unimural

I haven't gotten far along at all in the game yet (still waiting for the Obduction game night), but I do love the Cyan's marriage of narrative, spaces and puzzles. I also initially expected The Witness to have a strong narrative. My first couple of hours with the game I wanted to play something closer to a Cyan game. The references to Myst, and Braid fooled me. Then I learned to stop worrying and love The Witness. But I am also very glad to have this thing too.

Entertainment Preview Complex would be an excellent Jam-slash-Wizard-dash-Jam-dash-game.

Obduction is out! http://obduction.com/ Reception seems to be positive, which is most cool. I backed the Kickstarter, but I haven't played it yet. I played a lot of these games hotseat with a friend of mine, and we're trying to organize an evening to do just that with Obduction as well. So I'm in spoiler avoidance mode, but ridiculously excited! Also, I really want Jake to play Obduction and talk about it on the show, even though it'll mean I can't listen to the episode for a few weeks.

I voted other. I also would love a stream of Dwarf Fortress, but a lot of people would not. My vote is for Helldivers co-op. I think it would make for a great stream. The co-op ideally should be local. Janine + Nick team Helldiving would be most excellent. Although, I suppose anyone Helldiving with Nick would be rather wonderful.

Obligatory Dwarf Fortress defender post: Getting started with Dwarf Fortress installation-wise is really easy these days: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=126076 The main issue still is that there's so much to learn. Most of it isn't difficult at all. There's just a lot of it, and you have to internalize a fair chunk before you can get anything functional going on in the game. Really, you have to study the game before you can play it. Either by reading the wiki or watching a bunch of let's plays. Or ideally having a patient live tutor sitting next to you. Back in 2006 when I started playing the game it was all a lot simpler. I don't envy people who try to get in the game these days.

As a rule I don't play early access games. I do occasionally back something on Kickstarter, or I might even buy some early access games. But as long as the game hasn't had a proper release I won't play it. It's mainly a question of time. There's a ton of wonderful games, way more than I have time to play. If I had more time, I might dabble in some early access stuff. As things currently stand, I'd much rather play some finished product than a work in progress. I do suspect some games suffer from early access, but some games might never get where they are going if not for early access, so I don't mind the phenomenon so much. It does mean I miss out on a lot of the discussion, but I'm willing to pay that price. Especially as many early access games a such long, grindy, iterative games. It is addictive stuff. I do also think that feature asphyxiation is a thing, Paradox being one of the worst example. CK2 and EU4 have been expanded to a point where it is quite a mess, the whole kind of being less than its parts. I'm also rather worried that Stellaris will never reach a good place, as the starting state is a bit too much of a framework of a game, with especially the sector system just kind of being there and looking for its form. I just don't have to faith that they can rework the game as much and as freely as is needed. It's more like a wonderful prototype than a good design. That said, the worst example of this is possibly Dwarf Fortress. The feature undead. It's not the same thing, as all of that craziness is planned, at least on rough level, and the vision is always Toady's. Yet, the community loves it, even if they don't direct it as much as with some other games. In general, there are silly people, to whom the pleasure they get from hitching the cannons is worth any damage to pacing, usability or focus. The grandeur of the DF's simulation, and the mere concept of the ability to Rube Goldberg the living daylights out of everything causes serotonin to flood my brain. And while I die a bit inside when I get a new wave of immigrants and have to micromanage 30 new dwarves, I also love it. And I am incredibly grateful for it. Even if it means that most people will never want to join in.

