Chris

Idle Thumbs 259: Breckon's Similar Sausage Face

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The new Unreal Tournament game will hopefully be what you guys want in terms of just bring a bare bones fast paced arena shooter. The Alpha lacks exp bars, classes etc. It does have some cosmetic unlocks but considering that user made skins were part of earlier games it doesn't feel out of place.

 

I think Reflex also works well on that front.  It feels more like Quake to me than the new DOOM game I guess (http://reflexfps.net/)

 

 

Edit: also, that's me playing in the video...so sorry for my shitty playing in advance!

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Here is an article that asks developers in praise of Stephen's Saisage Roll for more in depth reasoning than what's allowed in a tweet.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/271017/Simple_but_incredibly_filling_Devs_weigh_in_on_Stephens_Sausage_Roll.php

I haven't played the game since I can't get past the first level in English Country Tune. It's interesting to see all these mechanically biased indie-folks find the no-nonsense game they've been waiting for; it pushes me more into my own biases toward material, motive, and imperfection. Stephen's Sausage Roll is such an interesting case to compare those sensibilities since here is a case of one of the most prolific, influential, and straight-up helpful developers in free impressionistic hobbyist games coming out with a mechanically refined commercial release that isn't attractive to me at all. It makes me feel like I'm in the place I want to be in.

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The TF2/CS:GO talk reminded me of this article I saw recently about using gun skins for gambling on GO matches. It contains this fun quote:

 

At Valve’s 2014 developer's conference, employee Kyle Davis explained the thinking behind the strategy. The best way to get players deeply engaged in games, the company had determined, was to give away virtual items of random value and encourage a robust market to trade them.

 

“This is not an accident. This is by design,” he said. "We see more blogs popping up and more and more e-mails from our players saying, ‘I’m not really sure what happened but I’ve been playing DotA for the last week or two, and I made $100 selling these items that I got.’ This is hugely successful for us.” Davis declined an interview request for this story.

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Could someone recommend a different online Increpare game to play? I know he has tons.

Everything I've read about sausage simultaneously attracts me and repels, due to the design and extreme difficulty respectively.

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I really wish people would stop focusing on the difficulty/brutality/etc of the Souls games. It's very apparent it puts people off the games, and makes them go in with often incorrect preconceptions. You shouldn't be afraid to explore systems.

That YouTuber who went through without having played them before put it very well:

 

This is an awful lot like what I feel about The Witness. A lot of people made it very hard for themselves because they expected it to be hard. Rather than seeing a puzzle and thinking "I'm not equipped to deal with this, I'll wait until the game teaches me these concepts," as they would with a normal video game, they think "oh yes this is a hard puzzle in the hard video game 'The Witness,' I should spend 3 hours brute forcing it."

 

Expectations make up a huge part of how we experience games.

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This is an awful lot like what I feel about The Witness. A lot of people made it very hard for themselves because they expected it to be hard. Rather than seeing a puzzle and thinking "I'm not equipped to deal with this, I'll wait until the game teaches me these concepts," as they would with a normal video game, they think "oh yes this is a hard puzzle in the hard video game 'The Witness,' I should spend 3 hours brute forcing it."

Expectations make up a huge part of how we experience games.

Are there actually a lot of people who do the thing you describe here, or do you suspect and feel sure that there are and then have worry over those people? I ask because I have never heard anyone describe an experience with The Witness like the one above.

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Are there actually a lot of people who do the thing you describe here, or do you suspect and feel sure that there are and then have worry over those people? I ask because I have never heard anyone describe an experience with The Witness like the one above.

That's the impression I got from how Danielle was talking about the game, as well as a few people on other podcasts. Rather than accepting (or possibly even realizing) they don't have the toolset necessary to progress, they'd bash their heads against a puzzle for hours and end up hating the game.

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Isn't Mortar & Pestle basically a puzzle game like Head Over Heels (from the days of 1980s "gimmick" puzzle games)? It feels more like that - a game where you have to separate Mortar and Pestle to solve bits of puzzles which the other can't do separately, but then combine them to do other bits - than a "two buddies" game like, say Bubba and Squeek (from the days of early 1990s platformers with buddy AI). 

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Could someone recommend a different online Increpare game to play? I know he has tons.

Everything I've read about sausage simultaneously attracts me and repels, due to the design and extreme difficulty respectively.

 

I'd recommend just downloading 5-10 of the games from this website and trying them out when you get an urge to. Most of them take less than 30 minutes to get through. A lot of them are somewhat distressing and a few of them are not safe for work. I don't really have any personal favorites, and I typically don't enjoy the act of playing them, but I gain something by exposing myself to them. I doubt that one game from that website is essential, but the diversity and expressed sensibilities and their being displayed as the work of an author presents a valuable context for computer-games.

