Chris

The Unity Asset Store is a great resource for assets if you're working on a Unity game (surprise). Even if you're not using Unity, there's a lot of good stuff up there and I think there are some command line tools you can use to extract the assets out of .unitypackage files. Most of the stuff up there is paid, but almost all of that is extremely inexpensive. There's a lot of free stuff too!

This is the only worthwhile pun in this thread.

I stared long into the abyss, and the abyss stared back into me.

Look what you've unleashed here. Good lord.

Christ almighty.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope I didn't inadvertently fail to respect Katryn's wishes by reading her name; we just always read names unless people specifically request otherwise. But I'm really glad everyone involved talked it through and ended up in a better place.

I don't think any of us did the "lose faith in humanity" thing; I think that's usually a facile comment to make under any similar circumstance. Danielle mentioned it, we reacted with what is essentially surprise and bemusement, and commented that it didn't seem like the game got much traction generally.

Wrong podcast.

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I noticed that and had to suppress a minor urge to point it out.

I didn't say that, I said when I play a lot of modern Japanese games, they seem to lean on that stuff disproportionately. I also almost never like movies that rely on their American equivalent disproportionately, so I don't think I'm being unfair here.

Beginning of this game is boring-ass tutorialized canned action sequence garbage. Anyone played long enough to know when/if it breaks out of that?

I'm saying that I don't buy that "anime tropes" is equivalent to "cultural tendencies of Japan", even if it's RELATED to or PART of those tendencies. Same way I don't consider blockbuster action movie tropes to be equivalent to "American culture", even if they are connected to it, and super successful and widely-watched, and an important force in American popular culture.

"Saying that a handful of internationally acclaimed Japanese movies don't trade in what could be called 'anime tropes', therefore they're probably not that significant in Japanese culture" Where did I ever say that? If that's what you think I meant to communicate, I didn't express myself well. I also didn't grow up with Nintendo games.

I don't think that's true. That's like saying American cartoon tropes are just American cultural tropes in general; obviously not the case. They may draw from larger cultural elements, but they have become standardized into more predictable and specific forms. There are animated Japanese movies I love, like those from Ghibli, that don't overly rely on the kinds of anime tropes I'm talking about, and non-animated Japanese films about which you can clearly say the same. I'm sure that games like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, and Katamari Damacy, and Silent Hill, and tons of Nintendo stuff, and a billion other Japanese games, share some deep cultural roots with the kind of anime stuff I'm talking about, but they sure aren't poster children for them.

Yes, in a practical sense our choice boils down to the same thing, and we said as much on the podcast. (Usually it's just "buy the cheapest one on Steam.") But we also were making a larger point about what the actual intended experience of the game is. Small creative choices are still creative choices, and they are not interchangeable. Just because not every single one of these minor content pieces is actually interesting or important doesn't mean that none of them ever MIGHT be, and when this is the attitude taken in shipping games, it just declares that such choices can never be taken seriously. It's not specific to Watch Dogs; pointing out that this has been happening for years simply means that something dumb has been going on for years, not that it's less dumb.

Yeah but those are all actual SKUs that are being sold. It may include DLCs that aren't PLAYABLE yet, but they are still being SOLD as part of these SKUs.

It felt super short to me! I was surprised when exporting it that it made it to an hour.

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Nick and I tried to play it for a few hours and we both bounced off of it pretty hard.

I'm just going to pop in for this one point here--did the game actually break? We tried to support as many of these character-specific shortcuts as possible. Hopefully you were still able to progress; that was the intention.

Welcome, new people!

I do think a lot of even very good games that I like fail to respect the player's time often, and that doesn't disqualify them from being good due to any number of other qualities. But also, in Far Cry 2 and Miasmata, there's always the potential that something interesting or surprising or wacky or disastrous could occur in those "dead" moments, but as far as I can tell that's not true in FRACT. I mean, if I'm sucked into the world, and I just don't notice that I haven't actually done anything significant in 20 minutes, then it's sort of a moot point. But if I'm constantly being annoyed by it with little to no payoff (and I mean little payoff from the wandering itself, or direct result of the wandering, not from any other parts of the game), I'm more likely to consider it a real flaw and not just part of the game's structure or pace. Also just in case anyone is conflating two topics (which I don't think the post I'm replying to is), there's definitely a distinction between games that genuinely bother me in this regard and games that I'm simply having a tough time getting psyched up for even if I suspect they're still good.

As a note, when talking about the investment problem, I wasn't talking about me at all points in my life, or me when I first started playing Spelunky; I was talking about me now.

This is spot on I think. I also agree about Ken's reaction to Joan. Mad Men is one of the few shows on television that consistently represents this kind of deceptively subtle social interaction rather than overly broadly telegraphing the clear and obvious meaning of a given exchange.