The lead-up to the 2016 US presidential elections have been very visible even here in Finland. For a really long time, as well. The US presidential elections always get some coverage, but Trump certainly made it more visible far earlier. I would like to add the caveat that as a foreigner one always has a distorted view, and weird stuff always gets the most attention. Finland is also a small, for the most part relatively secular and extremely homogeneous country. This makes the cultural differences sometimes seem baffling and huge. The past week I've tried to gain some kind of an understanding of the elections. I've read a few pieces online, and I've read a fair bit of this thread as well. From this relatively distant and safe perch, the rise of Trump seems to speak of a fundamental societal failure. This certainly is not an isolated phenomenon, and not limited to US. We here in Finland also have seen it, a sharp increase in demagogue and populism in general. To me that seems to be the true danger that Trump and Brexit represent. Both UKIP and the republicans are merely exploiting what has become acceptable, and unfortunately people who are afraid seem to be willing to accept anything. I get that the elections aren't about this, and whoever wins, nothing final will happen. However, to me it seems Trump very much personifies the abandonment of reason over passion. He represents fear-mongering, complete lack of responsibility, personal or otherwise. He says he's outside the system, but he seems to offer the worst of the system, combined with elimination of some of the benefits. It is this that scares me. Trump himself seems just another narcissistic sociopath. For a combination of reasons, some people will rather listen to such a person than anything reasonable. Even if Trump doesn't get elected, the political landscape in US and Europe has been changed. We will be living with consequences of this for a long time, and the discourse will be, well, it will hardly be discourse. If Hillary wins, this doesn't change. However, if Trump wins, I believe the change will be bigger, the consequences will be worse and wider reaching. I shudder to think what the future of politics would be. Democracy will be meaningless if the political landscape is completely removed from facts. This is why I think it would be important for Hillary to win, and for Hillary to win with a comfortable margin. However much people are frustrated with the system, the sad fact seems to be that slow and incremental change is the way to go. The past 15 years have been hard, and in some regards we as the western world have not improved. But by and large the direction has still been net positive. Based on historical precedence, breaking the system leads to French Revolution way more often than it does Ghandi. And even that lead (several) India-Pakistan wars.

You're not crazy, Valve removed it: http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/107906804069/changes-in-steam-key-redemption

Good cast. I'm also quite taken by Chris' Rimworld streams. I simply just have to clarify one thing with regards to Chris' rimworld story. Jake said: 'He was born and still is Nick Breckon.' In fact, Nick 'Goldblum' Breckon is a Vatgrown soldier. The Nick Breckon IP obviously outlives us all, and is used as a template for the soldiers of the future. Also worth noting is that Goldblum's past life has left him incapable of violence, caring and social. And he has a bad back. Chris might have understood this correctly, but with regards to the 5 x rebuffed by Jr. Mints that Chris saw after Sr. Mints and Goldblum got together, those had happened in the past. Some mood modifiers last a while, and expire gradually. Others, like the environmental effects are instant. A small gameplay note: The dumping stockpile thing chat asked you to do didn't quite work out. The idea, I think, is to only have a single dumping stockpile near the stonecutting table, and set that dumping stockpile to accept a single type of stone chunks. Thus whenever someone uses the stonecutting table, there's uniform stone readily available. However, you currently have two dumping stockpiles there. In the first stream you had set a dumping stockpile near the farms and the other stockpiles. And now in the 3rd stream you created a new stockpile in the stonecutting room, that is set for slate chunks, but you also have the old stockpile right outside. So you won't get uniform stone block types without additional micromanagement. Also, there's no reason to keep a stone chunk dumping stockpile indoors that I know of. Having stone walls is a good idea when one of your colonists is a pyromaniac.

Is there a way to invert the mouselook y-axis? I'm one of those old geezers who have to spend a disorienting half hour adjusting to forward translating to looking up. The game does look really intriguing.

I've been iterating on matcha-drinks for a while now time. They work great as start for an evening/night, and I'm kind of suprised bars don't serve them to keep people partying all night, as one of these will totally wake you up from whatever stupor you've ended up in. I'm also trying some other matcha drinks, but they still need work. Mint and matcha work very well together, and mojito with match isn't bad either. But I'd really love to make a great gin-matcha drink. The best candidate I have is 50/50 Triple Sec/Monkey 47 -gin -- I finally had time to try some of the things here, specifically Field of Dreams, Bublé Bloodborne Bloodbeef (fresh berries are in season here) and The Rich Uncle. - I highly recommend the Blueberry Field of Dreams. I did not have blueberry gin, but I substituted by using a lot of blueberries. I tried it with both Schweppes Indian Tonic and Vouvray. I think I preferred the extra bite from tonic. Should probably have opted for a more acidic/less sweet sparkling wine. - Bublé Bloodborne Bloodbeef, which was really intense, although that's partially due to a less than ideal choice of chardonnay. I added a dash of triple sec to sweeten the thing, which worked out ok. - Rich Uncle was really tasty and simple, but by that point I was already way too drunk to really have any real analytical capability :-) I'm a big tea dork, and I would love to find some of the wonderful flavours of pu'er or oolong teas with drinks. Any tips for infusing tea in alcohol? Or other ideas on how to get tea flavours to survive?

