Jake

Idle Thumbs 231: Computer Processing Unit

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

 

I want to second this, and insist that everyone play Undertale! I love it so much.

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I want to second this, and insist that everyone play Undertale! I love it so much.

 

I'm not actually that outraged, but it is a good game that people should play.

 

 

 

My secret gaming shame is that I have played more Rayman games than Mario games. So by my reckoning, Superstar Saga is actually the best Mario game ever made.

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I think the bigger issue though was that this is a cast about video games, and doing an ad read for a video game created confusion as to what was endorsement and what was not.

Yeah it had nothing to do with whether we played it. We just didn't want to implicitly (or otherwise) endorse video games for money on the show. It felt gross to be paid to tell readers to download a game.

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I've got to be video game forum guy and agree with Jake totally. I'm also of a certain age, and really hit my game stride during 90s PC Gaming. (Is 90s PC Gaming officially a concept?) So I wasn't blown away by the introduction of 3D, and thought M64 was garish in its colors, the forced joy, and stars, and his accent. This caused some rift between me and my roomate at college!

 

At the time I was really into the Treasure games console wise, and thought that M64 really lost all the charm of the sprite art. 

 

I also maintained for a long time that nobody would be nostalgic for the early days of 3D, (that segment in Metal Gear Solid 4 hen you flashback to MGS1 is such a small blocky nightmare) and that gameplay wise the very late 90s and early 2000s would be sort of a lost generation (does nobody love MAKEN X?). I think that is partially true, but "low poly" emerged as a viable aesthetic, and has been deployed in a lot of stylistic ways. I'm not sure that qualifies though, because I think modern pixel art stuff is faithful to the "tenents" of original pixel art in a way that low poly isn't. 

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Yeah modern low poly styles are actually making good use of minimalist design, texture and lighting in a way that early 3D didn't in games. Look at Tomb Raider Go for a good recent example. I think in part it was because of technological limitations, though also because even now games can be a real hot mess with art direction.

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Yo, Mario, I'm really happy for you, Ima let you finish, but Rayman 2 was one of the best Nintendo 64 platformers of all time.

 

Come, now.  Surely we can all agree that Rocket: Robot on Wheels was the best N64 platformer.

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I'm kind of surprised that people like that CPU Bach thing.  What I love most about J.S. Bach are his beautiful melodic lines (sometimes found in the bass when, for instance, he's arranging a fairly plain hymn tune), which you just don't get from the kind of noodling a computer can do.

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I'm always sad I can't buy any of the things advertised on the show b/c I live in australia. I just have to daydream about eating delicious treats in my underwear in a cosy bed  :cry:

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You just need to find the local equivalent like DownUndies.com

The feathers are so irritating though.

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There is genuinely an underwear brand called AussieBum.

 

I smell a sponsorrrrrrr!

 

no wait that's underwear

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I'm kind of surprised that people like that CPU Bach thing.  What I love most about J.S. Bach are his beautiful melodic lines (sometimes found in the bass when, for instance, he's arranging a fairly plain hymn tune), which you just don't get from the kind of noodling a computer can do.

I don't imagine most people appreciate C.P.U. Bach for the same reasons they appreciate J.S. Bach. You appreciate J.S. Bach for his actual work, and you appreciate C.P.U. Bach as a striving labor of love inspired by someone's deep appreciation of J.S. Bach, and for how it might provide a new avenue by which to appreciate J.S. Bach.

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I also think it's interesting as an exercise in "which elements of Bach can skilled programmers who appreciate his work even attempt to successfully replicate programatically, and which proved almost impossibly elusive?" I think for Sid Meyer (and most everyone else involved in CPU Bach's creation or appreciation), "This computer will replace Bach" was never in the equation.

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So the "Bach" in CPU Bach is kind of a synecdoche for "baroque-style composition rules"?  

That reminds me of David Hurwitz's modest proposal "Let's Just Say Bach Wrote It" (sadly unavailable behind a paywall), suggesting that the problem of excellent but neglected baroque works could be solved by just attributing them all to J.S. Bach.

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I'll hop on the terrible video game forum guy bandwagon and say that I wasn't that impressed with Mario 64 (really, any 3D graphics from that console generation). The textures on all systems of that generation looked blurry and unpolished to me compared to their 2D counterparts. I'm 33, FWIW. 

 

What I think Mario 64 did nail was the controls and the camera. Even into early PS2 era, many third person 3D games were consistently terrible to control. I think it took the industry several years to catch up to Nintendo in that regard.

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It was hilarious to hear the rant on Mario 64, I was one of those guys playing Diablo and Quake or whatever at the time.

 

I wonder what the market for games/toys that take advantage of midi controllers? I'd never really thought of using mine for anything but music.

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I definitely agree that N64 (and a lot of 3d ps1 and saturn) games are a mess visually. I guess my question would be, is there a platformer on the N64 that does exemplify good design, or is the issue muddied because of how bad a lot of that stuff looked especially in comparison to the 2d heights of the end of the 16-bit era? 

 

I feel like Mario 64 being a tour of "What 3D Games Can Be Like" and less structurally cohesive than it's predecessors doesn't really make it bad or shitty. Also some of that lack of cohesiveness was played around with in the game, because you have stuff like endless hallways that have the return exit right behind you no matter how far you run, or ceiling mural light beams that teleport you into levels, or levels that change depending on what time you jump in the portrait. Even the idea of jumping through paintings to enter levels is a very surreal concept that might seem more mundane now just because of how long it's been since that game came out. It felt like they were playing around with the idea of what a "world map" is, and that became a large part of the design. I haven't played Sunshine, but Galaxy felt like it did a lot of similar things as well.

 

I didn't really play a lot of SM64 so I'm probably not a good person to talk about this stuff. I do know that whenever I was playing it at a friend's place the world instantly conveyed a sense of wonder even years after it had come out.

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Oh man, I thought the camera controls for Mario 64 were pretty awful too. I don't think any of that got good until Mario Sunshine.

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Yeah its camera was bad but it was the first pass at the camera philosophy that eventually got good and became the standard.

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Listen I have great nostalgia for Super Mario 64.

 

But Super Mario Sunshine is a beautiful game. I'd love to see a proper sequel to that. Bring FLUDD back! It added so much to the game. Hell, if you want, just make it a new game. Like a proper Splatoon spinoff or something, it'd work pretty well there, thematically speaking, to have an ink jetpack or something.

 

GRRRR. NINTENDO.

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