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Idle Thumbs 309: "Terrible" Jason Voorhees

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Idle Thumbs 309:

Idle Thumbs 309


"Terrible" Jason Voorhees
The game begins and this time, you are him. You look out through the holes in your mask, through the trees, and see the teens scattering across the camp. "They fear you," you think to yourself, gripping your iconic machete tighter, your extra senses already picking up their noise, their movements, their smell. "You are the only hunter in these woods and they fear you." A branch snaps behind you, and you whirl around. A small goblin-like man in a hat and overalls looks at you, bobbing slightly, his face expressionless. The goblin man removes his hat, his gaze never leaving yours, and throws it at your face. You try to scream but there is just blinding light, and then nothing.

Discussed: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Super Mario Odyssey, Friday the 13th: The Game, the internet as distressing confessional

 

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The post I made on the Friday the 13th forums after listening to this episode:

 

Quote

 

PLEASE CONSIDER THESE SUGGESTIONS AND MAKE "FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE GAME" THE BEST ASYMMETRICAL MULTIPLAYER GAME OUT

 

"You all start as teens. Then one [player] gets a "cutscene Jason," who spawns behind you, eviscerates you, and you scream, then everyone else hears the first kill, and that [player] is Jason for the round. The game picks one random [player] who gets drilled through their chest and looks down at a gross first-person death, and then they're Jason. And [the other players] hear that echo across the [map], and it goes like, 'First Blood!' or something." - Jake Rodkin, Idle Thumbs Podcast 309 https://youtu.be/VYEkxXDBQRg

"I guess for each map what you'd ideally do is have a cutscene for any given different [player character]." - Chris Remo, As Above

I know you developers have balance issues and bugs to work on already done an awesome job but please take these suggestions into consideration. I haven't played the game but [I plan on buying so] I follow and watch it online, and I think these offhand ideas have the potential to expand on what you've created exponentially.
Imagine the ultimate slasher flick simulator. Since players know one of them will become the killer they would want to stay away from each other and make some kind of preparations (escapes, traps, etc.), but if you double down on the fact players are playing as teenagers and introduce a few mechanics* that either encourage or force them to interact with each other for some period of time, then you can keep the core gameplay you've created, which people love, and also add another element to keep it fresh.
You devs brought the Friday the 13th franchise to life and people like me (who love F13, grew up with video games, and needed a successor to the '89 Atlus game) appreciate what you've done, but please don't ever feel like you have to toe the line with this game. What we think of as multiplayer asymmetrical games right now do not have a true boundary†.

E.g. Maybe compatible characters can get intimate in degrees (1st, 2nd, & 3rd Base) and the farther they go the higher the chance one of them becomes Jason but if they don't get the roll then they gain some kind of buff like higher stamina or stun chance, etc.
Maybe characters can get drunk or high together and one of them has a chance of getting so wasted they walk off and pass out somewhere then Jason can't find them during the round until a certain amount of time, or random number of other characters get killed.
† Eventually, with sufficient technology, we could end up playing a giant monster movie simulator (Godzilla/King Kong) with dozens of players scrambling to survive and attempting to coordinate an attack in a sprawling map that can become a destroyed wasteland. /dreams

Looking back, I feel the post may have been too much...

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That stream idea is a lie; it will never happen, Nick.

 

Let's all trick him into streaming again!! We can provide bit showers when it happens!! B)

 

Anyway, great episode. If PUBEs ends up being the stream game this month, you should try getting Sean or Steve to join; they've been playing a ton of it. Also idlethumbs.casino is down.

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Nick will never stream again because he's an old man who is vulnerable to the mockery of teens. This episode confirmed it.

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I'm sure the Thumbs are aware, but for anyone who's not, former Thumbs Sean and Steve have been streaming PUBG:

 

http://www.twitch.tv/seanvanaman/videos/all

http://www.twitch.tv/stevegaynor/videos/all

 

Also the Polygons including McElroys have a series, THE AWFUL SQUAD:

 

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaDrN74SfdT5xZKh7TsCL4ydk7TOduLeu

 

EDIT: Also hbomberguy who should be well-known on these forums is streaming it RIGHT NOW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT0IEMCDkCI

 

Speaking of McElroys, there was a video where Justin and Griffin play a similar game to PUBG (televised deathmatch) set on an island, but now I can't find it. It was more jungle-y and there were health dispensers dotted around.