The Hitman stream was excellent, with a truly wonderful payoff! During one of the wonderful breckonian moments in the stream a song started to play in my head. While inferior to the pure stream experience, I created a youtube mashup of it. http://crossfade.io/#!/azo9al2yd1

Idle Thumbs 1254: Guy Calls it Quits So, in 2035 the last non-robotic cast member produces one final pod of Idle Thumbs? Or the robots have already taken over, and the 1254 consists of a single robot pretending to be a Nick Breckon.

A more freeform Idle Weekend was an enjoyable and interesting listen. I hope you won't entirely give up on the topical discussions, but I'd rather you have a freeform discussion instead of force yourself to discuss a topic that you either feel you can't do justice to, or just aren't into on any given week. I'm happy with the walking simulator term. I like such games a lot, from Proteus to Davey Wreden/William Pugh stuff. I do find it tiresome that the discussion around these games often degenerates into a discussion about definitions. If using the term "walking simulator" or "software theatre" gets us past this point, I'm glad. If that's not enough, I hope someone comes up with the term we can all use. Even if it's Emergent Presecribed Exeperience or epee. Or Narratives' Management, nama. It'll happen eventually, and then we can just discuss the things, instead what the thing can be called. I haven't played Rapture, but for me often a big draw of the "walking simulators" is the walking. Especially making the traversal fit the environment. Miasmata is probably my favourite of these. Miasmata does have a fair number of mechanics, but it also has the best walking. You move at fairly realistic speeds and you have to estimate if the ridge is to steep for you to not fall down. All of us can walk, but we still stumble every now and then when walking in rough terrain. The other mechanics also support this, and indeed the experience evokes a lot of the same unconscious decisions we make when traversing a natural space. Firewatch, I think, achieves some of this with the environment interactions: the ledges, the navigation and even the distant but ever present threat of fire. Even something like Stanley Parable kind of does this, merely through it's environmental design. Evoking and distorting two familiar navigation spaces: office indoors and games. In Stanley Parable the navigation is snappy and linear, serving the narrative content. Firewatch, Proteus and Miasmata all invite you to look at the horizon, climb higher to get a better view, to learn the land and enjoy that process. Assassin's Creed is also pretty close to being a decent walking simulator. If only I could remove all the hud elements and remove all the mission triggers and collectibles. That's would be a good game. It is a shame AC has no interest in the really rather wonderful places they've created, instead opting for the spectacle. But traversing virtual spaces is fun. More games, or namas, should celebrate that.

An old man question: What the heck does VOD stand for? The only thing I can think of is Video on Demand, but that is obviously not applicable here. Or should not be.Despite being an old man, I did know Twitch nowadays also stores chat. However, my search was fruitless, as the chat only replays in real time, and doesn't display the history. Since I don't remember anything except that Chris was physically present during the stream, the search was too haystacky to be feasible.

On one of the Dark Souls tiki streams someone desperately tried to get Chris' attention to tell about the Cumularity book. He had an url for an image of the book, but I can't find it from my browser history.

