Chris

Idle Thumbs 215: Flirtation & Procreation

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Idle Thumbs 215:

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Flirtation & Procreation

Abandoned and alone, Chris and Nick hunker down in the studio while everyone else braves the harsh wastelands of E3. Join us for an intimate and lively chat about social simulation, our fantasies of a historical New York city builder, video game sweaters, our inevitable AI-dominated future, and forced, soul-sucking human reproduction. The Overlord demands it.

Things Discussed: Fallout Shelter, Anno 2205, Shenmue III, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Dreams, Creator (N64), Dr. Mario, E3, Cool Video Games, Robot News, the terrible circle of life.

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How could you guys have forgotten Episode 151: A Fascinating Experience?

 

Also, Chris, you'll be interested to know that XCOM 2 will most likely not be launching with controller support. It will probably get it later, but Firaxis has said they're not prioritizing it right now.

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If it's any consolation, Chris, I literally didn't even realize "Fallout Shelter" was a fallout shelter until you pointed out because I have the Name Subtitle pattern so deeply entrenched in the folds of my mind. Obviously I know what a fallout shelter is, but man my brain didn't even want to think about looking in that direction. The second you started talking about it, I felt quite foolish.

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I would have loved to be a new listener this week. This episode rocked.

 

That turn of the century city-builder idea is insane and I also want to play it. Reminds me of how Cities Skylines released a full European themed content pack. Hoping that they do other eras of buildings as well.

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God, the 'tap to accidentally skip tutorial' thing happened to me, too. Drove me nuts.

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Nick didn't think we heard him referring to Vault Boy as Fall Out Boy, but we did.

 

 

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Oh man, Chris and Nick alone? This is exactly what I wanted!

You guys' chats/rants on Chris's old Spelunky streams are classic! Remember the time you talked about whether Spelunky's gonna stand the test of time or not with classical music playing in the background? Or the time you waited for Jake to show up and watched this weird music video?

Oh, and who could forget this one:

 

 

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When playing Fallout Shelter I definitely experienced the weird bleakness of procreation that Chris described. However, it was heightened for me because I found Three Dog's uniform (the clothes of the radio station DJ from Fallout 3) and a set of pyjamas early. As an aside, a lot of the clothes (like Three Dog's uniform) in this game are gender locked, which is really annoying since they have functional use of improving SPECIAL stats. But both these uniforms increase charisma, which as Chris said, seems to improve the rate at which two characters will go from meeting in a residence to procreating. And, if you've ever played the 3d fallouts, you know that pyjamas look like flannel or silk pyjamas on men, but lingerie on women. So, fictionally, whenever the Overseer of Vault 416 decides to increase the population, he locks a chosen man and woman in a dorm, throws in a gross set of DJ clothes and lingerie, and doesn't let them out until the lady is pregnant. And one thing to note about pregnant women, they are capable of performing their job, but they will always run and hide whenever there's a fire, radroach invasion or raider attack, regardless of how they're armed.

Also, my first reaction to the art wasn't really to call it well animated. The Vault Boy design is really cool, but the animation is a lot of flash rotation, it looks fine but I don't really find that stuff impressive. The gender split in my game has never been pronounced. Right now I have 35 dwellers and it's split almost right down the middle, with one more on the male side. I didn't get that bug Chris got with the resources, but the game has felt really easy after the actual flow of external dwellers stopped. You have so much control over when you expand your base that I haven't really had any issue with the big 3 resources. It's a lot different from games like Theme Hospital or Dungeon Keeper or SimCity where how well you're doing correlates with your growth and forces you to constantly adapt. I feel like I could pretty much stagnate at 35 dwellers forever without much change.

Edit: I totally agree that the theming doesn't really fall in line with the world of Fallout. Like you guys said, it's weird that you seed a Vault with outsiders, but what I find even weirder is that you just send people out into the world on a semi-regular basis to scavenge and they return without any changes. Leaving the vault is supposed to be this sort of anomaly in pretty much all cases, so it's weird it's a kind of throwaway resource gathering mechanic.

 

Edit 2: Bluh finally finished the fallout segment and saw you told a similar story. Sorry, I got really excited by your mention of the procreation stuff, and then I got distracted by actual news. >_>

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I have yet to play Fallout Shelter (I will if it comes to Android) but I would really love it if each time you started a new game it randomly drew from a pool of possible Vault experiments to seed your community.

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I'm going to put on my Fallout Lore Cap here.

 

The procreation in vaults is something that's only come up once (to my knowledge) in Fallout. And I guess it's not technically a vault, it's the Brotherhood of Steel bunker in New Vegas. One of the companions you can meet, Veronica, is a Brotherhood member in a relationship with another woman. She explains at one point that their relationship was frowned upon by the rest of the Brotherhood because they don't take on new members from the outside, so procreation was one of the duties that everyone was expected to take part in.