It's also worth noting that increpare made some very accessible tools for game-development and often provides the website-hosting for the results.

-A choose-you-own-adventure making tool, tinychoice

-An point&click adventure-game making tool, flickgame (also increpare curates a gallery of flickgames others have made)

-A pinball making tool, plingpling

-And PuzzleScript.

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If you want to join other people's games, you can buy the white soapstone from the Maiden at the Firelink Shrine and use it to inscribe your own white sign on the floor. People will summon you to their games and you'll get to keep a quarter of the souls that are earned from defeating a boss. There is no penalty if you or the host dies, besides time spent and the end of your tenure together. If you feel like playing conservatively and keeping risk low, it's a good way to explore an area and learn a boss without risking any of your own souls.

 

This is exactly how I learn boss fights. Find the arena, drop a sign, and sunbro a few battles before doing it myself.

 

From has also been making it easier and easier to co-op with people you know as the games have gone on. If the Thumbs wanted to run with some people from the forums, it's as simple as setting a multiplayer password in the menu.

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It doesn't make for good radio, but Judson Cowan did a very nice visualization for the various Dark Souls' world structures that I thought encapsulated things really well:

 

CgPeoGkWEAAANdi.jpg

 

(That middle one for DSII could just as easily be Demon's Souls as well)

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That seems like a fair representation. I've read some interesting DSII apologists' articles on that game's world design, but the interlocking puzzle box of Dark Souls 1 continues to dwarf anything else I've played.

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That's the impression I got from how Danielle was talking about the game, as well as a few people on other podcasts. Rather than accepting (or possibly even realizing) they don't have the toolset necessary to progress, they'd bash their heads against a puzzle for hours and end up hating the game.

Yeah, a lot of this came from following Danielle on twitter, but her experience was hardly unique among people who I found stuck in the game. Very often people were stuck on a puzzle because they hadn't found the part that teaches you that mechanic yet. I remember lots of forum conversations along the lines of "Help I've been stuck on this for hours" "Have you done X yet" "No" "You're not equipped to deal with that puzzle yet."

 

My assertion regarding what particular expectation they had wasn't really founded in anything but my own assumptions about why people won't move on from a puzzle that they can't solve. There's also the fact that people aren't used to games structured in this fashion. In most games you are generally trained to deal with a puzzle before you have the possibility to encounter it. The Witness does try to teach the player about the structure of the game early on, but it's not exactly something that's unmissable, and depending on the path you initially take through the game, it's not really ever reinforced for a while. Maybe the game shouldn't have opened up until you hit the town for the first time, rather than letting you go off to the left and do symmetry first.

 

But, if you've been stuck on a particular puzzle that you aren't equipped to deal with for a while without leaving it and looking for puzzles you can do, at some point you have to think "This is what the game is asking me to do" which is something that's only possible if you believe that the game is really that demanding. The buzz surrounding the game at release definitely could help one to believe that.

 

Also, as a post script: I'm not trying to say that The Witness is an easy game and you're all babies for finding it hard. Even absent this issue, there's some legitimately hard puzzles even once you know all the mechanics, and some of the tutorializing has some pretty big leaps between what one panel is asking you and what the next panel is asking you.

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But, if you've been stuck on a particular puzzle that you aren't equipped to deal with for a while without leaving it and looking for puzzles you can do, at some point you have to think "This is what the game is asking me to do" which is something that's only possible if you believe that the game is really that demanding. The buzz surrounding the game at release definitely could help one to believe that.

Yeah, that's definitely how Dark Souls has been for many people, too. A bunch of people pushes through the Catacombs and into the Tomb of Giants, even though the game was trying to tell them that they were headed in the wrong direction by upping the difficulty, because they thought the game was supposed to be that hard. It's the fault of the marketing, in that case, but in the case of Mr. Blow's game, who knows?

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speaking of dark souls maps, and that email from nels (hi nels), I tried drawing undeadburg from memory until I ran out of paper

 

ik9WZLh.jpg

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Yeah, that's definitely how Dark Souls has been for many people, too. A bunch of people pushes through the Catacombs and into the Tomb of Giants, even though the game was trying to tell them that they were headed in the wrong direction by upping the difficulty, because they thought the game was supposed to be that hard. It's the fault of the marketing, in that case, but in the case of Mr. Blow's game, who knows?

I think in both cases, it's primarily the fault of the game actually being very challenging.

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The first one took me a while, but I solved all three puzzles.

9hESxwH.png

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I think in both cases, it's primarily the fault of the game actually being very challenging.