You guys have really great guests! I don't know if I've read anything by Heather before, but she was an interesting guest with enviably conciseness to her discourse. Maybe I misunderstood what the cast was getting at with their cigarette butt sensei metaphors, but this week I felt the cast basically condemn the harshness of the Souls games (and The Witness) as unnecessary and being mean. I somewhat disagree with that point of view. Rob did state what I think is the only sensible point that yeah, the makers of the game were ok with excluding people who don't have the time to sink in to the game and thus it's not for me. Rob continued by talking about the great community, yet added that the community exists because the game is a shitty teacher. And I kind of have trouble with that way of phrasing it. That the community is some kind of a sunk costs club, valued by those tortured by the teacher, partly because of the exclusivity of surviving that torture. Earlier Heather said that it's bad that the reason for the great community is that the game is a bad teacher. I hadn't really thought about it before, but the Souls series are niche games. People rarely complain about IL Sturmovik being hard, why are Souls games different? The discussion around The Witness focused a lot on its difficulty, where as the discussion around Stephen's Sausage Roll seems to mostly focus on $30 being too much for game that doesn't look prettier. Perhaps there's a question of is it disingenuous to market a game for everyone if it is not for everyone, but we all should understand that not everything the society produces is for us. I suppose part of it is that games have been such a mono-culture that it is still always somewhat strange to come up with a game that is fundamentally not for me. Could never be for me. I am not a Souls player myself, having abandoned Demon Souls perhaps third of the way in. Since then my only real Souls experiences have been my friends lunch time stories and watching the Thumbs' Tiki & Souls streams. Based on that I think that Dark Souls 3 is fair. It absolutely is. If you approach it with a meticulous mindset. Why is it not acceptable that for the first time you should enter each room hiding behind the biggest shield you have. You peek in to the right, you back out. Nothing jumped at you, You peek at the roof, the the left. Perhaps I can enter. Is there anything strange about the texturing of the floor, possibly indicating a trap? Doesn't that sound kind of cool? I'd never want to do that for more than three rooms. So not a game for me. Yet it is wonderful that there's an experience that can demand that from those that want/enjoy that. I think it's unfair to say it's a sadistic sensei set on your demise. I think it is extremely great that games have enough room and audience, that something like Souls can exists at it's budget level. That it is feasible to serve a relatively specific experience for those who desire it. Around 8 years ago I was worried that outside of Spiderweb Software level indies, old fashioned turn based rpgs were disappearing. All the new big budget RPGs were action games, à la Mass Effect or Fallout 3. Nowadays there are more interesting, varied RPGs than I would have had time to play as a kid. Sure, I'm still missing the holy union of RPG with roughly 15 XCOM level tactical battles, but I think everywhere you look the old-era Idle Thumbs question "What is game?" is being answered more broadly year after year. In this respect I believe the fact that Dark Souls isn't for many any more than Super Meat Boy is, should be lauded, seen as some kind of purity of design instead of belittling the experience by saying well I suppose masochists will have fun in the sadists class. Now, if only Dwarf Fortress could support such a budget, and have all that budget be spent on interactions instead of graphics.

Amazing! Thanks for making my dream of seeing all the "Wouldn't it be silly/cool/disgusting" tangents Jake comes up with and then get uplifted by the rest of the Thumbs implemented, one tiny bit more real!

