Idle Weekend October 22, 2016: Crazy Uber

[Jake]

Idle Weekend October 22, 2016:

Crazy Uber
Sit down, friends. It's time for a frank chat about expectations, marketing hype, and why Nintendo keeps naming things so... sexy... this fall. Then we SWITCH over to a robust mailbag, and a little tour of great American cities. Don't forget to give your Crazy Uber driver five stars!

Discussed: The Last Guardian, Red Dead Redemption, Nintendo Switch, System Shock, BioShock, BioShock Infinite, Burnout Paradise, Burnout 3, Devil in a Blue Dress, Ip Man (film)

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[Mygaffer]

Anyone who is familar with the original Mad Max movies should not have been surprised that the story being told was not Tom Harding's character's story. He is the vehicle through which the audience sees the other character's story.

 

That is what was so strange about some of the backlash on the Internet, which was admittedly small. They talked about Max not being the main character like the original films and I had to ask myself, have you even seen the original films?

 

Anyway, Fury Road was an excellent movie and frankly my new favorite from the series.

[Cbirdsong]

3DS games often support local wireless play, so I'd say it's likely Nintendo continues that with the Switch.

[Beasteh]

Somehow I knew Danielle would be stoked about the Switch!

 

Arcade driving games got kinda absorbed into the open-world game genre. I guess people who like driving games are more into the semi-simulation titles like Gran Turismo. Namco really need to get their act together and make a next-gen Ridge Racer...

[Twig]

22 minutes ago, Cbirdsong said:

3DS games often support local wireless play, so I'd say it's likely Nintendo continues that with the Switch.

 

Yeah I was going a bit crazy listening to all that talk about Nintendo possibly not supporting local wireless multiplayer... Even the original Game Boy had the link cable, and ever handheld since has supported multiplayer!

[BigJKO]

And they also showed what one must assume was local wireless multiplayer in the trailer, with the NBA 4-player multiplayer.

[Henke]

Who else had to go to urbandictionary.com to find out what "switch" means?

 

Or maybe it's just me who's not up-to-date on the latest sex-lingo.

[Vader]

4 hours ago, Henke said:

Who else had to go to urbandictionary.com to find out what "switch" means?

 

Or maybe it's just me who's not up-to-date on the latest sex-lingo.

 

I will admit I didn't immediately make the sexual connection when I heard the name. I think Danielle is reading it as an S&M reference.

Also, I'm glad I can always count on Jake and Danielle to always have opinions on the latest Nintendo news. Every video game podcast needs at least one of those.

[Danielle]

Ha, and here I thought I was a huge dork...

 

Ok! So, it's not just relegated to kink, or to queer sex, but the term Switch does come from those worlds. Simply, a switch is someone who can be a "top" or a "bottom" in the sexual sense. You can think of it as sub/dom, but with much broader meaning. Like, someone who simply enjoys the top or bottom position more identifies that way.

 

A switch is just someone who goes both ways!

 

Also... it's the new Nintendo Console! It sort of actually works...

 

 

[Henke]

You learn all kinds of things listening to this podcast.

 

VERY EDUCATIONAL! 

[Vader]

1 hour ago, Danielle said:

Ha, and here I thought I was a huge dork...

 

Ok! So, it's not just relegated to kink, or to queer sex, but the term Switch does come from those worlds. Simply, a switch is someone who can be a "top" or a "bottom" in the sexual sense. You can think of it as sub/dom, but with much broader meaning. Like, someone who simply enjoys the top or bottom position more identifies that way.

 

A switch is just someone who goes both ways!

 

Also... it's the new Nintendo Console! It sort of actually works...

 

 

 

huh, thanks Danielle!

[Ninja Dodo]

As someone who is fully hyped for Last Guardian, here is why, if they succeed at all at what they are trying to do, it is still very much relevant:

 

Shadow of the Colossus, eleven years later, remains unsurpassed as an achievement in dynamically interacting with living breathing creatures. No one (in my opinion) has done intricate physical character interaction to the level of Shadow of the Colossus in a game before or since. Not linear Quick Time Events, but actual dynamic interaction with AI characters. There have been advances in procedural animation to be sure (Ubisoft, Naughty Dog and Rockstar have been doing interesting work) but it's mostly used to make slightly better ragdolls or nicer transitions and rarely actually used in a way that significantly alters gameplay. Last Guardian promises to be a game  about the friendship between a boy and his giant adorable griffin-cat, not with dialogue trees or "press X to have emotional moment", but with subtle and intricate direct interaction between believable characters. This could be something truly special... important even.

