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Idle Weekend January 29, 2016: Far Gone Prestige

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Idle Weekend January 29, 2016:

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Far Gone Prestige

What makes a "prestige" game? Is it arty graphics? Heady themes? Years of adoration in the press? Difficult puzzles mixed with BBC lectures? The Witness is only the most recent example of the phenomenon. Elsewhere, there are adventures to be had rating bad video game movies and spoiling the hell out of Fargo Season 2 in a post-show free for all. (But don't worry, we made it easy to skip!) Wear your fluffiest coat!

Discussed: The Witness, ThatGameCompany, Jason Rohrer, Starward Rogue, Final Fantasy IX, The Magicians, Best of Enemies, Fargo Season 2

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I'm bummed about the news with Arcen games.  I haven't bought all their games, but I've bought and played several of them and I feel very similar to them as I do Ace Team, where I don't quite love their games, but I sure am glad that they exist and someone is making them.  They've also had an odd interest in trying to find ways to incorporate co-op play into the majority of their games, which is something I always appreciate. 

 

 

Oh, I had a friend recommend that Buckley/Vidal documentary to me to the other day as well, I really need to watch it. 

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The Super Mario Bros movie is GREAT. It's a terrible Mario movie, but it's so enjoyably weird. I also really like the Doom movie (for reasons similar to Danielle). A couple recommendations were (understandably) trimmed for length, so I'll put them here:

 

Tekken and Dead or Alive both have ridiculous stories, but also have fun-to-watch fight scenes. One of my favorite things about any of these movies is in DoA: Someone decided to sprinkle a few gun sound effects into the normal fight scene foley, and it's endlessly amusing to me.

If, like me, you enjoy sitting around and groaning at bad movies, there's Alone in the Dark, House of the Dead, BloodRayne, Far Cry, Doom, and King of Fighters.

 

And oof, Onechanbara... It's the lowest of low-budget Japanese action/horror movies. It's... man.

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Uber prolific cult Japanese director did an Ace Attorney movie that's alright in addition to, oddly, a Dead or Alive trilogy that has no relation whatsoever to the video games other than sharing a title.

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Rob, thank you for your comment on William Buckley. From today's standpoint it is difficult to understand how some found him impressive. You mention Buckley vs. Baldwin. This is the interview, a fascinating historical document.

I would like to follow this up with Buckley vs. Chomsky on Vietnam.

It's not as much his views (which thankfully didn't stand the test of societal change) as his very dishonest presentation, his barely hidden disrespect for his guests, his overly verbose language carrying very little content.

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I've listened to 3 or 4 episodes of Idle Weekend now, and sadly, I don't think it's for me. Maybe it's just over my head. Maybe what I like about Idle Thumbs isn't the serious video game talk, but the banter between friends. Idle Weekend doesn't feel like friends having a good time, it feels like overhearing academics pontificating about video games.

 

I really miss Danielle on Idle Thumbs.

 

I feel that only in the past two episodes Danielle and Rob managed to get an enjoyable chemistry going. I do like how IW differs from IT, though I enjoy both shows.

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i'm loving it. it's like the sunday magazine section of the times

Great analogy.

 

On the topic of Valve and the steam frontpage:

 

I think the steam remake and their horrible curators system made it so hard to discover games on the site.  Before the frontpage was basically new games, top sellers, and things on sale.  It meant that developers could put their games on sale and guarantee some level of exposure.  Now, my front page has slim downed versions of those things and a number of recommendations based on curators.  Unfortunately, the curators I would be interested in don't really update that often and the people who do update regularly have incredibly mainstream taste like Total Biscuit (for example, he recommended a visual novel, but with this caveat "A visual novel rather than a game").  So, how does a company like Arcen games get to the front page to be discovered?  They either have to sell well, release a new game or appeal to the taste of handful of white dudes who control the front page.

 

Personally, I hate the change.  I used to discover unique games on steam.  Now, I only find interesting game elsewhere and go to steam to buy them.  The frontpage wasn't great before, but now it is basically the iOS store of PC.  It's just useless unless you wanted to find the best selling games.  It's a system that makes it easy to be a make release, but very hard to an indie release.  It's nearly impossible to be a company that makes interesting mid-level games in the system because there is just no way to find sustained exposure over time like those games tend to require.