When I was a kid (5th grade I think) a Cool Kid said: "The MicMac store [or something vaguely Native American like that] is the best store in the city." I internalized this. We did not live in the city. The next time we went to the city, I wanted to visit the MicMac store and insisted that I must visit this cool place. It turned out it was a boring clothing store and there was nothing cool about it. In fact, the place sucked. I experience a rather severe bout of cognitive dissonance. I had been so awed by this kid that I internalized his opinion without any thought or filtering. I like to think I learned something. At least I gained an anecdote. I've always been a Cyan/Myst fan, and would like to point out, that you can still play "Myst Online: Uru Live again", or MO:ULa. With the fondness of throwing a barb at your friend, the experience has some resemblance to the acronym. Uru Live was insanely ambitious for it's time. Uru was initially conceived as a pure multiplayer experience. The game was released in 2003, initally as the single-player component Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, with Uru Live entering beta shortly afterwards. This was a time when broadband was still pretty much limited to campuses and even internet access wasn't a guarantee at all. The whole thing was doomed from start. To combat this, Cyan has designed the most overdetailed, bloated, overcomplicated game engine ever. It had an ambitious physics systems for items and the character models. Quaint by modern standards, but pretty cool at the time. I remember playing something soccer-like with safety cones as goal posts with some people. Even the audio was physically modeled. All of that meant that a single location couldn't even handle 10 people, before the performance tanked. I remember trying to attend one in game meeting in the Cavern, where the devs where supposed to do some roleplaying. At 30 people the whole thing had become a warping slideshow of people running around to the cacophonous soundtrack of the physically modeled echoes of their footsteps and jumps. The whole thing crashed before it reached 40 people. The game had a rather incomprehensible instancing system, where basically everyone could have their own instance of every single game location, but there also were multiple shared instances. All of which were accessed via the same in-game, very Myst, puzzly interface. Ubisoft cancelled Uru Live before it was officially released in 2004. I think. Cyan released some of the stuff they had intended as part of Uru Live as kind of expansion packs for Uru: Ages of Myst. To D'ni and Path of the Shell. Cyan also release Myst V in 2005. While I've never really found out, I suspect a lot of the content in Myst 5 was initially intended to be a part of Uru Live. Later, 2007 I think, in a rather strange deal, GameTap, which was the Turner Network's attempt at getting in on the whole games and digital distribution thing, bought/funded Myst Online: Uru Live as part of their monthly subscription service. Myst Online got cancelled a year later, again. The rights reverted back to Cyan and a few years later Cyan release Myst Online: Uru Live again client as open source. There's an official server, and some vague plans of supporting fan made Myst worlds, but it's still kind of pending. There are also two fan servers with custom content. I'm not sure if they use the Cyan server, or MOSS, which is some kind of a reverse engineered version. There's a bunch more details, but a lot I also do not know. I would love to read the full story of Uru Live. MO:ULa is free and can be downloaded from www.mystonline.com. The installation on Windows 10 required some troubleshooting: http://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=28177 The real pain is getting the account, as there doesn't seem to be any automated system for creating the accounts. Instead you must create a forum account (or resurrect your 9 years old account, depending on your circumstances), apply for PM rights on the forum and then request an account via PM.

The stream was again great fun. It's been very interesting and entertaining to watch Nick's pretty amazing progress, despite the inebriation. Possibly my favourite moment was 90 minutes in, when Nick was at a bonfire, and there was a wolf, occupying a third of the screen, that the chat wanted Nick to talk to. Stacksman : How are we guiding him to the wolf? readSA : He's already @ the wolf. Naturally Nick simply runs away, and the chat explodes. A minute later Chris catches up on the chat and Nick asks: "Where's the wolf?" I was most amused :-) I exhibit similar blindness myself, so Nick also has my sympathy. EDIT: I forgot to add, that in addition to Hitman and Stellaris, both of which I fully support for streaming, some co-op game like Helldivers would be a lot of fun to watch!