Yes, but there are other challenging games that don't cause their players to choose near-impossible paths through the content and assume that it's developer intent for them to be having such difficulty. People playing Fallout: New Vegas, to choose a bad example, don't head north, run into deathclaws from the endgame, and still keep going. They turn around. Somehow, the same sequence doesn't happen to people going into the Catacombs in the first Dark Souls. Something has been communicated about the game's difficulty, before they even start playing, that makes virtually any gameplay experience, no matter how failure-ridden, be interpreted as "normal" for the game. It's a really interesting phenomenon and doesn't deserve to be flattened down to just raw difficulty.

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This is the Oscars season of Idle Thumbs episode titles. Really gotta get in some classic ones before the Wizard Jam.

 

I can't believe they didn't name this episode "Try to Incentivise Dads." Think of the games you could make with that!

 

I didn't play much of the Doom beta but I had a fairly good time with it. I'm not sure it'll be mega popular but it's not a bad game by any means. I've also seen people compare it to Halo and that comparison bugs me for two reasons. One, it doesn't play anything like Halo, the only similarity is that you have an armoured space marine guy, which is a ridiculous comparison because Doom had an armoured space marine guy.

 

Two, when people make this sort of comparison to Halo they're usually doing it in a negative way, which I can't stand because Halo is a really good game. What people are really mad about is how Halo popularised a new style of shooter that worked well on consoles and inadvertently brought an end to the wild west era of late 90's/early 2000's PC shooters which didn't really have a unifying design philosophy behind them. When people talk shit about Halo they're really taking an elitist stance against dumb console shooters for babies and lamenting how modern shooters aren't like the Good Old Days. But there have been shooters that tried to recapture the old-school style (The Rise of the Triad remake comes to mind) that all seem to have missed the mark, because it's so easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater when you intentionally try to eschew modern design conventions. Because modern design conventions are fun! And if they weren't fun they wouldn't be design conventions!

 

With that attitude, I don't see how Doom can win. If it features modern conventions like weapon loadouts then it's a dumb baby shooter for console kiddies, but if it tries to be a faithful recreation of days gone by then it risks just not being very good because modern video games have far more mechanics to consider than games from 1995.

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I can't believe they didn't name this episode "Try to Incentivise Dads." Think of the games you could make with that!

Usually when there's an unforgivable title oversight, it's because we didn't write down the superior phrase after it happened and no longer remembered its occurrence by the end of the episode. It's always a minor tragedy.

I didn't play much of the Doom beta but I had a fairly good time with it. I'm not sure it'll be mega popular but it's not a bad game by any means. I've also seen people compare it to Halo and that comparison bugs me for two reasons. One, it doesn't play anything like Halo, the only similarity is that you have an armoured space marine guy, which is a ridiculous comparison because Doom had an armoured space marine guy.

 

Two, when people make this sort of comparison to Halo they're usually doing it in a negative way, which I can't stand because Halo is a really good game. What people are really mad about is how Halo popularised a new style of shooter that worked well on consoles and inadvertently brought an end to the wild west era of late 90's/early 2000's PC shooters which didn't really have a unifying design philosophy behind them. When people talk shit about Halo they're really taking an elitist stance against dumb console shooters for babies and lamenting how modern shooters aren't like the Good Old Days. But there have been shooters that tried to recapture the old-school style (The Rise of the Triad remake comes to mind) that all seem to have missed the mark, because it's so easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater when you intentionally try to eschew modern design conventions. Because modern design conventions are fun! And if they weren't fun they wouldn't be design conventions!

 

With that attitude, I don't see how Doom can win. If it features modern conventions like weapon loadouts then it's a dumb baby shooter for console kiddies, but if it tries to be a faithful recreation of days gone by then it risks just not being very good because modern video games have far more mechanics to consider than games from 1995.

Yeah I'm with you on all of this.

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I've kind of started to wonder if Wizard Jam has had an impact on the Idle Thumbs podcast network naming convention, especially now that all shows are on the table.

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Those Dark Souls map visualizations are so good.  I really wonder how much of an anomaly 1 will continue to be due to the kind of time and attention it takes to make that world interlock and wrap around naturally the way it does. 

 

 

Weirdly enough though, so far, I think I would take the DS2/Demon's overall world design over the DS3 design.  Each individual area in DS3 is better than the individual areas of 2 (not counting DLC), but I still appreciate the ability to have multiple paths from the beginning that I can pursue rather than a fairly lengthy linear path that 3 mandates before it starts offering branching options (and some of the branches in 3 aren't really branches, in that in one case there is a key at the end of a branch that is required for future progress, so that branch is functionally part of the straight linear path). 

 

As a few of us in Slack chat learned last night, there is one integrated major sequence break early in the game where you can intentionally summon a late game boss that will unlock a hidden path, but hoooooly shit is that a next to impossible battle at low level.  The boss can 1-2 shot most characters who are sub level-40 and takes at least 4-5 minutes to beat down with low level weapons. 

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