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A question about Myst: I've heard several times the story of how Myst was highly acclaimed, and eventually then panned and dethroned.  I absolutely loved it and was wondering how it came to fall.

 

I recall buying it with a friend (who wasn't a gamer) for my parents' Apple computer while I was visiting my old hometown.  My friend and I started playing mid-morning.  Somewhere around 8pm we decided we better go out and get some food, having played all day.  We actually battled over control of the mouse and had to use a timer of about 2 minutes to end the (friendly) arguments.  It was a gorgeous game with wonderful atmosphere and puzzles that were hard but "fair" (meaning that they could be figured out, they didn't require luck, incredibly arcane knowledge, or pixel hunting).  It literally took me months to complete the game and it drove me nuts but I loved it.  So what's the story on how the consensus shifted?  Why on earth did this great game become a pariah?

 

And since I just recently started listening and went back to earlier episodes, I want to also comment on Banner Saga.  Loved that game, and I disagree with the podcast comments that the game lacked depth.  It's true that the basic fighting is kind of straightforward but positioning and taking advantage of each character's abilities made the battles lots of fun.  I played it thru twice and kept discovering little nuances as I went thru.

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The first two Myth games are great RTSes, and terribly overlooked. One could say they're the kinds of games that deserve a dedicated episode on a strategy gaming podcast.

It's even perfectly playable on modern systems!

http://projectmagma.net/

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I recall buying it with a friend (who wasn't a gamer) for my parents' Apple computer while I was visiting my old hometown.  My friend and I started playing mid-morning.  Somewhere around 8pm we decided we better go out and get some food, having played all day.  We actually battled over control of the mouse and had to use a timer of about 2 minutes to end the (friendly) arguments.  It was a gorgeous game with wonderful atmosphere and puzzles that were hard but "fair" (meaning that they could be figured out, they didn't require luck, incredibly arcane knowledge, or pixel hunting).  It literally took me months to complete the game and it drove me nuts but I loved it.  So what's the story on how the consensus shifted?  Why on earth did this great game become a pariah?

 

I think part of why it had some backlash is probably because from a technical standpoint, it hasn't aged well. It was basically gussied up hypercard with no animated transitions when moving from screen to screen, something that even many free flash escape games will have today. And I think part of that kind of reaction is valid because a large part of its massive popularity at the time was because it looked really good relative to the standards of the day. That's not to say the puzzling was necessarily terrible or anything, but if a future audience is looking at it and no longer seeing this visual juggernaut, that's bound to take some of the shine off it.

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I think part of why it had some backlash is probably because from a technical standpoint, it hasn't aged well. It was basically gussied up hypercard with no animated transitions when moving from screen to screen, something that even many free flash escape games will have today. And I think part of that kind of reaction is valid because a large part of its massive popularity at the time was because it looked really good relative to the standards of the day. That's not to say the puzzling was necessarily terrible or anything, but if a future audience is looking at it and no longer seeing this visual juggernaut, that's bound to take some of the shine off it.

 

Agreed on the original version of Myst being problematic. I don't think I've ever gotten to run on anything other than Windows 95/98. That said, have you looked at the latest remastered version? It's actually pretty good.

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I wonder if this Myst backlash could be also,a effect of the saturation or a bad generalization on the adventure genre games and its problems, such as the pixel hunt or the bad design in puzzles, which at one point caused Myst to be thrown among "bad games" even if wasn´t bad as many other adventures of it´s period. You kind see this happen on Jrpgs, where they are labeled "bad" and all thrown in the same bag, even if they where very different or it´s design didn´t suffer from this or that problem.

 

Once I was in a shop, choosing a game to buy and I remember hearing two guys looking at the Myst box (can´t remember which version, but it was one which as sold around the same time, as the pc game AD&D - Birthright: Gorgon´s Alliance, which was the game I bought, which was around 97) and saying, that "they would burn their brains trying to figure what to do" and I do wonder much people started to think that every adventure was like this, even if it was not true.

