BobbyBesar

This show does have the biggest WTF ending in the history of children's cartoons. So it has that going for it.

I'm not sure if this is common knowledge or not, but the "Year Beast" isn't any particular inspired creation by Valve. It's taken more or less directly from a Chinese folk tale, regarding a monster called the Nian (literally: year) that is scared away with fireworks and Lions. Just so you know, before you go around giving out "best naming" awards or anything. It seems like they could do away with some acrimony by displaying MMR only if you're in a guild with that person. Presumably, that wouldn't have too large of an impact on the community at large. Is there a way to create groups of build guides, or anything like that? It'd be interesting to see what kind of build guides the Idle Thumbs community has put together. Whenever I look at build guides, I think about how much better the explanatory text could be (it's typically pretty bad). It'd be interesting to try to but together and "book" of community guides.

If you haven't been following it, PvZ2 was already completely different from the game as it launched, they completely re-did the progression, streamlining the map into a single path, and completely changing the way in-game unlocks work. They also changed the pace of the levels to be much shorter and faster, presumably to raise the skill floor required to pass the levels and encourage purchase of single-use powerups. It seems they've been casting about for ways to effectively monetize it for a while now.

Yes? That was my point: that there are games that are technically "free to play" that don't correspond to what we call the "free to play" business model.

In your discussion about very low probability / non-reproducible events, I'm surprised that you didn't mention Guild Wars 2, which is built on a completely "living world" concept. Every so often they have special events, which only happen once, and which change the world globally and permanently. The key is that you have to build the entire system around that concept. One of the main reasons people get upset when they miss out on special custom content because the perception is that this sort of things happens only rarely, and so they're missing out on a very limited pool of chances. But if something new and different happens every day, you're no more upset about it than missing out on the daily special at a restaurant: it's too bad, because I would've liked to try that, but I know something else cool is right around the corner. Also, it made me think of that Crusader Kings 2 Joan-of-Arc/Satan-Spawn story (might have been mentioned on the Crusader Kings 3MA). Even with online sharing and twitch streaming, etc, I think there's still an understanding that you're seeing something fairly rare and special when you encounter it in-game. Also also, I was just listening to an older episode of Jon Shafer's podcast where he had a similar conversation about it re: the fountain of youth in the Civ 5 expansions. (maybe #38?)

I'm assuming that by F2P you're talking about the dominant mobile business model that makes use of what are essentially content pay-gates via microtransactions. This excludes some fairly pedestrian examples of F2P which are basically a free-demo/unlock model. Fundamentally, what these microtransactions do, from a user perspective, is to eliminate consumer surplus, which is essentially the amount of enjoyment you enjoy above what you paid. With a typical single purchase game, you can trick yourself into thinking you got more than your money's worth out it (this also uses a number of other psychological tricks, like sunk costs). This isn't really possible with microtransactions, which charge you for each incremental piece of content you experience. Note that the entire business model is built on this: Whales are people who occupy the verrrry top end of the demand curve. The shape of the demand curve helps explain why these games can be so much more profitable than standard single purchases.There's a lot of excess consumer surplus to capture at the top-end that usually would go un-earned. There is a similar issue with episodic games, incidentally, which is one of the reasons I suspect they never took off the way they were supposed to. The consumer surplus discussion is somewhat orthogonal to the question of the exploitative mechanics used to draw out the big spenders, but only somewhat, as although I suspect it does shift the shape of demand curve somewhat, i think it's mostly just a means of revealing true preferences. The evil-ness of game design is definitely a matter of degree though. Almost all designs can be argued to be unethical to a certain extent. Micro-transaction based free to play is on the evil-er end of it though: - It masks the true cost of the product - It relies on subconscious cues that buyers are not accustomed to recognizing or capable of controlling - It has a greater potential to be harmful to the player

On the one hand, I'm astounded that people are meta-ing a Disneyland ride to exploit high scores. On the other hand...of course they are.

