Jake

Idle Thumbs 220: Life Finds a Way

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Idle Thumbs 220:

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Life Finds a Way

This week we guess at how life might begin, and are shown many ways it might end. Here, in the middle, is a podcast. Spaff evolves while showing off Gang Beasts at Evo, Chris weighs the value of a new life versus a long and celebrated one after some startling developments in his Fallout Shelter, and Jake worries about what's living inside his car's brakes.

Games Discussed: The Flame in the Flood, Gang Beasts, Circa Infinity, Fallout Shelter, AlphaBear, VVVVVV, You Have To Win The Game, The Talos Principle

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To be fair, Spaff does sound a bit like a British Breckon.

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Oh man, I can't wait for Fallout Shelter to come out on android. Sounds like a lot of hilarious systems that the devs didn't think about all the way through. 

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Oh man, I can't wait for Fallout Shelter to come out on android. Sounds like a lot of hilarious systems that the devs didn't think about all the way through.

For the most part the game is actually pretty fuckup-proof. A lot of the experiences I've had are because I'm bumping into the systemic walls that the designers very deliberately created because they DID think through the systems they chose and realized that without such walls, things would actually get genuinely broken or exploitable. I think they were really smart when it comes to how they limited scope in a mobile game.

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For the most part the game is actually pretty fuckup-proof. A lot of the experiences I've had are because I'm bumping into the systemic walls that the designers very deliberately created because they DID think through the systems they chose and realized that without such walls, things would actually get genuinely broken or exploitable. I think they were really smart when it comes to how they limited scope in a mobile game.

 

What I meant was that they built the systems for limiting the scope of the game to make it playable on phones and it doesn't seem like they considered how those limits would make the end game so dark., people trapped outside, eternal pregnancy etc

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Oh my god, trying to hold in laughter and I'm getting tears in my eyes.

 

Chris can you please post a screenshot of your uberbase with its Patient Pope? I want to know what the dark future of a successful shelter looks like.

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The opening of this episode is like the world's worst psychic routine.

 

 

I had the same problem with Alphabear, I'm glad someone else brought it up because I felt like the only person who got really frustrated with that game. I don't care about the free to play bear stuff as much, but what really annoyed me was that you can't even play the game without an internet connection. There's absolutely no justification for that unless having control over your stupid timed F2P environment is more important than letting the player actually play your game. I was visiting my mum this weekend, and as soon as I leave a major city in Scotland I completely lose my 3G signal. I'd only just installed Alphabear and I was looking forward to playing it on the bus journey, but the restriction soured me so much that I just deleted it since I no longer had any interest in playing it.

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"Should I kill a pregnant woman to win favor with the guy in the Pope hat?" sounds like one of Nick Breckon's Crusader Kings II stories.  Except with Nick I guess we know what the answer is.

 

Also Nick Breckon's name was mentioned countless times, Jeff Goldblum's was mentioned twice, and Danielle's was mentioned zero times! (At least at the 50 minutes mark I'm at now.)

 

I miss Danielle!  I guess I miss Sean, too, but I just assume he's sitting in the next room and is with you all in spirit.

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Also I have internalized VVVVVV to such an extent that when Chris described the flip mechanic at the heart of the game, I thought, "huh, I always just called that 'movement'..."

 

Although my Super Gravitron record is like seven seconds so I am unworthy of this game I love.

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Last year I bought my friend a captain zoom DVD as a birthday present. Her name... LAURA. If I could only turn back time that 16.95 USD (plus shipping and handling) could have been used for a Captain Zoom DVD for someone named Jason, or maybe even a Bently.
 

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For the most part the game is actually pretty fuckup-proof. A lot of the experiences I've had are because I'm bumping into the systemic walls that the designers very deliberately created because they DID think through the systems they chose and realized that without such walls, things would actually get genuinely broken or exploitable. I think they were really smart when it comes to how they limited scope in a mobile game.

Systems-wise, sure, Fallout Shelter is now pretty solid. But it's not without problems.

