Jake

Idle Thumbs 253: Ambitious Ambivalence

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Sorry this one was late! I screwed up!!

Idle Thumbs 253:

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Ambitious Ambivalence

We paid some of the smartest and most hardworking university-grade linguists to translate the contents of this week's episode into a language you will understand. Unfortunately they were unable to finish their work, as one was suddenly gored by an elk, the others are caught up in a cheating scandal surrounding the game of Bridge, and a randomly propagated fire seems to have engulfed the room they were using to do most of their work. We were able to save one notebook from the blaze, a notebook empty except for the phrase, "You are the One."

Games Discussed: Far Cry Primal, Far Cry 2, Stardew Valley, Crossword puzzles, Bridge, Myst, Obduction

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Graham Smith wrote a persuasive piece around the time Assassin's Creed Unity came out that that game, and the series in general is no longer critically relevant. "In short, Assassin’s Creed is now the adult contemporary of video games. Assassin’s Creed: Unity is Michael Bolton."

 

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/08/14/assassins-creed-unity-2/

 

I think we're at the point now where we can extend that metaphor out to all of Ubisoft's major franchises.

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Y'know it's also possible that the Far Cry 4 and the Far Cry Primal map are the same because Ubisoft has built so many open worlds that they're designing them with the same honed, efficient process, and they designed the same shape twice.

 

Or maybe it's one big epic lore.

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I have to say Nick describing this time with Stardew Valley has to be one of the most visual stories i've heard on the show. I could see everything as Nick was talking and it was hilarious. 

 

This moody little 16 bit guy that can't be bothered to tend to his garden so instead going to the store to get bread then returning home and going to bed. I just wanna stay in bed.

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It's weird. This is the second podcast I've listened to this week that for some reason attributes Harvest Moon to Nintendo. They're made by Natsume, always have been. They haven't even been exclusive to Nintendo consoles either.

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If I hadn't listened to the podcast before, I would have assumed Nick's Stardew Valley impressions were a bit.

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It's weird. This is the second podcast I've listened to this week that for some reason attributes Harvest Moon to Nintendo. They're made by Natsume, always have been. They haven't even been exclusive to Nintendo consoles either.

 

They evoke a lot of the Nintendo sensibilities, and seem similar to Animal Crossing. (also what other consoles are they on?)

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It's weird. This is the second podcast I've listened to this week that for some reason attributes Harvest Moon to Nintendo. They're made by Natsume, always have been. They haven't even been exclusive to Nintendo consoles either.

 

Drove me fucking nuts on Daft Souls. Quinns said it like ten times. Even worse because Daft Souls is frequently quite negative about Nintendo and he kept basically saying "Nintendo is dumb for making bad Harvest Moon games". So frustrating.

 

I actually rage-tweeted at them about it. X:

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The use of Proto-Indo-European was an interesting but ultimately peculiar choice for a "prehistoric" language in Far Cry: Primal. By now, after two centuries of research, the phonology, morphology, and syntax of PIE are about as well-understood as they're going to be. A big chunk of the actual vocabulary has even been reconstructed to most scholars' satisfaction, making it mostly a thought-exercise for a trained linguist to build a dialect from it: run a few phonal shifts, drop some of the more obscure cases, and regularize word order. I mostly see its celebration in multiple interviews as this great gesture of authenticity to be a sign of video games' usually tenuous relationship with historical reality; for example, no one lost their minds that Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire had conversations derived from PIE back in 2001, but now... Still, it's a direction in which I'd like to see more games go, using non-industry specialists to build more detailed worlds.

 

But then Ubisoft did their Ubisoft thing and made it weird: they set the game in Central Europe during the Mesolithic period, thousands of years before PIE existed and nowhere near its hypothesized place of origin around the Caspian Sea. Despite all we know about PIE, there are few things we can say for absolute certain, yet one is that people in Europe around 10,000 BC would not have spoken like the characters in Far Cry: Primal do. And then, what's more, the language is rendered in the subtitles like caveman speak from an old movie! "Me see big scary bird, walk high in sky." That's AAA game development to a T: spend thousands of dollars developing multiple imaginary languages, then translate it into a childish pidgin to conform to audience expectations.

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Chris's calamitous caper began when he cracked a caveman's cranium and bested a bewildered bear, but he was jumped by a jaguar and engaged in a joust before jumping after an aquatic artifact under the care of a crocodile that curtly chomped him until he expired it with an expert excavation, and he almost escaped until he was eviscerated by an elk.

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I'm one of those people who really didn't like Myst when it came out, and I think you guys hit most of the reasons. It was around an odd crossroads in PC gaming. Part of it was due to my not liking the direction Sierra was going. This all feels super silly to type out, but I didn't like most of their VGA point n click games, and I blame the fidelity/interface transition more. Around 1992/93 we had PQ3, QFG3, KQ6, and SQ5. They looked nice, but I thought they were less interesting, and I think Myst struck me similarly.

 

There was also a bit of proximity to the FMV "games are the new Hollywood" explosion, and I probably felt Myst was closer to that. It had the smooth motion, but generally less-"interactive" nature. It wasn't like 7th Guest or anything, but it seemed more like that to me, when my favorite game at the time was Ultima 7, which was pushing "total experience" in a way no games had at that point.

