Comments on: The RPS Electronic Wireless Show 31

By: Rei Onryou

Rei Onryou — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:55:08 +0000

When it came to the end, I didn’t actually think it would be the end. More wordspeak please! Your random witterings entertain pleasingly!

By: pignoli

pignoli — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:39:39 +0000

Had no idea Stalker did that poorly in the West (Talking about West as opposed to Eastern Europe / Russia, rather than Japan here. I'd be surprised if it ever saw the light of day there). I didn't pick it up until this year and now consider it an essential part of the shooter (hell, gaming in general) landscape. Does the Western market have a lower tolerance for such flawed jems (i.e. only to the level that it is great in free/indie/cheap stuff a la Dwarf Fortress, but full price games must be highlt polished)?

By: Muzman

Muzman — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:04:31 +0000

Traitors. Spider traitors.

Yes the DM ones are pretty amazing. The first time I saw them (probably in the dark) I was saying such things as to myself as ” I hope those ceiling ones are just decorative…Nope. Wow, look at the detail and fluidity of those animations on the Giant Fucking Thing..Oh god! .WaaaaaaAAAhhhahahaaaaaa *sob*”

By: qrter

qrter — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:14:07 +0000

I tweeted the question because I’m playing Red Faction: Guerrilla at the moment and ‘lo and behold, I (almost) immediately got stuck on the third ‘main story mission’. I must’ve tried playing that mission about 30 times, feeling worse and worse every time. If I had beaten it then, I wouldn’t have felt satisfied at overcoming an obstacle, I would still feel bad because of all the frustration and time lost on playing that mission.

In the end I downloaded a trainer from somewhere and cheated my way through. That didn’t make me feel much better either, but at least I could move on to parts of the game better suited to me.

By: TeeJay

TeeJay — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:03:10 +0000

It doesn’t need to be (just) talking heads – could have a (quasi) random mash-up of you-tube, promotional and flickr slide-show images as a backdrop…

By: TeeJay

TeeJay — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:59:07 +0000

Also strawberries and bananas :)

By: westyfield

westyfield — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:49:12 +0000

Get well soon, whoever that poor, cold-afflicted person is!

By: Lewis

Lewis — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:41:07 +0000

Games need to understand the experience they’re trying to offer a bit better, and work their difficulty around that. So, Spelunky absolutely should be that bloody difficult, as that’s the whole point. But, say, BioShock – that was absolutely correct in going with the Vita Chambers.

By: aoanla

aoanla — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:20:18 +0000

Yes, but I think that’s a more common response – sometimes games just feel complete in themselves. (The same thing, of course, happens with films – you can always tell when the sequel was made purely because the original did well, rather than being narratively justifiable.)

By: TotalBiscuit

TotalBiscuit — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 08:23:49 +0000

Incidentally if you are recording via Skype then you’re doing it wrong. Skype is fine for the actual communication itself, but suffers from random audio artifacts and quality degradation. In the off chance that you are doing it this way with your co-hosts that you can’t get into the same room, do this.

1) Setup your Skype call as usual.
2) Fire up whatever audio editing program you use, have any other host who is not in the room with you do the same.
3) After a count-in, everyone starts recording their own voice, on their own machine, with their own audio editing program.
4) Stay silent for 20 seconds or so, that’ll give you a good sample of background noise/hiss for noise-reduction in the post-production process.
5) Do the show
6) After the show is done, everybody stops their recordings, whips up an mp3 and sends it over to the producer.
7) The producer puts each track he’s been sent on a separate audio channel, if you all started at the same time, then they should be in sync by default so you won’t need to muck about. Use the 20 seconds of silence to create a noise reduction profile in order to reduce background noise. If it ends up sounding too robotic (ie. you’ve gutted the frequencies of your voices in order to rip out the background noise), then you need to either dial it back a bit, or use a music-bed to mask the background noise. There are plenty of royalty-free/creative commons tracks you can use for a music-bed and these are commonly used by local/university radio studios who do not have ideal studio environments. When setting up a music bed, ensure that it’s volume is just a smidge higher than the volume of that background noise. A lot of folks make the mistake of having their music beds too loud and then listeners complain.
8) Run all the audio tracks through compression/normalisation to make sure you’re all the same level. Also make sure that each audio track is mono, stereo is weird as hell for something like this, don’t use it unless absolutely necessary to differentiate very similar sounding voices.
9) Encode and upload.

And that’s that, in a nutshell.

By: The Dark One

The Dark One — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 08:22:40 +0000

I thought your comment on anticipating a sequel to a game you didn’t like was interesting. The opposite can happen, too. I enjoyed Bioshock, and despite there being nothing really objectionable in the content they’ve shown for the new one so far, I have almost no interest in the thing.

By: Dave L.

Dave L. — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 02:41:30 +0000

Dark Messiah had the most terrifying spiders I’ve ever faced in a game.

I’m also surprised at John’s suggestion that the spiders will fight against the bugs. Does he not know that spiders are not insects, but in the war they will side with the insects?