Jake

You are a hero for this being your only post, btw.

Wuxtry! GDC! The Idle Thumbs Journal of Games Just before GDC we put together this newspaper to share with our friends and to toss at people unexpectedly while passing them on the escalator. The Idle Thumbs Journal of Games contains a mixed bag of video game truth, video game lies, and the expansive gray area in between, featuring a combination of old pieces by Thumbs podcasters and friends, and new material written just for print. Really, we just wanted to make a newspaper. Digital facsimile of the printed word, now available in PDF form. Enjoy news! Featuring written content by Chris, Steve, Marek, Duncan, and David, with Lawrence, Alex, and Spaff on the conceptual assist, layout and design by me, and some amazing illustration work by Stevan.

Comedy adventure game heroes have traditionally been klutzy or socially inept or in over their heads goodballs, perceived as dumb or crazy by the world around them. I know Full Throttle was a deliberate move against that, with a super stoic, confident protagonist whose name was just "Ben," without a bunch of goofy modifiers. Old adventure game protagonists were rarely actually dumb, though. They were just seen that way by others in the world. I think part of the weird mini-trend of modern Euro adventures featuring dumb protagonists came about because people are getting it wrong. "Guybrush was such a dummy, always getting into trouble! So wacky!" would probably be an invalid take on Monkey Island and why it's appealing, but it's something one can easily decide or inaccurately remember if you haven't actually recently played the game or actually sat down and put some thought into the reality of that character and what made him work. I always worry (especially when I was working on something like a new Sam & Max or Monkey Island) that I'm remembering without thinking. I think that's the best way to not only over-lean on nostalgia, but to also get wrong why that nostalgic thing you remember worked so well in the first place. To what degree I succeed is probably questionable, but it's something I always try to think about, because I have the fear, from seeing it happen everywhere. Adventure games seem highly susceptible to that sort of backwards, surface level reminiscing. We have a genre now that has fans clamoring for puzzles of an inbred, tangled nature beyond most peoples ability to care*, and many developers who still seem to think the true appeal of the old games was not the story or characters or clever interweaving of engaging plots and engaging puzzles, but that it was actually the pulsing crosshairs cursor, or that there was once a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle**, and fixate on chasing and extrapolating from these inane details or self-swallowing references instead of doing the heavy lifting of finding what's flowing beneath it all. (I work at a modern adventure studio and obviously we're guilty of our own sins like anyone else, but this post is my personal thoughts, detached from any company vision or statement or whatever.) * Probably because they first started playing these games as kids, when a game that fit on four floppies felt like an ageless quest, before they had a developed grasp on history and math and interpersonal relationships so every puzzle was a genuine personal learning experience, so every new puzzle was an actual new piece of knowledge and new way of looking at a tiny corner of the world. My soccer coach used to do the "if this is four, and this is two, what's this?" number hand game, so I immediately got that puzzle when I first encountered it in Monkey 2, but for most 11 year olds that was probably an eye opening first ever look at that type of riddle/game and deductive reasoning. I think that's an impossible high to chase for 30 years, but it hasn't stopped the hardcore for trying. ** Again, probably because that's just what is most clearly remembered or fondly latched onto, without going back to investigate the context and intent behind those choices and that content in the original game. It's the adventure game equivalent of a marketing driven bad sequel, a Terminator movie where all Arnold can say is "I'll be back," and all any inanimate object does is explode, except instead of a marketing department there's just nostalgia, fueling decisions based on what people say they want because of a thing they remember, instead of based on figuring out what made that memory stick in the first place, and how to create new versions of that.

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Agreed entirely. If he was being anti-Semitic or some other flavor of racist, nobody would buy "he does it all the time" as a valid defense, except for other racists. "Oh, he's just always a Jew-basher and calls people niggers!" would hold no water, for instance. http://twitter.com/nickbreckon/status/32924303615856641

Its at like 400 now or something.

After spending 20 minutes trying to get everyone properly connected and joined to the game's lobby (dozens of dropped connections and auth errors), we got 3 minutes in when my client decided it was stuck in cutscene mode indefinitely, so all I could do was spin around with the mouse and chat, while everyone else ran around setting things and each other on fire. Then another guy's copy crashed, so I quit. I'll give it another try soon, though.

The ending of Puzzle Agent always has felt like the ending to more than 50% of all X-Files episodes, so it never bothered me when working on it. The idea that the case is technically solved (the factory opened, which is what you were sent to do), even though by the end of the story that's become the least of your worries, was meant to be frustrating, but I guess at the end of the day, for many, it was way too frustrating. It bugged a lot of people! The story for the rest of the Scoggins mystery wasn't "storyboarded," per se -- Graham doesn't have pages of shot by shot breakdowns or anything like that -- but Sean had written a two page document which included the bulk of the story from front to back, and the game only really covered the first big chunk of it. I'd like to do more, to see that story through. Hopefully we do!