 

Given their previous work, if anyone can pull this off it's Fumito Ueda and his team. Asking if maybe the world has moved on from games like this is rather like suggesting people have moved on from Ghibli films if Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement...

[eRonin]

I hope the Switch supports 8 player local multiplayer, the way the 3DS does! The Wii U managed to support 8 player Smash Bros and there was that one indie game that supported 9-player, so if they want to make the ultimate local multiplayer experience, I don't think they can back down from that. 

[Ninja Dodo]

Just got to the rest of the cast and I'm finding it hard to relate to Rob's stance that there's no point visiting historic sites because those times are gone. Have you ever been to Europe, I wonder? Because I think you vastly overestimate the degree to which, as you put it: "those worlds no longer exist"... Walk the streets in pretty much any European city worth its salt and you can practically taste the history. As someone who also has an interest in classical history and recently visited Greece I have to say you are missing out.

 

From the art, to the architecture, the landscapes and even what lives on of the old culture and language in modern descendants, these places are still very much around.

[Gatazhk]

Had trouble hearing Rob in this episode. 

 

Also I agree, 100% with Ninja Dodo about Greece Rob, you'd be amazed at Delphi, the Acropolis, Mycenae, Epidaurus, Corinth, Delos, Knossos, not to mention all the stuff in Turkey and a dozen other sites in Greece, plus the various archeological museums, you are simply missing out. 

[jennegatron]

Ruins/ancient/historical sites just dont appeal to some people. That's okay. They're super boring to me and I have been to Greece. There's a bunch of stuff I loved, like the food and the beach and the wine, but I thought the ruins were very underwhelming, crowded and uninteresting.

[Ninja Dodo]

It's not for everyone, obviously, but I find it difficult to imagine someone with an appreciation for history, especially Greek history, could not find something to enjoy there. And if you don't like crowds you should probably try the off season (early spring or fall). I went Oct/Nov and while the weather varied a bit, it was relatively quiet (great for taking pictures) and just in time for things to mostly still be open.

[Valorian Endymion]

On the subject of a reader email which comment of how internet often treat some games (I might not be remembering right this):

 

Internet has this tendency to often turn everything in hyperbole or polarization to a point, that any discussion is lost - one side is the devil himself and it is your duty to "win", this have also the effect that different voices inside a group tend to be ignored or reject if they don´t match the hyperbole (became the whole, self validation by invalided everybody and everything) - a long time ago, you could spot this when people debate the whole thing about ludology "vs" narratology, at one point some people turned the debate in a bizarro sport match, with teams (with people self proclaim themselves in this or that side), cheerleaders and narration..

[jennegatron]

We went in September which is the beginning of the off season. Athens is a pretty ugly city and when you are packed into the Parthenon with 2 cruise ships full of tourists and everything is surrounded in scaffolding because they're trying to repair and undo the damage that restoration efforts 40 years ago did, which were trying to undo the damage that was done 40 years before that you can really wonder why you spent a whole day there instead of actually experiencing what is cool about Greece today.

History is interesting to me because it's the narratives and stories we construct about events that happen in a desperate attempt to determine cause and effect not because someone used to wrestle near some columns that are now fallen over.

[Gatazhk]

20 hours ago, jennegatron said:

History is interesting to me because it's the narratives and stories we construct about events that happen in a desperate attempt to determine cause and effect not because someone used to wrestle near some columns that are now fallen over.

History is about time and place.  So if you're in the place, then you're halfway there. 

 

I should point out also that the Greeks themselves (the modern day ones, that is) wear their ancient heritage proudly on their sleeve.  They cherish their past, and they see a direct line from Homer through the conflict with Persia, to Alexander, Roman times, the thousand years of Christian Byzantium, the Turkish occupation to the present.  And in major towns like Athens and Corinth, the backdrop to their daily lives is the acropolis, just as in ancient times.

[jennegatron]

I am just trying to back up Rob on why historic sites might not be interesting to him, by explaining why they're not interesting to me. It's fine that other people like them, but it's not bad to not enjoy them. Posters explicitly said they had a hard time relating to that feeling and I was just adding another voice. Believe me, I know why other people like them. I think they're boring as hell and if I never get dragged to another one on vacation again it will be the best thing to every happen to me.