 

I do agree with Rob, Myth was great game, and I also think that mostly like reason how it deal with death is likely the "physic engines are cool!" the history was however slight more serious (sometimes trying maybe too hard to be serious), but almost a bit too edgy. But my impression might be tainted because the brazilian localization, which was overall very good, but had some problems here and there - some voices and a bit of translation sometimes made things a bit goofy, archers had a very high pitched voice and the localization tried to used some slangs, which sounded ridiculous. The dwarves had a voice that sound a bit like a children (again a bit too high pitched, instead of a deep voice) trying to do a bad imitation a scottish person.

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Once I was in a shop, choosing a game to buy and I remember hearing two guys looking at the Myst box (can´t remember which version, but it was one which as sold around the same time, as the pc game AD&D - Birthright: Gorgon´s Alliance, which was the game I bought, which was around 97) and saying, that "they would burn their brains trying to figure what to do" and I do wonder much people started to think that every adventure was like this, even if it was not true.

 

I didn't know there had ever been a video game version of the Birthright campaign.  That was the only D&D campaign that I ever ran as a DM, so I've always had a lot of fondness for it.

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I've listened to 3 or 4 episodes of Idle Weekend now, and sadly, I don't think it's for me. Maybe it's just over my head. Maybe what I like about Idle Thumbs isn't the serious video game talk, but the banter between friends. Idle Weekend doesn't feel like friends having a good time, it feels like overhearing academics pontificating about video games.

 

I really miss Danielle on Idle Thumbs.

 

I like Idle Weekend and I like both Rob and Danielle, so I don't want this to come off as being negative but there's something about Idle Weekend that doesn't quite hit for me. This is not an accusation or even a criticism really, but the best way I can put it into words is that it feels very edited. Hearing Danielle instantly reading a transition or outro after finishing a conversation is a very different experience from Idle Thumbs. Maybe it's skype, or different mics, or something? I don't know.

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I like that both Myth and Myst came up, because usually whenever I try to talk about Myth everyone hears it as "Myst".

 

Anyway, I feel like the veteran unit mechanics (kill counts, names, and flavor text being persistent across campaign missions) and the game's narrative and how it's told both work together to encourage the player to get attached to their units. It's striking to me that in place of the pre-mission briefing most other '90s RTS games seemed to have, every level opens with a passage from the diary of a common soldier writing about the hardships the Legion faced, instead of, I don't know, a Starcraft 1-esque conference call between the Nine Avatara where they give you a bunch of orders. There is a high fantasy story of ancient prophecies of destruction and fallen heroes and all of that stuff, but you're seeing it from the ground up, from a narrator who cares more about how cold it is in Bagrada ("your eyes frost shut and the snot freezes in your nose") than whether Balor used to be the legendary hero Connacht or whatever. And the gameplay reflects this! Weather matters-- that Bagrada narration leads into a level where snow can extinguish your bombs and the wind blows your arrows off-course-- and every unit is precious, and when Fallen Lords or Avatara do actually show up on the map, they're terrifying, larger-than-life figures. Like, it might be cool if, say, Starcraft told its story from the perspective of some random Marine, but it wouldn't be as fitting for a game where you just pump out hordes of faceless marines and send them to grisly deaths, since you know there's more of 'em where the first ones came from. But Myth not only had a good story, it was exactly the right story for the kind of game it was.

 

I wish there were, like, some modern spiritual successor to Myth. Is there one? It's the only RTS I've ever really loved.

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I like Idle Weekend and I like both Rob and Danielle, so I don't want this to come off as being negative but there's something about Idle Weekend that doesn't quite hit for me. This is not an accusation or even a criticism really, but the best way I can put it into words is that it feels very edited. Hearing Danielle instantly reading a transition or outro after finishing a conversation is a very different experience from Idle Thumbs. Maybe it's skype, or different mics, or something? I don't know.

 

I do edit the podcast, although usually pretty lightly. This week there was one big noticeable edit, which was the segue between the "prestige games" segment and the Arcen Games segment. Usually there's more of a clean transition. One thing you might also be identifying is the fact that this show has specific discussion, which is different to Idle Thumbs (and was one of the reasons we figured it was justified to start up another "people talk about video games" podcast). There's also of course always a difference in conversational tone between remotely recorded casts and in-person casts. They both have strengths and weaknesses; I do think one strength is that any given host is more likely to be able to speak a complete thought without being interrupted, a luxury we definitely don't enjoy on Thumbs.

