The (Bad) Walking Dead EP 3: Ass of Holding

By Shamus Posted Friday May 8, 2015

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 68 comments


Link (YouTube)

We’ve been kind to the game this week. We’ve admired it for what it tried to do. We’ve talked about what the game might have accomplished if it had been given more time and money. We tried to find the good among the bad. But then in the comments someone pointed out that right now, TODAY, Activision is asking FIFTY DOLLARS OF US AMERICAN UNITED STATES OFFICIAL MONEY for this horrendous low-quality cash-in. That’s disgusting, but also mindbogglingly stupid.

Making a zombie game so long after the zombie craze has come and gone is bad. Making a cheap zombie game to cash in on a license is worse. Asking full AAA price is worse still. Doing so when your trailer looks awfulAnd yet is still dishonestly better looking than the actual game. is more worser. Asking full AAA price when the jig is up, everyone knows the game sucks, and there are literally tens of thousands of far better games on the shelves for a fraction of the cost is insane.

In case you’re wondering, Activision published this.

I think we’re going to go through with our plan and make May “Zombie Month”. We’ll see how it goes. Thanks to Chris for putting the time and effort into putting these episodes together.

 

Footnotes:

[1] And yet is still dishonestly better looking than the actual game.



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68 thoughts on “The (Bad) Walking Dead EP 3: Ass of Holding

  1. Tizzy says:

    There was definitely a good game trying to get out of the Bad Walking Dead. At least, it looks like they were trying something new, where the zombie hordes could be truly overwhelming when poorly managed.

    I don’t know if the mechanics they were going for would have worked, but they certainly needed more iterations to find out.

    But the publisher pulled the plug on more dev time (maybe rightfully so, maybe the game was not getting any better and they gave up). It was their choice, but I wish they would try and live with the consequences: don’t price it as if it was a polished title, not now, and not even when it first came out. Admit that it is disappointing, and maybe people will be curious and will send a few mercy bucks your way and not feel ripped off.

    Even with Norman Reedus, $50 is way too much for this crap, especially after watching that glitchy gatorade nad punch video that was linked in the first episode.

    1. Benjamin Hilton says:

      Even if it was good, 50 dollars this far after release is just silly.

    2. Michael says:

      I knew it was 50 bucks when it launched. I’m a little surprised it hasn’t been marked down. When Chris said he picked it up for 7.50, I figured the game had been knocked down to 15, and then put on a half off sale.

    3. Nidokoenig says:

      The problem with licensed content is that it comes as part of a corporate strategy, which means it is generally aimed to sync up with other parts of the franchise and thus can’t be delayed, but it also won’t be commissioned until the main schedule is set in stone, so you get devs trying to push out AAA titles in six months or less with whatever’s left in the kitty. Much as they might try to reuse assets and code from other games they have, there’s only so much that can be done, so if a company wants to represent their franchise with a game made under budget on a tight schedule, a cash-strapped dev is going to let them.

  2. Benjamin Hilton says:

    It’s funny, after watching the last two episodes I was thinking that I could go for this game. Instead of looking at it as a low quality AAA game I looked at it as an upgrade to all those flash based games I used to play.
    Hell I spent 10 dollars on Fort Zombie Back in the day, I can drop a few bucks on…. A few bucks…. A few….why does that say 49.99? That must be a mistake. Surely they don’t expect full price….WTF….

    Moral of the story: If you want this particular itch scratched, go buy Fort Zombie.

    1. Ivellius says:

      This was my reaction, too. “Oh, for a few dollars I’d try this; I’ve got free time. That’s… not asking for a few dollars.”

    2. Syal says:

      Or Organ Trail, which is $5.

  3. Daemian Lucifer says:

    I would love it if some critic decided to rate games on a 10 point scale from 9.1/10 to 10/10.That would be awesome.

    1. Lachlan the Mad says:

      Even then the review scores would probably in practice only go down to 9.6, with 9.1-9.5 scores being withheld for only games which were broken at a fundamental level.

