vimes

I second the comments about the SMB documentary, I've got no interest in the game, but I watch the 9 episode in a row.

What's the distributed patronage website? I can't catch the name :/

Some random info about AR: you don't really need to have abstract shapes for AR tracker, AR libraries can now detect 'normal' images. actually, if you're just going to integrate simulated stuff over reality, without these virtual object having a 'real world' object counterpart, you don't even need any special pattern or grid to provide the simulation with a reference of what sort of perspective the camera is looking at. PTAM sort of solved that a few years back rather impressively (the creator went on to work at Microsoft, never to be seen again; just like Johnny 'Wiimote hack' Lee) AR has great wayof feeding off from other technologies; like Kinect (or any system able to create depthmap) - it leads to proper occlusion of virtual vs real, relighting of the real environment by virtual lightsources and (possibly) doing physics with the real space (grenade rolling down a tea table). I don't know how CastAR deals with occlusion by the way. RFID would probably be useful in the case of having elements being moved out of any of the players view and still wanting the game logic/simulation to acknowledge it. (stupid example: somebody moves a warrior next to a target, the simulation should start a fight even though none of it is visible to the players).

The were a bunch of interesting tidbits but the discussion about finding new ways to document game making was cool. But, it was topped by the stunning revelation that Jake is the culprit for Idle Book Cast delay

Interesting! If that's an accurate analysis, it's a genius decision to have made such thin links between the different threads because, otherwise, I think I would have found this side story excessively grimed. It'd be ironic for me though, because I really appreciated Oscar story for it's uncorrelation from the rest of the narrative and for the way it withered off without complete closure - which felt fresh.

The resulting conversation is a good rendition of the game itself, because even if you've played The Stanley Parable a bit thoroughly, there's so many branch that could possibly fit the one they vaguely reference that there's no way to check if you are on the same mind track as them.

I'm of two minds about this game: on one hand, I find it smart, funny, well written, well constructed and, by the way it poke at genuinely interesting things, quite fascinating. Sometimes, it can also be quite touching. On the other hand, I feel like the creator obviously knows how to write, he has great voice actors at hand, and as an acute understanding of the genre and the player habits it has generated; so it makes me slightly mad that he doesn't inspire at anything more than being cynical and/or ironic about the form. I know it's incredibly selfish and I know it's unfair - and frankly, I'm not proud to have this reaction - but it's like: I have embryos of what I think are interesting stories that can stand on their own and self-contain a valuable meaning and experience; but they will probably never get beyond that embryonic stage because I don't have the writing talent, chops and instinct to properly inject them in our medium. So it feels like a gigantic waste that a guy who does seem to have the talent has spent the last 2 years sort of 'safely' writing a detached and cynical piece of ironic entertainment; instead of putting out there what he genuinely thinks might be a better storytelling experience than what he criticizes.

I really had to soldier through the first hour of the game because it really felt like a clunky Video game crammed into an uninspired animated series episode: the writing was saturated with swear words and physical violence which looked like a cheap attempt at grittiness, the interaction was minimal (3 minutes of cust-scenes for 1 minute/1-gameplay action), the controls were incredibly rigid (that's without counting manually fixing the win8+x360 pad crash that's been in the TTG Engine since TWD) and it featured the same confusing camera cuts during environment exploration that made me rage quit Back to the Future. The last 3 problems remained for the whole episode, but thankfully, once the game asked me to choose between investigating Toad's or The Prince's building, it mysteriously found its pace, its tone and its identity. It's really odd, but it felt like the creator didn't manage to solve how to get to that point gracefully. The best thing is that it also revealed a different philosophy toward player choices when compared to TWD. The brilliance of TWD is that it didn't want to make me go back to try different decisions because it put me in a place where I wasn't a player anymore: I wasn't making choice to min/max situations or because I knew the overarching plot depended on my input - I took decision that only defined how I saw my own character and how the other saw me. The Wolf Among Us doesn't go down that road again and that's great: since you're playing a character that's already part of the lore it wouldn't make that much sense and your function puts you anyway at the core of the overarching story. The different sequences and what they require from the player keep reminding you that your actions affects much larger issue... and so, it made me want to replay some of the segments to check if there was a better outcome. Strangely, the moments I want to revisit are not the one after which the game blared at me 'blahblah appreciated this' or "you were blahblah to blahblah", after conversations - since these are similar to TWD in construct and I don't think they'll have much impact- but choices that were made in the spur of the moment through physical actions or detective decisions (most notable, how I handled the situation with the Prince) were the one that got me curious. It's a very gamey approach, so I'm pretty sure the series won't be of the same caliber of TWD; but not all games have to be and I'm sort of excited to see where they're bring this formula next.