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I do edit the podcast, although usually pretty lightly. This week there was one big noticeable edit, which was the segue between the "prestige games" segment and the Arcen Games segment. Usually there's more of a clean transition. One thing you might also be identifying is the fact that this show has specific discussion, which is different to Idle Thumbs (and was one of the reasons we figured it was justified to start up another "people talk about video games" podcast). There's also of course always a difference in conversational tone between remotely recorded casts and in-person casts. They both have strengths and weaknesses; I do think one strength is that any given host is more likely to be able to speak a complete thought without being interrupted, a luxury we definitely don't enjoy on Thumbs.

 

I hope my words didn't come off as accusatory, or I implied the podcast was fundamentally changed because there were edits. I have full confidence that any editing is an attempt to improve the flow. The podcast wouldn't suddenly become better if unexpected interruptions were left in, for example. I love the editing on Thumbs. I agree, I'm nearly certain that part of what I'm experiencing is exactly what you say, the remote nature of the conversation. The word "edit" just kept bubbling up when I was searching for vocabulary. Maybe the prescribed direction of the discussion makes it feel that way to me.

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They both have strengths and weaknesses; I do think one strength is that any given host is more likely to be able to speak a complete thought without being interrupted, a luxury we definitely don't enj-

 

Yeah I like the style of Idle Weekend where Danielle and Rob can slowly tease out their full argument before the other person really reacts.

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I didn't know there had ever been a video game version of the Birthright campaign.  That was the only D&D campaign that I ever ran as a DM, so I've always had a lot of fondness for it.

 

Birthright was my favorite campaign background, but I never managed to convince my player to play it much.

 

The game was a very good port of the tabletop rules, it was maybe the last AD&D done when TSR was under Sierra (maybe the only title under them), it had both the kingdom management rules and battle (which played in a very total war way) and even some adventures, where you lead your regent and up to three more followers. The sad part was that they had plans to make expansion to cover more regions, but never happened.

 

Talking about Myth, I decided to pick up my old Myth II manual, and what imense surprise it was when I was looking at the credits and see it that the Scenes (I guess the cutscenes) where done by the Anime International Company (Tokyo, Japan as you might guess by that name, their works include: Tenchi Muyo, El Hazard, Date a Live, Record of Lodoss War and others) something that I had forget, I decided to do a quick check on the director name in the manual: Nakazawa Kazuto. He was director of some works such as the anime part of Kill Bill, Parasite Dolls, and he did lots of character design for games such Sengoku Basa, Ashita no Nadja and others.

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I like that both Myth and Myst came up, because usually whenever I try to talk about Myth everyone hears it as "Myst".

 

Anyway, I feel like the veteran unit mechanics (kill counts, names, and flavor text being persistent across campaign missions) and the game's narrative and how it's told both work together to encourage the player to get attached to their units. It's striking to me that in place of the pre-mission briefing most other '90s RTS games seemed to have, every level opens with a passage from the diary of a common soldier writing about the hardships the Legion faced, instead of, I don't know, a Starcraft 1-esque conference call between the Nine Avatara where they give you a bunch of orders. There is a high fantasy story of ancient prophecies of destruction and fallen heroes and all of that stuff, but you're seeing it from the ground up, from a narrator who cares more about how cold it is in Bagrada ("your eyes frost shut and the snot freezes in your nose") than whether Balor used to be the legendary hero Connacht or whatever. And the gameplay reflects this! Weather matters-- that Bagrada narration leads into a level where snow can extinguish your bombs and the wind blows your arrows off-course-- and every unit is precious, and when Fallen Lords or Avatara do actually show up on the map, they're terrifying, larger-than-life figures. Like, it might be cool if, say, Starcraft told its story from the perspective of some random Marine, but it wouldn't be as fitting for a game where you just pump out hordes of faceless marines and send them to grisly deaths, since you know there's more of 'em where the first ones came from. But Myth not only had a good story, it was exactly the right story for the kind of game it was.

 

I wish there were, like, some modern spiritual successor to Myth. Is there one? It's the only RTS I've ever really loved.

