Salacious Snake

I think a lot about the bland emptiness of open worlds. Rob was right on the money when he called the Ubisoft model a facade. For all the pedestrians milling around, nothing about Assassin's Creed's locales feels alive. A couple of games popped into my mind that have interesting takes on openish worldy structures: Deadly Premonition: They really went out of their way to make the other inhabitants of Greenvale seem like they got shit to do other than clog up the streets. I've never made any significant progress in the story, but I've enjoyed looking in people's windows and watching their mundane lives. Of course, it's all pretty shallowly scripted, and the stilted text dialog is far from a convincing simulation of life. Cool stuff, though. Metal Gear Solid V: This is sort of a hybrid. When you're just tooling around, it can feel lifeless. The NPCs (humans and animals alike) are directionless without input from the player. But once you do start poking at things, holy shit. The whole Metal Gear series is like a parallel evolution of the immersive sim genre, and it works well in the larger, more open environment. The world design helps, in that the actual mission locations are highly designed gameplay spaces; they just happen to be connected by roads and plains and canyons instead of load screens. Cool games

Yeah, the random hero brawl was cool. I'll definitely play that again when it rolls around. Arcade was fun for a minute. I haven't really played Hanzo or Genji, so I should do the new one in order to learn them a bit.

I got some hot Zarya Tips'n'Tricks coming your way, everybody (especially Danielle). This may not be news at all, but it took me awhile to catch on, so I figured I'd put it out there since it wasn't directly mentioned on the podcast. The trick to her is that whenever she blocks damage with one of her shields (either her personal shield or the one she projects onto teammates), her weapon gets more powerful. There's actually a numerical value from 0 to 100 seen on the reticle, or you can just go by how big the energy wad is on her gun model: The value depreciates over time, so you have to keep blocking to keep it up. It's a great way to encourage being a team player! The difference in effectiveness is so pronounced that I'm not sure it's worth fighting at all at the start of the match; this creates an interesting sort of arc, where you play as a support early on, and then suddenly you can just rip everyone apart. Couple a fully charged weapon with her Ultimate (the vortex thing that sucks everyone together into one spot), and you can really do some damage. [images stolen from the internet]

Yeah, Lwaxana is great in DS9. I think it's just a side effect of it being a better-written show.

Finally got 5 commendations in a match as Lucio. Felt good to be appreciated! I'm finding that I like all the characters that I try for a bit. Sometimes I'll initially bounce off, but once I kinda figure them out they become part of the repertoire. I think they've done a brilliant job of designing these characters/classes. They all have some fun twist. In most class-based games like this, I'll only find a couple that I like. Also, the ability to switch at will is huge, so you can adapt to the situation, and you don't need to worry about being stuck with the wrong tools. I'm so glad they went in that direction.

Whenever I hear Terrible Lie by Nine Inch Nails, I'm transported back to sitting on an orange shag carpet, playing Syndicate on a CRT. I can feel the Jaguar controller in my hands.

This is so Star Trek! The Enterprise scooting around the sector solving colony problems... that's what I want in this game!

I bet this game is super fun in multiplayer, but goddamn it, there's no way I'll ever have the kind of contiguous free time I'd need to make that a satisfying experience. Sometimes I miss being a teenager, but then I remember how much I hated life at the time and it's ok.

I love this description! Early online experiments like that were so exciting and ultimately disappointing. Even on the singleplayer side, the "let's physically model everything" approach was one I always admired, even when it led to things like Trespasser. edit: I keep thinking about this. I miss the way game developers would sometimes take a hardcore simulationist approach in genres where you'd never do that now. Like, I can't imagine Interstate '76 existing now (which coincidentally also had a fundamentally screwed up networking model). At least we have ArmA, but I'd love to see another sci-fi/fantastical game with that approach. The discussion about Tribes on the cast fits into this; C&C Renegade and Bethesda's Terminator games also come to mind. It was a very 90s ideal to approach things from the perspective that you should obviously try to realistically simulate whatever outlandish scenario you're presenting, because that's what computers are good at.

hahah, that's so good! I especially love the held note during the speed-ramped leap near the end.

Smite could be described with the same words. I'm a little surprised, too, I expected it to be more shootery.

I think this game is gonna blow up. It's so fun! Lucio is my man.

I'm playing it on an ultrabook with an Intel HD 520, and it's playable at 720p with everything set to buttocks.

