Chris

I agree. He came off as legitimately human—an actual person whose flaws would probably manifest themselves in relatively unremarkable (if not always admirable) ways were he born as a normal member of society, but which are allowed and encouraged to become monstrous when empowered by a royal station.

Welcome, new people!

I was similarly surprised to learn how lightly-imagined all that stuff from Sam & Max was when I got older. I grew up entirely on the West Coast and East Coast of the US, and had basically no exposure to Midwestern culture of any kind; I've still never really even been to the Midwest. I haven't even spent much time very far outside the major cities of the coasts. I love that a video game made me at least aware of a lot of that stuff I never directly experienced. I feel like if that game came out now, it would be the subject of a lot of really interesting discussion that at the time it probably didn't have as much of a chance to generate in public channels (as opposed to local discussion among friends).

Sean and I will come by tomorrow! We just posted about the meetup on the Thumbs Twitter account.

I might theoretically play a bunch of Last of Us combats in a game that wasn't so dedicated to presenting a coherent narrative, but that theoretical game isn't the one in question. I don't think you can separate them out that way. Just like in any other creative work, all parts of the thing should more or less support each other. The inclusion of something in one game doesn't make it equally valid in another. If you do find the way those things all work together in this game to be appropriate and well-pitched, that's of course totally fine!

I do enjoy them in a general sense, but the volume of them is what makes me enjoy them less.

I didn't say the very presence of those things dilute it, just that the sheer volume of it does. The hundredth time I go through a combat encounter, I'm not actually learning anything new or revelatory (even marginally so) about the relationship between these people. Those things aren't hard at all though. They're the same every time. If it was a different kind of traversal puzzle, and just the exact same of THAT hypothetical puzzle, I don't think my point would change. You'd still just be re-solving the same thing you've already solved a bunch of times. I don't think any real journey works that way. The journey that these characters are on would be hard for a LOT of reasons, almost none of which would have anything to do with laying a plank across a gap or whatever. What I'm saying isn't that Naughty Dog should have bit off some kind of crazy simulational game that would try and simulate those hard things, in the vein of Stalker or Day Z or whatever, more that they way they DID choose to abstract it (and the repetitiveness of that solution) to me doesn't capture what it seems like they were trying to capture. And I think if there were simply less of all this stuff, it would be less apparent to me.

Yeah, Zuma came up in the podcast, but I don't see them as directly comparable. The Last of Us goes way, WAY out of its way to present itself as a coherent, affecting, and meaningful narrative. And to my mind that goal is watered down by, well, watering down the narrative with so many basically-identically-repeated gameplay sequences. Zuma (Tetris, Drop7, etc., etc.) is a totally different beast. It is essentially ONLY the gameplay hook, in pure concentrated form. (Zuma has a very light overarching structure but it is basically a formality.) It's something very elemental. It would be silly if Zuma had some grand swashbuckling story about the frog in it. But by extension, on the other end of the spectrum, I also think it's kind of silly that The Last of Us has so much ladder-rearranging in it. I know I've brought that up several times, it's just the most transparent example for me of "Well, this part isn't a cutscene and it's not a combat, so we need something for the player to do"—and it's a bummer to me that that needs to exist so frequently. The amount of combat itself is just a less-pronounced version of that for me.

I don't think that's necessarily the claim to infer. I think a more accurate implication might be that not enough time has passed to know which recent films deserve a place among the more time-tested greats. That's not to say you have to agree with that claim either, it's just usually how I interpret this kind of thing.

I'm already feeling like it's too long and I'm not even close to done, so I stand by that comment. You may not have felt that way but I definitely do. It doesn't make it a bad game, but at this point every time I walk into a room and I know I'm going to have to shuffle a ladder or fight/evade a bunch of guys I get a pang of weariness. I've just done it all so many times already. I'll keep pressing on for a while but if it actually takes 17 hours as Mington claims, and I'm only a third through that, I don't know if I'm going to make it.

If that's the case, I'm still not really sure what that means. "In alternate universes things might theoretically be pretty different"?