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During the Far Cry map discussion, sadly, my mind imagined a future Ubigame with a lore terminal explaining why in the Far Cry -universe the tectonic plates moved alot more in pre-historic eras and the primal bit of Europe ended up in the Himalayas some 10 millenia later. And a diary for why, despite these vast changes, the area still looks the same.

 

My experience with Stardew Valley was less extreme than Nick's. Still, I did experience some existential discomfort as well. The kind of weird opening cutscene paints the farm inheritance as an escape from the corporate serfdom. However, what the actual gameplay encourages is extreme time management and micro-optimization. Each day lasts only 20-30 minutes, and at the very least you have to water the plants. If a villager has a birthday, you really should give them a gift. If it's raining, you don't have to water the plants but you can spend it fishing or mining or just doing general chores. 

 

Instead of leisurly working on the farm, each night I need to plan the next day: I need to buy seeds today, so I should first go to the sea shore to collect the shells, and if I have time before the shops open, catch a fish, and then sell the shells, then go to the seed shop to get the seeds. Then back to the farm and plant the seeds and water the plants. After that I still have half a day so a quick trip to the baths to replenish energy, then to the mines to collect some ore. My poor farmer guy never was this beholden to the clock as the office worker. I suppose this matches what actual farming is like. You worry about the weather, time and expenses. Definetly not relaxing :-)

 

I still feel the comparisons between Myst (plus its sequels) and The Witness are weird, since pretty much the only thing the games have in common is the are first person, they have puzzles and they begin on an island. The Myst begins with a very clear narration, and an hour into the game you're already diving into other worlds. As iconic as the island is for Myst, you spend most of the game off it. There are a lot of journals and there is, in general, a whole bunch of story being fed to you. Pretty much all the puzzles in Myst try (and often fail) to fit in the world. Fictionally, they are not puzzles for the sake of being puzzles. They are the tools the inhabitants of the world used. Where as The Witness, instead of having a bunch of menus for choosing puzzles has an island you walk on. But it effectively is a pure puzzle game. The game I personally have found myself comparing the Witness to is the Starseed Pilgrim. Admittedly it's a lot less well known. But I would never compare Starseed Pilgrim with Myst. Perhaps I'm doing a disservice for the beauty of the island of the Witness, and all the environmental stuff in the game.

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I'm one of those people who really didn't like Myst when it came out, and I think you guys hit most of the reasons. It was around an odd crossroads in PC gaming. Part of it was due to my not liking the direction Sierra was going. This all feels super silly to type out, but I didn't like most of their VGA point n click games, and I blame the fidelity/interface transition more. Around 1992/93 we had PG3, QFG3, KQ6, and SQ5. They looked nice, but I thought they were less interesting, and I think Myst struck me similarly.

 

There was also a bit of proximity to the FMV "games are the new Hollywood" explosion, and I probably felt Myst was closer to that. It had the smooth motion, but generally less-"interactive" nature. It wasn't like 7th Guest or anything, but it seemed more like that to me, when my favorite game at the time was Ultima 7, which was pushing "total experience" in a way no games had at that point.

 

I don't think it's that silly. There's a difference between the AGI/SCI 1 vs later SCI era Sierra games. Sierra clearly had a lot of trouble with learning to design puzzles for mouse-driven interface.

 

Myst and the 7th Guest did make me worry that I'd loose the games I really loved: the Lucas adventures. Eventually it turned out I did, but not for the reasons I thought. I also thought that Ultima Underworld games were the heralds of a new age, but that also never really came to be.

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Chris's calamitous caper began when he cracked a caveman's cranium and bested a bewildered bear, but he was jumped by a jaguar and engaged in a joust before jumping after an aquatic artifact under the care of a crocodile that curtly chomped him until he expired it with an expert excavation, and he almost escaped until he was eviscerated by an elk.

Bravo.

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The twist of Far Cry Primal is that one of the tech dudes working at Animus for Ass Creed had a seriously bad mushroom trip and lived out this weird 10,000 BC life.

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Also, man, Nick turning Stardew Valley into Depression Quest 2: Skip Work and Eat Bread in Bed was rough to listen to...

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It was definitely the best. I'll say this - before Nick described his absolute iron willed refusal to engage with that game, I had no interest in Stardew Valley at all. Now that he talked about it, I kind of want to play?!

 

 

It's funny, right before Jake talked about how Idle Thumbs was the worst for not evoking FC2, I was thinking about how proud I was that there was such an interesting and engaging discussion about a Far Cry game about it's own pitfalls and merits without mentioning Clint Hawking's Far Cry 2: Far Cry 2 at all.

 

You're wrong Jake! You're 100% incorrect.

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Whoops you misspelled his name. I think you're thinking of Tony Hawk's Crusader King's 2.

 

No there are definitely hawks in it. I'm leaving it as is.

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Whoops you misspelled his name. I think you're thinking of Tony Hawk's Crusader King's 2.

Whoops, punctuation error. I actually meant Tony Hawk's Crew: Sade R. King's 22nd Birthday Bash Minigame Collection

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