Jake

This week was insane. Podcast was recorded yesterday morning and is on its way up!

Whoa there's a Mac version? How do I not know this... Steam itself isn't updated to reflect Mac availability.

what? What disappeared?

Birds. This is BioShock Infinite.

There, renamed the thread for you guys.

Oh, best.

Our engine has an insane default audio compression setting from 2006, and somehow we have accidentally shipped multiple games with the default setting and had to patch in new audio. Should we just change the default? That would make a lot of sense. Have we? Well, here we are.

I think you're selling Hotline Miami short.

Or "Our Friend Scoops." Idle Thumbs 79: Most Memorable Maid When two of the best games of the year land on the same day, we have little choice but to call in reinforcements. With special guest Steve Gaynor. Nice mask. Games Discussed: Dishonored, BioShock, XCOM Enemy Unknown, Jagged Alliance, Far Cry 2 Direct episode download. iTunes page. Feed RSS. Episode page.

I remember being so pissed off by it in Half Life 2 (which maybe makes sense as Half Life 1 let you just murder everyone), but at this point, especially in a game like Dishonored, I'd really rather the game just said "it's actually not worth it to even try and shoot this person, it would just be dumb and the game would stop, so here you go."

Yikes.

We were discussing it in terms of what the game actually does, which is to just say "Game Over." If there is no budget available for any of the hypothetical situations you propose (or if the designers don't want their game to be about the types of simulation-narrative branching you're proposing), I would much rather a weapon be lowered than the game just committing suicide because I did an action I thought was valid but turned out to go against the prescribed story I wasn't yet aware of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H_vW55TsANA

The "-or" versus "-our" suffix business is more complicated than "the Americans fucked it up," but it's fun to moan about it, so I'm sure it will never die and people will never shut up.* The "-or" suffix was used in words with Latin roots, "-our" with words coming more recently from French. At one point England standardized on "-our," which I think was admittedly before the colonies existed, but it was in flux for a long-ass time, at least through the 17th century, which puts it only around a generation behind the founding of America. The "-our" suffix was always in deference to/in honor of French word roots though, so it irks the shit out of me when it is decided that "-our" spellings are the Proper British Ways. Anyway Dishonored. * See also: "Soccer," a word invented by Brits, but forever blamed on Americans (by Brits).

Stealth. Steam. Murder. Idle Thumbs 74: That Meat Boy Sat Me Down PC Gamer Executive Editor Evan Lahti joins us as we pore over maps and documents in preparation to tail our mark. As we take one step out of line -- as giant circles of sound radiate from our feet for the world to see -- only then do we realize we were killed by the best. Games Discussed: DayZ, Mark of the Ninja, Super Meat Boy, Steam Greenlight, Steam Big Picture Mode, Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie Episode page. Direct episode download. iTunes page. Feed RSS.

Consider it dropped. Idle Thumbs 77: Our Neighbor Scoops A fun outing to the city takes a turn once Jake and Sean run out of food. Chris gets more than he bargained for when he brings home a new pet. TV-MA Games Discussed: Torchlight II, Diablo III, FTL: Faster Than Light, Tokyo Jungle, Toe Jam & Earl, Smuggle Truck, Cow Clicker, Pyst, The X-Fools, The Oregon Trail, Number Munchers Direct episode download. iTunes page. Feed RSS. Episode page.

I think right after he left we said Thanks Patrick Klepek from Giant Bomb once.

The brands would have already sounded fully dated in 2004. Nikon, Sony, were already on the decline if not gone from the public lexicon by the time the book was written, at least compared to the way those names fully captured the public mind 30 years prior. Given that he name-checked Orwell and Huxley in that segment, and almost all the brand names were things which were stalwarts of the 20th century but didn't make it much further ("disney" being a notable exception, though its use as "pop film" seems to evoke an older definition of that company), it seems like a deliberate throwback to mid-20th century dystopia fiction. Not literally -- I didn't read it as "you are reading some torn out pages from a portrait of a grim future written in 1975" or something -- but it feels at least like a future which takes place in one of those type of worlds, more than a literal future of our own world. Whether that choice was something you agree with or not, I don't think Mitchell was trying to sound current with the brands. I could be majorly reading too much into it, or I could just want that bit to be something that it's not. I just don't think it would be giving Mitchell too much credit or benefit of the doubt to say that his use of those particular brands as nouns was deliberate for tone and setting beyond an immediately-dated attempt to be futurey-sounding. He has such a good and specific handle on deliberate word use everywhere else. I'm not denying that it felt dated to me -- it did -- but it felt dated to me in exactly the same way a story taking place in the future but based on the society and lexicon from the '30s or '40s would, meaning that, like the rest of the book, the language and structure of how that chapter was told had its own unique and secondary sort of "sidecar" of preconceptions and feelings that came not from the events or even the language, but just the type of story I was reading for that chapter. Again, could be an over reach, and as usual I don't feel like I'm explaining myself fully, but that's something that came to mind when I was reading.

I think it is how the engine is sold, as SpectreCollie said. Unreal Engine is always presented as "USE ALL THE SURFACE MAPS! YOU TOTALLY CAN!" and when you do, you get a world where every surface is super excited to catch and reflect light in 3 different ways, even if at the end of the day it isn't appealing. Dishonored and BioShock Infinite both seem to be made by people who are comfortable enough with the tools and their style to not throw every switch to "on," but that seems like a relatively new change. (I haven't seen a UE game, including Dishonored or Infinite, which has people who don't look like reanimated wax puppets, but I am holding out hope.)

Venn diagram z-axis unlocked.

They seem to have gone for a flat look in part to combat the fact that the Unreal engine by default wants to gouge huge pits into all surfaces and make your game look like the surface of the moon, dipped in cooking oil. Some may argue that the pendulum swung too far the other direction, but I like the more flat look. The light and color levels throughout feel really deliberate, but still naturalistic, whereas most UE stuff, as good as it looks, does often look like the details were left up to a computer to figure out.

I wonder what the venn diagram is of "people complaining about hiding in shadow in Dishonored being frustratingly unclear," versus "people complaining that Mark of the Ninja isn't immersive because it clearly demarcates hidden and visible through non-diegetic UI."

I don't think texel density is even what this thread is about, at least not my first read. It was about gratuitous contrast and gratuitous scale (textures being blown up to be too big on a surface) causing really offputting/unrealistic scale and depth issues in game worlds (despite the textures themselves all being artistically sound, from a detail and technical standpoint). The original example given was a corrugated floor texture where the actual corrugated... protuberances were the size of a wrist or most of a foot, when in real life those things are usually as long as the diameter of a small coin. That's a wholly separate issue from actual texel density, and I still think it comes from people being too far down the rabbit hole of "this is what a game space looks like," the representative school which comes from lower-res assets, a lack of stopping and re-assessing what the real world looks like. Maybe I am off, though. That said, I wish Dishonored had a higher res textures. I bet the source textures are at least 2x what they shipped, and I hope that the PC version will get a patch to up that. The actual style of them, the scale, color design, contrast levels, and general map-based surfacing across that game all impresses the hell out of me, though. It's beautiful all the damn time. Every time you go around a corner, you feel like you've stepped into a new fully designed concept painting, but it's an open and explorable space. It's sweet. You just can't get as close to the walls as you'd like on a PC.

Do you guys want this thread renamed to not just be about the demo?

Anyone here playing Dishonored? That game seems to be the antidote to this thread in all regards.