Jake

Idle Thumbs 231: Computer Processing Unit

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Idle Thumbs 231:

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Computer Processing Unit
Using this custom-built glimmering console of knobs and sliders, we have calibrated the podcast to be perfectly suited to your taste. The sliders have also been tuned to provide you with incredibly fat bass, a catchy counter-melody, and a breathtaking view. The view initially featured twelve cavemen stabbing a mammoth to death with a bunch of spears, and some possible hints at greater lore, but we turned that off with one of the knobs.

Games Discussed: Far Cry: Primal, Panoramical, World of Warships, C.P.U. Bach, Super Metroid, Super Mario 64

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Second time having an email read, woo! I always feel like a bit of a doof any time someone reads something I've written out loud but oh well. I totally didn't mean to make it sound like I believe Panspermia is 100% fact or even that it's likely, just that it's a theory that exists. Oh well!

 

 

Also I'm outraged there was no Undertale talk this week. Outraged!

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I love that Danielle is gone for one week and already the cast is back to:

-Chris messing around with a weird music game.
-Riffing on random non-sensical syllables.
-Discussing the obscure project of a 90s PC game star designer.
-Nick Breckon playing a hardcore war game.
-Puns.
-Jake playing an old Nintendo game instead of anything new.
-Far Cry 2.
-Super Mario Sunshine is under appreciated.
[edit]-And now Wizard baboo, holy shit.

[edit2]-I can't believe I missed the Goku shirt.

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My Russian friend said that the language in the Far Cry Primal trailer was accented Russian, can anyone confirm?

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When you were talking about C.P.U. Bach, i remembered a robot news related story: If There Was A Turing Test For Music Artificial Intelligence, 'Kulitta' Might Pass It.

 

Kulitta is a framework for automated composition, created by Donya Quick at Yale, that can be configured to run as a standalone artificial intelligence for generating music in a particular style.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=66&v=VXo-4wOb_vo

 

Added cosmic confluence: Donya Quick also uses a Korg nanocontrol.

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A reader definitely wrote in about CPU Bach in the past, but I don't know what episode it was.

 

Episode 54: Super Expert Pro

 

Games Discussed: Metro 2033, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Just Cause 2, Shatter, Chime, CPU Bach, Shadow and the Colossus 2: Everything's Windmills Everywhere (In Hell). Consoles Discussed: Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo Autodesk 3ds Max 4

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*Jake Nerd Voice*

 

"Um excuse me Jake, I believe you mean The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past and not Ocarina of Tiiiiiime!"

 

God I love Super Metroid talk. One of my favorite games all time. Never owned a Super Nintendo, still one of my favorites and the best.

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Jake is entirely right about Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine. I actually just set up the Dolphin emulator in part to replay Sunshine. Don't listen to Nick, he plays those nongame mobile things like "World of Warboats".

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I agree with Jake on Mario 64. The game feels like they had some arbitrary mario like "worlds" which exist in no relation to each other, stitched it together with a magic castle and teleporters and added arbitrary quests to complete to open a door. And the worlds itself felt like tech demos where they smushed together geometric shapes and colors.

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The game feels like they had some arbitrary mario like "worlds" which exist in no relation to each other, stitched it together 

 

Doesn't this describe every NES Mario game?

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Doesn't this describe every NES Mario game?

 

That's not arbitrary. The worlds are numbered, and as you progress through the game the number goes up in a linear fashion!

 

 

 

 

 

:P

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That's not arbitrary. The worlds are numbered, and as you progress through the game the number goes up in a linear fashion!

 

 

 

 

 

:P

Boo. There is a cohesion to almost all other Mario games that is absent in Mario 64. While there are all sorts of weird ideas ("Big World" "Pipe World" etc) they are all riffs on a theme, and each game ends up feeling like it has some sort of center to it. With Mario 64, though, it seems like the centering thought was "we have no limits now in 3D so we can do ANYTHING!" and then made a bunch of low res garbage versions of any idea they came up with.

I agree with Jake on Mario 64. The game feels like they had some arbitrary mario like "worlds" which exist in no relation to each other, stitched it together with a magic castle and teleporters and added arbitrary quests to complete to open a door. And the worlds itself felt like tech demos where they smushed together geometric shapes and colors.

I think "tech demos" is being too unkind because while the worlds do just feel like an arbitrary smattering of whatever the fuck and drift dangerously close to that, the place where there is cohesion is in Mario himself -- his move set and the way he controls is amazing and revolutionary in Mario 64. I just don't think the rest of the game he was put in was very good. 3D Mario was used much better in Sunshine, but ultimately he was used perfectly in Super Mario Galaxy.

I think people give Mario 64 a pass because Mario himself and his movements and move set were so shocking at the time, but compared to Super Mario Bros, or even Mario 3 or Yoshi's Island or something, I don't think there is a comparison. It feels like they were so dazzled by the technology that they forgot to actually use it in service of something specific, and instead took this great movement set they built, and used it to give you a tour of "What 3D Games Can Be Like."

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Man I just made the most Video Game Forum Guy post I have made in years. Woof look at that mess.

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Man I just made the most Video Game Forum Guy post I have made in years. Woof look at that mess.

