Idle Thumbs 217: To Have a Life

[Chris]

Idle Thumbs 217:

To Have a Life

You strap on your VR headset and log on to the terminal. It's a Windows 95 system: you know this. You rifle through dozens of unsorted video clips revealing a fractured prophecy of inevitable robot domination. Sinister, shadowy figures dance and leap in the periphery of your vision. You glance down to admire your virtual arms. They're huge.

Things Discussed: Her Story, LEGO Jurassic World, Batman: Arkham Knight, Spider-Man 2: The Game, Fallout Shelter, Piloteer, Faceted Flight, Tales from the Borderlands, Sleep No More, DisneyQuest, Aladdin (SNES), Aladdin (Genesis), artificial intelligence

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[mikemariano]

Speaking of Lego Jurassic World and Her Story's 90s computer interface, is there a Lego version of the "Unix" system Lex uses in Jurassic Park?

[chummer]

Speaking of Lego Jurassic World and Her Story's 90s computer interface, is there a Lego version of the "Unix" system Lex uses in Jurassic Park?

 

This reminded me that there was game jam game that replicated that interface: I Know This

[Vasari]

Chris's fallout shelter sounds awfully similar to the mansion from the end of 28 Days Later, so I'm not sure how much of a step up that is. I wish I could play this game and see it for myself but it runs like crap on my phone and crashes constantly.

 

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to write a scathing piece of hate mail about how the Mega Drive version of Aladdin is superior to the SNES version (and how Mega Drive is a way cooler name than Genesis.)

[matthew]

Has anyone here played Aisle, by Sam Barlow? Danielle, if you read this, I think you'll really like it. It's a 1999 text adventure that was a Big Deal in the interactive fiction community. I came to it about 3 years ago and fell in love. It showed me the joy of a text parser, without the mental overhead required to use keywords and things like that. Aisle only allows the player to enter one command before the game ends.

 

You are an old man in a grocery store aisle. What do you do?

 

From that, you make your request, the game responds, and you reset to that moment. You can "Remember the past", where you learn he had a wife, then "think about wife", and she died in a tragic accident, then "Remember the accident" which might have been a car crash. Or you could, I don't know. "take off your clothes". "pick up corn". "kiss the woman in the aisle" Etc, etc.

 

In many ways, Her Story is a more palatable, updated sequel to Aisle. They both offer a single point from which you access the past in a nonlinear fashion. I hesitate to say it, but I think I prefer Her Story. There's something beautiful in the spaces left to the imagination in Aisle, but it has in my opinion the critical flaw of presenting multiple pasts. There's an interesting mechanic where you can track what timeline you're in, but that's neither here nor there. Sean and Jake talked about the necessity of having all of Lee's possible statements in the walking dead being 'Lee canon'. That's not the case in Aisle.

[matthew]

"a kiss", by Dan Waber, also similarly explores a moment in insane detail, from one point of reference (a kiss).

[Gormongous]

I kept waiting for Christine Love's games to come up in the discussion of Her Story. I know Danielle's mentioned her before. Digital: A Love Story involves a detailed recreation of an Amiga desktop as part of its historical fiction, and both Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus involve semi-blind and non-linear database access, albeit orders of magnitude less sophisticated than Her Story.

[kickinthehead]

Speaking of Lego Jurassic World and Her Story's 90s computer interface, is there a Lego version of the "Unix" system Lex uses in Jurassic Park?

 

Yes there is! Though unsurprisingly it's not terribly complicated. It's just a few nodes and each one is a short "Simon" - like minigame where some buttons flash in a certain order and you have to repeat it. Still, I'm glad that they put it in. It's pretty fun to play through the movie scenes that are otherwise short moments. For example you get to heal the sick Triceratops by feeding her veggies, a popsicle and something else.

 

Oddly enough even though they do use the original actors' lines from the movies there are some characters for whom they used soundalikes like: Nedry, Mr. Arnold, Gennaro and Dr. Wu. I haven't played through the other movies yet but I suspect it's a similar situation in those too.

 

I forget which LEGO game was the first one that used lines from the movies instead of the pantomime mumbling cutscenes, I think it might've been LEGO Lord of the Rings?

[a_grey_stone]

Hi guys. This is my first post on the forums. Been listening to the podcast for about a year now so thought it was about time I joined in. 

 

Definitely going to check out Her Story sounds right up my alley. Can anyone recommend any other recently released desktop simulation games.