Great cast! It probably took some chops to go into the 'author anxiety' territory, and it was definitely worth it - super valuable stuff! The discussion that followed on writers as actors reminded me of this:

That's an awesome choice; looking for forward to all of these interviews (Hubbard & H????? in particular)!

From last season, I strongly recommend Uchouten Kazoku; it might take an episode or 2 to get used to the background art, but I think it does interesting stuff in terms of tone, characterization and theme treatment. Nothing revolutionary or gimmicky, but it's has an off-beat that I felt very unique and sidesteps itself quite often. Also takes place in Kyoto with some interesting revisiting of folklore figures and actual places.

Since people seems to enjoy that series a lot, the new opus looks positively amazing [media=] [/media]

If the game ends up being only about cross-breeding heroes it would be extremely disappointing. But after listening to the design talk, I don't feel like it's going to be like that: Brad Muir is obviously enthusiastic about the whole 'Song of a Family of Heroes' motif, but, given his reaction to the adoption idea and the way the discussion went, I'm thinking his underlying motivation is not so much about the bad ass epic than it is about creating stories that interesting characters whose personalities and life choices are entirely forged in gameplay systems that mixes biased simulation and player choices... and I expect there are a bunch of influences within DoubleFine to bring him novel ideas on how to achieve that, and on how to infuse meaning and 'ideological' bias inside the systems to make the result thought provoking (or at least, not completely archetypal). I mean, just the adoption mechanic would a brilliant gameplay vehicle for the 'hereditary vs education vs experience' thematic. And if you generalize that to 'where does the kid come from' (infidelity, adoption because of same of sex, infertility or wound in battle) you open a bunch of doors for the player to make decision about how he can choose his heir: are there conflicting criteria? does the orphan origin matter? Can your 'life partner' have anything to say about it?Do they have to be aware of it? Can they discover it later? Do your decision influence the relation in the couple afterward? Can he/she adopt a kid without your consent? Or cheat on you, with you only discovering the child isn't yours when he can't use a relic from one of your ancestors? if/when/how to reveal the orphan origin and the simulation's response to that: how the orphan will react to the revelations: will he cut the ties with his surrogate parent? Will he go on a search for his blood relative and possibly come back with chocking new bloodline to explore ? will he turn into an adversary like Mordred in the Arthurian Tale, joining the demons? will he just disappear to grow beet like Patrick R. mentionned? Will this change his stats? The stats of his relative? Will this changes the view of the people on the hero and the realm in general? And even if you the systems are not 'aware' of the orphan status, it should still 'color' the player's perception of how this character performs within the gameplay systems: an orphan who slays a dragon to get the relic of an ancestor he isn't related to doesn't have to be acknowledged as a special case by the simulation, it will automatically mean something different for the player. In any case, the field of possible is huge at that point - which is a good way to fire up the imagination - and I'm cautiously confident they'll pick an interesting angle, rather than the eugenic one.

Braff's answer to this claim:

I backed it because the idea sounds good, but a couple of things surprised me: I was expecting one of the AF 'finalists' to be kickstarted instead of a completely new project... but hopefully that means at least one of them has already been picked up by a traditional publisher/Steven Dengler. 750K seems low: Broken Age budget has been immensely underestimated, so I'm surprised they are not targeting a higher amount. It feels like 750K would be really tight and that they're hoping that, once it's reached, people that were sitting on the fence would join in. I might be completely wrong though.

Is there anyway to get some sort of a mail alert when a twitch-tv channel starts streaming? I've been missing on quite a lot of these...

I just bought it on Steam and will probably play it over the week-end.

Though the book reads itself, I'm nowhere near done... but I wanted to drop and share a passage that made me revere the author's skills: I was lovestruck by this passage the first time I read it, without understanding why. Then I reread it. Several times. I'm no literary critic, but I'm going to try and explain how. First, there's the very simple and elegant writing style as well as the unorthodox (at least for me) use of the punctuation that transmits the kinetics of the two girls' movement and attitude. Then, there's the power of evocation: the vignette is rich and detailed on its own, but somehow, at the same time, the author also managed to paint at the edges of the reader vision the mood and complexity of the whole scene it is part of. On top of that, in one short sentence, she quickly recommits to Thomas point of view, confirms the complexity of the scene, and by the way it blends with the ongoing description, hints at Thomas mental and emotional state. Finally, in two sentences, she confirms that state and finish with a use of colon that's like a small punch in the chest. Amazing.

I can't ever get excited about projects built on nostalgia, and on top of that, the 'so bad it's good' aesthetic movement is beginning to seriously irritate me; so this is... urg. It feels like we're giving way too much attention and too many praises to something that sounds lazy and/or cynical and/or reactionary. How is this any different from Space Marine 101? Because they say it's for the lols?