 

I appreciate it though. I definitely grew up playing all the NES and SNES games at my friends houses, but my first home console was an N64 and I'm completely unable to be objective about Super Mario 64 in any way. It was the source of dozens of separate transcendent experiences for me, and the idea that someone can not just not be into it but think it's kinda shit is baffling.

 

My first thought listening to the podcast was a dismissive "Well, Jake is Mr. Nice UI and Design Guy, so he's just being overly critical of it's ugly graphics and completely ignoring the game itself", so I appreciate the elaboration even if, on a subjective level, I can't actually ever agree with you.

 

I think the lack of cohesion is actually one of the things I like about Super Mario 64. It felt like this box of toys where anything could happen at any time. I like MGS 2 for the same reason. Playing these games is as much about figuring out all the weird little secrets and easter eggs as it is completing objectives. There were hidden entrances in Super Mario World but it never felt like the same level of playfulness. The world around you kept changing in weird and wonderful ways. The moat has been drained! There's a rabbit in the basement! Looking up at this sunbeam takes you into a secret world! 

 

Also I never had a Gamecube, so maybe all this and more is improved in Sunshine.

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My Russian friend said that the language in the Far Cry Primal trailer was accented Russian, can anyone confirm?

 

It doesn't sound like modern Russian to me, even with an accent, and the internet doesn't seem to have picked that up. I certainly hope your friend is wrong anyway, because Russian is the product of a very specific historical situation (Norse rulers of a Slavic population blending into a single culture) and making it an "ancient" language is really othering. It's possible that they're using something like Old Church Slavonic, which eventually became Russian, as the language, but I can't hear enough words clearly enough to tell. My hope is that they either use an isolate language that's known to be rather ancient, like Basque, or they cobble together something out of the reams of research done on Proto-Indo-European.

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Historian Jason Scott gave a talk in 2009 about Super Mario 64 that gushes about Mario's movement, like Jake said.  But he spins the rest of the game in a more positive manner, too.

 

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OK, so this will out me as a dork of the tallest order, but...

 

Dang, Spaff, that is by far the worst description of P.D.Q. Bach I've ever heard, though I'm sure Peter Schickele would be delighted with it.

 

It's a classical music comedy act, and maybe a single piece (or a single tour, if things got out of hand) would fit the description you gave.  It's got more in common with Tom Leher than a noise band.

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Disclaimer #1: I'm more or less exactly like Patrick, in that Mario 64 was one of the defining games of my childhood, so I can't keep a "critical distance".

Disclaimer #2: I'm writing this after 6 beers and an Opeth concert.

 

Boo. There is a cohesion to almost all other Mario games that is absent in Mario 64. While there are all sorts of weird ideas ("Big World" "Pipe World" etc) they are all riffs on a theme, and each game ends up feeling like it has some sort of center to it. With Mario 64, though, it seems like the centering thought was "we have no limits now in 3D so we can do ANYTHING!" and then made a bunch of low res garbage versions of any idea they came up with.I think "tech demos" is being too unkind because while the worlds do just feel like an arbitrary smattering of whatever the fuck and drift dangerously close to that, the place where there is cohesion is in Mario himself -- his move set and the way he controls is amazing and revolutionary in Mario 64. I just don't think the rest of the game he was put in was very good. 3D Mario was used much better in Sunshine, but ultimately he was used perfectly in Super Mario Galaxy.

I think people give Mario 64 a pass because Mario himself and his movements and move set were so shocking at the time, but compared to Super Mario Bros, or even Mario 3 or Yoshi's Island or something, I don't think there is a comparison. It feels like they were so dazzled by the technology that they forgot to actually use it in service of something specific, and instead took this great movement set they built, and used it to give you a tour of "What 3D Games Can Be Like."

I see what you're saying, but I feel like you're being way too harsh. Yeah, Mario 64 has a lot of rookie 3D mistakes, like making the worlds way too big compared to your size/speed, but almost no one else had made them before. But I don't think the designs and concepts were as bad as you make them out to be.

 

For example, a lot of the worlds have a kind of natural end point, despite being open ended. In the first world, you can do whatever you want, but your eyes are immediately drawn to the mountain top, and you think "I want to go there". Think about this almost 2 decades later, when first- and third-person games still have trouble getting their players to actually look up.

In a way, a lot of the levels are the answer to "how do we turn a 2D game into a 3D game", and deciding to wrap the levels around a zenith or nadir. But in some of them you start down, some you start up, some are linear, some are mazes and some are very open.

 

Another thing is that the levels do have a cohesion, just not always in the visual theme. There's three distinct tiers of levels. The starter set, the basement set, and the top floor set. In the starter set the paintings are all on the ground floor, and the levels are all ground-focused, or rather single-planed. In contrast, the basement levels are much "lower". The progression is usually dependent on going down, or you have to be careful not to go further down, because death awaits (infinite pit, lava, quicksand, etc.). And the top floor set are very vertical, like the rainbow level, the level where you change size, the mushroom platform level, or even the water level (has you changing the water... level in order to get to the top). 

 

 

 

Man I just made the most Video Game Forum Guy post I have made in years. Woof look at that mess.

 

Together with the podcast (see my first post), this has come full circle back to 2008.

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Oh, it was Nick, never mind then.  That was a completely unexceptional Nick description of a thing.

 

But do tell Nick to stop speaking in a Spaff accent, it's confusing.

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