  4. Daemian Lucifer says:

    A big,huge,major flaw of most of the zombie games is that combat is repetitive as hell.

    1. Tizzy says:

      Agreed. But I think that where this game was trying to go is to discourage combat altogether, so that boring combat would be your punishment for playing the game wrong. And I find this approach interesting.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Yeah,but you dont discourage combat by having swarms of zombies,and ninja zombies appearing at your back.Also giving zombies enough speed to follow you,conga line style.

        1. Tizzy says:

          Agreed, once again. That’s why I said the game was trying, rather than succeeding. We all know that the game needed 3 to 6 months of extra dev time at least, and even then, I am not certain that they would have found the right balance between making zombies avoidable enough and keeping the game interesting.

          Also, the studio that made this game is Terminal Reality. I never played any of their games, but, from looking at the list, I am not convinced that this is the team to pull off a game both truly innovative and also mechanically sound.

    2. MrGuy says:

      It’s sort of a flaw of zombies as an enemy type.

      By design, zombies are regular people, but largely mindless, and lacking the coordination and skills of their former selves. They SHOULDN’T really exhibit much variation. Even a zombified special forces soldier should behave very similarly to a zombified Subway sandwich artist. Zombies make for terrible end boss badasses.

      If you start from that base, which you have to do if you’re making a game with a “realistic” zombie plague, then you’re stuck with samey enemies. You can have an ambush or a swarm, but fundamentally they’re identical. The only way around this is to not worry about a “realistic” zombie disease that effects everyone equally (L4D), or use something that’s sorta like zombies but different so there’s a basis for not all being the same (HL/HL2), or put in a lot of lore/science to explain why they’re different (no example comes to mind). I think the genius of the Good Walking Dead was that the enemies, by and large, weren’t zombies – the enemies were people.

      Bad Walking Dead can’t abandon “realistic” zombie plague without abandoning the source material, so the choice to focus on PvZ combat means samey boring combat. Rock climbing, Joel.

      1. guy says:

        Honestly, there’s no particular reason why a zombie plague should effect everyone equally. Various zombies could retain different levels of intelligence and behave differently. And of course a number of games have taken advantage of different things they were wearing before death.

      2. Daemian Lucifer says:

        But just because your enemies are the same doesnt mean you have to always be the same.This is the perfect place to have creative weapons and fighting styles,as was shown by the few notable zombie games that dont have tired same old combat.

      3. Tizzy says:

        Last of Us had different stages to the infection. They behaved somewhat differently.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          And then it ended up pitting you mostly against raiders.*sigh*

      4. Groboclown says:

        “Rock climbing, Joel.”

        *sniff* Gone but not forgotten. I’ve been rewatching those for the past 3 months.

        At least it’s not… Deep hurting! Deeeeep huuuuurting!

  5. Daemian Lucifer says:

    We really need to start a series where we take Campster out of context.

    We have been doing it in the comments for quite a while now.

  6. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Anyone else find it funny,but appropriate,how the zombie games have spread everywhere,encroaching the market,eating developer after developer and making them spew the same game as the rest,over and over and over and over….

    1. Tizzy says:

      Zombies invaded all aspects of culture, but I think they have been particularly popular in games because it gives you an excuse for monsters with piss-poor AI.

      Not that all games are successful at rising their AI to zombie level…

  7. Alex says:

    Re: State of Decay

    State of Decay is a terrible game for one simple reason: if you save and quit the game, you don’t start your next session where you left off. And I don’t mean that in the normal “the devs saved resources by only saving some of the game data” sense.

    In State of Decay, the dev team made the deliberate decision to consume resources, kill your neighbours and generally be assholes between game sessions.

    This is shit.

    The only possible excuse for this type of behaviour is in an MMO with player-owned infrastructure like Eve Online, and even there it is something that should be minimised so that griefers can’t simply abuse your sleep and work patterns to attack you at times you can’t defend yourself. Putting it in a single player game for no other reason than to punish you for not playing their game 24/7 makes me regret that they even got five dollars out of me for this bullshit.