A rather slight Mad Max Fury Road spoiler

As I was listening to the episode I was thinking how much more effective the chat was at making me interested in the game than any of the marketing material for the game has been. Some which has been rather bad. Last week Chris talked about multiplayer/co-op anxiety, and people responded to it this week, mostly by focusing on the relatively seamless nature of multiplayer in Dark Souls. Naturally I can't speak for Chris, but at least my multiplayer anxiety hasn't got a lot to do with the mechanics, but with my mindset. And while I have a whole set of rationalisations about it, it fundamentally just boils down to me having a cognitive bias against multiplayer in what I've categorized as a fundamentally single player experience. I can play a pure multiplayer game, because from the outset the goal is to play a game with other people. Usually the game also should have a certain immediacy and time pressure to it. Rounds help a lot. As do set maps. We are all there to play a match and that's that. I could never play a game like Dark Souls with random strangers. I am always very slow, when it comes to ARPGs, or basically any games where there's any world to explore. I take my time, and I don't care that much about being the most efficient about killing things. I'm also a bit too compulsive about finding the hidden items, and always check under the staircase. But a big draw is exploring the world at my own pace. Any kind of multiplayer is a distressing disruption. In co-op I feel a huge pressure to not slow down the game and ruin it for others, and I end up feeling I miss everything. Conversely, if I don't hurry along, the co-op guy/girl will run ahead, kill everything, trigger everything, skip all the lore dumps, kind of ruining the experience for me. I can't adjust my mindset on the fly, and I don't even really want to. Even Diablo 3 was pretty terrible for me. Eventually (a while after reaching torment -difficult) I had played the game enough that the world was familiar, and there wasn't really anything left to explore. It became an abstract set of stuff that I probably should have considered to be from the start. The desert thing has first area with the alternating mountain-crater thingies with special events in the middle, a chokepoint bridge, an open area before the village with the ambush in the cellar, a second open area with a couple of dungeons, the final village with two sections and the butterfly boss lady. All the enemies are familiar and playing the game is reflexive. The game world became a set a Quake 3 maps. I could finally play the game as a straight up mouse click driven slot machine. And yeah, it's a pretty smooth multiplayer experience these day. However, I kind of suspect that I'm still biased against it, because at that point I should switch my mindset from exploring the world to just enjoying the mechanics. And at least with the case of Diablo 3 I wasn't really able to enjoy the game much after I had reached a level of familiarity with it. Which is not a knock on Diablo 3. It's an impressive game, and I played it a whole whole bunch. Co-op/multiplayer with friends is a very different proposition, but even then I prefer games that don't have strong narrative or world exploration elements.

Age of Wonders 3 has tactical battles, right? In my mind that kind of disqualifies it from filling the same role as Warlords series. Still, Age of Wonders 3 might be worth visiting all on it's own.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a game that would scratch the same itch as Warlords 3, probably specifically the Darklords Rising expansion. I don't recall it changing the game significantly, but I remember enjoying the campaign a lot, and it having a whole bunch of both custom and developer made scenarios. For me, the Warlords series was wonderful light mix of wargame and strategy elements. Battle for Wesnoth is great, but lacking all economic management aspects it's a vastly different things. HOMM-likes live and die with the tactical battles, and are greatly slowed by them as well. And anything real-time is not turn-based. Warlords 4 is, at least in my rather vague memories, vastly inferior.

Apologies for slight derailment, but I've been thinking about the future of games for a good while now after the AlphaGo games. Especially interesting is the fact that a single instance AlphaGo performs relatively speaking only marginally worse than the clustered version. Do e-sport tournaments have requirements that the participants should be humans? While we are still far away from a system that could read the game image and control the game with a mouse and keyboard API, strategy-wise a system capable of defeating top humans in Lords Management/RTS could probably be built already. The single player AI is a truly fascinating field though. The possibility of a game having relatively human-level understanding of the game state is really promising. It brings us a step closer to solving the problem of generating a system that can provide a satisfying gaming experience for the player. Sometimes you just want to blob and steamroll. Sometimes you want a challenge. People look for different things from games, often without being fully cognisant of what they actually want. Varying the desired short and long term goals for the AI is probably very difficult to manage, as the information channel the system would have of the player's mental state is merely the in-game actions the player takes. But even ignoring all the psychological aspects, we already could do so much more with just some general understanding on the state of the game. Hopefully this means that in the future the end game slog will be made both shorter and more epic. After the game reaches the point where the AI predicts that the player will win 80% of the games from this point onwards, it will change it's strategy fundamentally. For example, if the AI is aggressive, it will go for one final big push, sacrificing all else. If it's passive/pacifist it will just surrender. And perhaps a diplomatic AI faction will fracture, with some cities/armies surrendering and others joining some other AI faction. I can also imagine some of the horrible things that will follow. Tutorials that will determine what kind of a challenge the current game offers. Ubisoft will have really scary player profiles. Oh, this guy quits the game if he fails a mission twice in a row in the same combat, but will keep trying as long as he get's a bit further every time. So we will always make the second encounter of the same enemy/jump really easy. And this guy is a masochist for collectibles, so we emphasize them on the minimap and advertise our collectible dlcs to him every time in Uplay. Well, they probably do the latter already. Still, it's all really interesting, awesome and horrible at the same time. As is our future in general :-)