 

There are so many cool little genres within the indie game community these days. I can't keep up. Is the only way to basically just live on itchio?

 

I don't know how Danielle does it. 

[mikemariano]

This reminded me that there was game jam game that replicated that interface: I Know This

 

This is amazing!  They definitely thought through this more than the interface from the actual film.  I like this quote from one of the developers: "There’s still a 1.2 planned release with Oculus Rift support ..."

 

 

Yes there is! Though unsurprisingly it's not terribly complicated. It's just a few nodes and each one is a short "Simon" - like minigame where some buttons flash in a certain order and you have to repeat it. Still, I'm glad that they put it in. It's pretty fun to play through the movie scenes that are otherwise short moments. For example you get to heal the sick Triceratops by feeding her veggies, a popsicle and something else.

 

This is amazing!

[Korax]

I forget which LEGO game was the first one that used lines from the movies instead of the pantomime mumbling cutscenes, I think it might've been LEGO Lord of the Rings?

 

I think that was the first to use pre-existing dialog, but Lego Batman 2 was the first to have voiced characters.

[richardco]

Hi guys. This is my first post on the forums. Been listening to the podcast for about a year now so thought it was about time I joined in. 

 

Definitely going to check out Her Story sounds right up my alley. Can anyone recommend any other recently released desktop simulation games.

 

There are so many cool little genres within the indie game community these days. I can't keep up. Is the only way to basically just live on itchio?

 

I don't know how Danielle does it. 

Welcome!

 

Her Story sounds sooooooooo good.  I want to play it, but I think I'm going to try to get my mom and brother to play it with me when I see them later this summer. They aren't really into video games, but I know they do enjoy mysteries.

[RubixsQube]

My thoughts:

 

1) The Arkham games have a Batman that is so dissimilar to the one I want in my head, and it's really sad when you're playing and flying all over the place punching dudes. It is just incongruous to think that this BeefBat is capable of that kind of acrobatics. I have always liked the David Mazzucchelli version of Batman, lithe, competent, and springy. 

 

2) Batman actually has three iconic things in his batcave: the penny, a giant Joker card, and a Tyrannosaurus Rex animatronic:

 

It's strange (and pretty funny) going through images of the Batcave from various comics, how they try to make these trophies look "cool," but they come off always looking strange and incongruous. 

 

3) I also played the Aladdin VR game at the Epcot Center Innoventions when I was younger, around the same time that Danielle and Jake went. It was neat, although I was most impressed by two other attractions in the same building. The first was a force feedback joystick attached to a demo with a little stretchy trampoline that you controlled with the joystick, flinging a ball into the air. The more important attraction was a green screen that allowed you to put yourself in Bayside High, sitting on a trash can while some of the cast of Saved By The Bell did a little skit. You looked at a screen that had humorous lines to say, and you were projected on a giant set of screens for the assembled Innoventions guests to watch. Weird.

 

4) The Genesis Aladdin is far inferior to the SNES / Capcom Aladdin. Shinji Mikami worked on the SNES game, although he says he prefers the Genesis version because of the animation and the sword ("The Genesis version had a sword, actually. I wanted to have a sword.") I've always thought the sword was pretty lame, and while the animation is nice, the game looks pretty ugly in retrospect. 

[mikemariano]

4) The Genesis Aladdin is far inferior to the SNES / Capcom Aladdin. Shinji Mikami worked on the SNES game, although he says he prefers the Genesis version because of the animation and the sword ("The Genesis version had a sword, actually. I wanted to have a sword.") I've always thought the sword was pretty lame, and while the animation is nice, the game looks pretty ugly in retrospect. 

 

I don't think the screenshots are that bad; most of the value of that game was in the animation.  Most of the drawbacks of that game were in the animation, too.

 

RIP Genesis Aladdin: Killed while stuck in an elaborate animation.

[RubixsQube]

Watching

, and it still just looks like overwrought animations with a gross color palette and flat, disconnected background elements. Still not super impressed, but again, I am VERY BIASED.

 

Oh shit, I also forgot:

 

5) Late in college, my buddy and I spent an evening pitch-shifting the guy who sings "Oh Yeah," by Yello. When we did it the first time, we pitched it up too high, and it just sounded like a fourteen year old boy saying those stupid, stupid lines. "even MORE beautiful."

someone else made where it's probably approximating the actual voice of the dorky dude who did the lines. 

