Sean

Idle Thumbs 73: Pegasus Launch

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We're puffin' up our buddies.

Idle Thumbs 73: Pegasus Launch

Chris, Jake, and Sean are reunited with Steve and Nick live at PAX 2012 to discuss the mechanical virtues of aesthetics and scale, and also video games. Doug Tabacco escapes throngs of adoring Walking Dead fans to launch a new website live under the hot lights of the Pegasus Theater. Recorded with regrettably substandard audio quality. It won't happen again.

Games Discussed: Spy Party, Gone Home, The Walking Dead, Day-Z

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Episode page.

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Idle Thumbs 73: Puffing up my buddies

So Jake! What was your answer going to be for your favorite glitch in a game?

That's probably one of my favorite questions ever to get asked on the cast. Good job to whoever that was.

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The sound quality isn't that bad. It's better than the panels that got put on youtube at any rate.

For the record, I remember the Instincts reference, along with "Farts Cry: In Stinks".

EDIT: Oh and Icebox got put in the cooler.

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I was expecting the worst with the warning prior to listening but I'm half way through (Thumbs makes my drive to work rather more pleasant than usual) and it sounds fine to me.

Unless it turns into high pitched shrieking near the end that causes me to crash, then I'll revise my opinion of it.

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I agree, best sounding - "hey this is bad sounding" podcast of 2012.

Whizzo, did you stop your commute to post on a message board, or are you forum-posting-while-driving? (edit: Doh, I get it now. Your commute is probably like 20 minutes. But I like the image in my head of someone stopping on the side of the road to write a forum post.)

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I made my post from the safety of my office desk! Hopefully an assault on my eardrums won't happen on the drive home as I listen to the rest but in comparison to some live casts I've heard from other sources this is perfectly fine.

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Idle Thumbs 73: Puffing up my buddies

So Jake! What was your answer going to be for your favorite glitch in a game?

That's probably one of my favorite questions ever to get asked on the cast. Good job to whoever that was.

Oh it was a bug in Telltale's Wallace & Gromit game where as Wallace was dropped through his bedroom floor by his morning wake up machine, the engine was switching him to the wrong character skeleton so it looked like his own invention had broken every bone in his body. He turned into this lumpy sort of shambling mess which was then being dressed in a sweater and started drinking tea.

My favorite collection of bugs put to song, though, is Buggy Saints Row: The Musical.

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a real shame that there was no videostream, but other than that, great cast.

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The "act as an NPC" thing in Spy Party is also used in the Assassin's Creed multiplayer. I like it quite a bit, but it seems like most people don't bother trying to blend in, so it loses a bit because of that. Spy Party sounds like a highly refined version where if you don't pretend, you will die, instead of being able to run away like in AC. Sounds fun, I can't wait to play it.

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Great episode! The apologetic preamble really made for a positive surprise. Also, the Far Cry Instincts reference was great, since it's the one discussion that, when I heard it, made me laugh for real, rather than just on the inside.

I've never been to anything like this, but I imagine a room filled with a lot of people, many of which know each other from the forum, but since we're using code names and hilarious pictures nobody recognizes anyone, and even the people we heard ask questions are really people from the forums but it's sort of embarrassing to say «Hi, my name is Pete, but I'm ic€money0O7 on the forums!»

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I got a chance to play some Spy Party at PAX this year, and I found it really hard to try and blend in. I pretty obvisously stood out as the spy because I was walking around too much, and even when I did stop to blend, I always seemed out of place. I think Jake mentioned this exact thing, the controls didn't seem to let you face the direction you thought you should, and I ended up far to worried about that. Looking forward to getting to play some more, though, and hopefully get better as the spy.

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The "act as an NPC" thing in Spy Party is also used in the Assassin's Creed multiplayer. I like it quite a bit, but it seems like most people don't bother trying to blend in, so it loses a bit because of that. Spy Party sounds like a highly refined version where if you don't pretend, you will die, instead of being able to run away like in AC. Sounds fun, I can't wait to play it.

I LOVED Assassins' Creed Brotherhood Multi. (Assbro for short) Just loved it. Will talk about it next week (wanted to bring it up on the panel but was afraid to derail the momentum on Spy Party we had going).

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I was sitting in the front row refreshing the site on my phone as it was being launched. I even got the error message before it was fixed.

This makes me think of a Thumbs Last Supper.

2012-08-31%2010.36.05.jpg

Also, here's a shot from the meetup after

2012-08-31%2023.00.53.jpg

At one point, I saw Sean and Jake at the Double Fine booth playing Happy Action Theater and the game turned Jake into a hotdog on a bun. Sadly, I didn't get my phone out in time to get a picture.

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Poor Nick! When Jake said, "Oh yeah, and parts of Skyrim," pointing out the only panelist Chris didn't praise, I gasped out loud.

Nick Breckon let us plant trees in Skyrim! If that's not the future of games I don't know what is.

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I also loved AssCreedBro multiplayer and very much look forward to playing Spy Party (which fully reminds me of it). The whole thing Chris was saying about using garbage game memory to try and ape NPC behavior applied fully there. And those players you mentioned HTRM, that ran around like crazy, usually did way worse in the end than the ones who successfully blended into the crowd. The amount of strategy mixed with luck was such a great combination.

At some point it kind of got old, and I'm not really sure why but I think it was a matter of the devs relying a bit too much on the gimmick and not engineering enough variety in how the games played out. Which seems to me like a potential danger with Spy Party. Obviously I'll reserve judgement until the game comes out, it already seems like having to complete tasks besides just killing someone else already adds some much needed nuance to the base idea.

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On the note of Assbro vs Spy Party: I haven't played Spy Party yet, but one thing I worry about is how the NPC tells and animations work, and how microscopic it could become. By making a tiny room be the setting, and by restricting the verbs possible to players, snipers are able to pay much closer attention to individuals than in Assbro. The fundamental mechanic becomes less about who generally stands out from the crowd, and more about who made a small animation blip that NPC's shouldn't be able to. End game and competitive players could end up simply memorising the list of generated weirdness (like, oh sometimes the game makes an NPC move their hand this odd way), and then comparing any visual cues with this list.

I guess what I'm getting at is that in Assbro, the weird NPCness happens organically because Assbro is a systems driven game. The results of these interacting systems is what creates the weirdness. Crowds shuffle into each other, NPCs regularly shove into each other, or simply stop dead in their tracks. While Spy Party is systems driven too, one of these systems is a purposeful attempt at generating weird NPCness by hand, and thus is much easier to trace back and understand/memorise.

I haven't played Assbro super seriously, so this could happen there too.

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"One of you here will betray me."

It's Nick.

He was the only one that didn't come to the meetup, although to be fair, I think he was required to go to Bethesda's crazy mansion party.

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I wanna hear you guys introduce every podcast in this way from now on, like they're Masterpiece Theater or the clip-shows that they just show for Lawrence Welk episodes now. Especially with the outro too.

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Poor Nick! When Jake said, "Oh yeah, and parts of Skyrim," pointing out the only panelist Chris didn't praise, I gasped out loud.

Nick Breckon let us plant trees in Skyrim! If that's not the future of games I don't know what is.

Plant Trees is the killer app of the Skyrim mod community. I may have watched the third trailer like 15 times.

Also sorry for being a dick re: that Skyrim remark; that didn't mean to come out the way it did.

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He was the only one that didn't come to the meetup, although to be fair, I think he was required to go to Bethesda's crazy mansion party.

That's too bad. I was hoping for him to have been more involved in the cast than he was, too.

Then again that Bethesda party might have been the shit. I've been lazy about using Twitter lately so I may have missed out any notes from Nick about it.

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