 

EDIT: Found it. The Culling: http://www.polygon.com/2016/3/7/11175108/the-culling-is-smash-tv-meets-the-hunger-games

 

Speaking of games similar to other games Friday the 13th seems a lot like Dead by Daylight, which I never played but my brother did:

 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/381210/Dead_by_Daylight/

 

I remember that game had a DLC with a famous slasher villain, like Michael Myers or something?

 

 

Edited by Paul Smith
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Nick's Friday the Thirteenth fiasco is the most relatable online multiplayer experience I have ever heard.

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re: PUBG spawning imitators, while I'm sure that will happen in its own right it's also probably worth mentioning that PUBG is just one of a spate of battle royale games like this that have come out recently, many of them before PUBG, with I think the most notable of these being the King of the Kill mode for H1Z1, which is almost exactly the same game as PUBG but worse. I think it's likely that this streak of battle royale games will continue and cohere into a genre with its own conventions, and I think as that happens we'll probably see the sorts of changes you guys are talking about as these games try to distinguish themselves from their competitors.

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"You should stream that"

-Chris in, like, the last 5 episodes of Idle Thumbs

 

Also, regarding the significance of Bowser's Peach wallpaper. Bowser and Peach are getting married in Super Mario Odyssey, and Mario is trying to stop the wedding with his Italian homunculus vessel.

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Eurogamer had this good PUBG article recently -

How PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds emerged from the messy history of survival shooters

 

Quote

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' tremendous success - at more than four million copies sold in three months, it must be considered among one of the biggest games of year on any platform - is owed to the remarkable-for-being-remarkable fact that it is one of the few games of its type that was conceived from the ground up to be the game that it is. It is very much like H1Z1 and the ArmA mods that made its lead designer's name, but it arrives with the backing of a publisher, with a specific design and scope, with a relatively traditional, easily-understood structure. It takes what was fundamentally appealing about survival sandbox games and makes it quick, accessible, relatively stable, and good-looking: more or less exactly what World of Warcraft did for the MMO, with equivalent results.

 

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RE: Jake's problem with "teens together -> teen getting stabbed and turning into Jason" resulting in giving Jason too much information on teen locations, maybe a cooldown period for Jason to actually appear might be enough to let the teens scatter?

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It seems to me that they start the game with Jason surprising the teens because it gets to the point where there is defined gameplay: for the teens, survive, and for Jason, hunt. From the podcast, it sounded like Chris/Nick are sad that each round starts with the teens already in flee/survive mode, when they would rather the early game experience hew more towards the films, where there is a calm before the storm. Chris brought up the fact that this is perhaps an impossible thing, because the players know, going in, what the game entails, so there's no real surprise. Jake's suggestion just shifts the random roll for choosing Jason to a slightly later moment in the round, but I don't know what the players would be doing while waiting for Jason to appear. Would they all be scrambling around looking for survival/escape items? This doesn't seem to be much different from what the game is already. 

 

Edit: This was discussed further on in the episode.

 

To replace this comment, I have a question about New Donk City - do you suppose that this is the same city from the arcade Donkey Kong game, where Mario bounded up a construction scene to rescue Pauline? Also, I'm confused as to why Chris thinks that the citizens of New Donk City are "normal humans" whereas Mario is a "capering homunculus." Everyone in NDC is suspiciously similar, and I don't know if I would call them "normal." Is it because they're wearing business suits? I would argue that the style of the Mario games up until now makes the NDC citizens profoundly abnormal. The only other time (that I can remember) Mario has hung out with a group of people much taller than him is in Mario's Time Machine.

 

 It should be noted, as well, that only one person in NDC can be controlled via Cappy, the RC Car dude who is not wearing a hat. Cappy can only allow Mario to "cap-ture" (Nintendo's term) characters that aren't already wearing a hat. 

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If Mario has access to a time machine, how does that change the Idle Thumbs Unofficial Mario Canon? Cappy could be riding a dinosaur thanks to the wonder of time travel (no need for Mario to be 65m years old!)

 

On 08/07/2017 at 2:09 AM, Paul Smith said:

Speaking of games similar to other games Friday the 13th seems a lot like Dead by Daylight, which I never played but my brother did:

 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/381210/Dead_by_Daylight/

 

I remember that game had a DLC with a famous slasher villain, like Michael Myers or something?

 

Dead By Daylight was the game that sprang to mind when the Thumbs started talking about Friday the 13th. Proof that good ideas tend to keep coming back to the surface.

 

 

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On 7/9/2017 at 1:51 PM, mikemariano said:

RE: Jake's problem with "teens together -> teen getting stabbed and turning into Jason" resulting in giving Jason too much information on teen locations, maybe a cooldown period for Jason to actually appear might be enough to let the teens scatter?

