Jake

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Join us as we wander the world without a map, pecking away with tiny pointed attacks at anything perceived as adversarial, navigating with only the barest remembered scraps of where things were, what they were like, how they should be.

Discussed: Offworld Trading Company, Dark Souls III, Hyper Light Drifter, Duck Game, Team Fortress 2, Hitman, Sin Episodes

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That's a pretty eclectic list of discussed games. I'm looking forward to it.

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1:22:13-1:25:04 of this episode: https://vine.co/v/ejhPMjQ9ZFq

 

I expressed my thoughts/feelings on that specific part of the episode via a popular internet meme video because I am a dimwitted frequent internet user whose brain has been turned into a garbage factory. (Joking/not joking.)

 

Seriously, though: enjoyed Jake's thoughts on "Hyper Light Drifter" and the discussion of episodic games and what has and hasn't worked for them. And as always enjoy a Thumbsian tangential farce. Thanks!

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I could've sworn I knew that Uru = "You Are You" because of the Idle Thumbs podcast, but Chris and Nick seemed so surprised by that fact. 

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I could've sworn I knew that Uru = "You Are You" because of the Idle Thumbs podcast, but Chris and Nick seemed so surprised by that fact.

I don't remember anything we have ever discussed on Idle Thumbs

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Yet I probably do remember close to everything you've ever discussed on Idle Thumbs. Podcasts are weird, man.

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Listening to the discussion of the janky emergent gameplay techniques of early multiplayer FPS, and how they have been polished out of modern games like Call of Duty or Battlefield, or formalized like skiing in Tribes Ascend, and I think your examples are great, but I can provide at least one example that the jank is still out there. Here's a 6 page guide to obscure Chivalry mechanics for example, "dragging is the manipulation of the player view so that your attack lands quicker (accelerated attack), or that it lands slower (delayed attack)." I would imagine with all the early access survival games out there today, all the Minecraft mods the kids are playing, that there is still plenty of weird emergent play styles fostered by niche communities.

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Listening to the discussion of the janky emergent gameplay techniques of early multiplayer FPS, and how they have been polished out of modern games like Call of Duty or Battlefield, or formalized like skiing in Tribes Ascend, and I think your examples are great, but I can provide at least one example that the jank is still out there. Here's a 6 page guide to obscure Chivalry mechanics for example, "dragging is the manipulation of the player view so that your attack lands quicker (accelerated attack), or that it lands slower (delayed attack)." I would imagine with all the early access survival games out there today, all the Minecraft mods the kids are playing, that there is still plenty of weird emergent play styles fostered by niche communities.

Haha, this is a great example. You should write in to [email protected]!

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What was the uh URL for the Thumbs flower thingy!

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What was the uh URL for the Thumbs flower thingy!

 

proflowers.com, click that microphone, and enter the offer code "thumbs"!

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That's a pretty eclectic list of discussed games. I'm looking forward to it.

 

It is kind of mind bending how many good games have already been released this year, and we still have things to look forward to like new Dishonored and new Deus Ex!

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Chris' declaration that Jake could not have been in high school when Deus Ex came out sounded like the most passive-aggressive way of calling him "old."

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Here's a couple of essential Arnold compilations:

 

 

+

but still pretty motivational...

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When I was a kid (5th grade I think) a Cool Kid said: "The MicMac store [or something vaguely Native American like that] is the best store in the city." I internalized this. We did not live in the city. The next time we went to the city, I wanted to visit the MicMac store and insisted that I must visit this cool place. It turned out it was a boring clothing store and there was nothing cool about it. In fact, the place sucked. I experience a rather severe bout of cognitive dissonance. I had been so awed by this kid that I internalized his opinion without any thought or filtering. I like to think I learned something. At least I gained an anecdote.


I've always been a Cyan/Myst fan, and would like to point out, that you can still play "Myst Online: Uru Live again", or MO:ULa. With the fondness of throwing a barb at your friend, the experience has some resemblance to the acronym.

Uru Live was insanely ambitious for it's time. Uru was initially conceived as a pure multiplayer experience. The game was released in 2003, initally as the single-player component Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, with Uru Live entering beta shortly afterwards. This was a time when broadband was still pretty much limited to campuses and even internet access wasn't a guarantee at all. The whole thing was doomed from start. To combat this, Cyan has designed the most overdetailed, bloated, overcomplicated game engine ever. It had an ambitious physics systems for items and the character models. Quaint by modern standards, but pretty cool at the time. I remember playing something soccer-like with safety cones as goal posts with some people. Even the audio was physically modeled.