I enjoyed the discussion on fighting games. I just take them so totally for granted that it's really interesting to hear Rob and Danielle's perspectives. I looked at Wikipedia's list of fighting games, and I counted over 150 that I've played, and it's definitely not a comprehensive list. That's a lot of fighting games, so you'd think I'd understand them pretty well (and maybe not totally suck at them, ha ha), but their insights into what makes these games tick was totally fresh to me. Not that either of them needs more games in the backlog, but I think having kinda broken through with SFV will make it so they can understand and enjoy basically any good fighting game. Even going so far back as SF2, all the ingredients they talked about are there.

That's part of why it's so hard to recapture the wonder that games can create when you're a kid. Even if you don't know the specifics of a certain game, you'll still generally have a realistic idea of what's possible in it. Like, it turns out that Star Control 2 is a pretty simple game, but even at the mature age of 13 it felt like a living universe was inside my 3DO. Feeling mad wistful over here.

Me too, although I think T2 may be a good starting point. If you play 2 and learn to love it, you can go back to Gold and really appreciate the shit out of it.

I hope you can handle spooky stuff. Thief is spook central. Ooh, Down in the Bonehoard? That's a good level. It's a good thing you've been preparing yourself by playing all these old shooters, it'll make it easier to handle the more sprawling maze-like levels.

I could make some echoey 60's style space noise, but I'm not sure if that's what you have in mind.

I think the presence of weapon loadouts has a deleterious effect on Doom. I don't think I'm simply being a Doom purist or CoD-hater (I've played and enjoyed almost all of the Calls of Duty), here. The fact that you can start the match with a rocket launcher means that it can't be an awesomely powerful (and dangerous to the user) item, because it has to be balanced against all other weapons. Call of Duty deals with that issue by making everything quite lethal. (It also helps that fictionally, you'd expect most small arms to have about the same effect.) In Doom, they've tried to make everyone fairly survivable; it's a potentially valid choice on its own, but combined with the above decisions, it leads to all the weapons feeling weak, whether they shoot bullets, plasma bolts or explosive rockets. But the other, probably worse knock-on effect is the way it makes map navigation sort of directionless. In the classic id shooters, you'd spawn into the world and have a few options. Maybe you'd want to go try to get the rocket launcher, but you'd have to weigh that against the fact that it's in a dead end that turns into a total meat grinder (dead ends being another thing that has been largely designed out of shooters). Perhaps it'd be better to take a cautious approach and see if you can ambush someone else who had the same thought. Or, fuck it, let's get the super shotgun and maybe a supercharge if it's respawned. In this new Doom, you just... pick a direction and start running in the hopes that you'll find people to shoot. Once in a while the demonic rune appears, but the game announces this, so you know not to waste your effort looking for items the rest of the time. Continuing the comparison to Call of Duty, I actually think this is a problem in those games, too. Appearing in the world and thinking, "OK, I guess I'll run in the direction I'm already facing... or I could turn around and run the other way for no real reason!" is just... I don't know, it gives me a sense of ennui. Of course, I'm not taking objective-based modes into account, but if you're going to include straight deathmatch, it should be fun. The objection that Doom shouldn't have loadouts sounds like a curmudgeonly "not in my demonic murder simulator!" position, but I think the argument can be made that it's a poor decision for this game, nostalgia aside.

I would like to contribute music! Not too long ago, I got a nifty little pocket synthesizer that makes chiptunesque sounds, so if you're doing something with a retro aesthetic and want to go the obvious route, that could work. I recorded one song the day I got the thing and haven't touched it since, so I'd enjoy having a reason to poke at it more. (I'm complementing it with a sister device that will allow more solo-style lead synths and long pads, so it won't necessarily be restricted to such a heavily loop-based sound.) The best ways to contact me: PM, Idle Thumbs Readers Slack (name is jd), email: [email protected] My other talents include pet photography

Mass Effect 2 is a good game, but it doesn't hold a candle to the sense of exploration and discovery in the first one, nor does it have a good threat or overall narrative. It does refine the combat a lot, and sure, the Mako was annoying to drive in the first one, but man. I loved the first game so much, and the sequels were both disappointing to me. Getting to bone Garrus was really the best thing the sequels brought to the table.

You know, I think I may have just been looking at information from a recent edition. Edit: yup, you're not crazy!

I was going to gush about other stuff that Greg Costikyan has done, since he was brought up in the cast as a designer of Tales of the Arabian Nights, but it doesn't appear that he was involved in that game at all. But man, he has done a lot of cool shit. His tabletop roleplaying designs were staples of my adolescence. And for such a heavy hitter, he's like super ridiculously humble if you talk to him about this stuff. Relatedly, seeing Warren Spector's name on Toon is another good "Oh shit, it's that guy" thing.