 

I swear I saw a post that said this, but that's almost exactly how the match starts. There's a cutscene that shows Teens around a fire, Jason appears and eviscerates someone, and the Teens scatter to their starting locations hidden behind the cutscene load. It's not as player driven as suggested, but it's note for note how it works.

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23 hours ago, RubixsQube said:

Also, I'm confused as to why Chris thinks that the citizens of New Donk City are "normal humans" whereas Mario is a "capering homunculus." Everyone in NDC is suspiciously similar, and I don't know if I would call them "normal." Is it because they're wearing business suits? I would argue that the style of the Mario games up until now makes the NDC citizens profoundly abnormal.

 

This is a good and true point. The denizens of NDC are definitely a mish-mash reminiscent of those from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Pleasantville, and The Truman Show. Whoever populated the city with them obviously only had those sorts of inspirations to go off of, which is why they look like regular people from *our* dimension. It's really just a huge design faux pas by someone high up the chain in NDC, who is now too embarrassed to change it this late in the game.

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I read this article because it popped up when I was searching for the one Chris was talking about where the true, evil nature of netizens is revealed from their Google searches. I assume it's the same one, but it doesn't really matter because I thought it was interesting either way.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/09/everybody-lies-how-google-reveals-darkest-secrets-seth-stephens-davidowitz

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The first time I saw gameplay of Friday the 13th, I thought that it was a mod for Dead by Daylight.

 

A couple of clarifications from Nick's description of the game.  The character that you can call in is Tommy Jarvis, who is apparently a recurring character from the movies (honestly I've never seen them).  He effectively acts as a respawn for one lucky player to return to the game after they are killed.  It's possible to kill Jason but the method involves several steps including

Spoiler

calling Tommy, having a female character find and wear the sweater of Jason's mother in the shack where Jason starts the game, knocking off Jason's mask, and having the sweatered girl confront Jason (who will freeze up as he mistakes the character for his mother) while Tommy finishes Jason off with a machete.

I was hoping that Nick would mention one of my favorite details but I guess since he was such a terrible Jason he didn't realize it.  One of Jason's powers allows him to become invisible and move very quickly that allows him to catch up to other players (and is different from the map teleporting power).  If he uses this ability near another player, the game indicates this to the player with a VHS "rewind/fast forward" effect.

 

I should note that I've never played the game, everything I know has been gleamed from let's plays.

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I hate to be the bearer of bad Mario Lore news, but when Mario uh, uninhabits something, it doesn't disappear. It lays there stunned for a second before going back to it's normal behavior. At least this is how it worked in the bit of the Treehouse playthrough I saw. Maybe it depends on the enemy?

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Is this the episode where the guys imply that there should be a Mario + Assassin's Creed crossover? That already happened:

 

 

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Question about PUBG... I bought it and just couldn't play it on my computer. Now, it is not a terrible computer. I have played GTA V and Doom 2016 without problems. But even on super low graphics the game was constantly crashing and freezing... Anyone had a similar experience? Is that a matter of optimization?

 

Anyway, I asked for a refund for it 'cause why bother with a game I can't play properly... Hope it gets better in the future or something!

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6 hours ago, Professor Video Games said:

I hate to be the bearer of bad Mario Lore news, but when Mario uh, uninhabits something, it doesn't disappear. It lays there stunned for a second before going back to it's normal behavior. At least this is how it worked in the bit of the Treehouse playthrough I saw. Maybe it depends on the enemy?

Ah oh well. That's much simpler and better. 

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58 minutes ago, Zygliplix said:

Question about PUBG... I bought it and just couldn't play it on my computer. Now, it is not a terrible computer. I have played GTA V and Doom 2016 without problems. But even on super low graphics the game was constantly crashing and freezing... Anyone had a similar experience? Is that a matter of optimization?

 

Anyway, I asked for a refund for it 'cause why bother with a game I can't play properly... Hope it gets better in the future or something!

 

It craps itself on certain configs, for some reason. Every patch has optimizations and it's slowly getting faster and more stable. It makes my computer run red-hot but that's all, which works for me in the end!

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5 hours ago, Zygliplix said:

Question about PUBG... I bought it and just couldn't play it on my computer. Now, it is not a terrible computer. I have played GTA V and Doom 2016 without problems. But even on super low graphics the game was constantly crashing and freezing... Anyone had a similar experience? Is that a matter of optimization?

 

Anyway, I asked for a refund for it 'cause why bother with a game I can't play properly... Hope it gets better in the future or something!

At this point, an SSD is basically required.

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