You could launch the game, and let it run for 10 minutes without pressing any buttons (user input is subjective!). Just 10 minutes of title screen / attract mode.

Re: Sleep no more, it's not the expense that's so bad, but it's hard to get tickets. because they sell out quite a while in advance, or at least that was the case in the beginning when it was new. Also, I have a friend of a friend who knows a bunch of the Sleep No More actors. According to him: "I see at least one couple having sex every night." So, it depends on if that's what you're into. Does anybody have a link to the Disney Haunted Mansion guy's memoir? I couldn't catch the name.

I would think that's the same as F2P for all intents and purposes. It means the subscription business model has failed.

Probably the poster child for the so-subtle-it's-obfuscation is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun (Shadow of the Torturer, etc). I've had a long-running argument with my wife about their value. She reads extensively, but says that the obfuscation for it's own sake undermines the entire work. If the entire thing is unreliably narrated to the extent that you don't actually know what happened, then what's the point in even reading it? There's _so_ much interpretation (and Wolfe assiduously avoids answering certain questions about the events depicted), that you wonder if there's anything actually there. It's like the old proverb about how if you have something to say, you should say it simply. So, if you say something in a very complex manner... I re-read the Book of the New Sun every couple of years, and I don't think I ever would have gathered all of the allegory or meaning in my lifetime without somebody else to guide me towards it, yet I can tell there's _something_ there, which is part of what makes me keep going back. I honestly can't tell you to what extent the presentation adds to the experience of reading those books. I couldn't tell you if it serves any purpose other than making myself feel smart for figuring it out. But the more I think about it, the more I think it does matter though. In this case, the willful misrepresentation is itself a commentary on religious texts in general (probably). While it's possible to express that sentiment in simpler language (see: the previous sentence), that kind of misses the point of literature, which is to tell you something, but also simply to be a beautiful thing that you engage with and experience. Yes, it's partially the writer showing off to his readers, and the readers showing off to each other that they understand it, but to dismiss that out of hand is to dismiss the entirety of human endeavor. The Carl Wilson/Celine Dion book is indeed awesome. It's an amazingly concise summary of taste-theory, and will probably make you re-think how you engage with media. It's particularly relevant in what has been called the "post-ironic" cultural landscape, where people seem more comfortable holding many such conflicting taste values in their minds at once. Want to understand Bronies? Read that book.

I'm also not a lawyer, but this is correct. You can look up derivative works, but basically, your illustrations, though based on their copyright, are likely transformative. Bear in mind, as my wife like to remind me: "Fair Use is an affirmative defense". That means that, if a suit is brought against you, you must prove that it's transformative, they don't have any obligation to prove it isn't. That being said, you're pretty much safe, Disney is no more likely to go after you than to shut down every single booth at Comic-Con that's doing unauthorized sketches of Spiderman. It's probably nice to provide attribution (of the original game) regardless, though. (Nice work BTW.)

I think that the games industry in general is a better place for having Nintendo in it. Neither Sony nor MS have cultures that really promote the kind of weird thinking that brings us Wiis, or balance boards, etc. They may not always be successful, but we need somebody pushing those boundaries. While 3rd parties like Novint may always exist on the sidelines, you need somebody with enough clout that they can affect the way that the industry in general approaches games. (RedOctane / Harmonix managed to do it from the sidelines, but that was a pretty long shot). I've seen this theory in many places, but Nintendo's emphasis on simple interfaces and same-room multiplayer have the potential to be a video-game version of Hasbro / Parker Bros. board games: family fun, designed not for adults or for kids, but for the entire family unit to enjoy together. Nobody else is really even trying to do that. Another little thing that slipped my mind: Chris mentioned that it seemed like Nintendo designed the Wii to eliminate user interface complexity, but then sort of went off on a tangent with things like the balance board. IIRC, when the balance board came out there was an Iwata asks where they talk about the development of the balance board, and how it was originally supposed to just plug into a Wiimote, like a Wii Rock Band guitar controller. That was their vision: one hot-swappable device that does all the have lifting, and everything else just used that as an interface. The problem was that they under-engineered the controller, and to get the balance board to work they actually needed wghat amounted to 2 controllers worth of bandwidth, so they had to scrap the original design, and it became a weird custom interface. In a sense, it can be seen as a scam to sell more plastic (Mario Kart wheel, Wii Sports golf clubs), but it also could have provided a familiar platform for everything to work through. Nintendo really under-engineered the WiiMote badly, they didn't really have enough faith in it and cut costs in a lot of places (the lack of the second accelerometer until the Wii Motion+ being the most obvious example)..