Downgrade management is why I stopped. A lot of my casual playing/tourism happened because I could play in a browser tab between tasks at work, and that became a less lazy-capable task when I had to start version managing.

I think Chris has talked about playing X-Wing and TIE Fighter before really knowing what Star Wars was. I might be exaggerating that, though.

Macintosh is not but the Macintosh Opearting System is!

Offputting I was genuinely looking forward to this game for ages and ages, and now I'm entirely not.

Valve tracks more than what you buy. They track what you play. Creepy creepy, or whatever, but that does mean that you can buy it on PS3, and then clock 300 hours of it on your PC, and Valve will figure it out.

Somewhere, Ron Grossman sheds a tear and doesn't know why.

I'm not a huge fan of MS points either, but it is undeniably exclusive and unified across the 360 platform!

I don't really know a lot about this stuff first hand, but I've been around a couple games going through approval/certification for XBLA and PSN, and I've read plenty of peoples stories on various dev forums and games related blogs so while I don't know for certain any of what I'm writing, I think you're a little off base assuming that it was a paid deal. I think its more likely that this just comes down to Sony not giving a damn what people do with their network. Games on PSN seem to be able to do funkier things because Sony doesn't care as much, or "allows it." Games can load web content directly from the publisher/developer more indiscriminately over PSN, for instance. It seems you can more easily get away with letting your game code look at PSN data like leaderboards and actually use that data for other things (I'm guessing that's why only the PSN version of Swarm is going to have a "cumulative Swarm guys killed across all players ever" persistent counter, while the 360 won't). Their online certification requirements aregenerally just less locked down than those for Xbox Live. I don't think from a financial buy-off standpoint Sony particularly cares one way or another if a third party publisher is integrating their self-published game with their self-run online network. Microsoft, on the other hand, cares more than anyone else ever about ensuring that they are the only online service on their hardware, so I don't think any amount of money would have made the deal happen on the 360... at least until/unless its a success and deemed a necessity due to it doing well on PS3. The upside to Microsoft's enforcement is of course that you only ever have to worry about one login and one bandwidth provider and one network and one online currency and one common interface across all games. Gamers clearly appreciate that since Sony over the lifespan of the PS3 has been building more and more common cross-game UI into the PS3's operating system... the big difference being that still only a portion of that common functionality is mandatory. At least that's how I think it works. The notion of console exclusives has, I guess, irrevocably wrecked gamers perception of how things work. If there is ever any disparity in features between SKUs, the default assumption is "X bought off Y so they would make the game work better for X's console." Obviously that may have happened here, but my gut says that isn't the case. Its bold to go further than that maybe but I feel like if money were to change hands at all here, it would be the other way around -- "we'll cut you a deal and give you a discount on fees if you publish your guaranteed hot selling game on our system, even though you won't be able to support all the features you want."

That video is fake. Look up the authors name or more about tue video and you'll see that he's a video/performance artist of some kind.

AGS can scale it up if your monitor can't natively display that resolution.

"I really wanted to see the top of the bridge, so I thought I would be helpful and make a secret staircase whose only undocumented entrance is underwater, by destroying the existing foundation. I realized this was a bad idea when I finished, and told myself I'd fix it when I was done looking around, but went to sleep instead. Don't make my mistakes!"

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This should be converted to a train at everyone's earliest convenience, for no reason.

Sorry, that was me. Legitimate drunk minecrafting. I'm really sorry about that. Wont happen again. If you need any help with repairs let me know.

I posted the thread before listing to all of it. Owned. Oh it does say produced by him at the end so he's mentioned two times. Yeah. Also, good podcast.

hahahahahahahahah i'll kill you. unrelated distraction: finally got http://goty.cx renewed and back up. Now with 2008's gamse of the year!

I'm fine with friends / friends of friends, if that's where people want to draw the line. For whatever its worth, here's where I'm coming from when suggesting we actually try and recruit some new folks: The last server basically died down to just 3 or 4 people, and I think it was at least in part because the only people who knew about it were the people on this one subsection of the main forum (a subsection you can't see until you are registered here, so the most passive lurkers dont even know it exists*) and they got tired of it. This is the third go at a Minecraft server by the exact same people as the first two gos, and we're all looking for ways to keep it fresh. New blood seems like an obvious option. There are risks with new folks, surprise demolitions or whatever, but I'm more interested in, you know, the positive surprises that come from having new people around. If we can find a way to do that without wholly throwing the doors open to staircase-TNTing vandals, I think it would do some good. * Speaking of: I agree with Wubbles that it may make sense to drop a sign near the spawn telling people to make a forum account and visit this thread, or to visit idlemc.com or something. That this thread is hidden from the world is pretty nice in some ways (the whole multiplayer networking forum hides if you're not logged in in hopes of keeping peoples gamertags and things at least a tiny bit more private, and it keeps it friendly or whatever), but to any legitimate outsider its not exactly welcoming.