  8. newdarkcloud says:

    Regarding Rutzkarn’s poo-pourri pun, that’s an ACTUAL product.

    http://www.poopourri.com/

    That’s not a joke either.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Thats a shitty name.

      1. Jimmy Bennett says:

        Hey no. Someone worked very hard to come up with that name. You shouldn’t just crap all over there hard work like that.

        1. Ledel says:

          No, it’s fine, mock it all you want. I tried their product once, it was pretty much like flushing money down the toilet.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            Well,this conversation quickly went down the drain.

    2. tmtvl says:

      With apologies to one of the greatest bands in human history…
      “You give me something, I think you’ll understand,
      When I say that something’s… I wanna hold your ass.
      I wanna hold your aaa-ss, I wanna hold your ass.”

  9. Tizzy says:

    All kidding aside, I find the concluding comments in the video quite chilling for developers.

    Simply from watching the game being played, I got the feeling that Chris pretty much missed the point, played the game “wrong”. Beyond the whole compass fiasco, my guess (it’s hard to say for sure) is that you are supposed to avoid fights a lot more. And because this is very much an unfinished product, it’s not clear how much more enjoyable the experience would be, but still, it wouldn’t have the repeated executions slog that we just watched.

    But the crew didn’t pick up on this at all. If playing the game was boring, it was the game’s fault, and they never questioned Chris’s approach. As I said, chilling for devs: don’t bother trying to come up with something different, players will miss the point, have a bad experience, and dismiss your game out of hand.

    And this is from Chris, who had the gall to moan, in his “Last of Us” video, that every AAA game released at a certain point in time uses exactly the same mechanics (in that particular instance: weapons upgrade, character leveling, lousy stealth, radar ability, chest-high cover, distractors,…).

    Gee, I wonder why they stick to proven mechanics, given how forgiving the reception is?…

    1. Alex says:

      Without playing the game, the problem I see with avoiding fights is that avoiding a fight is not a solution unless you avoid every fight. Sneaking past a zombie means you now have a zombie behind you, and if it sees you, or if another zombie sees you and alerts it, you are now being attacked from behind. Better to fight zombies on your terms – by plunging something sharp into the base of their skull – than to allow them to fight you on theirs.

      1. Tizzy says:

        Stealth is often decried as boring because it takes so long to incapacitate foe after foe to clear a level. I would like to see more games were sneaking past is a viable option. It would speed things up and create more tension at the same time, precisely because you are surrounding yourself with enemies.

        The problem is to balance that risk properly so that this is more attractive than playing it the safe way. I don’t think that I’ve seen yet a satisfactory way of doing that.

        Metro Last Light did it sort of OK for me, though I had to brute force my way through some levels that looked impossible to sneak through. And then, you hit the hardest bit for suspension of disbelief: You enter a new area in the same location, and everything is reset: no one seems to know that their comrades have been gunned down next door. No heightened state of alertness: blank slate.

        Very difficult to swallow when dealing with intelligent enemies. And making it more realistic would be very difficult, and could easily trap players in impossible situations.

        But dealing with zombies, you could let people get out of tight situation at the cost of noise that would impact everything you do for the whole level. Maybe it attracts the horde slowly to your position. You can avoid completely screwing players over by giving them escape routes to bypass the problem. But these routes might be more annoying or less rewarding. Maybe you can’t stay too long and as a result can’t scavenge as much. Maybe messing up simply means having to give up on an optional objectives, or cost you a lot of resources (ammunition, healing items) because you have to brute force your way to it.

        I would be interested in such a game.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Stealth usually doesnt work because of one or more of these reasons:
          1)If you trigger one enemy,you trigger them all
          2)You lack interaction with the enemies aside from avoid/incapacitate
          3)Your spead while stealthy is sloooooow

          Notable exceptions are mark,of the ninja and its 3d counterpart batman,that are quick while hiding,and can rehide if detected by an enemy or two,and hitman(sans absolution)where you can hide in plain sight by imitating other people.

