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Idle Thumbs 273: "Batman Loves Him A Parallelogram" or "I Considered An Oeuvre"

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Idle Thumbs 273:

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"Batman Loves Him A Parallelogram" or "I Considered An Oeuvre"

Join us on two very different journeys to the future... of the past. We crack open our briefcase-sized laptop and hack through layer after layer of security in the 80s cyberpunk world of Quadrilateral Cowboy, then take a wrong turn and find ourselves in the polished fiberglass and shag carpet Fondlarium of Headlander. Batman is destroyed.

Discussed: Quadrilateral Cowboy, Headlander, RimWorld, Inside, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Half-Life, Imbroglio, Batman

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While the title for this episode is strong, I think we also need to appreciate the parallel universe where this episode is called, "I Considered An Oeuvre".

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While the title for this episode is strong, I think we also need to appreciate the parallel universe where this episode is called, "I Considered An Oeuvre".

Maybe it was always called that.

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Prey had an interesting respawn mechanic, you went to the spirit world and shot some weird flying things to get some HP back before returning to the regular world.

 



I also remember some of the early Rainbow 6 games had an Xcom like death mechanic, where new squad members were recruitable if some died on a mission. However there was a very short name list and eventually you started getting numbered anonymous soldiers. 

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Prey had an interesting respawn mechanic, you went to the spirit world and shot some weird flying things to get some HP back before returning to the regular world.

Oh yeah! That felt very inspired by WoW death to me at the time. Or, one felt like the other. Whichever was first.

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Ultima Online, at least in the initial couple of years, had you come back as a ghost and you had to travel to be resurrected.  Which could mean some incredibly long corpse runs if you had to run back to town, and then back to your body with no equipment on you.  I know eventually they added like insured equipment and stuff to help with the second part.

 

But, there were some interesting parts to being a ghost.  You could manifest by entering combat mode, and players could see you, but not understand you unless they had the right ability or skill.  Since your default state was invisible, if you were PK'd by an asshole, you could track them invisible as a ghost, and then alert your friends as to where they ended up so you could coordinate your vengeance from beyond the grave.  Being a ghost also let you get into and explore a few areas that would have been risky alive. 

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Ultima Online, at least in the initial couple of years, had you come back as a ghost and you had to travel to be resurrected.  Which could mean some incredibly long corpse runs if you had to run back to town, and then back to your body with no equipment on you.  I know eventually they added like insured equipment and stuff to help with the second part.

 

But, there were some interesting parts to being a ghost.  You could manifest by entering combat mode, and players could see you, but not understand you unless they had the right ability or skill.  Since your default state was invisible, if you were PK'd by an asshole, you could track them invisible as a ghost, and then alert your friends as to where they ended up so you could coordinate your vengeance from beyond the grave.  Being a ghost also let you get into and explore a few areas that would have been risky alive. 

Everquests corpse run mechanic was the worst, I remember multiple times where I had to pay people to drag my body back to somewhere I could get back to.

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Is there a link for the Batman episode generator? I can't for the life of me find it :(

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I have mildly bad news: the Batman episode generator (and most of the predictive text stuff out there) is not exactly the Voice of Robots. Most of the stuff I've found is using this code; it generates a dictionary from the text corpus fed to it, but then it only suggests the next word given the previous ones. It gives the user a list of suggested words, and it's up to whoever is using the program to "write" the story by continuously picking the next words. The amusing results are great, but they are heavily curated. 

 

(I'll try to write a quick thing that uses this code and picks the next word at random based on the probabilities that the code already calculates and see how much nonsense comes out of it)

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On the topic of death/failure in games, there's a really cool text adventure game called Spider and Web that plays with this in a novel way. You play as a spy infiltrating a secret lab, but the story is presented as your character having been captured and being interrogated as to how he broke in. So when you get something wrong, the interrogator will say "You're lying, that couldn't have happened. Tell me again." That doesn't just happen for failure states, but if you do something like solve a puzzle a certain way, the interrogator will say that the method you used couldn't have been done (Which is actually a neat trick to stop the player using an item that they need to keep for a later puzzle).

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I would just like to thank Barbara Batman and Spaff for appearing in the episode. Spaffs laugh at the end really cracked me up. Thanks Spaff.

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When talking about a game that leaves your corpses behind you should check out an iOS game called "sometimes you die" great game with cool atmosphere and a death mechanic that requires you to die in order to keep progressing. I highly suggest it.

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I just wanted to say the Quadrilateral Cowboy release trailer is easily my favorite game trailer of the past several years. The typing as the rhythm/metronome to the whole thing is so good.

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I just wanted to say the Quadrilateral Cowboy release trailer is easily my favorite game trailer of the past several years. The typing as the rhythm/metronome to the whole thing is so good.

Hey thanks :) The rhythm was an early idea that Derek just totally nailed in his capture and editing of the big gameplay montage that makes up the bulk of the trailer. The amount of secret detail he got in those shots is nuts. I'm glad you like it!

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I meant to post this a few days ago but it's about a game's respawn/death mechanics.

 

Planescape Torment's entire drive/story is "Why can't I die". In game, you just respawned in some safe/previous area after dying. I think (can't remember 100%) it's suppose to be your body regenerating itself and whatever killed you losing interest. Your party members then drag you away or a wandering corpse collector brings you to the mortuary. There's an actual mechanical thing that happens that depends on how many deaths you had, as well as the story

 

making you feel bad about all the times you died.

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Weird thing about Half-Life 2 in the context of player deaths being erased from the overarching narrative: there's a line of dialogue from the generic citizens where they say "Wait a minute... That's not Gordon Freeman!" after you die. It implies a mistaken narrator much like Price of Persia: The Sands of Time.

 

I found it while poking around in the asset packages, but I don't recall ever actually hearing it in the game so I'm not sure whether it was unused or perhaps just has a very low chance of being triggered. 

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Weird thing about Half-Life 2 in the context of player deaths being erased from the overarching narrative: there's a line of dialogue from the generic citizens where they say "Wait a minute... That's not Gordon Freeman!" after you die. It implies a mistaken narrator much like Price of Persia: The Sands of Time.

I found it while poking around in the asset packages, but I don't recall ever actually hearing it in the game so I'm not sure whether it was unused or perhaps just has a very low chance of being triggered.

Huh I would expect a line like that to be in the context of a brush with fame - like "that's not Gordon freeman is it?! Can it be??" and not "that's a different guy! an impostor!" but I haven't heard the line. Weird stuff! I hope that it is a little peel back of the wallpaper revealing a weird world underneath as you also hope, and not just a bad line read.

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Aha, found the clips:

http://combineoverwiki.net/index.php?title=File%3AGordead_ans17_female.ogg

http://combineoverwiki.net/index.php?title=File%3AGordead_ans17_male.ogg

 

My guess is that it was a little joke with a nudge and a wink through the forth wall, but it was perhaps later decided that it was making implications that weren't coherent with the rest of the fiction.

 

However, I do like the idea that there was this supposed Second Coming of the Freeman who was promptly splattered by his own gravity gun mishap, revealing him to just be some guy with glasses and a goatee. I guess he was unable to tell everyone to stop calling him Gordon Freeman.

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Did you guys say you'd do an 'inside' spoiler chat at a later point? I've played through it now so I'd like to hear that :tup:

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I believe they already did the spoiler chat in lieu of doing it at a later date.

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