Problem Machine

Members
  • Content count

    1829
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Problem Machine

  1. I follow all these dudes on twitter but I hadn't heard about this-- I've stopped reading my feed since it seems to end up being about half comprised of people I respect being kind of dicks to each other. Maybe I should follow fewer people. Apparently he works at Telltale now? Congrats/fucks! I applied and was rejected
  2. Idle Thumbs 94: Readers Like You

    Did I imply that I thought that was a problem? I didn't mean to. And-- well, I know you've gotten a lot into the comparisons between AAA games and AAA films in the podcast, but suffice it to say there tends to be a lot more under that umbrella when it comes to films. I mean, there's obviously the huge big budget action movies which are the most ready comparison, but there are a lot of films with nearly as high budgets that are much more strongly authored by a particular person. Most of Tim Burton's work, for example. I suspect that the games industry's particular fixation on basically checklists that comprise the correct way to do a genre is a hold-over from its software engineering roots, but that's probably a research paper and probably one I don't want to write. I usually fall back on 'large budget'. Same thing really. If it was just AAA I'd have probably stuck with it, but his reasoning on why IP in particular was a gross term for lots of people to be using resonated very strongly with me, and so I avoid all of them as best as I can now. It's generally preferable to use the phrases with the least possible baggage, I think.
  3. Idle Thumbs 94: Readers Like You

    Yeah unfortunately games, particularly AAA games, tend to be really good at undermining themselves in this respect. This is I think because they're developed in the mindset of 'best practices', IE what works well for whatever genre they are developing in, rather than a mindset of 'what are we trying to achieve with this game?' TBH this thesis is what like half of my blog posts end up boiling down to. Also, to be fair Jake, the way Hotline Miami and Cart Life handle this is super super smart, so it's probably a bit unfair to make that comparison. AAA developers just don't have the same resources as indies-- when it comes to self-consistency, since they don't have a self to be consistent to. Also also, since I'm sleepy and rambling and have used the term 'AAA' twice in this post already, Chris's rant a few months ago has made me super self-conscious about using terms such as 'AAA', 'IP', and 'title'. I tend to avoid using them now in my writing in favor of other descriptors if I can think of anything that fits, but it's still that really conscious self-editing process. You know, the kind that seems excessively laborious for a forum post? ... Anyhoo.
  4. Idle Thumbs 94: Readers Like You

    I will definitely check that out next time I am procrastinating. I end up watching a lot of random videos at such times, it may as well be something educational. Bukmarkt. The particular reference to a 'ratio' kind of confuses me in this context. I can understand the idea of the motions meshing well with the theme, but I'm not sure how the ratio comes in. Slightly related to your antidote, though, when I first started playing Super Hexagon a lot it would mess with my head in such a way that, whenever I read text, I would actually imagine a little triangle where the focus of my eyes was dodging between the letters and they rolled in on it. It was super weird.
  5. It was a really fun episode and it's cool to hear about Thomas Was Alone's success. It's not a game I'd hold out as a standard of gaming achievement, but it knows what it wants to do and does it super well. It's just a really, you know, nice game. It's the sort of game which, unlike Dead Space 2, your mom doesn't hate. I also completely dig the soundtrack. However, I think Chris's presence was sorely missed. It was particularly weird hearing one of his transitions without having his voice as a presence in the rest of the cast-- you dudes should have busted out some improvised a capella transitions, and it can only be a sign of your lack of commitment to the (vaguely defined) cause that you didn't. Anyway, Chris is really good at keeping things on the rails while still leaving plenty of room for goofy hijinks, so things, I dunno, kind of sprawled a bit here. That could be an editing issue as well. Oh, right, and congrats on your BAFTA thingies (fuck your BAFTA thingies).
  6. Idle Thumbs 96: Historical Beef

    I don't think anyone is claiming that it's a rape torture fantasy, but it is an intersection of sexiness and violence which is kind of weird, all the more so for it seemingly being unaware of being weird. Personally, I don't have a problem with the violence or the sexiness or the combination of the two as long as it's done in an aware and intelligent way, but I'm really not sure what they were going for here.
  7. Idle Thumbs 96: Historical Beef

    Right, I wouldn't argue that there's no creepy fetishization of Lara Croft, but I would argue against the idea that having ones weird fetish brain involved in creativity is inherently creepy and ugly. TBH, I think a lot of what makes Lara unnerving is that as far as we can tell there isn't a Tarantino there pushing the sexy violence just because that's his thing and it's his game, it's a product of a design by committee and yet somehow they were all okay with this. That's kind of, uh, weird, right? I mean, people find Rapelay kind of weird and unnerving and gross, but mostly understand that it's just a crazy japanese fetish project and not intended for mass consumption, but if EA makes a game like that... Not that I intend to draw any direct parallels between Rapelay and Tomb Raider. I just want to be clear that, basically, the fetish stuff gets creepier the more people involved in its creation and, even more importantly, the wider the audience it's supposedly intended to serve.
  8. Idle Thumbs 96: Historical Beef