 

"Such a gooood time, a really goooooood time"

[prettyunsmart]

[SeanMay]

First off, I'd love to hear a spoiler-filled discussion of Her Story next week. I think it's an incredible game, and I'd love to hear what everyone thinks of what the story means.

 

Also, I'm glad that they brought up something I'd been feeling ever since starting up Arkham Knight: the general feeling that I'm playing as a horribly bad person who is presented as a hero. The game may call him Batman, but I'm not so sure that version of Batman is the one anyone outside of Frank Miller wants to see.

 

I honestly just felt so gross playing the game and watching 'Batman' torture person after person to get information from them. My first breaking point came when:

You finally track down one of Arkham Knight's goons, and to get information out of him, 'Batman' proceeds to drive the Batmobile over the guy's head until he gives him the information. There is no way a person would survive something like this.

This really honestly made me sick to my stomach. It made me sick in the way that GTA V's infamous torture scene did. Except in GTA V, the torturing is done by a person (Trevor) who is clearly made out to be a murderous psychopath and is presented very clearly as a criminal...and even then, the game concedes that the torture was unnecessary and entirely not worth it. Not in Arkham Knight, though! Here, torture is seen as a very clear and very useful tactic that results in the protagonist exactly what they want every time. 

 

As much as they give you dumb 'Detective Vision' quests that are really just walking around an environment and scanning things in, 'Batman' isn't a detective in this game, he's a gritted-teeth thug who will only use his powers of deduction if beating the shit out of the person doesn't yield the desired results. Even after he does some detective work to figure something out, there's a good likelihood he'll still give an unprovoked torture session to anyone who happens to be within arm's reach.

 

Then there's the absolutely deplorable way the game deals with women. Within the first couple hours of the game, we have 

Catwoman tied up, waiting on the heroic 'Batman' to save her, Barbra Gordon kidnapped, and Poison Ivy forced to be a simple utility to Batman's plans.

I don't think there's a single moment in the game that I saw where a female character had any kind of agency or power in the game. They all just seem to serve as damsels in distress, completely unable to do anything until 'Batman' swoops in to either save them or beat the shit out of them.

 

Speaking of gross misogyny, the last straw for me to completely stop playing the game was when:

Of course, after spending an hour trying to find Barbra Gordon, she wakes up for two seconds and puts a bullet in her head. Of fucking course that's what the game is going to do with a female character. I read ahead in the story and see that maybe she's not dead and it was a projection of Scarecrow's fear gas, but still, it's fucking gross

 

As far as I can tell, Batman: Arkham Knight isn't a fun game at all, at least to me. It seems less like a Batman game and more like an ultra right-wing wet dream simulator.

[Nappi]

Loved the story of Chris' vault. He is approaching Nick level of fucked-upness in strategy/simulation games.

 

Regarding Danielle's comment about the quality of Witcher 3 quests, here is the most memorable side quest I have encountered so far. Spoilers for Black Pearl side quest ahead. No spoilers for the main quest line.

An old soldier asks you to meet him in Skellige and help him find a rare black pearl that he promised his wife a long time ago. He finally decides to fulfil this promise but has grown old in the meantime and needs your help. If I remember correctly, he does not tell you why he suddenly considers an old promise to be so important.

 

You meet the man in Skellige and he shows you where he thinks the black pearl can be found. He is too weak (?) to dive there himself, so you offer to go instead. While you are diving for the seashells you are attacked by a couple of sirens. Once you have dealt with them and found the black pearl, you start to swim back to the shore. Suddenly the man is attacked by drowners, but he manages to defend himself until your arrival. You give him the pearl, and he thanks you and asks you to meet him again in Novigrad for the reward.

 

You travel back to Novigrad and meet him in an inn and he gives you a small reward. He says that he thinks his wife likes the pearl. When you make a comment about his wife sounding a bit ungrateful, he says that things are a bit more complicated than that. Apparently, the wife has gradually started to lose her memory and now has troubles recognizing people, even her husband. The husband thought that by bringing her this pearl that they have talked about so much in the past would somehow reverse the process. Unfortunately, it did not.

 

 

I can't help but think that if this was Rockstar game, it would be revealed in the end that the wife has been dead for 10 years, and the insane husband has been nursing her rotting corpse all this time.

(Some parts of Red Dead Redemption were so fucking stupid.)

[Bjorn]

2) Batman actually has three iconic things in his batcave: the penny, a giant Joker card, and a Tyrannosaurus Rex animatronic:

 

It's strange (and pretty funny) going through images of the Batcave from various comics, how they try to make these trophies look "cool," but they come off always looking strange and incongruous. 