    2. James Porter says:

      If the game had been intended to play in a certain way, they needed to spend more time teaching the player how to play their game.
      Unique games like Portal spend an enormous amount of effort teaching players how to play that game. In fact in the case of Portal, it never stops teaching you how to play.
      If you don’t explain to the players how to play your game, they are going to make assumptions based on previous games. For instance, this game is a First-Person game with guns. First Person Shooters are games primarily meant to embody power fantasies with precise and manageable controls. It is up to the game to teach the player that despite the game’s genre, it is meant to be played differently.
      Just cause I am interested now, looking at how this game begins, it doesn’t try at all to get you to avoid combat. The beginning of the game is a pointless section where you die, without really understanding what you did wrong. The game then makes you run into crowds of zombies to pick up gas. This isn’t how you teach player’s how to play your game.
      Thats what Rutskarn was getting disappointed about at the end. This team was not given the chance to make this game good, it was a quick, rushed mess that remains depressing because you can see the developers trying to make something good.

      1. Tizzy says:

        From watching the video, I could tell where Chris was doing things backwards, misreading the devs’ intention, starting with the level where they leave the cabin, where the intended path is clearly to turn right on exit (away from the zombies piled at the front door).

        Yes, the devs deserve a lot of the flak for this. At the same time, we cannot expect Valve-grade level designs from everyone: I suspect these guys (Terminal Reality) had neither the budget, nor the time, nor, quite frankly, the talent to pull this off.

        Does that mean that only Valve gets to innovate? That would be really sad.

        Not to mention that this is not Portal-level of innovation either. They are just trying to tweak familiar mechanics.

        1. stupiddice says:

          What innovation? There are no mechanics to support stealth other than a binary “have you gotten into the enemy’s field of view?” and a backstab mechanic that also works in combat. I mean the original Metal Gear was released around 28 years ago, a stealth game isn’t exactly an innovation especially since most of the mechanics seem to support combat (multiple weapons such as guns, insta-kill QTE, no way to shake pursuers). Seriously, where is the innovation here? Is it “lets make 80% of mechanics a trap”. If your going to go with the “flawed but innovative approach” I’m going to need to see more than zombie game clone #4332.

          This is a retail game and its first priority should be to be worth the customer’s money, and there is nothing here that justifies it. Innovation is merely a means to an end, not an end.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            The stuff you do in the zombie map arent the only part of the game.The map,dealing with survivors and rations,swapping cars,etc,are also a part of the game.And judging by reviews,those are the parts that showed the most promise,and some are even good.

    3. Thomas says:

      Plenty of reviewers have played this game fully and they all reported back basically the same thing. The gameplay is incredibly repetitive, all the systems are broken (if you run out of fuel they just make you do a level of fighting zombies to find fuel, so there’s really no consequence to their collection mechanics).

      The combat mechanics are broken and exploitable, there’s no variety. The stealth is bad and clunky. The gameplay is literally “go into this area and find an object” “go into THE EXACT SAME AREA and find an object. But through a different door!”

      There’s an attempt at a story but its awful. You’ve got this levels where the NPCs sit at their desks and make you do fetch quests when it makes absolutely no sense and the NPCs don’t fit into their environment. It’s hard to tell when the outbreak is meant to occur.

      And it’s not an original game. I can go onto steam and find 10 zombie survival games right now with resource management, melee combat and weak stealth. Chris mentioned a much better version of this game in the Let’s Play.

      Those 10 zombie survival games on steam each have much more creative mechanic sets, lots of experimenting between local and persistent multiplayer, crafting, base building, unique interactions with other survivors…

      It’s not wrong to point out that a bad game is bad, and whilst this good have been a decent game, even with another year would it really have been better than State of Decay or H1Z1 or DayZ or whatever that zombie parkour game is?

      This is a cheap cash grab by Activision which the developers then tried to do their best with, it’s admirable, but it’s not wrong to call it a bad game and its not hypocritical to admire good AAA games.