    Disagree. I actually think one of the charming things about Kill Bill is Tarantino's crazy fetish bullshit, but I think that's because it tends to inform the action rather than justify it. You'd still have a movie without hot chicks stepping on eyeballs, but it would be a less personal (read: hilariously insane) movie without it. It can be a difficult difference to pick out, but has to do with where the heart of a piece lies. Unfortunately, the heart of Tomb Raider, as with most games, likes with "hey this worked in this other game so let's do it here without actually thinking about why it worked." Or, such is my perception, as someone who has not played it or, indeed, any Tomb Raider game.
  9. Idle Thumbs 96: Historical Beef

    Fact is, both Lara Croft dying a horrible death on player failure and people jerking off to it are not new things. They have been a fixture of the series since day one, the main difference being that now that we have interwebs and youtubs it's a lot more visible. 'Course, just because it's not new isn't really a defense of it, but Lara dying and Lara being a sexy action-lady are mainstays of the series so whatever. I think what bothers me more is the whole ill-advised, trite, and unnecessary gritty reboot approach. I actually wrote a thousand words about this on my bloog when the whole dumb controversy broke, but my basic take on it is that it's a stupid approach that makes no sense as an origin story and I would have liked to see something more in the direction of Venture Bros than Passion of the Christ for the new game. I'm rereading it now and it's actually pretty funny. Good for me.
  10. Idle Thumbs 96: Historical Beef

    To be fair, the space cop paradigm is pretty obvious. Bioware stopped short of actually naming paragon/renegade good cop/bad cop, but that was obviously the intent... at least at first, before it got sucked into the same crap vortex as all video game morality systems. My sentiments on playing the game mirrored Chris's pretty exactly, and though I did enjoy the more exotic adventuring the game offered later on I was quite disappointed at yet another save the universe video game plot. Fuck the universe, I like space copping. Instead I just ended up space-copping a feel of alien booby in a creepy cutscene. :( frowny face.
  11. Idle Thumbs 96: Historical Beef

    Oh, wow, I think Chris actually talked about Zuma's Revenge on the podcast before, didn't he? I remember him mentioning feeling, actually, kind of like Jake described feeling at the high school, in sort of a weird emotional space of encountering a slightly wrong version of something he'd spent a lot of time with. Unfortunately I have no idea what episode it was just off-hand. I remembered the ep when Chris was talking about Zuma before but, having only a vague recollection, assumed he was talking about Zuma Deluxe. Now... all the pieces are coming together...! Tangentially, before she passed my grandma was super into Zuma, though she never got very far into it as I recall, bogging down somewhere in the second or third world. (Another piece of the puzzle!?)
  12. Idle Thumbs 94: Readers Like You

    It actually strikes me that if you were to set up an MMO to do so from the start it probably wouldn't be too difficult to record them 24/7. I doubt most servers would generate more than a few hundred megs a day of just entity instructions. And then, considering the actual level of social interaction that happens outside of one's immediate social circle, it would be possible to have a fairly authentic replay at some arbitrary point in the future with just your circle of friends playing in the recorded demo-world. You could still buy things from other ghost-players via whatever in-game storefronts are set up, even. I suppose you wouldn't be able to really participate in the inane chatter in quite the same way, but it would still be pretty authentic. And fake servers could be set up to just stream the demo data off of a central 're-enactment server' somewhere. Dunno. Interesting idea!
  13. Idle Thumbs 94: Readers Like You

    Great episode. A couple of topics you guys were discussing actually reminded me of things I've been writing about over the last few months on my blog. First, your discussion on how game designers get bogged down in explaining worlds and how sometimes this is notably worse than the alternatives reminded me of this thing I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how not justifying everything in a game can actually make the experience richer and more mysterious. Second, the letter about exploring a design space as distinct from exploring a world space reminded me very much of something I wrote quite a bit back, actually, about how a game can be conceived as the sum of three spaces: Design, Narrative, and World, and how most games emphasize exploring one or two of these, and how these can interact with each other. (Rereading this after writing it 6 months ago, I find I no longer agree with some of my assertions, but I think the premise is worthwhile) I also liked the Danny Glover anecdote, though I have to disagree with Chris about his primary response being one of recognition being a creepy commentary on our world. I think it's actually charming that we categorize celebrities in our brains as tribe members, acquaintances to be worried about or proud of. I think it's definitely preferable to thinking of them as inhuman movie-constructs or like royalty. In fact, I think that this is part of why we like celebrities, the social aspect of seeing a familiar face, almost like a friend. I guess one could think of it as sad that we'd need such a thing, but I prefer to think of it as sweet that we'd want such a thing.
  14. Idle Thumbs 88: Lacks Restraint

    Everything I need to know about Far Cry 3 I learned from this video.
  15. Idle Thumbs 88: Lacks Restraint