 

I'd never really thought about Batman as just a bored, rich big game hunter, who prefers hunting in his backyard for trophies rather than flying to Africa.  But the Batcave certainly makes an argument for that interpretation. 

[Bjorn]

And this sent me down a rabbit hole of reading weird shit about batman. 

 

1.  The Batcave West is Batman's California headquarters in San Francisco, whose secret location is fronted by a "specialist leather goods and fetishwear" store.  This is now my favorite piece of Batman trivia ever.

 

 

2.  For awhile, Robin apparently had a pet cow named Bat Cow.

 

Fuck all this gritty realist shit, I want a Batman game with leathermen, fetish lovers and Bat Cows.

 

 

[kickinthehead]

For awhile, Robin apparently had a pet cow named Bat Cow.

 

Fuck all this gritty realist shit, I want a Batman game with leathermen, fetish lovers and Bat Cows.

 

Bat Cow is in LEGO Batman 3!

 

 

The great thing about LEGO games is that if the source material is good then the game is good, if the source material is terrible then seeing it in LEGO form is even more hilarious.

 

I beat Arkham Knight, and didn't find the story all that interesting. And yes it by and large treats women as damsels and props which is gross.

 

I still enjoyed playing it, but for me the grim dark broodiness of it only served to enhance the humor I took from seeing my Batman dragging through the water from an ill-timed grappel shot or "sneaking" in the Batmobile tank trying to stealthily take out large drone tanks as he casually bumps into (and therefore blows up) nearby cars while the enemy voice over says "WHERE IS HE???" 

 

I always loved the deadpan look on Batman's face after he grappels out of a body of water I just accidentally fell into. I always interpret my Batman as super embarrassed when he missed a ledge landing, and accidentally reveals himself to the henchmen. But under his breath he tries to boost himself up by saying "It's okay, I'm the night, I'm Batman."

[CaptainFish]

Has anyone here played Aisle, by Sam Barlow? Danielle, if you read this, I think you'll really like it. It's a 1999 text adventure that was a Big Deal in the interactive fiction community. I came to it about 3 years ago and fell in love. It showed me the joy of a text parser, without the mental overhead required to use keywords and things like that. Aisle only allows the player to enter one command before the game ends.

 

You are an old man in a grocery store aisle. What do you do?

 

From that, you make your request, the game responds, and you reset to that moment. You can "Remember the past", where you learn he had a wife, then "think about wife", and she died in a tragic accident, then "Remember the accident" which might have been a car crash. Or you could, I don't know. "take off your clothes". "pick up corn". "kiss the woman in the aisle" Etc, etc.

 

In many ways, Her Story is a more palatable, updated sequel to Aisle. They both offer a single point from which you access the past in a nonlinear fashion. I hesitate to say it, but I think I prefer Her Story. There's something beautiful in the spaces left to the imagination in Aisle, but it has in my opinion the critical flaw of presenting multiple pasts. There's an interesting mechanic where you can track what timeline you're in, but that's neither here nor there. Sean and Jake talked about the necessity of having all of Lee's possible statements in the walking dead being 'Lee canon'. That's not the case in Aisle.

 

Haven't listened yet, but I'm seconding this recommendation. I'll even link the online version of it!

 

I kind of liked how it wasn't one specific story, it felt like it was sort of reacting to how you choose to act on the setting presented. It's cool that he chose to do a game that's more about piecing together a reality with Her Story, though. It's definitely on my list of things to check out.

 

Side recommend: Galatea is a game that feels in the middle where the game reacts somewhat to your actions and interpretations, but there's definitely a story to unfold if you're patient enough (as a user and a character).

[RubixsQube]

Wait the Batcave West has another giant coin in it

[Bjorn]

Wait the Batcave West has another giant coin in it

 

Looking up the giant penny is what initially led me to the page on it. 

[namman siggins]

And this sent me down a rabbit hole of reading weird shit about batman. 

 

1.  The Batcave West is Batman's California headquarters in San Francisco, whose secret location is fronted by a "specialist leather goods and fetishwear" store.  This is now my favorite piece of Batman trivia ever.

 

 

2.  For awhile, Robin apparently had a pet cow named Bat Cow.

 

Fuck all this gritty realist shit, I want a Batman game with leathermen, fetish lovers and Bat Cows.

 

 

Bat-Cow_01.jpg

Ah, Morrison's and the artists' he worked with run on Batman was a fun read.