All of that meant that a single location couldn't even handle 10 people, before the performance tanked. I remember trying to attend one in game meeting in the Cavern, where the devs where supposed to do some roleplaying. At 30 people the whole thing had become a warping slideshow of people running around to the cacophonous soundtrack of the physically modeled echoes of their footsteps and jumps. The whole thing crashed before it reached 40 people. The game had a rather incomprehensible instancing system, where basically everyone could have their own instance of every single game location, but there also were multiple shared instances. All of which were accessed via the same in-game, very Myst, puzzly interface.

Ubisoft cancelled Uru Live before it was officially released in 2004. I think. Cyan released some of the stuff they had intended as part of Uru Live as kind of expansion packs for Uru: Ages of Myst. To D'ni and Path of the Shell. Cyan also release Myst V in 2005. While I've never really found out, I suspect a lot of the content in Myst 5 was initially intended to be a part of Uru Live.

Later, 2007 I think, in a rather strange deal, GameTap, which was the Turner Network's attempt at getting in on the whole games and digital distribution thing, bought/funded Myst Online: Uru Live as part of their monthly subscription service. Myst Online got cancelled a year later, again. The rights reverted back to Cyan and a few years later Cyan release Myst Online: Uru Live again client as open source. There's an official server, and some vague plans of supporting fan made Myst worlds, but it's still kind of pending. There are also two fan servers with custom content. I'm not sure if they use the Cyan server, or MOSS, which is some kind of a reverse engineered version.

There's a bunch more details, but a lot I also do not know. I would love to read the full story of Uru Live.

MO:ULa is free and can be downloaded from www.mystonline.com. The installation on Windows 10 required some troubleshooting: http://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=28177 The real pain is getting the account, as there doesn't seem to be any automated system for creating the accounts. Instead you must create a forum account (or resurrect your 9 years old account, depending on your circumstances), apply for PM rights on the forum and then request an account via PM.

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I could've sworn I knew that Uru = "You Are You" because of the Idle Thumbs podcast, but Chris and Nick seemed so surprised by that fact. 

 

You are correct. Jake brings it up pretty much every time Myst is mentioned.

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Always excited when Myth comes up in a podcast!

 

Jake was basically right about Myth III-- when Microsoft bought Bungie, Take Two got the Myth (and Oni!) IP, and they hired Mumbo Jumbo to make Myth III, which as far as I know literally nobody liked. I checked out as soon as I played the demo and realized the mission briefings weren't read by Geoffrey Charlton-Perrin, since why even play Myth if you don't start every level by reading an old man's diary about the hardships of war or whatever.

 

I guess afterwards Take-Two just gave up on Myth and according to Wikipedia the whole Mumbo Jumbo Myth team was laid off. :(

 

edit: why on earth did these forums parse a frown face emoticon as some kind of chomping tomato

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So, after the discussion of a Thief trailer, I thought "Hey! My favorite YouTube Cellists, 2Cellos (sorry, ThePianoGuys), definitely did a version of Smooth Criminal!" So I mashed it up with one of the trailers for Thief from 2014, and after a little futzing with timing and adding in some more clips from a different Thief trailer to pad out the bits where I cut out Garrett sinking particularly far into the uncanny valley, I think it's pretty good (for less than an hour's work).


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Pretty solid discussion about what makes TF2 easy to grasp (if someone just points out what you need to pay attention to) vs how incomprehensible DOTA is. The problem with DOTA is there aren't a couple of basic things you need to know, there's tons of small things you need to understand. Honestly the only saving grace for the game is how out of this world good Valve's sound design is, and that's the part that makes the game super "readable", but that's also the part that is hardest for new players to pick up on.

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At 30 people the whole thing had become a warping slideshow of people running around to the cacophonous soundtrack of the physically modeled echoes of their footsteps and jumps. The whole thing crashed before it reached 40 people.

I love this description! Early online experiments like that were so exciting and ultimately disappointing. Even on the singleplayer side, the "let's physically model everything" approach was one I always admired, even when it led to things like Trespasser.

edit: I keep thinking about this. I miss the way game developers would sometimes take a hardcore simulationist approach in genres where you'd never do that now. Like, I can't imagine Interstate '76 existing now (which coincidentally also had a fundamentally screwed up networking model).

At least we have ArmA, but I'd love to see another sci-fi/fantastical game with that approach. The discussion about Tribes on the cast fits into this; C&C Renegade and Bethesda's Terminator games also come to mind. It was a very 90s ideal to approach things from the perspective that you should obviously try to realistically simulate whatever outlandish scenario you're presenting, because that's what computers are good at.

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