[sclpls]

While I wouldn't say I'm hyped for the Last Guardian, I'm still looking forward to it. I only played Ico & Shadow of the Colossus when they were remastered for the PS3. At that point Shadow of the Colossus felt dated, and Ico felt super dated. Despite that I enjoyed both games, especially Ico even though the controls and camera were awful. Maybe the Last Guardian will be a mess because of the time it spent in development, but I'm not worried about the game being bad because of the dated game design. In my experience that ends up not mattering for this studio. I thought the comparison to Brothers was off, but I'm also the only person in the world that thought that game was awful. Brothers wore its emotions on its sleeve, but Ico & the Last Guardian were refreshing because they were these games that had these emotional resonances without beating players over the head about how they were supposed to feel, and that is always a refreshing experience.

[Gatazhk]

Yeah that's cool. I'm just trying to point out that those sites you don't like are part of the fabric of modern day Greece and very important to the modern day culture of the Greek people. You don't have to like them - but if you miss them, you kind of miiss Greece. 

 

I get how a day with hundreds of tourists slogging through the heat up to see the Parthenon might be a bummer, but for every experience like that there is something else that is ancient and sublime available to someone with an interest in the classical past like Rob.  The remnants of ancient temple or complex at a gorgeous site with spectacular views and few if any tourists around.

 

Dunno -  been awhile since I've been to Greece maybe it's all been spoiled now? Damn Euro!

 

[sclpls]

Gatazhk, I like the point you made about how history is tied to places. I think that's an insight that is much more obvious in a place like Europe compared to America. In the U.S. we often think about how history is just the stuff that happened in the past. But it is probably more correct to think of history as the stuff from the past that endures in the present. In Europe, this is unavoidable. You go to Rome and you see buildings from the 3rd century right next to a building from the renaissance, and another building that used to be from that time period, but is now just a building built in the 50s after the war because the old building was bombed into rubble. That's history as a lived experience, and it is what makes traveling intrinsically satisfying. Even going to a hyper-contemporary city like Tokyo you can't help but notice the skyscrapers have design patterns that echo something much more ancient in the culture. There's another aspect of experiencing a culture's history though where the historical object has been quarantined in a museum, and that can be more hit or miss because at that point you can only experience the thing through the lens of a tourist, which is a bit alienating. In contrast to Rome, I thought being in Venice felt like being in Disney Land, and as incredible of a city as it is I can't ever see myself making a point of going back there for that reason.

 

It probably helps to develop your own itinerary as opposed to just going to see whatever it is people are supposed to see. I spent my 4 days in Paris going to various spots where certain events happened to writers I admired. Like I checked out a restaurant where Rimbaud and Verlaine got into a fight, things like that. It's more work but can be more rewarding.

[unimural]

Going on a tangent with expectations, for me Ip Man was the straw that broke the camel's back. I've watched quite a lot of Hong Kong movies, and I'd like to think that I'm at least passably familiar with wuxia as a cinema sub genre. For a long time I've felt that HK cinema keeps repeating itself and is as uninspired as Hollywood can be. I saw Ip Man at a festival, and there was a fair bit of buzz to it. A huge hit in China, and everyone seemed to love it. Ip Man was a miserable experience for me: a classic example of everything that's horrible and boring about HK cinema. Since I saw it some 6 years ago I've kind of unconsciously avoided most HK kung fu films.

 

My two main issues with the movie were that the black-and-white prejudiced world-view and typical wire-fu approach to action in a film very much billed as a story about Bruce Lee's master. Additionally the simplistic wuxia-style lack of characterization and unfortunately still very prevalent overtly misogynist approach to female characters didn't earn the film any points either.

 

I honestly think that HK was better when it came to dealing with Japanese in the 1990ies. Something like the Jet Li Fist of Legend was, I think, a far better characterization. These days it seems most Chinese movies go full on insane nazi villain territory with regards to the Japanese. I admit I rarely enjoy any kind of nationalistic hubahuba, but it seems endemic in HK cinema these days. Understandable, perhaps, what with the influence Hollywood cinema has gained in China. But still unfortunate, at least to me. In this case the worst of it is perhaps that the only character development the Yen's Yip Man gets is him becoming ever more angry at the Japanese. It makes for some very bleak watching in a movie that's perfectly willing to abandon all historicity for sake of cheap drama.

 

I get it's a bit silly to moan about a wuxia film featuring ridiculous action, but I hoped they would have at least made some token effort to recognize Bruce Lee's impact on kung fu action. This is exactly the type of action he championed against. Instead we get yet again over the top cgi-wire-fu, no remorse -edition. I do admit there are a couple of impressive looking, even pretty inventive fight scenes. But nothing we haven't seen a million times already. This would have been a brilliant opportunity to go for some authenticity.