      Its not like Chris doesn’t spend a vast amount of his free time highlighting innovative games which break the mould for a wider audience.

      1. Tizzy says:

        The cash grab is real. The fact that the game was not ready is a fact. As I stated elsewhere, I’m not even convinced that this particular studio had the chops to pull off a good game out of the premise.

        But the end of the video made it sound like the crew was saying they shouldn’t even have tried, and I simply can’t let that slide by.

        1. James Porter says:

          Not sure what you are referring to. They actually go out of their way to say that it wasn’t the fault of the development team that the game didn’t come together.
          Or are you talking about Chris saying these specific mechanics do not go well together? I think there is a number of reasons these mechanics do not gel, but their point isn’t that they never would, it is that they could have never had a chance to figure out how they would work together.
          This isn’t saying that innovation is wrong, you just have to do it right to count.

    4. Daemian Lucifer says:

      But you cant really avoid fighting since all the zombies jog following you in a conga line until you are forced to stop,in which case you usually end up stabbing them in the face with that minigame,as was shown in that video theyve linked in the first episode of this.

      You can say that this crew is “playing the game wrong”,fine they didnt research it,and its not the point of this show.But check the videos of the others that do “play the game correctly”,and thats what youll see:A conga line of zombies jogging behind the player while they scramble to either finish the objectives quickly,or stopping to painstakingly kill every last one of the zombies in that tedious minigame.

  10. nerdpride says:

    RE: Worldbuilding

    Well I’m not super excited to hear all the contrived possibilities of human waste elimination like it’s some kind of Harry Potter fanfiction. I don’t think Morrowind had any chamber pots anywhere and I didn’t mind. Another thing was how did they get water in the middle of ash wastelands. Whatever. Magic or something.

    I wish more writing had a point to it. Consider Conan, the cheesy movie. The “Riddle of Steel” was an awesome, thoughtful idea. Spoiler: flesh is stronger than steel. Maybe a zombie game could have one of those “skill trumps masses” things? I dunno, I don’t write for a living. It would be nifty to have a coordinated, dependable group of people develop instead of the usual zombie survival mechanics.

    Meh.

    1. Spammy says:

      “You ate my mother! You ate my father! You ate my people! You ate my father’s sword!”

      “GRRARGARRRGRBRAGAGH.”

  11. MadTinkerer says:

    “Activision is asking FIFTY DOLLARS OF US AMERICAN UNITED STATES OFFICIAL MONEY for this horrendous low-quality cash-in.”

    I was going to say that maybe they cynically think that they can make money off of people confusing it for TellTale’s award-winning The Walking Dead. But then I realized that these are AAA executives we’re talking about and maybe they’re confused that it’s not Telltale’s award-winning The Walking Dead.

    It’s entirely possible that one of them has sat down with this game, noticed how bad it is, got confused by the fact that Clementine hadn’t shown up yet, got frustrated that they couldn’t get to the part with Clementine but didn’t want to cheat, and then went back to trying to figure out the complicated unsolved mystery of whether they had the rights to NOLF or not.

    1. TMC_Sherpa says:

      Nah, the problem isn’t with the developers, at least not directly. The problem is you (and by you I mean a nebulous someone else, not you specifically) give them your money and you get a….thing. That may or may not be good. And there isn’t anything you can do about it once you install it. So they have no incentive to make that thing any good.

      I suspect if BioWare (not the retailer, a check from EA) had to give refunds to everyone unhappy with ME3 rather than saying suck it up we made the game we wanted? The “new” ending would have been new.

      Review embargoes on the other hand are a whole nother kettle of fish.

    2. McNutcase says:

      That assumes facts contradicted by the evidence. Nobody is interested in finding out if they have the rights to NOLF so that they can get paid for letting people put it on sale again. All the parties that may have the rights have basically said “Well, maybe we have those rights, but finding out would involve actually looking, and we don’t want to deal with that even if you pay us for our effort in looking.”

