Jake

Idle Thumbs 211: Spector's Oil

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I love that "IT TALKS!" was one of the back-of-the-box features for the Game.Com. I guess that was a big deal for a handheld in 1997.

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I had to go and find footage of the Dreamcast Track and Field goofy stamina-loss dash:

 

kN3sWio.gif

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That Kanye West game thing is wild. It makes me think about how all these crazy fans for shows like Lost that come up with really implausible scenarios and are reviled by the rest of a show's audience. If you get them to play games though, then one of them eventually figures it out and they get to be a hero and Kotaku writes about them. All because game designers actually indulge in the implausible, and we get to think this sort of thing is neat instead of totally stupid, and it works since game playthroughs can be different from one another. 

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I feel like I've become That Gamer. In recent months, I have played League of Legends to the exclusion of other games. I will load up a podcast (I'm going to start an Idle Thumbs Relisten podcast soon) and play Spelunky or Necrodancer or Nuclear Throne. I listen to the baseball game while I play Elite. I realize that's not a single game, but just due to the immense weight of games crushing down on me from my Steam Library I have all of those at my disposal. If I didn't, I could easily make due with just one or two of them. I have Witcher 3 waiting for me when I get home, but the low impact of booting up Elite and flying space ships instead of learning a whole new game is so alluring.

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On the subject of game where you can get old and/or got hurt:

 

- If memory don´t fail me Deus EX (the original) had a system where you could break your legs if you got shoot or fall from higher distance.

- A few mods for Mount & Blade feature a system of permanent wounds (if you lose all your health you could suffer a random permanent wound like a broken bone).

- In some mods for Total War games your generals might got special traits to reflect their old age and wounds. Crusader Kings II too have a system like this.

- Darklands (1992, Microprose) had a system where your character can get old and maybe lose some attributes or simple die.

 

Talking about crazy/offensive ads in old magazines, I recommend look around for old vintage computer ads (http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads-1980s), they where even more insane (I remember correctly there was one ad that had a artwork with two cities, one highly futuristic, with lots chrome around everything, lots of green and even a cyber deer and the other show a futuristic city destroyed by war, and below was written - What future you want for you son? followed by the ad for a computer) and maybe slight less offensive (but you still got some ads like one that feature a woman in a swimsuit on a beach making a model pose with a lot of 5 1/4 disks around her).

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I want to start a Fury Road Rewatch podcast where I just rewatch Fury Road every week and talk about it again for 1 hour. 

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On the neat things some of those old games would say to you, I think my favorite was UT 2003 (I think).  If you went into the graphics settings and maxed everything, when you adjusted the final slider, this big booming voice said, "HOLY SHIT!"

20-whatever year old me thought that was way the fuck too cool.

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You don't coat your weapon with Spector Oil to defeat him, but Warren Spector is a villain that opposes your character in Worlds of Ultima: Savage Dreams.

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I'm not sure you guys separating film fans from game fans in terms of craziness is especially accurate. You have to consider the reason the Silent Hills fiasco is causing such outrage is because fans were given something substantial and then it was taken away. You can never play the P.T. demo again, it is now some kind of rare thing for no plausible reason whatsoever, even though it's just a bundle of files. No one who did not previously own a PS4 and download it can experience it for themselves anymore. Just that the game will not be finished is only a part of that story. Also P.T. was released pretty much as a standalone and it was never confirmed that that would even be in the final game in that form or at all.


Think of it as a curiosity. You have to consider it closer to other games where there was large chunks of working things where it was different before it was either cancelled or pushed into a different direction, like Sonic X-Treme for Saturn (which I think fans put together a build of), Earthbound Zero, the early version of The Dig with the separate graphics and fourth character, or even strange fans of Rare who get all wishy washy for the original beta version of Conker's Bad Fur Day where everything was happy and there was a lot of jumping.

