Badfinger
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Posts posted by Badfinger
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I think commuting can happen and buying/selling energy can also happen. If city to city loans can happen I'm golden.
Yes, it totally can! Just click the speech bubble in the tutorial to continue...
Yes, in the tutorial they have a brief thing where you go to region view and you check what services and people are moving in between cities. So it showed that you're getting garbage truck service from CasinoVille, and residents from your city are going there to work.
Aaaaaahhhh so excited for this game.
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^ The bungie bit was great
Maybe they'll change a subscription fee for the Gaikai streaming stuff or it'll get lumped in with playstation plus.
As the console will run fine without it, and many people with shit internet connection may not be able to run the streaming anyway. But it'll make sense to bundle it in with playstation plus as they can let people playstream a selection of ps2 and ps3 titles for free each month.
And yes i have just invented the word playstream ©
To clarify, I was thinking along the lines of XBox Live Gold where a pay subscription is necessary to play online games AT ALL. I know that's a core tenant of the Microsoft system that "won" the console wars, but I still think hiding online multiplayer behind a paywall is a terrible idea that only caught on because the 360 came first and the service was functional so people felt compelled. I am fine with added features like PS+, especially since they've transformed that service into one that has value actually worth paying for. If the PS4 comes out at roughly the same time as the new XBoxen and has online social/multiplayer features that work out of the box without a yearly fee, I think Microsoft is going to be in a hell of a rough spot charging for basic service a second time around. The internet is even more ubiquitous than it was 7 years ago. Smart phones exist, y'all.
On the other hand, if there's a Netflix-esque subscription to access streaming of the PS1, 2, and 3 back catalogs, that's a great idea. Imagine a new Tekken game coming out. You and a friend reminisce about how much Tekken 3 you played way back when, wouldn't it be fun to play it again? With PlayStream © (Intercapped), now you can! So you go into the library and then stare-face at the TV for how atrociously badly Tekken 3 has aged and laugh at it. That's worth $10-15 a month to me, absolutely.
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So on this week's Thumbs they heard rumor of charging for PlayStation network. If that was only a rumor and not announced (I haven't had time to sift through the whole Meeting), then count me pleasantly surprised by all their announcements. I came in with at least a 50% expectation to say "Sony you haven't learned ANYTHING since 2006, have you?", and I genuinely can't say that. They hit a lot of points that I think bode well for the future. They said a lot of the right things.
You can be critical of the games Sony chose to display, but the games themselves don't reflect the PSQuad. People are going to continue to make games where you shoot mans and drive cars fast. It's what we can do with them that's important. I'm not going to be purchasing any sort of console Day 1, but as the first salvo to open up discussion about new ways to make/play/experience games I am pleased. I feel they have set a very good bar for Microsoft to match or exceed.
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No, no... Somewhere i heard the idea suggested that Sim City should have distinct eras like an AoE game. I mean, and i don't think that would work, but things like how Sim City would gradually introduce things over the decades that would change how you approached your city, i always thought that was one of the coolest parts of Sim City, and i would absolutely love to see them go even further with that kind of thing. Have things falling in and out of favor as time passes, old infrastructure becoming obsolete and requiring overhauls. Seeing major shifts from early industrial up through the atomic age and into modern information age, creating situations that you have to respond to instead of merely having a new power plant unlocked that generates more power. How different are the ways a city is run now as opposed to a hundred years ago?
That is a city building game that i would probably play.
That sounds crazy! I honestly can't imagine how fantastically complex that would be. For all the griping from long time fans of the series about the small city size and the "dumbing down", it honestly seems fantastically complex to me. There are about 35 data layers you can look at. It's just nuts. I kind of can't imaging adding an obsolescence on top of what's already there.
Some insane person captured all the tooltip data they could get their hands on from the beta and posted it up on Box.
This insane person is going to root through it.
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I want to ask if the new game would appeal to me, a person who has stubbornly believed that everything after 2000 was misdirected and awful, but i feel like i already know the answer.
I'd probably be happiest just playing 2000 again, can i even get that anywhere? (Edit: It's on GOG.)
What is it that you want out of the game? I've had the pleasure of playing both betas so far (when they were working), so I feel like I have a decent handle on what they're doing with a single city tile. The ~mystery~ is how much you and friends can do in a region with 5 tiles, or 10. A lot of fans of 3K and 4 have bemoaned the lack of subways and the small size of the footprint. I can feel the squeeze, but at the same time I only "filled up" a city once, and that was just mashing down new tiles every time there was demand for them instead of attempting to increase density.
Did i hear the Idle Thumbs guys floating out an idea where Sim City would be a game that was set across different distinct eras? Did that happen? Or are my memories of different podcasts starting to run together?