Hi. I've been posting a bit on the forums, so figured I could check in here. I've listened to the podcast since the Kickstarter, although I now realize that I used to go to the idlethumbs.net news site in the early 2000s when it was, well, a news site. Never realized they were the same until checking the internet archive just now, and recalling the Thumb! Thumb! Thumb! sidebar. So that's weird. Software developer, worked for a while in the game industry, but now work in Enterprise software. Done a little games writing here and there, you know, like you do. I recently made a tiny human, so I don't really play games any more as such. But still enjoy the casting of the pods and the posting of the forums and whatnot.

If I can make a suggestion: in the about page you could publish a rubric that maps hundreds of individual features to arbitrary, and often redundant or contradictory point values that are used to make up the objective score. These point values then feed into an impenetrable formula that, readers are assured, has been empirically determined to map to the experience of playing the game. The rubric metrics could also invoke other, equally non-existent metrics (Polychromaticity > 50%: +0.5 points) Bonus points if you can make the explanatory text invoke Metacritic's weighting system.

If you've had your DS for a while, there'a fair chance you have it already. I think they might've also given it to early adopters as part of their "we're sorry about the price drop" program.

"given that this site is supposedly objective, every review on it should be matching the format of this book precisely." THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO SAY ANYTHING!

I finished listening to the Nintendo convo, so a couple of thoughts: My big problem with people saying that Nintendo should get out of the hardware business, or should release their products on iOS is that they're being very backward looking: they're looking at what's been successful over the past few years and chasing it. But that's almost never the right answer. Nintendo's current core assumption that graphics are "good enough" and the hardware arms race is no longer profitable is a _forward looking_ argument. I think they may have hit it a bit early (the Wii's graphics might have been good-enough for SD, but the HD era surprised them). I think that the relatively lukewarm reception of the PS4 and XBone just proves out Nintendo's assertion that there is a point that there is a point of diminishing returns on hardware spec competition. I'm not saying that Nintendo should double-down on their current strategy. But I think that their predictions are just starting to be borne out, and I think that a reactionary about-face is the absolute worst thing they could do, because they'll have failed in both eras. It's like the old wall street saying: Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered. re: the Far Cry 2 discussion, I think there's an unspoken barrier here in that people that by and large, the audience that consumes AAA games are unequipped (or unwilling) to explore any potential meaning beyond the surface level of interactivity and entertainment. That is, it wouldn't even occur to them that the game was trying to say something different with it's failure-mechanics, so they assumed the game was just terrible. This was even more true when FC2 was released. This isn't unique to games (most movie-goers aren't equipped or willing to engage with "difficult" film), but it's a worse problem in games because the proportion of the audience that is able to engage games in a critical manner is smaller than that for film. In order to understand what Far Cry 2 was trying to do, you have to be willing and able to step back and say "What is the experience I am having? What are the design decisions that caused me to have that experience? Were those decisions intentional or is it simply a failure of execution?" If you can't answer all of those questions, there's no way that you can see what the game is trying to do, because you aren't aware that a game can _try_ to do anything. I think this is getting somewhat better as the industry and the audiences matures. But, even so, (as an example) it's disheartening how many people look at Dark Souls and their takeaway is "that game is super hard" rather than understanding how it is hard, and the fucking astonishing design work that supports that. "Hard but Fair" isn't an accident, it's the result of meticulous attention to detail. (For instance, people who complain about the multiplayer implementation without understanding that the implementation is part and parcel of the world and mood the game creates.) As you guys mentioned, a sound work that fails to find an audience can be a failure _as an endeavor_, without being a failure are a work in and of itself. Also, Milo is great. make it extra strong, then pour it over ice.

