sclpls

Well said. I feel like I hear things I disagree with on this podcast, and many others, but instead of trying to say that the Idle Thumbs Podcast project is bullshit because I didn't find a particular point-of-view correct or particularly interesting - I engage in a conversation, and it is part of what makes Idle Thumbs great. But what I hear from so many detractors of this video project is this effort to shut down any sort of attempt at further engaging in dialogue. It is incredibly frustrating. It is even more embarrassing because so many of the critiques I am seeing leveled at this video are directly addressed in the video, so it makes it hard to believe that a lot of these criticisms are raised in good faith.

I also like Pandemic a lot, but I agree that it is on the simpler side of things. I am a big fan of Space Alert, which was a board game that inspired FTL, and has vaguely similar mechanics. Each player controls a space cadet dude, and you collectively have to deal with a variety of threats to your spaceship. There are two things that distinguish the game from the rest of the cooperative board gaming crowd. 1. You have these cards that allow you to either move to another room, or to activate a certain type of control (firing a weapon, rebuffering shields, transferring energy somewhere, etc.). So that becomes this sort of puzzle that you need to solve, moving and activating things in the right order. 2. The game is in real time. It comes with this CD that you play, and the CD is just the voice of the ship computer letting you know a threat has arrived (so you then draw from the threat card deck), or that the communication channel has gone offline (so players aren't allowed to speak when this happens), and stuff like that. The game has a hard limit of 10 minutes of play. The real time mechanic does an excellent job of solving two problems: it eliminates analysis paralysis from stretching out your board game session into an ungodly long time, and it also eliminates the problem that is rampant in a lot of cooperative games where one person just sort of takes charge of how to play the game, and everyone else just sort of passively agrees. The real time mechanic also makes things considerably more difficult. In your haste to put cards down before you run out of time, it is entirely possible you put a card down in the wrong order, or put down your card so that you are moving instead of activating something or vice versa. A single misstep can lay waste to all your planning. Some people will find that incredibly frustrating, but other people will find it hilarious. So its not a game for everyone, but for people that are amused by things going horribly wrong the game is great fun.

Hey Jon, congratulations! I have a suggestion for a game design topic for you to consider: feedback that explains why a player is losing. One of things that makes it so difficult for a lot of people to get into strategy games is that when they lose, they often have no idea why, and therefore when they play again they aren't sure what sort of things they should try to do differently. What sort of feedback should a game provide to let a player know what areas he or she can improve upon in the next play through? Anyway, congratulations again on the successful kickstarter, I wish you the best of luck!

As far as the Twilight Imperium not-quite-recommendation, I'm going to make my obligatory pitch for Eclipse, a game I very much enjoy, and one that should be receiving an iOS port sometime soon. It is also a 4X space board game with multiple ways to earn VP, but the rules are much more elegant than TI (TI is a pretty gnarly combination of Axis & Allies, and Puerto Rico). I forget who mentioned the game, but when he said it takes like 6 hours if anything he undersold it. I played a 9 hour game of it once where I was the only person that was even a little more than half way close to victory... it really is kind of too much. Eclipse, by contrast, probably takes about an hour per person the first time you play it, and then is more like half an hour per person afterwards. It is still a very robust board game experience, but it is also much more manageable.

You might want to peruse the archives because I believe the game was discussed in several episodes back when it was released. You may not hear the sort of conversation you're looking for though, I mostly recall Tom singing the game's gospel.

Hooray! http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/2/4056362/civilization-designer-soren-johnson-joins-stardock-entertainment

It's kind of amazing discovering that this game is really difficult and inaccessible for people. I remember buying it when it came out, and it didn't feel like that at all, it just felt like an amazing video game. But now that I've revisited it I can see where people are coming from, and I'm having a lot more trouble with it than when I originally played it. I do like the game more than Bioshock. Bioshock is much more impressive as an aesthetic, but I loved the character classes in System Shock 2 and how that would impact how you experienced the environment. Bioshock rolled it all into one so you were simultaneously a fighter, engineer, and psionic badass. That was a fine design choice, but I loved how in System Shock 2 you had these three discrete choices without being totally shoeboxed into playing a particular kind of way. I can't think of too many other games where that initial character choice would impact how you experienced and played the rest of the game, and that's something that I think a lot of RPGs and strategy games should look at more closely.

Brian Reynolds who designed Civilization II & Alpha Centauri also worked there (and it was reported that he also left recently) so yeah, it is pretty crazy that they had some of the most highly regarded strategy game designers working on things like FrontierVille. Anyway, I am very excited to see what both these guys end up working on now that they are no longer beholden to the casual Facebook gaming market!

This reminds me that I'd love to see a Mass Effect game that combined the sort of RPG dialog options, and space exploration with XCOM's turn based tactical combat. Both would emphasize consequences in the game environment.

Fallen Enchantress is 66% off on Steam now for like the next 2 days.

So I see that these games are now available on GOG. Which game does everyone prefer? What are the main differences between the two? From what I understand they aren't radically different from one another, and hold up fairly well.

Yeah, at $6 a pop, I ended up buying both, but I'm playing the 2nd to start out for the superficial reason that the graphics are a little nicer. I'll get around to the 1st eventually though! ;-) So far I'm loving this, and the game seems way ahead of its time in a lot of ways. The use of engineers, builders, and explorers vaguely feels like some sort of worker placement mechanic, and the conversion of resources into more valuable resources feels like an Uwe Rosenberg design. All that combined with a great diplomacy game! There's a lot to really enjoy here for sure.

So Civ 4 is like eight years old at this point. How old does a game have to be to be eligible for a classic game analysis? It's a game that of course is constantly mentioned on 3MA, but has yet to receive its own episode.