 

This is not to say game fans aren't crazy in so many cases, but I think it's often just a subset of nerd rage in general, like when fans of something like Guardians of the Galaxy track down the one critic who dared give it a bad review and send them an abusive message.

 

Considering Del Toro is a bit more finicky than most directors in the dozens of projects he gets attached to, there's a sort of skepticism that goes along with being a GDT fan. To make this example equal to P.T., you'd have to have backed out of a Guillermo Del Toro project where production has already been started and halted, which doesn't really happen with the guy, unlike the ruined Gilliam's Don Quixote movie that some people are still hopeful for to this day. Otherwise, as shown in the most recent art book, GDT's journals and small illustrations along with some maquettes and concept art are probably the most you are going to get.

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I want to start a Fury Road Rewatch podcast where I just rewatch Fury Road every week and talk about it again for 1 hour. 

 

A reference to the delightful Worst Idea Of All Time podcast, perhaps?

 

Although this would be a much less bad idea.

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I think it is telling that syntheticgerbil's example of crazy fans in the movie sphere is for a Marvel action film. To me that suggests a good chance that it is basically the same subset of nerds getting incensed about stuff that no adult should be getting incensed about. Movies have the benefit of not being completely subsumed in nerd/geek culture. Despite the leaps and strides made, games haven't really managed to extricate themselves from that space.

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Great show! I've been meaning to write to ask about game industry secrets, though I'd extend it to the inability to talk about stuff that was worked on. I remember a few incidents on Thumbs where Sean recalled his time at Disney, though I remember he did get into the Epic Mickey stuff. I always found it a little odd (generally, not him). Like all that work Obsidian did on Aliens RPG (allegedly finished it?) and how tight everything is held. On Tone Control I also recall a fair amount of "oh, this cool thing I worked on but isn't happening but I can't talk about." I can grasp some concept of trade secrets, but this seems a bit beyond that?

 

It sort of reminds me of repeated refrain of wondering what all the Diablo 3s looked like before the one they released.

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Speaking of trade secrets, Shawn Elliott appeared on Patrick Klepick's podcast about a month ago I think, and there was definitely a moment where he realized he couldn't talk about a particular aspect of Bioshock Infinite's production without violating some NDA. And I have to wonder how enforceable some of those nondisclosure clauses actually are. They seem so potentially broad in scope and cover stuff that isn't obviously directly tied to meaningful economic interests. So I suspect that in a lot of instances if a dispute were to actually show up in court a judge would throw a lot of these clauses out, but lax labor law enforcement being what it is companies can get away with these clauses knowing that the simple potential of a lawsuit is enough to keep employees and former employees in line.

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Yeah, it's perverse that studios can be killed instantly but NDAs are forever.  Somebody leak this stuff!  Where is the Edward Snowden of the Games Industry?

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I feel like I've become That Gamer. In recent months, I have played League of Legends to the exclusion of other games. I will load up a podcast (I'm going to start an Idle Thumbs Relisten podcast soon) and play Spelunky or Necrodancer or Nuclear Throne. I listen to the baseball game while I play Elite. I realize that's not a single game, but just due to the immense weight of games crushing down on me from my Steam Library I have all of those at my disposal. If I didn't, I could easily make due with just one or two of them. I have Witcher 3 waiting for me when I get home, but the low impact of booting up Elite and flying space ships instead of learning a whole new game is so alluring.

 

The more I play games the more I wish I could be that sort of gamer. Even games I love I tend to get bored with so quickly. What really surprises me is that Elite is the "low impact" option for you. I'm always worried I'm going to crash my ship doing something stupid in that game and be out a huge chunk of progress.

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I guess the discussion about industry secrecy made me realize that as much as I am desperately hungry for stories and insight from the development process, there's part of me that really does want to be surprised by all of it. That fact itself surprises me, if I'm being honest - I didn't think I could get excited about games anymore, but I guess there's a part of me that still is.