      Frankly, I think that what should happen in that case is simply being able to state to a judge “We made our best efforts to locate the rights holder. We’re just going to start selling it, put a reasonable proportion of the proceeds in escrow for whoever it turns out to be, and wait until we get sued. We want to pre-arrange a settlement of that lawsuit, since we’re not the ones being assholes for no reason here.”

  12. Samyo says:

    When Chris gets shot by the gas station man, I didn’t realize that Josh could laugh that hard, that was one of the most intense laughs I’ve ever heard!

  13. Benjamin Hilton says:

    The hosts kept joking about the obviously turning guy, and it’s a common trope that the people in these games and movies live in a world without zombie media, otherwise they would know what to do.

    I just have this vision that some day there will an out-break, and all of these zombies will come streaming out of like a lab or something. But everyone around will say “Psh I know what to do”. Everyone will be going for head shots and executing anyone who gets bitten, and the whole thing will be over in like a week. And then the scientists will come out and say that getting bitten doesn’t actually spread the infection, or kill the person, and there will be a bunch of people who just feel like complete jackasses.

    1. Abnaxis says:

      Back when they released some (free) DLC for L4D2 they released a comic with it, where one of the characters shoots her father after he gets bitten, because they’re both zombie genre-savvy and know “that’s what you have to do when someone gets bit.”

      Later on in the series, she finds out that A: her immunity is genetic, and B: if she is immune her father must have been immune too. And she feels like a jackass.

    2. Tizzy says:

      Or maybe headshots release zombie toxins, and you have to shoot them in the ‘nads instead to cure them. (They might not be all that thankful, btw…)

      1. Syal says:

        Similar to what I was thinking; everyone aims for the head and then it turns out they’re all Heaven Smile zombies and you have to shoot them in the elbow or the knee.

        Or the floating hair sometimes.

  14. Tuskin says:

    What is the music that plays on the title card? Sounds familiar.. Zombies Ate My Neighbours?

  15. Henson says:

    I think my favorite zombie game is probably Rebuild. The game is in the preparation, not the shooty stabby. And hey, the third iteration in the series is coming out at the end of May!

  16. Patick-who-is-Hector says:

    Ohmigosh!

    You guys need to do Witcher 2! The game where I’ve played through the intro chaopter a dozen ties but never managed to get past Chapter 1 thanks to incredibly frustrating bosses. (Yes, I should ltp and gitgud. Deal with it.)

    1. Syal says:

      Totally; Shamus would love that game!

      1. Patrick-who-is-Hector says:

        Yes… Shamus would absolutely LOVE Witcher 2.

        Mwahaha. My evil scheme commences!

  17. Ledel says:

    So, I’m willing to admit that I’m one of the few people who actually bought and played this game on release (really only because the place I did a pre-order came with a walking dead ear necklace). I played it on console (360) and the controls were horrible and wonky on top of the bad mechanics.

    I stopped playing after the first level with the gas station just because of how much it irritated me. The stealth was wonky (it loses your crouch if you stealth kill a zombie), the massive hoard you see coming after Chris after he filled his gas can actually used to spawn a lot closer and sooner, zombies took more hits to the head to kill, and their heads’ hit-boxes were a lot smaller. I returned the game after a few days for a partial refund just because I could see where it was going, and didn’t have the patience for the entire game of those shenanigans.

    It does look like they patched a few things to make the game more bearable, but that might just be my dislike of the game warping my memories. This game, Duke Nukem Forever, and Dead Island are the top 3 most disappointing and frustrating games I’ve ever spent money on.

    This game had potential, having you play as cool badass Darryl. I think it would have done a lot better if they leaned more towards it being almost power fantasy, rather than stealth.

  18. kunedog says:

    This is my favorite thing to do, to fill in fake but plausible sounding drink names.

    Like “Garwater.”

    Rewinding, I see Chris walked right by the tire several times, most flagrantly (and first) at 10:00. How easy it is to hide something in plain sight where it should never, ever be in the first place.