 

I have a vault of bad-ass ladies who automatically eject any male babies out into the wilderness to die that is now unplayable because every time I load that vault, the game crashes to desktop. And fool that I am, I bought a bunch of lunchboxes that I can't open any more because they're locked to that un-recoverable vault.

 

All that aside, this game is at it's best when you whole-heartedly commit to role playing it. Your people queuing up outside a vault door waiting for someone to die  is crying out for an lego Eddie Izzard deathstar cantina adapation. If only Lego made religious items for the bishop's hat, I would attempt it myself

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I hope that next time Chris talks about Fallout Shelter, it's because he maxed out everything he conceivably could and that actually triggered a special endgame event. It could be themed around him being a terribly controlling human being for the sake of optimal survival, or it could be about an even more impressive society of super people swooping in and decimating Chris's people despite all his efforts.

 

Also for some reason when you talked about the baby being born into a world of super people I imagined it as one of those movies about the average Joe chosen one. Even though he's surrounded by super competent people, he's the schlubby guy that learns to accept himself and save everyone despite statistically being the most useless member of the society by a huge margin.

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around 19m30s Chris says that last year was 10-year anniversary of HL2 and asks if people celebrated that and Jake answers "Probably not"

That is incorrect, Jake.

There was a message spread and on november 16, 2014 everyone (who heard the message and was interested) launched HL2 and played on that day. The intention was to bring as many people as possible playing the game at the same time, so that it would appear enormously high on the steam active players per game chart. This steam group was dedicated to that, if I'm not mistaken. Unfortunately, in the end only about 10'000 people played or something and it wasn't very noticable.

 

[and now i'll continue listening to the episode]

 

P.S. Spaff sometimes sounded like Nick Breckon to me, but i hear enough difference to distinguish them.

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The discussion of CRTs at EVO got me all excited (I get strangely excited about the subject)!  I still use a CRT for playing my PC games (though a different sort of CRT, as mine is an SGI branded Sony made PC monitor that generally runs in 1920x1440 @ 75Hz...though like most CRTs of its ilk it is multisync and does a wide variety of resolutions well as it doesn't really have a native resolution (one of the reasons I still like using a CRT in addition to the lack of input lag, the excellent black levels and contrast, and just my own preferences).

 

E49Du7zl.jpg

 

I really want to get a 15khz CRT (essentially an SD CRT) for old games at some point...preferably something like a 20" Sony PVM or GVM (as those have RGB inputs, usually through BNC...and you can get SCART and JP21 adapters for them...some even have VGA ports for RGB as well).  I love the way old console games look on an old CRT...I love the scanlines, the phosphor dots, the glow of the screen.  I can get a sort of kind of decent facsimile of the look on my PC CRT with some shaders (my CRT hooked up to my PC can't do 15khz (it will go down to 31khz I think...so 640x480 is the lower limit if I remember right...maybe 512xsomething) and is waaaay too sharp for that.  Scanlines end up being too pronounced on it, as the electron beam has no "bloom" to it at all.  This is what makes it an excellent high resolution monitor and why text is very sharp on it for a CRT...but I like a little tiny bit of pixel bleed on my pixel art games personally (it all comes down to personal preference).

 

I'm wondering if the tiny monitor Spaff mentioned looked something like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-PVM-8041Q-Trinitron-8-Color-Monitor-Portable-Field-Monitor-/201349970628?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2ee164bac4

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I just had the weirdest space out moment at the start of the show. It must be because I'm so tired. But I was going through my recently updated podcast list and the episode I'd just listened to (Aziz Ansari on Freakanomics -really good) had finished so I was staring at the next new podcast episode to play. Low and behold the voice of Chris Remo comes on talking about Squarespace as I'm staring at an episode of The Witness and I'm just thinking about how great it is that I've found another podcast with Chris on it. Then Jake starts talking and I'm still thinking "Hey cool another podcast with some of the Idle Thumbs people on it" and only when the video games song comes on does it finally click that I'm not listening to The BBC Witness Archive on The Tulia Drug Bust hosted by Chris Remo and Jake Rodkin But a new episode of Idle Thumbs that my iTunes just happened to skip to.