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From the outside of the industry looking in, it honestly feels like the hilariously overwrought secrecy surrounding game announcements and development is driven in it's largest part because it's What We've Always Done. In the age of kickstarter, by attempting to fund a game you are announcing it. We are past the point where people who follow games wouldn't grasp 2+ years of development. I understand not wanting a leak before you know for sure production on a game is happening, but hiding it for months or years is just silly. It also seems like it could be incredibly hard on all the people who want to talk about the awesome thing they're doing but can't. In the past I might have understood because certain companies could have hidden a game's existence to try to protect some sort of proprietary development technique, but that thought today is absurd. I don't have the data that shows me hiding a thing and making a big announcement generates more interest than long term development. I'll grant it's possible that for small projects you have to make a big splash or it's gone, but arguments exist both ways (Firewatch dev blog, Gunpoint full development cycle, etc). For the big game publishers it truly feels like kids trying to hide something to feel special. Fallout 4 exists you guys, we know it exists. Doom 4 has been announced for literally 7 years now but we all still want to know what it is.

 

With that said, massive levels of hypocrisy incoming. When companies pull off the Announce Game -> Release Date in 1 month trick it is a nuclear explosion of excitement. The thing is that no one's doing that, they're just exposing the last 18 months of production instead of all 36 months. 

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So I saw this and immediately thought of idle thumbs.

 

 

It's surprisingly well done.

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Jake brought up the Incredibles back-throwing-out reference/idea just as I was thinking it, which was very pleasing.

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Jake and Chris (I think) made reference to recent discussion of distorted expectations about what games cost and how long they take to make, and the idea that this could hurt Kickstarter campaigns because backers will think devs are lazy and greedy if they ask for the time and money it actually takes to make a game.

 

I think it's a mistake to assume that the handful of whiners who make these kinds of critical comments about Kickstarter campaigns are representative of the population of Kickstarter backers and potential backers.  Almost by definition, people who make comments aren't representative of the vast majority of people who don't.

 

I don't have any actual data, but I would guess the vast majority of backers decide to fund a game based on one criteria:  Do I want this game?   I'd guess there is a smaller group that also have a second criteria: Do I think this team can & will deliver?  And that's about it.  I'd be very surprised if there were more than a tiny handful of people who would refuse to fund a game they wanted by a team they thought could deliver just because they thought the team was asking for too much and being "too greedy."  On the contrary, I think most people are happy when a team they like making a product they want is successful and raises lots of money.

 

When a Kickstarter fails, I think it's overwhelmingly because there weren't enough people who wanted the game and heard about the Kickstarter.  Maybe in a minority of cases, it fails because a lot of people didn't believe the team could deliver what they were promising.   So, making a game people want, getting the word out, and, to a lesser extent, convincing people you can deliver.  Making sure you don't look greedy by asking for the amount of money you really need?  I don't think that's an important consideration at all, no matter what the trolls are whining about.

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Well that's hard to be certain of at the best of times, let alone when preparing to do a tenuous 30 day marketing campaign where your potential audience will determine whether or not you get funding to make your next project. The general gaming audience has not given a lot of cause to have faith in them at any time, let alone when your livelihood/a significant chunk of it is on the line.

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Oh man that fallback game has become TF2 for me. Before that it was Left 4 Dead. Briefly at one point it was CS: GO.

I've heard rumors that companies besides Valve make first person shooters but I haven't seen any confirmation yet.

 

Seriously I've put like 3500 hours into these games. Send help.

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I too, have felt the spector of Warren's Oil.

Seconding syntheticgerbil's bit about the slight difference in the Konami situation because of the P.T. I agreed with everything on balance, but it's an odd situation when their has been such a distinct and polished taste put out. This might be part of the poisonous cycle being described, where expectations are stoked long before they can be sated. I wish there was a way that more of the industry could agree to basically act in a saner fashion and sort of choose to ignore the rabid elements. I'm not saying I enjoy it when the film industry does that, but it's much easier not to fret. When there are a number of loud people out in the internet streets shouting injustice it can be harder to think clearly. 

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