Problem Machine

Guy almost set a PB during the any% Mario race. He got so giddy and pumped up, it was kind of infectious -- though he unfortunately choked on the last fight and ended up going about 25 seconds over his best.

I edited it in I think before you finished posting but quite possibly after you'd started

Yeah that's cool, humor is volatile anyway -- sometimes a joke can completely not land for someone and then the 5th or 6th time they hear it something triggers and it totally destroys. I just said it's my favorite, I don't expect it to be everyone else's

What makes it work perfectly for me is the shot where it pans out and shows all the rakes arrayed around him. Like, just as you start to construct a mental model of how this improbable situation could occur, it shows you this ridiculous array of rakes, and it's just perfect. It makes it way better than just the standard 'dumb joke repeated a bunch of times' gag. It's actually several jokes in one: First, him coming out from under the car all beat up after the trip and then stepping on a rake to add to that, which comes out of nowhere and is a pretty good gag in itself. Then, the second rake, which adds another layer of over-the-top weirdness to the abuse he's suffered. Then the third rake is like "okay that makes no sense" until it pulls out and shows all the rakes which makes that make sense (but in the words of Hermes Conrad "just raises further questions"). And then there's even another layer to it when they're having a conversation in another room and you can hear him step on the rake in the background. It's an amazing set of jokes that are the same joke told over and over in different ways. It's a masterpiece. Plus the grumbling sound he makes is hilarious.

Some thoughts I had about SU

The rake gag in Cape Feare is possibly my favorite joke in any television show ever

I dunno, I feel like the application makes sense when you acknowledge that the entire route is planned out beforehand.

Have you played Transistor? A lot of the combat in that reminded me of CT's positional attack stuff

Ocean House in VtM: Bloodlines The Ocean Palace and Black Omen in Chrono Trigger (I love that people are coming up with so many different favorite areas from this game, a real testament to its imagination) The Chapel in Symphony of the Night The Phantom Train from Final Fantasy 6 ... I dunno I can't think of anything else right now

I just got completely caught up and man that show gets pretty intense sometimes. I gotta say, I'm pretty jealous of kids. Cartoons nowadays are so much better.

It's three times as fast because it only has to render one channel instead of three!

Sorry, but if you can't predict that players will do tedious bullshit to get the currency in your game which you have explicitly communicated to them is valuable then that's very very much on you as the designer. Predicting how players will react to the stuff you put in the game is your job. So let me dig out (heh) the specific example I'm thinking of. There's a challenge in the lava level that you get to by climbing over some blocks without destroying them (my first time through I accidentally destroyed these by angling slightly too low on my d-pad, which lead to my observation about the arbitrary respawning of game objects). In this section you have to jump across fire fish to get to the chest, and then back across (thus all of my frustrations with their specific behavior). I got through this on my first time, but on the last jump on the way back I messed up and fell into the pit. Okay. Now, my three money bags spawned in such a way that in order to pick up the third one I couldn't bounce off the fish at the top of its arc, but had to jump on it when it was on its way up: A slight timing challenge but not that big a deal, except the fish is actually traveling so fast it will go right through your bounce attack and hit you and knock you into the pit. So if I didn't want to just give up I had to do this challenge which the designers explicitly didn't account for in their design, which wouldn't be that hard if the enemies behaved in a more predictable manner. I eventually got it all back just by dying in slightly different places until my bags spawned somewhere where they weren't impossible to retrieve without dying. Giving the player an incentive to do something that sucks is worse than no incentive. Even if the player doesn't have to do it, they'll want to, and as the designer if you're encouraging the player to do something tedious with no understanding of why you have fucked up.

Money is incentivized. Money is good. This is a trait that is inherent to money, especially in games: It is That Thing You Want. Taking it away when you mess up serves the purpose of giving you a reason not to fuck up. What, then, is the purpose of dropping it there so you can pick it back up? So that then raises an interesting question, being: Why does this work in Dark Souls (imo) when it doesn't in Shovel Knight (again, imo)? I think a big part of it is that it's very wishy-washy here. You don't drop ALL your money when you die, you drop just enough to be annoying. The stakes aren't high enough to feel invested in, just high enough to feel annoyed by. Also, Dark Souls is a game where you have a number of strategies at your disposal: You can try running past the enemies that killed you before, or luring them out, or using a special item to defeat them. In Shovel Knight, there's no decision to make, you just have to go back where you were and not mess up this time. So what's the point of having it at all, if most of the time it will make no real difference and the few times it will it will be by driving the player to do some obnoxious shit like go through an optional challenge again after having already collected the reward? Stuff like this makes me feel like the game is built around 'wouldn't it be cool if' style brainstorming rather than a specific guided intent. It feels amateurish... even if that style of amateurism is pandemic in the industry.