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The discussion of CRTs at EVO got me all excited (I get strangely excited about the subject)! I still use a CRT for playing my PC games (though a different sort of CRT, as mine is an SGI branded Sony made PC monitor that generally runs in 1920x1440 @ 75Hz...though like most CRTs of its ilk it is multisync and does a wide variety of resolutions well as it doesn't really have a native resolution (one of the reasons I still like using a CRT in addition to the lack of input lag, the excellent black levels and contrast, and just my own preferences).

E49Du7zl.jpg

I really want to get a 15khz CRT (essentially an SD CRT) for old games at some point...preferably something like a 20" Sony PVM or GVM (as those have RGB inputs, usually through BNC...and you can get SCART and JP21 adapters for them...some even have VGA ports for RGB as well). I love the way old console games look on an old CRT...I love the scanlines, the phosphor dots, the glow of the screen. I can get a sort of kind of decent facsimile of the look on my PC CRT with some shaders (my CRT hooked up to my PC can't do 15khz (it will go down to 31khz I think...so 640x480 is the lower limit if I remember right...maybe 512xsomething) and is waaaay too sharp for that. Scanlines end up being too pronounced on it, as the electron beam has no "bloom" to it at all. This is what makes it an excellent high resolution monitor and why text is very sharp on it for a CRT...but I like a little tiny bit of pixel bleed on my pixel art games personally (it all comes down to personal preference).

I'm wondering if the tiny monitor Spaff mentioned looked something like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-PVM-8041Q-Trinitron-8-Color-Monitor-Portable-Field-Monitor-/201349970628?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2ee164bac4

I had a 1920x1200 widescreen Sony/SGI CRT for years and I loved it. It was an amazing display. It's color accuracy finally degraded to the point that it was unusable for any actual design or video work so I gave it to someone on Craigslist but that was a fun display to have. It was also HUGE and caused every desk I owned to eventually sag, no matter how nice or thick the desk.

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The 2-D Half-Life game was called Codename: Gordon. It was eventually de-listed from Steam because the developer collapsed and let the domain registration of a site used in some sort of in-game ad banner expire. The domain was claimed by people who used it to link to porn and malware, so Valve just decided to sort of quarantine the game.

 

You can still enter steam://install/92 in a web browser to hook Steam into installing it.

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I really want to get a 15khz CRT (essentially an SD CRT) for old games at some point...preferably something like a 20" Sony PVM or GVM (as those have RGB inputs, usually through BNC...and you can get SCART and JP21 adapters for them...some even have VGA ports for RGB as well).  I love the way old console games look on an old CRT...I love the scanlines, the phosphor dots, the glow of the screen.

God, I'd love to do that, too. I have SCART cables for the Neo Geo lying around somewhere, but nothing to plug them into! It would look so fucking goddamn good.

 

Still though, even the worst CRT is worth having for fighting games. I kinda hate the "HD era" for gaming. My plasma is awesome for watching movies, but not for games.

 

I actually think console games in general have been hurt by it. Like, they need to by mushy enough that the latency doesn't matter. I mean, imagine how much tighter the combat timing could be in Batman or Assassin's Creed if everyone was still on CRTs. Tighten up those counter windows to something like the parry in Third Strike... aw yeah.  

 

Not that that would be the most sane design choice, but it would at least be a choice.

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I hope one day to play one systems-driven game and miraculously synthesize some kind of hilarity like chris or nick seem to do with every crazy game they play.

 

i know the reader mail song is a one-time joke, but it shouldn't be.

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Immediately after listening to this episode, the next episode of Elementary I was going to watch featured drone murder. Classic Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, I guess.

 

 

The episode is Season 2, Episode 21 "The man with the twisted lip".

It has a "normal" drone with a shotgun attached to it and a high-tech fake mosquito.

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