  19. Ah, soda! I wanted orange. It gave me lemon-lime.

  20. Offtopic:

    Shamus, I love the background you got going but the black solid background in the header kind of looks, um boring. (there is the black footer background too but it’s much smaller).

    Could you do something to the black backgrounds?

    My suggestion:
    Add the following to .header and .footer:
    background-color: transparent !important;

    Example: http://imgur.com/o7m4pNe

    Edit:
    I made an example for the bottom too http://imgur.com/Dt8NJ2E

    PS! Any chacne you can make the shadow of the dice at the bottom partly transparent? The shadow for the dice seem solid (grey/white?) If made partly transparent it should make the shadows look like they are on the background, thus the dice like they are rolled “on” the city/landscape.

    1. tmtvl says:

      Wait, ‘!important’? No! Bad. Bad Roger, no cookie for you.

      The background of the header is a manually defined image, so if Shamus did not want that, he’d simply remove the URL.

      The footer is nearly invisible without the dark background, so changing the background colour means changing the foreground colour, or trolling people with poor eyesight.

      P.S. Shamus, I believe most browsers nowadays support the rgba background value, so you could replace the image by “background: rgba(9, 24, 78, 219);”
      Sorry, but as a full stack developer, I just couldn’t let this slide, it’d be almost as bad as not defining both background and foreground colour for the page.

      1. “important” was needed for the example would not have worked. (I did a quick edit in Chrome live while viewing the page).

        And I did try using rgba(0,0,0,0.75) but that clashed with the category images making them less visible.

        Also I had to google what full stack developer meant http://andyshora.com/full-stack-developers.html
        So basically a jack of all trades master of none?

        Not sure what this has to do with anything.

        And considering I have eyesight issues myself I can assure you I’m not trolling anyone.

        Also in the case of transparency it is not possible (normally) to define a background color (since it’s transparent), instead it inherits the parent color.

        As to the full stack thing, I’ll take the chance and bite.
        That pixiv site you link to, your work? Why is the viewing of the page blocked by a huge “sign up / register” box?

        I do not consider that good design. Especially now when sites nag to join/subscribe/like, and banners that inform cookies are being used.
        Heck, I can’t even watch a youtube video without having to get rid of 4-5 boxes layered on top of the video, all wanting you to check out all the other videos (while I’m watching the video…?).

        I assumed Shamus knows his own design best, and will do it the way he wants it. The example I gave was just a quick way to test what it might look like.

        It’s not like I posted a CSS tutorial or similar.

        1. tmtvl says:

          I didn’t design pixiv, I just link there ’cause I like the site.

          Anyway, if you open up your browser’s dev tools and inspect the header (which hass the .header class), you’ll see the background element for .header is defined as “background: url(“images/screen_blue.png”) repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent;” if you disable that rule and add something like “background-color: transparent;”, it should be quite in line with what you designed.

          Oh, and full stack developer basically means that I need to look stuff up sometimes, but basically I go from server deployment over the full Java stack to CSS and JS.

          And by the way, the reason you should never use !important is because it should be reserved for user stylesheets.

  21. tzeneth says:

    Thank you Chris for putting your time and effort towards this with your, probably, already busy schedule.

  22. John Beltman says:

    Making a zombie game so long after the zombie craze has come and gone is bad. Making a cheap zombie game to cash in on a license is worse. Asking full AAA price is worse still. Doing so when your trailer looks awful is more worser. Asking full AAA price when the jig is up, everyone knows the game sucks, and there are literally tens of thousands of far better games on the shelves for a fraction of the cost is insane.

    This is only stupid if it doesn’t work. If it works it’s not stupid.

    1. Grudgeal says:

      Well, clearly it didn’t, so it is.

  23. Chris says:

    Zombie Week, sounds cool until the thought popped into my head of you guys doing an episode of Plants vs Zombies. Considering how epic the Scribblenauts was, I’m crossing my fingers that this game makes the cut. :)

  24. RCN says:

    Huh… was I seriously the only one who noticed Rutskarn singing “Engel” from Rammstein? Glorious angelic glowing models!

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