Diecast – Twenty Sided

I think I did okay with the Steam Summer Sale this year. I picked up a reasonable handful of games, but I didn’t add a bunch of crap to the Backlog of Shamefully Un-played Impulse Buys like I used to in the old days. I actually took this time to cull some stuff from my wishlist. I figure if it’s 75% off and I’m still not buying it, then I’m probably never gonna buy it.

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Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast349

Link (YouTube)

00:00 InnerSpace

Not the movie, we’re talking about the game.

03:08 This Badly Translated Game of Portal

Link (YouTube)

09:56 Kingdom Come: Deliverance

THE GAME COLON THE SUBTITLE

18:25 Picked up Final Fantasy XII

I originally played this thing on the PS2, way back in 2007. You can actually read my original thoughts here, back when I was just a wee baby critic. Since then, I’ve spent about a decade and a half reviewing games, analyzing stories, and exploring games from many new (to me) genres. My horizons are broader, and I’ve got a better understanding for the cultural context of the JRPG genre. And with the benefit of that added perspective and the chance to revisit this game all these years later, I have to say: Eh. Yeah. This is basically how I remembered it.

This is an obtuse mope of a game and I don’t care about a single one of these characters. The plot of FFX was absolutely surreal and the characters were full-on lunatics, but by the end I really cared about those oddly-dressed idiots and their goofy struggle against Kaiju Satan.

But what’s the consensus these days? The game did okay back in 2006, but I’d really like to know how history has judged it. Is this a series favorite? A weird experiment that didn’t hold up? A mistake? An underappreciated gem?

27:59 Deep Rock Galactic

You’ll have to toss me!

28:13 Sunless Sea

28:24 Venineth

28:35 The Outer Worlds

28:50 Dyson Sphere Program

30:03 Mailbag: Meeting Your Other Characters

Dear Diecast,

I don’t know if that’s necessary, but: spoiler alert for Dragon Age series.

In Dragon Age: Inquisition our character met Hawke, the main protagonist of the previous game. He could also receive a letter from the hero of the first game, the Warden. It seems that BioWare really likes the idea of meeting your own characters as independent NPCs – something of that sort can happen in Star Wars: The Old Republic; there are also similar ideas in Mass Effect 3: Citadel. Last but not least, developers were actually trying to bring the Warden to Inquisition in person, but determined it was too difficult to do.

So, speaking of RPGs in general: do you think it’s possible to create such situations in which we would be able to interact with our characters from previous games, without ruining the players’ agency? I’m specifically thinking about the ones that are mostly created by said players: e.g. more like the Warden, less like Hawke or Shepard.

Do you think it’s possible? Is there some kind of AI magic that could make it happen? Should we even try, or are we going mad from too much power?

Cheers,

Darek

34:55 Mailbag: Dead by Daylight

I happened to be watching some random Twitch streams and stumbled across people playing “Dead by Daylight” which self-describes as “a multiplayer (4vs1) horror game where one player takes on the role of the savage Killer, and the other four players play as Survivors, trying to escape the Killer and avoid being caught and killed.” In Shamus’s recent E3 announcements for various”Left4Dead” style games he mentions not being very excited about what was on offer in comparison to the originals. While Dead by Daylight isn’t a shooter, it seems like the closest thing to L4D that people are playing these days and the format has allowed them to adopt a number of famous horror properties into playable Killer characters, which I personally think is really interesting.

tl;dr Are you guys familiar with this game or have you given it a try? I’m interested on your thoughts on the various Killers they’ve adapted (Michael Myers, Leatherface, Freddy Kreuger, Ghost Face, the Demogorgon, Pyramid Head, Nemisis, etc)

44:28 Mailbag: Terrabyte Games

G’day Diecast,

so I was rummaging around in my attic recently and found a box containing no less than 11 floppies for a single game (Monkey Island 2). Of course nowadays we have CDs, which can hold hundreds of floppies of data, so I was wondering…

How long d’ya think it’ll take for games to reach a terrabyte in size?

Vale,

-Tim

Not to be confused with Trilobyte games.

49:36 Mailbag: Games that Made You Cry

Dear Diecast

Has there ever been a game that made you outright cry? In the emotional sense I mean, not because you were laughing your asses off or something.

From Dunkey

I knew it. I knew I’d think of a bunch of examples after the show. While I can’t claim any of these wrung genuine tears out of my stony heart, I did find them very emotionally powerful:

• Last of Us (Powerful)
• Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Lee’s last chapter. (Strong)
• Final Fantasy X (Mild)
• The very end of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (not so much sadness as shock.)

55:54 Mailbag: Thrill of Stealth

G’day Diecast,

so a few weeks ago Shamus mentioned he doesn’t like Alex (AKA FailRace, AKA that guy who does Survive the Hunt) being so very careful and sneaky and cautious. This made me wonder: how do you feel about general stealth gameplay? Do you not care for watching people play things like Thief and Alien Isolation, or do you go into those with different expectations?

Thank you and Paul for the wonderful content,

Vale,

-Tim

1:04:26 After Credits

I am not responsible. This is all Tim’s fault.