Dualhammers

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Posts posted by Dualhammers

  4. Posted

    Personally, I was surprised that it never lost steam. There were great jokes all throughout. My only concern was how, as you said Sno, the first level was so dense that it seemed to reward exploration and that encouragement didn't pay off well in the Hotel level. Mostly of those rooms were empty and that felt like a misstep.

  6. Posted

    While you tried to hang out on the internet I went to see the LEGO Movie with my Wife, ate Ice Cream, and played Pinball. Pinball is such an interesting game structure. It has tons of visual permutations but there is a very rigid set of rules governing how you can structure the board based on how the ball will invariably interact with the flippers placed at the bottom.

    In any event, if we have an IRC up I may join, but I get easily distracted by conversation and I imagine we could easily all just spend the hour navel gazing about physics engines instead of working.

  7. Posted

    Maybe this ins't the best place to ask, but after the cast where they discussed programming languages I had a few questions. Chris mentioned Processing as a really accessible language, and right now I am trying to learn C# and Python but are there any others I should know about?

  13. Posted

    There are differing schools of thought on criticism but I tend to hold the view that authorial intent is only one facet of a work because even with auteur-like control a creative work can produce meaning in others that was completely unintentional. Ultima Online, for example, was a game most likely designed with Lord British's intent of being a more manifest experience of his dream-world. He wanted people to feel what it would be like to inhabit that world and be a part of it and that is reflected in the inclusion of skills like bread-making and house-building long before any of those types of mechanics were included in other MMOs.

    My experience with the game was very different, however. I documented a bit of that experience once but suffice to say it taught me more about how people in the real world put on the trappings of a ideal they hope to aspire to, and that desire to become who they want to be is so strong that they will escape into a place where it is more easily accomplished if they need to. That being said, I am sure my experience of the game is a very specific one that not indicative of how most people reflected on their time in that game.

    I suppose the bigger question that this raises for me is whether or not having an intent for a game is a good idea. If I understood it right, Sean, would you say that having a clear goal is a bad idea?

     If I remember correctly you were moved by playing REAL LIVES, where you experienced what it was like to be born a poor African woman. Real Lives is a game whose main intent is praised right on the site: Simulating REAL LIVES Promotes Global EMPATHY. Would you say that game flipped a switch in you? I am curious to discover if you think Real Lives was a fluke in accomplishing its goal of trying to influence people. Or maybe it is better to say that the game influenced you but it was also a bad game?

  16. Posted

    Have we thought about starting a Starbound multiplayer server? I tried playing it for a few hours last night and found it an intensely lonely experience. With people I think the game could be a grand and hilarious adventure but on your own it feels like a replacement for the chores and errands I should be running instead of playing video games. Perhaps in this way it captures the true essence of life - it is better when you are not alone.

    So have we thought about setting up a server?

  17. Posted

    This may be the dumbest question, but what do you do while listening to the cast? Normally I listen on the bus but when I get home I find it hard to finish the cast. I feel weird just sitting there listening but a lot of activities are too distracting to really hear and process what is being said. I've yet to find the perfect mindless video game to accompany the cast at home.

    When you listen to the cast, is there something you regularly do to occupy your thumbs?

  18. Posted

    Chris posted earlier about this bananas thing that some modders have been working on. It adds multiplayer to Just Cause 2: http://store.steampowered.com/app/259080/

    The trailer is the kind of Video Games absurdity we all know and love.

    Just Cause 2, for those of you who don't know, was a open-world game with a certain absurdest take on modern political action games. You play as a CIA agent who uses a grappling hook and an infinite supply of parachutes to destabilize a south pacific dictatorship so we can sell McDonald's there. The world felt rather stiff and empty compared to higher-budget games but it more than made up for it with the goofy toy-box way you rampaged through the world. 

    Multiplayer will basically turn this into a kind of party game, where any sort of enjoyment is derived from players establishing their own for adventures and competitions. I imagine a Thumb Run would be most enjoyable. 

  21. Posted

    How does pinball fit into this? Maybe some sort of savant could predict the exact trajectory and ricochets of a shot, but for most of us it becomes a process of managing potential risks based on their possible rewards and likely dangers. But theoretically, the physics are foundational and comsistent.

    Actual pinball is a physical game, so it is actual physics rather than randomness as an attempt to poorly mimic the properties of our world. I also think Pinball isn't a game you beat rather than a task you merely try and perform as long as possible before your ability gives out. If you could completely master it the game would, effectively, never end. 

    Also, Pinball is really frustrating.

  22. Posted

    This episode was odd for me because it revealed how much of an out-of-the-loop weirdo I was as a kid playing Games that I was never invested in things such as CGW, GFW, Shack News, or even Nintendo Power. Being so heavily involved in the indie community now I feel as though I am missing a critical pieces of knowledge about my own heritage. 

    Chris, your description of having to let go of Platform muscle memory to unlock Spelunky caused a satisfying shift in my understanding of that game. It helped me articulate what I've felt is so interesting about it. The game is essentially an organic puzzle, evolving and cascading but essentially broken up into discrete problems you have to encounter and overcome. This may be the most obvious baby revelation but it was useful to me.

    You also mentioned how Spelunky does not have any variation in the outcome of movement or physics interactions given the same input, and how this eschews what a lot of games do for "flavor." This also made me remember how much frustration I've found in various games that do use an element of randomness to enhance the flavor of the game, by providing variation to mechanics, or to make the world feel more real or alive. The most common example I have experienced is the randomness of bullet trajectory in a game where you fire a weapon, as a short-hand for the randomness introduced into your aim by the recoil of the weapon. In an attempt to create verisimilitude they undermine the ability of the player to understand how the system works. In certain games it can be used for artistic effect: by providing a reminder that life is too big a complex to understand, but most of the time no such message is implied and the result is just annoyance.

  23. Posted

    Chris's observations about the role of dedicated community members in the ongoing development of a game kicked off a number of questions in my mind. The biggest is whether or not the kind of dedication to a game, whereby one person creates code for mechanics that are not even in the game yet, constitutes a new type of craft that is distinct from game development itself. Can a truly invested fan achieve a type of mastery in the mechanisms of player involvement that makes them as valuable as a developer? 

  24. Posted

    There are moments this past week where I've been looking at twitter and wondering "is Pynchon among us?"

    I'm still slogging through the last few pages of The Sun Also Rises. I find it is a really terrible book to read in my usual fashion: 5 or 10 minute increments between tasks at work. The way the story meanders requires extending reading even though the prose is easy to understand. The reason I find for this is that if I don't read it at a stretch I treat it as just a very simple, plodding, story rather than searching for the subtext. It's incredibly easy to overlook what Hemingway is trying to do in the novel.

  25. Posted

    I also found Leigh Alexander's piece to be more a criticism of the kind of generic reviews fans of these big AAA games expect, not necessarily a criticism of the people who enjoy or find value in these games. But Greg's right in that there are a lot of people ready and willing to mock others for playing GTA (or Bioshock, or TLOU, or Saint's Row...), for no other reason than "it's a triple-A game and therefore it has no intrinsic value." That to me, is as closed-minded as the rabid fans who are unwilling to entertain any kind of criticism for [insert whatever the big game du jour is].

    This I completely agree with. It becomes especially apparent when both sides use the same profoundly ineffective tactics to get their point across.