    Cart Life is really good. I'm not sure if I'll ever play it again. I started it up during a bout of insomnia, and at the point when I had Andrus starving and passing out while trying to keep the price of coffee and papers straight and trying to catch up to a lunch rush that wouldn't end so I could actually feed him... and then finally just saying fuck it and closing shop and going to buy lunch and then coming back and finding out that he was too tired to open the stand back up... and then going back to the motel and going to sleep and waking up I'm not sure when but I suspect like 10 at night since after I bought a slice of pizza everything closed... it started being, I dunno, a little too evocative. Also, tangentially: When I saw the toy cat in the superstore, the first place my mind went is "Oh this is the item you buy Andrus to keep him from going crazy if his cat dies." No idea if that's the case, but, fuck. Bleak and harrying all the way down. It's a really good reminder of why most of the games we like to play are escapist fluff. It might just be too real for me.
  16. Hotline Miami

    Wat? That's like the #1 most common complaint about the game as far as I can tell.
  17. Hotline Miami

  18. Regarding using a single voice or a single violin vs using a bunch of them, I feel like maybe some of that comes from how hard it is to make that sort of thing sound good when you're working with samples and/or synths. Because the little performance touches get really important there, you really need to hire a musician (assuming you don't know the instrument well yourself). While I'm sure that many of the composers working in the big-name game space have access to these sorts of things when it requires a musician it takes a lot of confidence in whatever you've written to take that leap, whereas it's much easier to dump a piece full of big bombastic sounds and make it sound EPIC. The best way to prove a concept that you can't perform yourself would be to quickly prototype it, which would require the samples and/or synths which, as mentioned, sound lousy with that kind of style. So, yeah. Also, I think a really interesting instance of the music and sound design interacting, though maybe not strictly diegetic (hard to say) is near the end of Limbo. The clicking warning of the gravity reversal becomes part of the music, which makes the entire flow towards the end just grab you right in the spine and yank you through the climax. It is pretty good.
  19. Idle Thumbs 83: Free Macintosh Warez

    I've never really watched Tim and Eric but my impressions from what little I've seen is that it's a much better source of existential horror than humor. I kind of thought that was the idea, to be honest.
  20. Ugly pretty textures

    So I've been kicking an idea for an essay around in my head for a while about a thing which I'm pretty sure is a thing but which I'm having a hard time remembering specific examples of-- I'm hoping you kind folks might be able to lend a hand. Basically, I've observed that a lot of 3d games use textures that are either way too high-contrast, way too large for the surface they're on, or both. An example of this would be a game I saw recently (I can't remember which for sure, it might have been a youtub video of Natural Selection 2) which had a standard metal plating floor which looked approximately like this: I'm sure we've all walked across floors more or less like that. However, in-game each of those, uh... protuberances? Each of them was scaled somewhere between the dimensions of a thumb and a wrist. Such a surface would be most uncomfortable to walk across and not be nearly as useful for traction, but that's how the texture was scaled to its surface. Now, it's not hard to see why this would be the case. If you know the detail is there, you want to be able to see it-- normally, in our day to day lives, we could just peer more closely at a surface to see what the texture is, but when you're taking screenshots to sell your game with that isn't exactly an option. So artists end up making textures that are scaled up and overcontrasted to make sure that you can see that there's a damn texture there. The same thing happens with specular and normal maps, so we see bizarrely shiny craggy rocks rather unlike any one would observe in nature, which I suppose wouldn't necessarily be a problem except that the developers are trying to evoke a natural environment. This is, incidentally, one of the traps Valve has consistently avoided. The textures in their game worlds tend to be realistically scaled and contrasted, which makes for less impressive screenshots but far greater potential for verisimilitude which can sometimes border on the creepy-- one of the reasons I've found Left 4 Dead so compelling is because some of the environments are so much like places I've been that I found seeing the nightmarish post-apocalyptic versions of them genuinely chilling. Anyway, I'm looking for more examples I could use, though I actually found more to say on this and more to show towards it than I thought I had here. Specific examples from big name releases are particularly welcome. Or, if you think I'm full of shit and would like to take this opportunity to say so, that's fine too
  21. Idle Book Club Episode 5: The Great Gatsby

    I can't keep myself from thinking of The Great Gatling Gunsby whenever I read the title now though. Dang it.
  22. You were just really into lawnmowers back then?
  23. GOTY

    Yes. Third page has my thoughts on the endings, sectioned off for spoiler reasons.
  24. GOTY

    Hm, strange to hear you say that as though it's a bad thing. I think the obscurity and the confusion was part of the draw of it for me and for many others.
  25. The Idle Book Club 3: Telegraph Avenue

    Yay, Gatsby! Great excuse to reread a great book. Also a short book! I liked the pod. I'm glad you guys liked the book, because after reading it and enjoying it I was worried I'd listen to the pod and it would just be two hours of dudes I respect tearing the shit out of a book I liked. Glad that you guys actually seemed to be on the same page as me,so to speak, when it comes to the relative merits and demerits of the book. That said, the pop-culture references never bothered me much-- I think after one or two my brain just said "well apparently this takes place in some strange alternate universe where everyone is a fucking nerd" and proceeded on that assumption.