I wrote a pretty long text about my experience of Bioshock, but here's my conclusion When I play a game with a strong core that has flaws, I always imagine how they could have been fixed. To me, the original Bioshock wasn’t about the events of the game, it was about what happened before, it was about a group of inspiring people united under a strong ideal who, when trying to implement it, discover that the difference in perception of what this ideal means is going to tear them and their utopia apart. That’s why, despite the obvious flaws of the game, I had no problem imagining a Bioshock more to my liking, a game that was not as belligerent, that would make us experience this central theme directly, during the city’s genesis, growth and apex. The seed and spirit of this ‘better game’ was definitely in the original one. But when I think about Infinite, I fail to see the mending possibilities. The game isn’t about the ideal behind Columbia – since it is condemned from the beginning and never shown a redeeming side. It isn’t about how people deal with guilt – since all options but death are insignificant. In summary, it isn’t about questions and the panel of valid answers that can exist for them. It is about Elizabeth. It is about the parallel universes and the narrative device to present them. And it is about the bullet laden escape. At best, it could be about the branching between Comstock and Brooker persona. But even then, it cannot NOT be an action game set during the bombastic fall of Columbia, because at their core that’s how the central pieces want to be explored: Elizabeth has to be freed by making a giant building explode. All the nice environmental art, the beautiful architecture, the brilliant sound design, the idea of a floating city, the research on American Exceptionalism… every awe-inspiring elements are just accessories to that. And that’s why, it never really mattered what the execution was, Infinite was always going to be this linear experience that I don’t like.

I'm curious, since some of these modifier could be turned on and off whenever, is there a special reason for only allowing them to be tweaked when starting a new game?

I seem to remember enjoying all the Calvino I've read so far, but I really didn't like Cosmicomics. I think that I would have appreciated each segments a bit more if I had stumbled upon them by chance in collections with other stories; but the effect of the style over time really irritated me. That comes mainly from Calvino decision to cast Qfwfq as an obnoxious old timer and to push this aspect of his personality in the text nearly every single sentence. In the abstract, a narrator that has the voice of old survivor/witness is fine - the translation of Australian Aboriginal myths I've read use a imilar device with great success - but Calvino drags his character to such an extreme that he makes him obnoxious, unlikeable. After two stories, I didn't want to hear from him anymore. I was interested in the stories, but not in the way he was telling them: he does sound like an old self centered grandpa who can't wait to use his eons of knowledge to craft a nifty paradoxical thought experiment, not caring if the audience is one step ahead or not. Yes, I understand that it is mindbending to talk in first person about the reason for a mollusc to attempt something when he doesn't have a brain that can give birth to that sot of process. Yes , you're telling the existence at a point like it's a naturalistic italian movie which is ahah. But it drags on and on, and it's too obfuscated when the core idea do not have the potential breadth that would allow for exploration over dozens of pages. I'm tempted to say that the book does better when it decides to focus on his narrator's feeling, but even then, Qfwfq's reactions are frustratring: despite his eons of existence and radical experiences, he doesn't seem to learn anything about relationships with others; and his self centerness is dismall. Which brings me to my final point: is this by design? Did Calvino intend to make such a flawed omniscient narrator that even though he knows everything doesn't learn? Is it his point to make the reader feels superior in his capacity to analyze the situation and empathise with the other protagonists? Is the tedious style a testament to Calvino's integrity or is it a bad choice altogether? Can a writer use a bad narrator - someone who can't really tell story - and display this flaw without veil again and again in order to make a larger point? When does it become bad writing? How the hell am I suppose to know?

Actually, I just bought the game based on Rab Florence's article linked int he RPS piece. So well written, so articulate.

My comment wasn't putting the quality of your reference into question - I actually think it was very appropriate - but since an important part of the podcast revolved around the perceived difference between the culture of competition in traditional sports vs. video games and you ended up dropping that reference later, I got curious about the Thumb 'involvement' in major league sports: I remember listening or reading you talk about the MLB and - I think - the NFL before, so I was wondering if you're all following all of these sports closely; and if that's a widespread thing in the gamer community or thumb staff.Maybe that can inform the discussion: I wonder if sports fan witnessing the behavior of coaches in theses sports (abusing the refs and their own player sometimes) tend replicate or accept the same behavior in video games. Or if the overly critics of players based on partial metrics in Fantasy Leagues changes the way player evaluate their ally efficiency. I don't know... that might be a bullshit line of thought, I'm not sure.

An obscure OJ Mayo reference? How many major league sports do you guys follow closely?