This is the best

I actually strongly dislike how that message is presented in Infinite, because it seems to me like the argument there is, "It doesn't matter what you believe, strongly believing anything is bullshit because it turns you into a monster." I mean, I DON'T think all strongly-held beliefs are actually equivalent. That's not to say I wouldn't be receptive to a more nuanced version of the argument: in fact, I think the original BioShock actually achieves that to a much stronger degree. BioShock achieves it, in part, by presenting an ideology that is fundamentally cartoonish in its very conception; it's a comic-book ideology, but it is treated in a humane way by the game. Infinite is the exact opposite. It takes actual historical human ideologies and gives them a cartoon treatment that didn't allow me to find any humanity. Infinite, to me, feels like it overly warps the plot events and characters motivations simply so it can make a nihilistic and overly-strained point. The game (to me) seems to ultimately claim principles are pointless and doing nothing is the same as striving for something. To be clear: I think ambiguity in art is crucial, and I don't yearn for polemic, but BioShock Infinite to me actually feels polemical in its exultation of callous ambiguity, and I just can't find any point in that.

Yes, it's adaptation. There's no need to use the word "transmedia" for cases where we have a perfectly good and less jargony word. The Walking Dead didn't even occur to me at that point on the podcast. Hopefully not too many people thought I was deploying some kind of burn-by-omission.

Sure, I mean, exaggerating the true extent of the status quo—to the point that it becomes all-encompassing, with any outliers sanded away—is also not admirable. In something like Ace Patrol, I wasn't actually bothered in an active sense while playing. It was more something that I found a little bit unsettling upon reflection. Not because I think it's going to be harmful simply thanks to that one game, but just the notion of taking an actual real historical event and using it as nothing more than essentially comfort food. It's definitely a weird gray area, but you'd never do that kind of thing with a more recent historical event of such global magnitude. And with some events, you'd maybe never do it. You'd never do that in World War II with the Nazis as one faction, right? (Or at least, probably not, in a game like this. There are goofy games with Nazis, but not where every side is portrayed as identically friendly and egalitarian.) But there were something like 37 million casualties in World War I still, and if anything it was one of history's biggest dividing lines between the old world system of rigid class hierarchies, and the slow lurch toward modernity. It was a fulcrum point; not an event following that fulcrum. So to just slap a coat of modern perspective paint over it seemed a little weird to me. And just to further clarify: look, I know it doesn't really matter all that much. It's not like I think Firaxis needs to be castigated over this or anything. But I do think it's worth considering, and I wonder what kind of discussions Firaxis had about it.

Gunpoint isn't one of the all-time great names of a thing, but it's concise, rolls off the tongue easily, and is essentially appropriate to the game in my opinion—I mean, very few game names ACTUALLY achieve those three basic things. I agree with your thoughts on "The Swapper," which sounds either like a totally different kind of game, or something unpalatable, like shorthand for a shitty joke on a bro-oriented morning show.

We've talked a lot about nature vs. nurture, adoption vs. true bloodlines, etc., and we have a lot of really cool ideas I think. I don't expect this to be Eugenics: The Game.

Thanks! Glad it came off in right spirit.

Sure, but if you make a game that's basically just like every other FPS in terms of design conventions, except it doesn't have crouching, that isn't particularly interesting either. I mean even just starting from the assumption "this is an FPS" is practically a recipe for making something that's largely a carbon copy of a bunch of other games.

To be fair to the guy you're replying to, Nick said "I'm going to spoil it," and the person said he paused when he heard that, so how would he know it's not a plot spoiler?

I don't know yet (the whole team hasn't been finalized) but probably not. I was involved with a bunch of the planning stuff but I doubt I'll be super directly involved with the game after the KS is over.

You can just back $1 if you want. It doesn't matter if there's a tier or not. (Also just to clarify, there's no RTS component to Massive Chalice. It's entirely turn-based.)

Nope.

"Dotato Day" is my favorite

I just never paid attention to the lyrics, it was essentially gibberish to me!