I also like the residential architecture in the Sunset. With all the fog, and the general lack of people walking around the street compared to other parts of the city the whole area has a serious land-forgotten-by-time vibe that is really amazing. Also I made some remark about some off hand comment about Tim & Eric several podcasts ago where I misinterpreted something or whatever, and listening to this podcast I feel bad that this is like a frustrating thing for Chris. Sorry about that! I totally get how that sort of out-of-context misinterpretation can be frustrating. This is why all politicians are basically robots!

Civ 5 has its flaws, but I think you're short changing it a bit. The adjustment to culture, for example, was a good development. I forget how it worked in Civ 3 exactly, but in Civ 4 it was a little too easy to culture bomb your enemies into submission, and once you got your output rolling it became very difficult for the AI to stop you in your tracks even if it was aware of what you were doing. The main advantage of culture in Civ 5 is simply allowing you to quickly move along the social policy track, and completing those tracks is one way to achieve victory. Another improvement in the victory conditions is not having to wait around for the discovery of Alpha Centauri if you're going for a technological victory.

So much of the feel of the Cold War came down to MAD, and that means you are dealing with game theory. This is why a video game about the Cold War is always going to be a problem. Game theory against a human opponent is interesting; game theory against an AI isn't. Either the AI is predictable, in which case it's boring, or it isn't, in which case it feels arbitrary and unfair. Arguably this is why the most successful game about the Cold War is Twilight Struggle, which is simply a two player board game. However this might also provide the way forward for a successful video game. Twilight Struggle abstracts away the conflict through the area control mechanic, and card driven events. A video game could provide greater detail in terms of how each side goes about spreading the ideology of liberal democracy/capitalism vs. communism. This hypothetical game could also perhaps follow along the lines of the event driven cards where you know certain kinds of scenarios and conflicts will crop up, but you won't know precisely when and what form they take. Aside from the grand strategy concept, I agree that focusing in conflict less global in scale would also be very fruitful. I think a lot of these conflicts haven't appeared much in strategy games because so much of our game design vocabulary revolves around state vs state conflict like World War II or the American Civil War. However board games like Andean Abyss are definitely demonstrating that it is possible to create compelling strategy experiences around more unconventional types of conflicts, particularly conflicts revolving around insurgency and struggles for state legitimacy. I don't really expect Paradox to make a Cold War game I want to play, but Paradox games are sort of not for me anyway. They seem to design games that I admire for the research that went into making the game rather than games that I actually think are fun to play.

Darkplace... nice! I spent this weekend skiing, which turned out not to be such a good idea because it hadn't snowed in the Tahoe area in awhile, so the snow on the mountain was pretty icy. I ended up taking a couple of gnarly falls down some steep slopes. Cue today: I have the day off, and I'm feeling pretty sore & beat up. I download Miasmata, and I am totally feeling the vibe of being some pretty weak dude that falls down hills a lot. I encountered the creature once. I tried running away from him, but he caught up with me pretty easily. I was in some swamp area so I just waded as deep into the water as I could. Then the creature left. Not bad! Hopefully I can keep having encounters along those lines...

Although I didn't write in stating this, since it is a topic out in the open now I will also cop to having a difficult time distinguishing between Jake and Sean's voices. The conversation about preserving games makes me think about my theory that future civilizations (say, 500+ years) will know more about the Romans, for example, than they will about our current era. That's because digital media is easy to transfer around, but it is total shit in terms of preservation. I have a number of CDs from when they were first released as a medium that just don't play anymore. Plus, CD players will eventually be as obsolete as cassette decks. Hard drives fail. The sub-optimal solution that we rely on is to just keep copying everything, which is what digital media is good at. Who knows what happens when human beings invent new mediums that we rely on though. Maybe we preserve all this digital junk, but maybe we don't... either way there are probably some enormous chunks of social knowledge that get lost in the process. I realize this is all way beyond the scope of games that require you to be logged into a server, but that topic did spark up that bigger topic in my mind, and it is something I think about a lot.

Gas Powered Games was acquired by wargaming.net Best of luck to GPG while under the boot of their new hawkish overlord!

Yeah, Kotaku is totally guilty of ridiculous web headline techniques, brilliantly described here: http://www.theawl.com/2013/01/take-a-minute-to-watch-the-new-way-we-make-web-headlines-now Besides the headlines, another thing that ends up bothering me about Kotaku is their genre of video-games-totally-saved-my-life, which always come off as excessive evangelizing.

Fantastic episode, I could have easily listened to another hour of the conversation. It was really interesting that most of the game design came into place from wanting to represent lines of battle, rather than supply.I hope whatever future designs they come up with will be better suited for multiplayer just because the game plays quickly enough that it is ideal for multiplayer in many ways...

Funny that, how every time Gearbox releases something terrible, it's someone else's fault. I'm not entirely convinced Borderlands is a particularly good game either, but people didn't notice with all the guns distracting them.

Anyone else here on board for the alpha testing? Normally I don't mess around with stuff like that and just wait for the finished product, but since the gameplay video looked fairly polished, and I really want this game to play well I figured it made sense to try and check the game out as early as possible.

Yes to both those games. I didn't really enjoy the gameplay of DEFCON, but it had so much personality & atmosphere it was difficult not to get sucked into that Cold War nightmare.

To expand upon this earlier post, it occurred to me that I just give up on RPGs all the time. Between the lengthy time commitment, and the many systems you need to be aware of, it is just too demanding of my time. I can't take a week or two off, and get back into things, which means I just end up never returning to the game. This happened not only with Dark Souls, but also the Witcher 2, and Xenoblade Chronicles. Also, I think I've only completed one Final Fantasy game (9 I think...). Much more commonly I make my way to the final boss, realize I still have hours of more grinding to do, and decide, ehh, good enough.