cowuponacow

I just finished the episode, and while I don't have anything to add to the current thread of the discussion, I just wanted to say that I greatly appreciate Jake voicing the following two sentiments: 1. "I don't actually understand what any people who do that sort of stuff actually want." 2. "I don't want to generalize."

What I really want — and this may be hopelessly optimistic — is AI that can make a rudimentary evaluation of whether the action it's performing is actually accomplishing its goals. By which I primarily mean, when none of an enemy's attacks are hitting you (perhaps because you're hiding behind a piece of level geometry), it notices this, and tries to attack you from a different angle.

Ah, okay.

I have to disagree with the Thumbs about AI in FPSs. I think it’s especially worth talking about, because it’s an area that’s sorely underdeveloped (so much so that NPCs acting even marginally rational tends to shock us). It may not be a solved problem, but neither is any other complex problem in games. If it were to be solved, then that is the point at which it would no longer be worth discussing.

I think it's specificity. I felt the same thing. Bastion and Transistor both take place in sort of surreal worlds, but whereas Bastion's narrator grounds that game with specific, even mundane, details, such as the smell of a liquor or the feel of a weed, Transistor's narrator is vague, and skirts the issue of what is literally real. I'm partway through my second playthrough of Transistor, and I cannot tell you with any confidence whether the narrator knew Red before he died, or why he was killed, or whether he was special, or whether Cloudbank is virtual, or whether the Country is virtual, or where certain events* took place, or why Red is so good at killing/deleting monsterdoodles. I'm not saying that information isn't in the game — probably most of it is — but I could have easily told you the answers to all those questions if they were about Bastion, after one playthrough. *

My high score is 444.

That's the one, thanks.

I'm almost positive there's an old (#<50) episode of Idle Thumbs where they jokingly suggest an idea for a game which is essentially Viscera Clean Up Detail. Does anyone else remember that, or am I just imagining things? I know that when I first heard of Viscera Clean Up Detail (like a year ago), my first thought was, "Someone must've gotten the idea from Idle Thumbs! Surely they'll mention it on the show." In other news, there was some webcomic that posted a couple of "Watchmen Kids" type strips that were very good, but all I can find anymore is this.

Actually, it seems to get easier. I think the longer strings of numbers are heavier, and therefore less sensitive to individual "flaps", so it's easier to smoothly guide them through the openings. Although that might all be in my imagination.

That was my thought, too, though unfortunately I never was able to get Signal Ops to run on my computer.

Very interesting discussion regarding the CGI in Free To Play. I'm of several minds on the issue. My first reaction was, "This is lame. The game should speak for itself. Just use the in-game graphics." Then I reconsidered. As mentioned elsewhere, the documentary is really about the players, not the game. If we compare Dota to chess, a documentary about chess should probably go into detail about different strategies and gambits, but a documentary about chess players could probably be forgiven if it simplified key moves with generic phrases like "Kasparov's testing him now, trying to find a chink in his armor..." (It's also worth considering, that if a given sequence in a game of Dota is so high-level that even a decent player has trouble understanding its significance, then someone like me, who doesn't play Dota, is going to need a lot of help to even begin to understand it. It might be more time-efficient to show a custom-rendered sequence that communicated the salient, but non-technical, points.) ...But then I reconsidered again. And I think it would be better if they used in-game footage. The people who play Dota competitively don't do so (I imagine) because they love to watch elves and demons fight with sweet glowing swords. They're engaging with the mechanics of the game, not the aesthetic. To use the chess analogy again, I think it'd seem pretty juvenile for a documentary about chess to replace images of the board and pieces with a CGI sequence of a knight swordfighting a queen.

I'll admit, I didn't recognize the name Ryan Payton, or Camouflaj, or Republique, and I'm not super interested in iOS games, so I was tempted to skip this episode. I'm glad I didn't; Payton's career story alone is worth it. Steve, I wanted to compliment you on your interview-sense. When Payton mentions having lots of "war stories" that he doesn't have time to go into, your response ("What's the one that's still on your mind right now?") was absolutely perfect. On the topic of stereo vs mono, I prefer the subtle stereo effect, myself. It feels more natural to me. I can see the advantages of mono (especially for your running, TokyoDan), but I think you should keep releasing them in stereo, since the listener can always use something like Audacity to collapse the two channels.