 

As for the big list of vaults and their experiments, I think that was all Fallout 3 marketing material. The idea that vaults were "social experiments" was one of the controversial ideas in Fallout 2, so it wouldn't have been mentioned before late in that game.

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I had two observations on your Fallout Shelter discussion. One, that it appears the gender ratio of your Dwellers is randomized. I've started multiple vaults on multiple devices, and had a full spectrum of men to women. Two, the game suggests that if you "properly" assign your Dwellers they gain happiness more quickly. If you zoom in on someone with a high matching SPECIAL stat to where they're assigned they'll make comments about being satisfied with their placement. I don't know if that has an impact beyond flavor text but it's implied.

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Nice deep dive about how small subtle decisions that don't feel like decisions can spiral out into these bleak social problems. That appears to be an under-appreciated component when people get into discussions about various systemic evils. Simulation type games are wonderful for bringing out these types of insights.

 

I also share Chris' lack of enthusiasm for the sort of generic sci-fi architecture that crops up all the time in games. And while I like the moon, I don't think I share the same enthusiasm for it as Chris and Nick, so the new Anno game hasn't exactly piqued my interest because of the architecture problem.

 

The one exception to this is XCOM 2 where I think Firaxis did a brilliant job of turning generic pristine future cities in video games on its head because this is the architecture of the alien overlords. There's this new building that went up in San Francisco's Mission district that makes me irrationally angry, and I cite it as everything that is wrong with the city right now.

 

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To me, this monstrosity looks like an alien ship just landed in the city and is patiently monitoring its human citizens. I feel really uncomfortable any day when I have to pass by it. So I am super excited for the new XCOM game where I will now have an outlet for my frustrations.

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Nick doesn't remember the name of Hearthfire when he did the voice over for the promotional video.

I mean come on, who can forget classics such as "Fish hatchery!"?

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I had two observations on your Fallout Shelter discussion. One, that it appears the gender ratio of your Dwellers is randomized. I've started multiple vaults on multiple devices, and had a full spectrum of men to women. Two, the game suggests that if you "properly" assign your Dwellers they gain happiness more quickly. If you zoom in on someone with a high matching SPECIAL stat to where they're assigned they'll make comments about being satisfied with their placement. I don't know if that has an impact beyond flavor text but it's implied.

 

I feel like succeeding at rushes helps a lot too, but yeah the game does imply that the correct SPECIAL stat will improve happiness. I was gonna complain about how the workings of the simulation aren't explicitly described anywhere, but there's actually a full help file in the Survival Guide, which is the wallet looking thing in the lower right menu.

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Nick doesn't remember the name of Hearthfire when he did the voice over for the promotional video.

I mean come on, who can forget classics such as "Fish hatchery!"?

 

I had this exact same thought.  It is inexplicable and yet entirely Nick Breckon.

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When I saw Fallout Shelter I actually thought about This War of Mine. Sadly I don't have an Apple device so I don't get to play. I'm glad to hear that the game operates just fine without the pay-for content, which was very plainly stated as being not necessary on stage.

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For those interested, both Anno 2070 and Anno 1404 went on sale on Steam today. Anno 1404 is particularly cheap, I'm thinking of picking it up myself. I have heard it comes with some pretty horrendous DRM as well though. I loved the discussion about this series, it's made me really want to play it now!

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At first Nick's comment about the podcast having a "Howard Stern setup" didn't make sense to me (I'm an avid listener of that guy), but then when the "Nice Anno segment" comment was chimed in from off mic it became 100% accurate. So I'm amused by weird stuff.

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Oh man listening to the Fallout shelter discussion my thought was they have basically created Schroedingers App.

Your vault dwellers can't die until they are observed! They aren't alive or dead until you open the app :D

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This is a little off-topic but I want to share this.

 

So about a year ago I managed to convince my housemate to start listening to Idle Thumbs, and he's enjoying it (and having a hard time telling Jake and Sean apart as well, which makes me very excited because it's clearly not just me). He still remembers hearing all the jokes about Nick Breckon and how weird he was, and then heard Nick on the podcast for the first time, on episode 144 (which was apparently February last year, which throws out my timeline some). Chris anticipated that Nick was trying to win at Buzz Lightyear Astro Blaster, and he thought that Chris was just winding Nick up, so he was very surprised to hear Nick readily agree that he was genuinely trying to optimise a Disneyland ride. He thought you were all joking about him!

 

What I'm saying is that a full hour of untapped Breckon is going to be a fun listen for him.

 

Also I broke down in an airport once listening to Nick Breckon spending all day in The Sims making his virtual girlfriend a megastar. So he won't be the only one.

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I had trouble with Jake and Sean for the first few episodes too, for what it's worth.

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