In old Sim City games they used to let you start in 1900, 1950, or 2000 which gave you different technology options (no nuclear power, no airports, etc). Is that what you're thinking of perhaps?
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For more on the fucked up US Internet situation, I recommend this Bill Moyers interview with Susan Crawford, who is really smart and just awesome: link
It'll make you mad about stuff. It touches on issues like what Luftmensch posted above.
It occurred to me that I should post this also. It had just been linked to me recently.
I am currently living in a place that has very good (and very expensive) internet access. I am lucky, and I know it and try not to take that sort of stuff for granted. I fervently hope that some day fairly soon the US government understands that the internet is now a Utility and not a Luxury. In places that have internet, the US should be right up at the top and instead it's kind of shitty and abusive.
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It was down or extremely intermittent for a period of more than 6 hours on that Saturday.
Important to remember that it was a closed beta/stress test, and also the game wasn't gold yet.
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Oh god I knew about it because shitty radio personalities that air around here kept making comments along the lines of "that's what you get when you put an uppity black in the White House! He gets so big-headed he just starts naming things after himself!"
Political radio is gross.
TALK radio is gross, with very few exceptions.
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Where was the post from the gentleman talking about the same team being on SC4, Spore, and the new Sim City? I thought I heard it was in last cast's thread but I didn't find it there.
So I was 20 minutes late and covered in tea when I got home, but it was a good podcast so I didn't mind overmuch.www.coveredintea.com/wizard
I have to say, I don't dislike the very introspective and critical podcasts, but I sure did laugh a lot at this one and in retrospect that was a fun change from Far Cry 3.
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Joe Montana from the 1980's would be really sad and shocked to find out John Candy is dead. :[
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Gabe Newell is the founder and CEO of Valve, and also worked at Microsoft as a producer on Windows through Win95 (which is where he made the fat stacks of cash to go start Valve). He basically sees all these crazy opportunities and then goes "Hey we should create a digital platform so we can produce and distribute our own game" and empowers people to make it happen.
"Hey what if there was a Steam Box?" Gabe says: There is a Steam Box, but it is actually an infinite number of boxes that happen to run Steam.
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Idle Thumbs asks: Can you babywall Sim City 2013?
We Answer:
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It was very weird watching Pikmin and apparently being in my own private chat room for about an hour.
I can say that watching streams (and subsequent discussion on a cast) of DayZ sold me a copy of ArmA 2, and the stream of FTL sold my a copy of FTL. The greatest viral marketing scheme in history.
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My god, episodes 43 and 44 might be my favorite back-to-back casts. The Goldblast, firefighter simulator and Batman Begins, and then the crazy ODST remix with Steve Gaynor Fresh Prince lyrics. Steve tends to dip into the absurd, and that leads to some extremely weird and funny moments.
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I want to listen to the simcity discussion again to absorb as much simcity as possible.
I did this. I was just as excited about Sim City the second time.
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That being said, finding out that the beta was now closed, and that the game is equivalent to $100 here when I am used to paying $15-25 for games is very off-putting. From the way Chris talked about it, it sounded like I should pick up the deluxe edition, but even the regular version is very expensive at $70.
What ever happened to the Saturday streams you used to do on a fairly regular basis? SimCity seems like something that would have been well suited to that format.
The consensus I've been seeing is that most people who are excited about the game or Sim City fans is that you should NOT get the deluxe edition. I don't like how harsh some people are being, but $20 is a HUGE ask for what feels like a couple of extra buildings and some palette swaps. I know I wont be getting that version, but that's just my own personal opinion because I'm not as excited about Big Ben.
The beta was a closed beta last weekend, so even though tons of people were participating in it you weren't supposed to stream. The game comes out first week in March, and at that time I agree it would be a fun Saturday stream.
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I can't tell you how excited I am for Sim City. So excited that I made two posts about it.
Re: effects multiplayer will have - that is EXACTLY what they're planning with the always-on multiplayer region play. Things you do in your city have an impact on other cities in the region, so if you want to be a Casino Lord crime boss, the other cities will benefit from their citizens being able to go be a tourist and play the slots, but also have to deal with the increased crime in the region.
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About halfway through this week's cast. Found it humorous that you have to actually know how to spell "phaedrus" in order to visit this week's sponsor.
e: Asking here, is there no thread for Sim City: The City Simulator? I poked through the first 2-3 pages of games the other day when I wanted to have a nerd freakout with everyone and I couldn't find it.
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That Infinite trailer is awesome. Absolutely awesome. They hit it exactly right.
