Jake

Idle Thumbs 263: Disable Enemies to Reveal Enemies

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Idle Thumbs 263:

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Disable Enemies to Reveal Enemies

In the middle of an awkward conversation you accidentally press down the left and right sticks at the same time. It turns out to be for the best: Your buddies look completely ridiculous frozen mid-sentence and you decide this is a perfect moment to preserve as a photo. You try to clear up the shot by setting any enemies to hidden... and find yourself suddenly alone in the room. Realizing you have no friends, you go load up Steam and play Doom for eight hours without interruption.

Discussed: Uncharted 4, Doom (2016), Dark Souls 3, DevGAMM, Planet Coaster, Parkitect, RollerCoaster Tycoon World, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare

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Referencing traversal mechanics in old Quake mods and Jake didn't mention Urban Terror? Hah

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Referencing traversal mechanics in old Quake mods and Jake didn't mention Urban Terror? Hah

I should have shouldn't I!

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Very bizarre hearing Chris talk about DevGAMM.

We basically share an office with the CEO, so I've heard some news about it every day for 3 years, also listening to Idle Thumbs in that time.

 

It's true, there's a whole scene of talented developers in Russia, Poland, Ukraine... If you're at GDC thinking "Wow, all the developers in the world in one place!" then you're forgetting the hundreds of thousands that were declined a visa, or just can't speak English well enough to communicate with PAX or Gamescom or the Indie Megabooth.

 

I don't have a good explanation for why it's called "DevGAMM", but for identifying it as a game developer's conference in Russia; it does sound right.

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I initially misheard "serving size: just enough" as "circumcised: just enough", which was an alarming notion.

Are pictures of the J Allard book available anywhere? It sounds amazing.

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Regarding the Amazon Video "X-Ray" feature that shows actor and music info on an overlay: I was playing around with that a while ago, watching The Good Wife. At one point Chris Noth suddenly popped in as a listed actor seconds before the camera panned over to show his face on a campaign poster. I have no idea if this was some kind of facial recognition, or just a very zealous intern.

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When you complete Uncharted 4 you can unlock some special render modes. One of these render modes is "Thief View" which displays friends and enemies in different colors (blue vs red).

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It is very Idle Thumbs that the Uncharted 4 spoiler discussion is actually kinda just about

Nathan Drake playing Crash Bandicoot and a weird photography feature

 

I also enjoyed your off-handedness in mentioning how bosses are bad. My Hyper Light Drifter experience seems to be similar to Jake's. I was really into the game as I completed the north and east (I think I'm remembering that right), and then I got totally, completely wrecked by a boss in the next zone over and over until I gave up. I hate bosses. Even the best ones mostly just feel like diversions from the 'actual' game, or at least what my perception of the 'actual' game is. 

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Are pictures of the J Allard book available anywhere? It sounds amazing.

 

On one of the Dark Souls tiki streams someone desperately tried to get Chris' attention to tell about the Cumularity book. He had an url for an image of the book, but I can't find it from my browser history.

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The talk about the Russian games reminded me of all the weird electromechanical games that existed in the 70s, and could still be found in out-of-the-way vacation spots in the 80s.  You can see some examples in the boardwalk scenes of the movie Jaws, for instance.  There were a whole bunch of types:

  • Shooting galleries with little figures that moved and you'd shoot pellets or BBs at them.
  • Racing games sort of like described in this episode, but the car you'd be controlling would be driving over a zoetrope rear projection or a vinyl track on spools
  • Lunar Landers where the space ship is on wires or rods.

There's a cool gallery here: http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2010/03/14/retro_arcade_museum_an_electro/

And apparently Sega made a TON of them:  http://segaretro.org/Category:Electro-mechanical_arcade_games

In some ways they were more impressive than early video games, because they have that weird tangible quality similar to pinball.  I'd find myself more mystified by how these machines work than the more complex programming behind a Space Invaders or Asteroids.

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Each level in Doom has a hidden 

room of a classic map, and when you open and find that room it unlocks the full level to play with the new doom guns and enemies from the campaign menu where you resume. "Classic Maps" is the section I believe. It's pretty spiffy, and also shows you that while the movement speed in the main game seems fast compared to modern shooters, it's still fairly slow compared to the original Doom run speed.

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On one of the Dark Souls tiki streams someone desperately tried to get Chris' attention to tell about the Cumularity book. He had an url for an image of the book, but I can't find it from my browser history.

 

All twitch VODs now have logged chat, so if you remember which stream it is, you can go find it.

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Is Jesse (or Jessie, or Jessy) H. the person who wrote in about Dark Souls/Witcher/MonHun combat a forum member? I'd like to hear their thoughts on why the combat in TW3 is as good as DS or MonHun.

