Jake

Idle Thumbs 252: Jonathan Bro

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Count me in as someone who loved everything about Transistor. (And Bastion!) What a wonderful game.

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Has Doug Tabacco played Doug Dug yet? I'm super curious to know whether or not Doug dug Doug dug.

Doug digs Dig Dug, Doug don't dig Doug Dig.

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Dean Erickson portrays Gabe in the only FMV installment of Sierra's Gabriel Knight series. Jake is right that he totally looks like FMV game man, but he actually gives a decent performance.

 

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Also, to Chris's point about designing with speedrunners in mind: I don't think smoothing things over completely is a great idea, partly because it would mean giving up on interesting mechanics or entire genres that are considered unsuitable for speedrunning (RIP autoscrollers) and partly because a certain amount of friction probably makes runs interesting in the first place. But speedrunning still seems like a valuable source of design insight. Because runners repeat levels and sections so frequently to perfect them, they essentially hold a comically oversized magnifying glass to the tiniest speedbumps in your game, and I think in a lot of cases these annoyances are things regular players also notice but don't necessarily know how to communicate. Things like platform cycles not matching up perfectly, or the game pausing to tally your score for a level with no way to skip or speed it up.

 

Your point about friction making runs interesting is absolutely true.  While runners like to complain about things like platform cycles or movement patterns, in truth those are some of the things that distinguish speedrunning.  The difference between a world record in a game might come down to executing a route perfectly in order to make a platform cycle.  If the cycles were designed to always be there, then the run is much less interesting because it takes minimal effort.  Part of what's amazing about watching high level speedrunning is not just the amount of knowledge the runners have of the game but the skill with which they can utilize such knowledge.  Speedrunners enjoy rising to meet and exceed the challenge presented to them by the game.  I don't think many want the game to come down in order to accommodate them.

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My experience with board game rules impatience is sort of the opposite of Jake's. The following has happened more than once, with the same guy in my board game group: He is teaching us a game, and forgets a detail about a rule. He decides to make something up instead of pausing to look it up, and then unbeknownst to everyone else, we play a hastily house ruled game, probably not having as much fun as we should have, and then later (perhaps months later!) someone finds out the rule we've been following is wrong.

This is also the worst. I've done this before when hosting a game and felt like such an ass. "Why wasn't this sample round fun? Oh, I ruined it and missed a rule." :/ It sucks.

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This is also the worst. I've done this before when hosting a game and felt like such an ass. "Why wasn't this sample round fun? Oh, I ruined it and missed a rule." :/ It sucks.

 

The fun counterpoint to both these situations is Monopoly, where the written rules and the house rules (no auction) both result in a grim, endless endgame.

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The fun counterpoint to both these situations is Monopoly, where the written rules and the house rules (no auction) both result in a grim, endless endgame.

I find the written rules of monopoly a lot better than people's crazy house rules. "You have to buy the property if you touch it and can afford it" helps so much, but so many people don't play that rule.

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Yeah, not that I think Monopoly is really a fun game to play, but the house rules version that everyone plays is miserable compared to the actual rules.

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There's a certain warmth that comes to the podcast when Jake's pleased by something that was said. It's apparent even when he's not talking, as I discovered when Chris said, "Jonathan Bro," and I could almost literally hear Jake beaming for the next thirty seconds. It's okay, I was laughing, too.

 

Some of my favorite moments on the podcast are when somebody says a wordplay, especially if they don't realize it, and the conversation moves on before Jake can say anything about it, but I know that Jake and we, the readers, are just silently enjoying it together.

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I think Jonathan Bro is Jonathan Blow's counterpart a la Donald and Charlie Kaufman from "Adaptation."

 

So if Jonathan Bro had to finish "The Witness" the last half would consist of unlocking a "Red Faction" style weapon, bashing the shit out of all the panels, and hotwiring the connections on every puzzle. I wish I had the capability to create this, but instead it will live in my head making me smile.

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I think Jonathan Bro is Jonathan Blow's counterpart a la Donald and Charlie Kaufman from "Adaptation."

 

So if Jonathan Bro had to finish "The Witness" the last half would consist of unlocking a "Red Faction" style weapon, bashing the shit out of all the panels, and hotwiring the connections on every puzzle. I wish I had the capability to create this, but instead it will live in my head making me smile.

Please Kickstart this.

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The LISA talk that mentioned the SOCOM DDoS is also publicly available (Thanks to USENIX' open access policy): https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa15/conference-program/presentation/perrine

 

If you've ever wondered about the computer plumbing used/required for large scale services, LISA tends to have some number of interesting talks in that regard.

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My favorite Jonathan Bro game has to be the Fitness.

loll

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"I heard Jon Bro works just down the street by the Swole Foods" - Ben Burbank, Campo Santo programmer. (Jon Blow does also work just down the street from us by the Whole Foods, which doesn't make anything Ben said okay.)

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I do like a bit of history in games, even when it only serves as a wrapper for the usual goofy nonsense. Speaking of Assassin's Creed, I recently finished my first game in that series (Black Flag), and even though from a historian’s point of view that game is probably total garbage, the attention to recreating period detail lends that game a great deal of character that it wouldn't otherwise have.

 

I wonder if it’s possible to think of examples where a good game has been made worse by excessive attention to historical authenticity. I can’t think of any right now. I think it’s always nice to see that work in there, even if the results aren’t obvious. I really like the efforts made to recreate the city in L.A. Noire, for example, even though the game never really asks you to engage with the historical setting and it’s something many players will never notice or think too much about. (Not like this gentleman, anyway.) It’s sad to think that I can’t see Rockstar making such a lavishly detailed period setting again.

 

Also, Doug Dug sounds really good and I think I’m going to play it. If anyone is interested in other side-scrolling games about digging, I’d recommend Steamworld Dig – it has that same thing of accumulating loot and upgrades through near-endless downwards mining, but it also has some nice light puzzling and a Super Metroid-ish vibe to the exploration. There's even a bit of environmental storytelling, too. It’s not on iOS or Android, but it is on pretty much every other platform now.

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