There's a trial here in Finland right now involving a rich dude and a bunch of scammers, and the whole thing is just the right kind of bizarre. A friend of mine described it as a Coen Brothers type of scenario, and I gotta agree. Just some incredibly bad judgment on display here. I had some fun surprise stomach trouble last night and didn't really sleep at all, so this sort of thing -- kinda goofy, definitely sloppy people getting involved in Big Crime Stuff -- seems like the proper thing to focus on now.

So, I just tweeted about MechWarrior 5, but let's ignore that and talk a little bit about the original MechWarrior PC game from Dynamix. It came out in 1989.

It was AWESOME. It's one of those games that, by today's standards, looks like... uh, not much. Those EGA graphics had all of 16 colors and not a whole lot in the way of resolution.

I picked up MechWarrior 5. It's not a terribly complex game, I guess, but it's really hitting that classic "go on a mission/salvage mechs/repair your stuff/go on another mission" vibe that goes all the way to the original MechWarrior PC game. Which I like a lot. So I dig it. This isn't relevant, but there's a slightly weird vibe in the very first tutorial area you're in, where for some reason they really want you to think the year 3015 takes place in a Best Buy computer section. Just an incredibly non-scifi setup. Made me chuckle.

"The scheduling pressures are impossible. For example, you're supposed to empty all trucks and freight crates, so you get exactly what you had on that video. Our volume has nearly doubled in the last 5 to 10 years, but the warehouse and the conveyor are still the same." "All they have done is add some more drivers and handlers."

I am not surprised that so many of these people are speaking up, this sounds completely untenable.

So, @UPS_Europe has once again pulled the classic "we tried to deliver the package to you but couldn't reach you" move, when I was literally sitting five meters from the door the whole time. Which they do it every time. But now they're kinda going beyond that. Let me tell you. I live in a row house so there's no access issue, no missing door code, nothing to complicate delivery. Anybody who wants to ring my doorbell can do so with ease. And yet:

So let me put my narrative jerk hat on for a sec and talk about something I think might be the most commonplace way to fuck up the storytelling of your game. It's a tiny thing, it makes perfectly serviceable scenes kind of suck, and you see it ALL. THE. TIME.

(A thread.) As an example, I'm going to use a bit from Cyberpunk 2077. Please don't think I'm trying to dunk on the game. I promise I'm not. You see this in games everywhere CONSTANTLY. I chose this simply because it's a loading screen, so I could very easily find it and capture it.

Completed Jedi: Fallen Order, and I quite enjoyed it. Frankly, it's Star Wars products like this that always convince me that Star Wars is very much at its best outside of the main movies. But instead of that, let me talk a little about the game's narrative implementation. Before I get started, I should say this: I'm doing this in the spirit of discussing my craft and what developing games is like, not to pick on the game. Criticism is inherent in the process here, obviously, but make no mistake: I liked the game, I had fun with it. Cool? Cool.

Here's a little story about how gloriously dumb and interesting game AI can be. I've been playing Watch Dogs 2. (Way more interesting than the first game!)

So I go into a car dealership for the first time in the game. And things get... a little wonky, in the best possible way. Now, I don't quite realize, at the time, how the car dealership works in the game. There's a couple of cars on the show floor, and I don't realize that in order to buy a car, I need to go talk to the salesman behind the counter. (There's a floating icon that I missed. I'm smart.)