Very much agree with Griddlelol about the feeling of emptiness, and annoyance at the ending. Now, I was already fairly dissatisfied with the game's story by the time I got to the ending, but I was still quite interested in seeing how they wrapped it up. As it turns out, they wrapped it up via the use of three tropes which particularly annoy me.

There is one, but it's essentially cosmetic.

For me, it was Diablo II. I played the game twice: first with a Necromancer, with whom I got to Act IV before giving up on (I was pretty bad at the game and had made a horrible build). Second with an Assassin, with whom I beat the game and the expansion. This was all strictly single player. I immediately started a new game, with a new class. Druid, I think. But I found that I wasn't enjoying the game at all; I felt like I was just grinding through the levels so I could try out all the high-level Druid skills. And I knew that, after that, I'd have to start a Sorcerer and level her up and try her high-level skills, and so on. But somehow I couldn't bring myself to just stop playing, even after I realized that I wasn't enjoying the experience. So I found a different solution: I used a save game editor. I gave myself a roster of high-level characters. I tried out an ice-Sorc, a fire-Sorc, and a lightning-Sorc. I Leaped around as a Barbarian. I tried every Paladin Aura. I gave myself crazy items, weapons that did five types of damage at once, or gave skills to classes that normally didn't get them (like Whirlwind to an Assassin). I tried full sets that would probably take me literally years to find legitimately. I boosted skills to levels not normally possible (ever tried amassing 99 skeleton minions simultaneously?). In total, I spent probably three or four hours, I saw every high-level skill in the game, I killed Diablo like he was nothing, and I think I crashed the game twice. And when I was done, the urge was gone, and I was able to put the game down and walk away from it. I had a very similar experience with Rogue Legacy, which is a fine game, but easy 5x-10x too long. After I'd gotten about 15% of the upgrades — and seen 90% of the content — I used Cheat Engine to give myself infinite gold, which I used to level my character up and beat the game. Only then did I feel free to stop playing it. So does anyone else do this sort of thing?

When I built my desktop, I picked up the cheapest keyboard they had at Walmart, a Logitech K120. Very straightforward, no frills. Used it for a long time. Never really had any problems, but then I started reading /r/mechanicalkeyboards, and it got me thinking. I love typing. I love hitting keys with my fingers. The idea of a more durable and satisfying keyboard was very, very attractive. But it was hard to justify spending $80+ on the keyboards people recommended. Finally, there was a sale on QuickFire Pros, aka the gateway drug to mechanical keyboards. Cherry MX Brown switches. $50. So I pulled the trigger. It came in the mail. I used it for a couple days. And... I much prefer my K120. No hard feelings to the mech crowd, but I guess I just like my rubber domes. They feel better to me, and I make fewer mistakes with them. My K120 is going on two years now without a single problem. Related: the idea of getting a keyboard without a numpad, or without arrow keys, terrifies me in ways I can't describe.

While listening to Tone Control episodes, does anyone else does anyone feel the urge to insert critique into the conversation? When they were talking about the upgrade system, and one of them said "So, say I really like my hammer, and I want to upgrade it...", I wanted to enter the podcast and say "Ha! That's ridiculous, the hammer's a terrible weapon. Why did you make the iconic weapon so bad?". (Which just goes to show that I'd be a pretty bad host for these things.)

This episode finally got me to play Gunpoint, which is great, because the game is great. But I feel like I'm missing something. MAJOR SPOILERS FOR GUNPOINT: Didn't Tom say in this episode something about a last level where the bad guy knocks you down? And if you fight back, it's programmed that you won't win until the last moment? And one of the testers realized you could do a vertical jump and the bad guy would sail through a window? Because I played the last level a couple of times, and couldn't get any of those things to happen. What's-his-name, the bad guy, just opens the door in your face and shoots at you, and you can take him out pretty much the same way you take anyone else out. Was Tom talking about something that didn't make it into the final game?

