like to see at least some attempt to explain these gaps, perhaps the security system fails in an interesting way when you cut the power, the backup generators aren't quite up to spec hence why some of the lasers only work periodically. Or maybe there are just more of those convenient red barrels (which inexplicitly bother me less) allowing me to blow a gap through since I am not interested in stealth. Something with a clear and obvious cause rather than just pure coincidence.
The idea I mention in the video, having created the security system and monitoring from an operating budget is really only something that can work in a role playing game A place where the GM has the luxury of time and reactivity, I don't think most game designers and devs have the time to do that kind of thing given that level sections and mechanics can easily end up on the cutting room floor and if the players get stuck you can't just have them come up with something different to do that night. Video games are pretty much always going to be more limited in options and tools at players disposal.
I was genuinely surprised at how good the Duke Training area is. It sells the concept really well by having each of those rooms have their own Ego Boost item, so even Duke benefits from practicing to be Duke and I actually found the reference to the Duke sound board at the beginning to be amusing.
It isn't all great of course, the confined combat arenas are just Duke Nukem Forever combat at its weakest except now with the added bonus of having to do it several times in a row. Still things are looking up with this DLC, the elements here for the most part are kind of fun and for the most part lacking the humour I find particularly grating.
As a kind of behind the scenes note, the fairly limited editing I do on these videos is done directly on YouTube. It lets me cut dead space at the beginning and end of the video as well as splice together video and audio and use transitions. I really would like to put together an intro and outro but haven't really decided how to do it right now.
With this video in particular I ran into a couple of strange issues, I simply wanted to remove 4 seconds of footage at the end but for some reason the editor wouldn't load, looks like the processing had broken somewhere in the video as the higher resolutions also weren't available but it took Youtube a while to work it out.
To fix this I tried reuploading the file, turns out youtube detects duplicate and rejects them, so after about 20 minutes I just got an unhelpful error message. To get things going I had to actually delete the old copy and then upload. The good news is this time the editor would load straight away, but it is possible if you watch this soon enough that you will only have a low res copy of the video available that still contains about 4 seconds of me fumbling for the stop recording button at the end.
It took me a while to decide on what to record next after finishing up Hack 'n' Slash, but eventually I settled on this, The Doctor Who Cloned Me, the DLC for Duke Nukem Forever. I have heard that it is better than the main story but really have no idea how good it is.
Duke holds a lot of nostalgia for me, I remember playing the demos of the first two platformers growing up and then playing a lot of Duke Nukem 3D in high school. As a result I think I bear Duke Nukem Forever less animosity than many people but it really isn't a great game. I do think it is an interesting lesson in what happens if you give a developer with too much ambition too few limits and oversight. After all 3D Realms didn't even managed to publish the game it took a purchase by Gearbox to get the game released at all.
The biggest problem going into this is that I fundamentally don't trust the writers to product a good story or even particularly coherent story any more which means I am much more likely to notice stupid inconsistencies and really predictable events. The DLC doesn't seem to be too long so hopefully this won't just be endless griping for the duration.
Influent calls itself a language learning game and I guess it is but I feel it is a bit misleading. It certainly doesn't teach grammar or even provide examples of words in sentences so you couldn't use this game to learn how to read or speak a language. I guess you could use it to brute force sentences that only uses the 420 words contained within it, though of course that list doesn't include anything other than nouns, adjectives and verbs, so they would still be a bit incoherent.
That said it does seem like a great addition to other studies in a language, which is how I am able to use it, my biggest frustration speaking Swedish is that my vocabulary is really limited and I basically run out of words. I reach for a concept that I know in English but can't really translate it over and sometimes those gaps can be surprisingly basic.
For example last night I wanted to say after learning that my daytime classes would start at 8:30, I sent a message to my partner about it basically complaining that "I need to way up so early", in order to get practice I try to send messages like these in Swedish but quickly realised I don't actually know how to say "so early", so the message was only half in Swedish "Jag behöver vakna so early".
So for me anything that helps me add more words to my vocabulary is pretty helpful, especially something that helps add geography to the list Influent it gives me a way of using spacial memory to help learn.
The flight sim minigame is still pretty strange though.
With this episode we reach the end of the game. The Wizard is defeated and there were no reality destabilizing deletions that took place. Leaving us free to help the princess and go and explore the world.
There are a few more puzzles to solve, ones that were skipped during the journey through the game, I could certainly go back and do them, but I am pretty content to leave things here unless people would really like to see it.
As for my thoughts on the game, I have kind of been sharing them throughout this series but I guess the summary would be this:
Hack 'n' Slash is a fun hacking based puzzle game. It has a good sense of humour and rolls out new mechanics and abilities at a nice pace; unfortunately the puzzle difficulty can be pretty spiky and I am not sure it really provides enough support for someone unfamiliar with programming to have a great time.
As the game progresses the level of abstraction increases and so there is a growing disconnect between your actions and the puzzles themselves. The end result is a puzzle solving process that is both more complicated and confusing, which means you really need to enjoy the process of experimenting in those machine states to continue to have fun.
If you enjoy programming and puzzle games I definitely recommend it otherwise I suspect there are better uses for your money.
Anyway, something new on Friday and I think I have an idea for a daily thing for a while too.