 

From my experience TW3 had god awful combat, but if they can convince me I was playing wrong or there's depth I didn't find, I'd be super excited to go back and replay it. The combat in that game was what stopped it from being one of my favourite games of all time. I didn't enjoy it and there was so damn much of it. 

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I don't know if this is going overboard here but could someone post a time stamp for when the Uncharted 4 talk ends? I'm planning on playing it in July but I don't wanna hear anything about it. And just to play up my British sensibilities I'd like to say thanks and sorry and sorry.

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I don't know if this is going overboard here but could someone post a time stamp for when the Uncharted 4 talk ends? I'm planning on playing it in July but I don't wanna hear anything about it. And just to play up my British sensibilities I'd like to say thanks and sorry and sorry.

 

They mention a timestamp at the start of the discussion that you can go to to skip all UC4 talk. 

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With everyone talking about Doom now I'm really surprised how many people are bringing up Quake 4 as an example of a bad modern iD game. I bought that as a 360 launch title and absolutely loved it. The weapons are really fun, it has cool level design and it's got multiple bits where you walk around and NPCs do things. I'm honestly surprised that so many people were down on that game because I genuinely thought it was brilliant.

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Regarding the Amazon Video "X-Ray" feature that shows actor and music info on an overlay: I was playing around with that a while ago, watching The Good Wife. At one point Chris Noth suddenly popped in as a listed actor seconds before the camera panned over to show his face on a campaign poster. I have no idea if this was some kind of facial recognition, or just a very zealous intern.

 

The Google Play movies do this as well.  It even has a box that comes up and identifies actors who aren't currently on screen but were just a few seconds ago.  (At least the app does, not sure about any other versions of the player)

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With everyone talking about Doom now I'm really surprised how many people are bringing up Quake 4 as an example of a bad modern iD game. I bought that as a 360 launch title and absolutely loved it. The weapons are really fun, it has cool level design and it's got multiple bits where you walk around and NPCs do things. I'm honestly surprised that so many people were down on that game because I genuinely thought it was brilliant.

 

I thought this was curious too - I have a lot more problems with Quake 4 than I think you do, but it seemed generally pretty competent, managed to improve on Quake 2's enemy design in a few ways, and was mostly pretty good fun. It certainly wasn't as terrible as people seem to now be remembering it as. (I mean, obviously it would have been better if they'd junked Quake 2 in favour of a sequel to the original Quake, but...)

 

That said, I've never played a Call of Duty game, so I'm unable to see if any of the comparisons made are apt...

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Funny: minutes after being amazed at the fact that amazon video knows what actors are on screen in real time, the podcasters find solace in the fact that robots won't be able to know how and when they are talking about the robot overlords on the podcast due to its analog nature.

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With everyone talking about Doom now I'm really surprised how many people are bringing up Quake 4 as an example of a bad modern iD game. I bought that as a 360 launch title and absolutely loved it. The weapons are really fun, it has cool level design and it's got multiple bits where you walk around and NPCs do things. I'm honestly surprised that so many people were down on that game because I genuinely thought it was brilliant.

 

I replayed Q4 recently, and while I wouldn't say it's a great game, it's also not a bad game. Just one of those games that's right in the middle, so it's kind of hard to find anything to say about it.

 

The advent of Space Jam mashups is due to Shut up and Jam Gaiden doing it with a chiptune for the game's main theme:

 

 

The sequel is actually still in development, though it was originally targeted at December 2013 in the Kickstarter campaign.

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All twitch VODs now have logged chat, so if you remember which stream it is, you can go find it.

An old man question: What the heck does VOD stand for? The only thing I can think of is Video on Demand, but that is obviously not applicable here. Or should not be.

Despite being an old man, I did know Twitch nowadays also stores chat. However, my search was fruitless, as the chat only replays in real time, and doesn't display the history. Since I don't remember anything except that Chris was physically present during the stream, the search was too haystacky to be feasible.

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When I was very young in the 1970s there were arcades in northern Wisconsin resort lodges that had a lot of electromechanical games. Commonly you'd see the "scoop real sand using a crane into a hopper within X time to get more time to scoop sand" and the classic baseball game which could be played with two players, one controlling the pitching and the other the batter, who would set off a flipper that would hit a ball into various chutes at the top of the playfield to indicate singles, fly outs, or home runs. There were also a lot of classic games like a stand up coin-op of Atari's Combat and the bar table inset version of space invaders. Memories.

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An old man question: What the heck does VOD stand for? The only thing I can think of is Video on Demand, but that is obviously not applicable here. Or should not be.

Despite being an old man, I did know Twitch nowadays also stores chat. However, my search was fruitless, as the chat only replays in real time, and doesn't display the history. Since I don't remember anything except that Chris was physically present during the stream, the search was too haystacky to be feasible.

 

It's Video On Demand. Where Twitch is typically live, watching an old broadcast is thus a video on demand.

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