I definitely agree with the comments in favor of a Half-Life 2 approach, in which the game is simplified and distilled to something like its core essence. Half-Life 2 does this by removing almost all of your abilities, and then giving you one extremely powerful ability, and throwing an enormous amount of enemies at you. Bastion, Sands of Time, and Heart of Darkness all do very similar things. Interestingly, some games that are based on leveling up or upgrading your abilities end up effectively doing the same thing. You hit a point, at 90-95% through the game, where you get so much income/experience that you can max at all your abilities, and at the same time you're fighting so many enemies, that it becomes an entirely different game. Instead of carefully taking on your enemies one by one, conserving your resources, you're forced to throw around the whole of your (enormous) power. Not only is the normal combat rhythm completely redone, but the upgrade/level up rhythm is also dispensed with, boiled down to a single checkmark. I might be alone in saying that I actually usually prefer my games to bar me from the rest of the world when I beat the main storyline. I think it's because, as I've grown older, I've become more interested in completing games than in playing games. I also may have got a bad taste in my mouth after finishing Skyrim, which I felt was one of the most anticlimactic worlds to wander around in after completing the game. Everything is exactly the same, only way too easy, and even though you've saved the world, the only response you get out most NPCs is "Oh, well done. Now don't steal anything or I'll arrest you."

Nothing, really. Blow was under no obligation. Simply, Sands of Time is one of my favorite games, but it's also a bit old now and out of the public consciousness, and I didn't want the conversation to go without a word in its favor. I wasn't actually anticipating any debate.

This is essentially my point, though I may not have stated it very well. That Blow criticized Sands of Time's reload mechanic in the context of systems-design, with no nod towards its place in any other context (such as aesthetics), was—in my opinion—unfair. If we were to critique Braid in the same way, we might point out that its rewind mechanic sometimes fully works, and sometimes partially works, and sometimes doesn't work at all; sometimes you still have to restart a level, or even the entire game. My point being, these claims are technically accurate, but it would be unfair to simply say "Braid's rewind system is inconsistent" and then move on.

I disagree. But we might be equivocating. Let me explain my thought process: I would call Sands of Time's rewind mechanic "unpleasant" because in my experience, running out of sand and being kicked back to my last save was often a mildly annoying experience. But, as I mentioned above, both the rewind mechanic and the save game mechanic are actually incorporated into the game's narrative, keeping them very much in-line with the game's aesthetic. For this reason I disagree that they are "ugly". (eot, I think this addresses your argument, as well.) Minor spoilers for Braid again: the reason I mentioned Braid's hub-world star is because I think it's a very similar issue. It's something that is entirely in keeping with the game's aesthetic; the possibility or impossibility of undoing mistakes is probably the central philosophical point of Braid. But from a gameplay perspective, I would call the hub-world star "unpleasant"—actually, I'd probably use stronger language. Certainly it's not "fun" to have to restart your entire game just because it won't let you take puzzle pieces apart again.

He didn't say it was unpleasant, though. That would've been a better criticism. He said it was "bolted in" and "ugly".

When you put it like that, it makes me think the problem is really how loose we are with the label adventure game. Sure, Broken Age and The Longest Journey are adventure games. But what about The Longest Journey's sequel, Dreamfall? It's not point-and-click, but it's still based mostly on having conversations and solving simple puzzles, and I think most people would call it an adventure game. How about Telltale's The Walking Dead: Season 2? Mechanically similar to Dreamfall, and quite possibly an adventure game. What about Anchorhead? We might call it "interactive fiction", but we might as easily say "text-based adventure". Is Gone Home an adventure game? Well, it's certainly more adventure game than it is FPS. Arguably it's more adventure game than it is RPG, given that "RPG" is strongly associated with "fighting and leveling up". What about Device 6? It hardly conforms to any of the traditional genres, but it definitely has a character and a plot and motivations and all that, and I wouldn't be surprised if it, too, were tossed under the umbrella of adventure game.

Very interesting to me that Jonathan Blow talks some (mild) trash about Sands of Time, a game which, in my experience, is usually only mentioned in glowing terms (other than the combat). It's worth mentioning that Sands of Time's time travel mechanic, and its continue-from-save mechanic, are both narratively justified. I think Blow's criticism of them is somewhat unfair. Also—spoilers for Braid—I was really hoping Steve would confront Jonathan about the hub-world star, which I consider an almost unforgivable sin in an otherwise wonderful game.