No, it's fairly common, since you're react to the game differently in a social situation than as a simulation. Similarly , watching a horror movie in a group is a very different experience from watching one alone. I find this is especially the case for games that have a relatively fragile systems as I have difficulty maintaining suspension of disbelief when my attention is split between the game and other people. Something like Facade, which requires tons of buy-in from the audience really suffers.

Nintendo has, famously, built their hardware, particularly their user interfaces around the requirements of the games that headline it (Mario/Zelda) - which is why the N64 controller was so weird (and bad), and the Gamecube controller was so weird (and secretly amazing). I have no doubt that they're looking at smartphones, if for no other reason that their core products, DS and WiiU, feature substantially similar touchscreen interfaces. But in their typical fashion, they would need to design a game from the ground up to fit onto the the smartphone, accounting for screen size / proximity, input limitations, etc.Nintendo isn't going to just "put Mario on the iPhone", because that would be a terrible experience for consumers and devalue their brand. If anything, I could see them doing some kind of spin-off thing like Square Enix does with targeting hand-helds: you get FF: Crystal Chronicles, not Final Fantasy. It expands your brand and exposure, but doesn't compete directly with, or devalue, your flagship products. If I was Iwata, I'd tell a R&D team: "Find me the smartphone's comparative advantage over the 3DS. if you can find me an excellent experience that is only possible on smartphones, then show it to me." Just from a perspective of understanding the competition. Of course, it could also be the fuck smartphones thing.

An Okami inspired skin for Lycan? (Curse of the New Season). Amazing.

There's a 3ds game called Hometown Story which is basically Harvest Moon with only shop management. It has a fair share of jankiness, as many of the Natsume games do, but it's apparently enjoyable enough if you can get past those issues. I'm having a similar experience with Rune Factory 4. I feel like I'm farther along in the narrative/adventuring than I should be, considering how little of the year I've been through. I feel like I'm "supposed" to be spending more time farming / crafting, but there isn't really much farming to be done. I think it's paced a little oddly in that regard, but it makes sense that there's "post-game" content, plus you're probably supposed to just keep plugging at it to 100% the crafting and everything.

What was the deal with the post-episode rendition of Axel F comprised of pitch-shifted samples of the word "games" from like a year ago? Nobody mentioned it, and then I thought maybe it was a thing we weren't supposed to mention, which I'll know was the case if this post gets mysteriously scrubbed.

I've played the in-game tutorials and a small number of matches (50 or so?), mostly to see "what this DoTA thing is all about". So, I've only looked at a minimum of the offline guides and tutorials, etc. Reading some of these "newbie tips", I can see that I really still haven't even come close to actually playing DoTA. It probably would've been useful to know that you can use Quelling Blade on Prophet's trees during the Frostivus event. You haven't even mentioned Frostivus on the 'cast. Did you guys play it at all? I'm wondering what people think about the prospect of full-time alternate game modes in DoTA, or if the core has so much complexity, any distractions would just be an annoyance that makes people worse.

I keep thinking I should try Korsun Pocket, having played the hell out of UoC, but then I look at those screenshots, and *gulp*. I'll stick to my bobble heads, thank you very much. I just follow Tim James around from forum to forum to second his recommendations for Unity of Command, so agreed Dr. Frog, that you should give it a try. I was in almost the exact same Advance Wars bucket, and it clicked for me right away.