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Idle Thumbs 269: Robot Russian Roulette

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Idle Thumbs 269:

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Robot Russian Roulette

The robot hovers silently in front of you; its micro-props keep it nearly still in the hot evening breeze. System Shock buzzes on the screen behind you. Next to it on another screen, the new Hitman runs idle, waiting. You've made a little easy cash from the robot tonight already - no big scores but better than the alternative - which means your luck has to be running thin, but how thin? You're not sure if you imagine it but as your hand approaches the palm acceptance plate the robot seems to pause, as if to breathe in. You lower your hand, slowly slide the balcony door shut and go play video games.

Discussed: System Shock (Remastered), Hitman (2016), Overland, Counter-Strike: GO, Bridge

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That header image made me think this was a new Terminal7 episode for a second.

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Anyone else play Tremulous back in the day? It's a quake3 mod based on Natural Selection. It had a small community but enough players for good games

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This episode made me laugh more than any other in recent memory. Great episode!

 

Edit: Specifically, the TF2 Hat Baron / CS:GO banter.

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Hey guys, thanks for pointing me to the Idle Thumbs Blog, lots of great information there!

 

Really looking forward to the new show on the network, "Esports Today"!

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Long time listener, first time poster (I think).

 

When the crew started talking about getting into game dev via modding, I racked my brain in an attempt to remember my first modding experiences. Turns out I skipped all that at first and went straight to super mega hardcore game development with the Unity of the day, back in '94:

Maxis / Europress Software's Klik & Play!

Any other Teh Hardc0rez Klik & Play devs from back then? I don't have any of my old projects (they never amounted to a "full" game anyway, just individual levels), but I'd love to see any games anyone else might have made using this awesome tool.

 

Also: Imagine my delight when I found that it is possible to download it! http://knpforschools.webs.com/

Back then it came on floppies. Who's up for a Klik & Play Wizard Jam?

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I also Klik-ed 'n' Play-ed (and a bit of Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion-ing too, but always stopping short of ever having to pay for full versions of anything). I never made anything very systemic ever. Everything I ever made was either a weird QTE/mini-game driven narrative thing (a David Cage style game I guess?) or a failed attempt at a Lucasarts-ripoff adventure game. Art was always stolen, music was always embarrassing midi covers of... well, anything and everything, with no cohesion. Mission Impossible theme, hip-hop beats, songs that Weird Al parodied, etc.

 

Eventually I graduated to AGS where I continued to fail to make adventure games, but this time not because I couldn't get it to work technically but purely because I'd be discouraged at how terrible my art was. Terrible, yes, even by amateur AGS standards; I played a lot of Reality on the Norm stuff and thought that all looked fine.

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Jay Tholen, who is occasionally around here, and is the mind behind Dropsy the Clown was a dedicated Klik n Play-er

(Dropsy is my 2015 game of the year)

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I also Klik-ed 'n' Play-ed (and a bit of Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion-ing too, but always stopping short of ever having to pay for full versions of anything). I never made anything very systemic ever. Everything I ever made was either a weird QTE/mini-game driven narrative thing (a David Cage style game I guess?) or a failed attempt at a Lucasarts-ripoff adventure game. Art was always stolen, music was always embarrassing midi covers of... well, anything and everything, with no cohesion. Mission Impossible theme, hip-hop beats, songs that Weird Al parodied, etc.

 

Eventually I graduated to AGS where I continued to fail to make adventure games, but this time not because I couldn't get it to work technically but purely because I'd be discouraged at how terrible my art was. Terrible, yes, even by amateur AGS standards; I played a lot of Reality on the Norm stuff and thought that all looked fine.

 

Hehe yeah, in my case probably 97% of the assets I used were the ones that shipped with KnP ;) Art is one of the big problems for me as well - I have a high bar for what I want and so little (almost no) skill. I might just be able to manage making a HOG using my photos and PS.

Hm. Actually maybe I should try doing that.

 

Jay Tholen, who is occasionally around here, and is the mind behind Dropsy the Clown was a dedicated Klik n Play-er

(Dropsy is my 2015 game of the year)

 

That's awesome! Yeah a lot of people really loved that game. I doubt he made that specific one in KnP tho :P

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My first modding experience was editing gwbasic games on a 8086. And later creating tools to edit games.

It wasn't until I went to the university (received a proper internet connection) and when UT came out that I really got involved modding.

The good old modding scene, when people tried to create cool stuff just because, not because of money or fame.

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I got started in games modification when I got a Commodore 64 - I keyed in a bunch of games and learned some Basic, which let me do cool stuff like

CLS
10 INPUT "What is your name?", a$
20 PRINT a$; "rocks!"
30 GOTO 10
And from there it wasn't super far to trying to cobble together primitive text adventures, or painstakingly drawing sprites during math class to try and input at home & make bounce around.

And if you're keying in games yourself from say a magazine, and can always look at a game's source code, it's pretty hard to resist the temptation to mess with it.

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Re. the Nintendogate thing, it's not by any means the consensus that it was baseless outrage or whatever that letter said. The arguments against it being two separate innocent jokes - a Watergate allusion and a fungi pun/callback - are, as I understand it:

 

the jokes aren't that far apart

gg were calling it a reference to themselves until Quinn saw it and agreed, at which point they changed their minds

it being a Watergate reference makes less sense in context than a gg ref

 

I think this has been discussed at length elsewhere on the forums, anyway.

 

Re. Klik N Play, Dan Marshall and I used to make games in that (and Games Factory and Klik N Create). Here's a Size Five forum thread that links to and discusses one of the more primitive efforts. Clyde also posts in the gaming board about KnP games. I think they're KnP anyway - they come from the glorioustrainwrecks community (a search for "glorioustrainwrecks/"glorious trainwrecks" on here would probably turn up more threads too). I've actually put together a fun video of gameplay clips from most of them and Dan will hopefully release it at some point when he wants a little PR bump!

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Re. the Nintendogate thing, it's not by any means the consensus that it was baseless outrage or whatever that letter said. The arguments against it being two separate innocent jokes - a Watergate allusion and a fungi pun/callback - are, as I understand it:

 

the jokes aren't that far apart

gg were calling it a reference to themselves until Quinn saw it and agreed, at which point they changed their minds

it being a Watergate reference makes less sense in context than a gg ref

 

I think this has been discussed at length elsewhere on the forums, anyway.

 

Also slight additional note that I don't think was said last week. There's also a line about the Shuffle Gate scandal ruining the career of the person who was cheating and instigated "shufflegate".  :/

 

It's not inconceivable that this was an honest mistake where unrelated things painted an unintended picture, but people are still understandable sceptical.

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And an additional note about KnP - here's an article about a KnP (or its successor Multimedia Fusion at any rate) game that someone developed for THIRTEEN YEARS. And a documentary about it:

 

 

Here's part 1 of an (insanely long) Let's Play:

 

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can i put in a formal request that you add the subtitle "Misbehaving Roombas" to this podcast title so that someone will make a wizjam game with that concept in the future??

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There's also a line about the Shuffle Gate scandal ruining the career of the person who was cheating and instigated "shufflegate".  :/

 

Nixon's career was also ruined. I'm fairly certain! :P

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also, Thumbs are ahead of the curve yet again as now the world of CSGO skins is getting embroiled in scandal with Youtubers endorsing their weird lottery companies without disclosing ownership.

 

And an additional note about KnP - here's an article about a KnP (or its successor Multimedia Fusion at any rate) game that someone developed for THIRTEEN YEARS. And a documentary about it:

 

 

that dude also made Teletrooper, which was a really fun top down shooter where you pilot what is essentially an Arwing.

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