Those narrated 'mission briefings' were great. They still hold up too (I'll post one below). It's actually one of my favourite narratives in any game. I can listen to the guy who reads them forever. Considering how much of an unsolved issue narrative in games is I'm always a little amazed how something so simple can work so well, it's all down to execution I suppose.

Just listen to this guy:

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Uber prolific cult Japanese director did an Ace Attorney movie that's alright in addition to, oddly, a Dead or Alive trilogy that has no relation whatsoever to the video games other than sharing a title.

 

Takashi Miike! And he also did a movie based on the first Yakuza game. I haven't seen that or the Phoenix Wright movie because I'm pretty sure that neither got a U.S. release. I'll probably try and track down a bootleg copy or something at some point. I know the Phoenix Wright movie had a New York theater showing at one point, so there must be a subtitled copy that exists in some playable format.

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The Takashi Miike Phoenix Wright movie is legit! Usually I'm wary of live action adaptations of Japanese anime or games because the budgets are generally very low, but I'm amazed at some of the creative decisions they made. For example, it takes place in a sort of not-too distant future so the way they show the game prompts are via these CG flat panel displays that announce what's about to happen. They clearly put a lot thought into it. Also, it plays the tone totally straight which really works well.

 

I saw it at a screening at I think a museum or arthouse theater, and a lot of people were saying "Oh, that was based off of a video game?" Because it's very much structured like a courtroom procedural with great twists and turns.

 

If you like Phoenix Wright I'd recommend tracking it down.

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Great analogy.

 

On the topic of Valve and the steam frontpage:

 

I think the steam remake and their horrible curators system made it so hard to discover games on the site.  Before the frontpage was basically new games, top sellers, and things on sale.  It meant that developers could put their games on sale and guarantee some level of exposure.  Now, my front page has slim downed versions of those things and a number of recommendations based on curators.  Unfortunately, the curators I would be interested in don't really update that often and the people who do update regularly have incredibly mainstream taste like Total Biscuit (for example, he recommended a visual novel, but with this caveat "A visual novel rather than a game").  So, how does a company like Arcen games get to the front page to be discovered?  They either have to sell well, release a new game or appeal to the taste of handful of white dudes who control the front page.

 

Personally, I hate the change.  I used to discover unique games on steam.  Now, I only find interesting game elsewhere and go to steam to buy them.  The frontpage wasn't great before, but now it is basically the iOS store of PC.  It's just useless unless you wanted to find the best selling games.  It's a system that makes it easy to be a make release, but very hard to an indie release.  It's nearly impossible to be a company that makes interesting mid-level games in the system because there is just no way to find sustained exposure over time like those games tend to require.

 

I also hate the change. The discovery queue is ridiculous. I recently bought Final Fantasy Type 0 which is some weird off-brand Final Fantasy game that was originally released for the PSP or Vita (I've never followed the handheld gaming scene so I don't know the difference) and ended up as a PC Port. It has incredibly mixed reviews on Steam because people don't like the PC Port (I think it looks fine and don't really care about that), and it is much smaller and tighter in scope than a traditional FF game (a major selling point in my book, but obviously not what a lot of fans of the genre are looking for). Anyway, I'm enjoying this game for kind of idiosyncratic reasons because I typically hate JRPGs, just find them dull and super uninteresting. But now Steam looks at me playing this weird JRPG with kind of mediocre reviews, and decides that my discovery queue should now be filled with bad JRPGs, no matter how many times I click the "not interested" button.

 

I basically think computer recommendation algorithms are just bad news for any artistic or pseudo-artistic endeavors. It's fine for shoping on amazon or something where you buy a vacuum cleaner and here are some other things you might be interested in if you're in the market for a vacuum cleaner. But when it comes to making curated recommendations for music, movies, or games to check out I think it's awful. Because it is only gonna understand genre. That's how we end up with all those ridiculous Netflix genres. It can't make recommendations based on whether there were aspects of a presentation of a thing you appreciated. And I think that ends up putting pressure on people working in these mediums because they know their work exists in this filtration system to reach people. So doing something idiosyncratic, and coloring outside the lines has become much more risky (and it was never easy to begin with).

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