Idle Thumbs 16: The Sources' Duel

[Jake]

Another week, another thingey on the thing. Enjoy!

"The Sources' Duel"

Confidential informants collide and megatons are dropped in this week's high-speed episode. We talk about gaming narrative as a pastiche of tone and suggestion, but you just want your damn cutscenes. Plus: Wired's Chris Kohler joins us to dismember your naked form with a samurai sword. Replayability: 3.7.

Games discussed: Afro Samurai, Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, Assassin's Creed, Mirror's Edge, Full Throttle

[elmuerte]

6 episodes with no song :/ The internet wants a song.

I liked the few sections about game mechanics in general, rather than specific parts in games. I think you should talk more about that in the next episodes. (except the whole story telling stuff, because that has been discussed to death).

Talking about ellipsis, you do use them a lot in your podcasts

[nonamermcgee]

Sweet, can't wait.

[SignorSuperdouche]

I can definitely relate to controllers not feeling heavy enough. I don't know if it's just because it's not what I'm used to or what, but I really dislike things that feel lighter than I'm expecting.

[MrChaz]

Re: Being gross out by a game

Soldier of Fortune 2 was the first that did it to me. I reflex shot a guy at close range wit the m249 or something. I blew his foot and lower leg off, his guts were hanging out and I blew half his face off and for some physics reason he was twitching. I had to quit

The other game to do it to me was play GTA and for some reason I was just wailing on someone with a baseball bat and after a moment it just dawned on me that I'd just gone totally psycho on the guy and I couldn't remember why.

[gdf]

Another entertaining and insightful episode guys.

Just a shame there was no mention of those in depth rebuttals to the stuff Chris said about Prince of Persia [Hint: I sent one in]

[soupface]

Spaff's anecdote reminds me of my friend's experience playing Quake. While playing, a fly landed on the monitor. He wanted to get rid of it, but his reflexes were still Quake'd: he snapped the mouse up in an attempt to centre his (player character's) view on the fly and shot off a few rockets. It took a second for him to realize that he couldn't shoot the fly on his monitor as he had been shooting characters in the game.

[Erkki]

awesome episode!

[David]

Dude whatever this game is terrifying

http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/23024

[Erkki]

http://listofdomainnamespointingtoidlethumbsdotnet.info/ is outdated

[T-Matt]

I can definitely relate to controllers not feeling heavy enough. I don't know if it's just because it's not what I'm used to or what, but I really dislike things that feel lighter than I'm expecting.

Yeah, I remember playing bond on n64 and I would have to have the rumble pack in just for the weight because I was so used to it.

[n0wak]

Good episode. Listened to it, in its entirety, while shoveling snow. Don't know if I'd want to do that again. I'd give it a replay value of 2.

[LetterT]

Another good cast. Listened at work, as usual. Though, I was a bit distracted and I don't think it fully sank in. I'll give it another listen tomorrow.

Oh, and fantastic job on the dramatic reading. Great as always.

[nonamermcgee]

Great stuff. Chris Kohler was a good guest, you should invite him back again soon, he flows really well with the rest of you guys.

[shawsie64]

You read my email and said you found it!, hahaha. Well you could have found it i supose and it was just a coincidence =P

Good show!

[Chris]

You read my email and said you found it!, hahaha. Well you could have found it i supose and it was just a coincidence =P

Good show!

Oh man, sorry about that. For the life of me I couldn't remember where I found that thing, and so I assumed I must have just encountered it on the internet.

[Garple]

Wow. The guy that wrote the email is here...awkward...

[brkl]

Dude whatever this game is terrifying

http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/23024

Eww eww eww

[Nachimir]

Dude whatever this game is terrifying

http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/23024

I can see a crossover between this and Gears of War 2

I do wonder if Takahashi ever managed to define gameplay for it. That video is basically the demo he unveiled at GameCity 15 months ago, but massively more polished.

Edit:

Good podcast, the confidential sources part was hilarious.

You answer to my question about the games press was a shit one though

Every sector has it's low-down trashy media and things at the pinnacle of criticism and analysis. Games are unusually bottom heavy in this respect though.

Edited January 29, 2009 by Nachimir

[Chris]

I can see a crossover between this and Gears of War 2

I do wonder if Takahashi ever managed to define gameplay for it. That video is basically the demo he unveiled at GameCity 15 months ago, but massively more polished.

Edit:

Good podcast, the confidential sources part was hilarious.

You answer to my question about the games press was a shit one though

Every sector has it's low-down trashy media and things at the pinnacle of criticism and analysis. Games are unusually bottom heavy in this respect though.

It's true, games writing is terrible. I think we sort of felt that topic has been discussed a lot though, and we're not sure how much we have to contribute to the discussion beyond "Yes it's true a lot of games writers are lazy or not particularly good writers."

[Nachimir]

Fair enough. It's also a pretty difficult question when you get into careers and audiences too.

Edit: To be fair, my boss asked me to interview people about this for our company log too, but instead of dwelling on shit I just highlight things I think are good.

Edited January 29, 2009 by Nachimir

[brkl]

Oh yeah, I don't remember any naked lady killing in Afrosamurai. I guess that comes from the developers' own genius...

[DanJW]

Regarding poor games writing; this post and others like it claim that the age of decent games criticism has started to arrive. Note that is criticism and not journalism though.

I also find it interesting that they are all blogs - no interesting writing is cited with a major game news website or magazine as the source (with the possible exception of The Escapist).

Perhaps this means the problem is higher up than the writers themselves - perhaps it is the editors to blame, for the kind of reviews they ask for and the kinds of analysis they feel "do not meet the needs of our target audience".

Just a suggestion.

[scribl]

I thought you spent ~10 minutes talking about storytelling in games because you'd already read my email. Pretty great coincidence.

Oh, and I get where Chris is coming from on Matt Hazard's gameplay. It seems kinda B-grade—though if the humor holds up, it won't matter to me.

I'm curious to see how much of the parody comes in the gameplay, and how much in the cut scenes. I hope they make fun of broader game conventions—I can think of a number of ripe targets—instead of just picking a few titles to directly parody.

[Nachimir]

I also find it interesting that they are all blogs - no interesting writing is cited with a major game news website or magazine as the source (with the possible exception of The Escapist).

Perhaps this means the problem is higher up than the writers themselves - perhaps it is the editors to blame, for the kind of reviews they ask for and the kinds of analysis they feel "do not meet the needs of our target audience".

You're right, there is more and more good stuff around, and a lot of it is blogs rather than more traditional press. Of the latter, I probably prefer gamesindustry.biz (despite the TLD) but think that might be party due to the way they lay their content out, and Gamasutra in particular makes more effort with things like Leigh Alexander's piece on salary fixing on Montreal or this piece on layoffs</advert>.

My RSS reader has about 25 games blogs I see as must reads though, and the main news sites I pretty much just scan the headlines.

It may not even be the editors to blame for that though, so much as audiences (i.e. The Escapist got nowhere near as much traffic before Zero Punctuation) and company directors that want to see results in terms of cash.

Like the bit I snipped out of the Jon Blow interview, where he talks about people misquoting him for sensation. You really can't stop trade rags running with that kind of thing, because it gets attention :|

MCV is a good example; I don't think anyone I know in the industry would say they like it (This Week! Peripheral Special! Really?), but everyone reads it because it's the weekly UK games publishing industry rag.

It's a complex deadlock, hence I decided to highlight the good where I can and ignore most of the bad. The question around games press is kind of a cruddy one to ask, but it's been on my mind recently. I've really not seen this discussed much before, but I guess it is a lot, informally.