It doesn't matter if it's secondary, it's presented as the right way to play. The game actually has a really weird relationship to money drops, seemingly making a bunch of decisions to keep you from gaming the system (not spawning money if you've already collected it in a level) while also providing a ton of ways to game the system (replayable mini-games etc). Your third point is total bs. Bad design is bad even if it only triggers when the player makes a mistake. That same logic can be used to justify any death system in any game, no matter how onerous or absurd. Regarding your fourth point, since the overwhelming majority of the time I end up dying on optional side challenges -- frequently on my way back from completing them -- that's untrue. I could just choose to ignore the gold, but then I'm losing most of what I got from the optional side challenge. Fun. I never said they were grindable, that was just a side note of how unfun incentivization can occur in a game design. In this particular instance, the unfun incentivization is putting something that you've lost (exploiting player loss aversion) in a place where it isn't necessarily retrievable (poor implementation) and then further punishing the player if they fail to do so, while feeding back into the same loop (vicious cycle). It's a concession that's supposed to make things simpler for the player that in practice makes things more frustrating and onerous, similar to the regenerating health example I cited. I think that trying to make things easier in a way that just makes them more obtuse and counterintuitive is a common pattern in the game, such as the stupid fish that jump out of the lava, spend an unknown amount of time hovering in place, and then fall back down, and sometimes they're on a timer and sometimes they trigger when you walk next to them and you have to bounce off of them so all of those specifics actually become really important. All of those design decisions, made to make them stay in the air longer and be there at the right time, end up making them far more frustrating to navigate than if they just followed a simple and predictable pattern. It's the best of NES overworked to a state where it no longer has the elegance and predictability that made those games work, and it makes me wish they'd stayed truer to the guiding principles of the game's aesthetic.

I wrote a few words about Adventure Time and loneliness. Currently about 2/3rds through the first season of Steven Universe and liking it a lot. Will probably watch Bojack Horseman after.

If only things were that simple

I've been playing through this and developing a real love/hate relationship with it. I think the core of the game is good, and the graphics and music are great, but some of the specific decisions are driving me crazy. First, the acceleration on the character is real strange. It seems like you can instantly reach top speed from a standing start, but you decelerate kind of slowly if you want to turn, except both of those are muted if you're in the air so I constantly find my character lunging further than I intended him to when I'm on the ground. Second, the decisions about what resets when are super arbitrary and kind of dickish. Like, enemies will respawn if they go off screen, platforms will regenerate when they go off screen IF YOU NEED THEM TO COMPLETE THE LEVEL but if they're there for optional loot then they stay gone. In general, it seems like they depart from the NES aesthetic a lot, which in itself is fine except it seems like they frequently do so simply to inconvenience the player by forcing them to go through the level again if they missed something. Third, the rules are frequently not conveyed well. It's actually kind of cool how many different interacting design elements they get into the levels, which is a place where they depart from the NES aesthetic in a way I appreciate, but sometimes the behavior of objects is weird and surprising when you find them. In particular, I remember the first time an anchor dropped, I immediately jumped over assuming I could climb the chain like a ladder: Nope, the only interactable part of the anchor is the crossarm, and you have to jump on that before it goes off the bottom of the screen for reasons. Having platforms that temporarily and lethally dip off screen is something that most platformers tend to avoid unless there's a clear reason why that temporary fall would be dangerous (lava, water, etc), none of which is present here, so the anchors are doubly bad design. In fact fuck that whole water level: Between the anchors and the water physics interacting with an already iffy control scheme, it was a total chore to get through. Fourth, fuck the whole currency dropping thing. I'd so much rather just lose the money permanently than have to go back and try to pick it up, especially when the placement of the money bags is extremely iffy. I'm still basically enjoying the game. I'm about 2/3rds through and I'll probably finish it, but man I wish they'd made some different decisions here. Then again, I've been developing a platformer, so I'm probably more than a bit nitpicky.

Oh god that's adorable

Well you probably wouldn't even fight Gaping unless you wanted to do an all-boss version of the run. I should look into those BoC 'sploits, because without that it's kinda RNG whether you get wax on'd into a pit

Man I don't think I would ever try to permadeath DS just because of Bed of Chaos...

This is unfortunately a very common line of thought among people in leadership positions -- and, more unfortunately yet, not one without some justification. The problem is, when you admit you're wrong, in a political context that can later be used against you, whereas if you never admit wrongdoing you can just keep spinning and spinning it, blaming anything that goes wrong on other people or on circumstances. This kind of an intrinsic social problem that selects for bad leadership in all walks of life. It's pretty shitty.

I think the point is more that trying to point out how his behavior hurts people, even in the most reasonable and helpful of ways, ends up feeling like an attack to him because it's essentially impossible to do that without sealioning him. Everything is so amplified by so many voices, seeming moderate is impossible -- which is what makes it so easy for him to believe the "both sides are culpable" line, because from his perspective all he can see are vast walls of accounts generating noise and bile. Again, I don't think this excuses his own lack of self-insight -- but it makes it functionally impossible to communicate with him now, even if he were predisposed towards communication.

Yeah I don't think it excuses all of TB's bad behavior, but it is a good reason why more nuanced communication with him is at this point extremely tricky if not impossible. There was a bit of side-discussion in that tweet thread about how TB has made it a moral imperative to interact with feedback even when that's really not good for him, but he's painted himself into a logistical corner.

An interesting point re: TB was brought up by Dan Olsen on twitter, noting the systemic issues that contribute to his thickness on some of these issues. I don't think this necessarily excuses his behavior, but it does make you think about how skewed everything is from his perspective. It's genuinely hard to interact with someone with 2 million followers without being SOME kind of sea lion.

He's reconsidered that stance following a discussion with Lindsay Ellis and Zoe Quinn. The conversation itself is pretty interesting as well.