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There are also certainly people who DO want the harshness and loneliness of being stuck in an unfamiliar spot for real. "Unfixable failure" might be beyond the pale, but frustration certainly isn't. I don't know if you've ever seen Survivorman, but its premise is that this dude gets dropped in a location with basically only the supplies he can carry or the normal "tourist" might have in that location, and has to survive and make it to an extraction point in 7 days. The big deal of the show is that in addition to being the show's only actor, he also films the entire thing with no crew. So even though they prep and scout and all that, he's still alone with just a backpack for an entire week. Some days he goes to bed hungry because his snares and lures didn't catch anything or didn't work or broke.
I wonder similar things about people who love truly scary/frightening things. I don't really care for/about haunted houses, or thrill rides (roller coasters are not meant to "scare" but it's similar emotionally). What is it in human psychology that causes people to actively seek out things our animal brains would want us to avoid desperately? I don't like being frightened of things, that's why they're scary.
Final thoughts on CK2- I appreciate your thoughts on it and attempts to reconcile it within the framework of that procedural narrative email, but we have to be honest with ourselves (especially me, since I'm arguing AGAINST it but with a stacked deck in my favor) that CK2 is not even implicitly trying to be the thing the email was about. Crusader Kings is NOT about crafting a story with a plot. The digital actors aren't all participating in service of the story and definitely not all in the service of the player. In my crude imagination procedural narrative storytelling is more like choosing two things, and having that generate a page of text for a book, then when you finish reading that you pick 2-3 more things and it generates the next page. That would be, to quote various game journalists, "Hell of janky".
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What would constitute an explicit narrative then? (Obviously part of the problem in these discussions is that "narrative" and "story" are such ambiguous terms.) I'm not talking about inventing stories based on what happens--I mean the direct, mechanical narrative of "the king's brother Claudius wanted to be king so he assassinated the king, but the old king's son Hamlet found out and assassinated Claudius in revenge but then some other courtier assassinated Hamlet and then Norway invaded and took over Denmark", which is totally a series of events and motivations that can occur in CK2 without any embellishment by the player. It's not Hamlet, sure, but that seems like a procedural narrative to me.
An explicit narrative is what I guess I'd call the plot. Or something that ALWAYS happens. I'm not saying CK2 doesn't have a progression, or a cadence, or a logical series of events. I'm saying that Crusader Kings literally does not have a plot. You could potentially not do anything but maintain a single duchy for 400 years. You can make Crusader Kings into Hamlet, but you can't make Hamlet into Crusader Kings because Hamlet's father ALWAYS gets murdered by Claudius, and Ophelia ALWAYS drowns, etc. Hamlet is more like Call of Duty than CK2. You're just as likely to have positioned your spymaster in a good place, learn of the plot, ask Claudius to abandon it, forgive him, and arrange a marriage between your son and his daughter. Then it's not Hamlet anymore.
I suppose my position is that a procedural narrative isn't a story or a plot until you make it one.
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Crusader Kings doesn't have an explicit narrative, though. You create stories based on events that happen, rather than the other way around. It's a Historical Wackiness simulator. In theory if the constraints of the game allowed it, you don't even have to participate at all. If the person you'd chosen to dictate the choices of died without heirs, you could potentially continue to simulate the alternate reality to the end of the time frame.
http://lparchive.org/Crusader-Kings-2/ I am not much of a Let's Play guy, but I think historical simulators can be fascinating for that sort of thing. In that guy's playthrough, he takes what is literally a bug in the game (you can hold a tournament, which lasts for X months. Due to a glitch, the tournament did not end until his current character died like 15 years later) and turned it into a narrative touchstone in the story of the history he was telling.
In that way, I feel it's like the story of Miasmata the Thumbs were telling, in that noticing the detail of the non-shirted arms and the extremely detailed medicine bottles they created a character who was an 18th century naturalist nudist that I probably would not have created in my mind.
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I totally yelled "Holy shit it's Nick Breckon" when I heard it was Nick Breckon.
(I didn't yell it. I did say it though)
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That room escape sounds so awesome. The East Coast has a lot of really awesome things, but in my brain, somehow Seattle and San Francisco have all the WEIRD awesome things. Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre pales in comparison.
I do not actually own a copy of The Ship, but I am a proud owner of Bad Rats and can confirm the Bad Rats virus phenomenon. One of the things about that game is it's 4.99, but I'm pretty sure the copy I was gifted was on sale for 50 cents. The price slash they will do to move copies is insane.
Video Games Patron: I will sometimes buy games I know I'll probably never get back around to playing but were something I know I WOULD have played had I been fully cognizant and able to buy them at the time. I own the Thief series and Deus Ex because I should have played them. The original Thief is all but unplayble for me now but I feel good to own it on Steam.
Idle Thumbs '95: H.D. Cool Spot
in Idle Thumbs Episodes & Streams
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Just destroy the road connecting to the highway and brute-force babywall it.