Jake

Idle Thumbs 22: Put On the Top Ghost

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Enjoy-a you podcast.

Put On the Top Ghost

Sometimes a game blows up in your face, 106 moves in. Sometimes a tutorial man tells you the controls backwards, just because. Sometimes, no matter what you try, the old man just can't kill that snake. When the world's got you feeling down, do what we do, and put on the top ghost.

Games Discussed: Empire: Total War, Tom Clancy's HAWX, Up, Mirror's Edge Pure Time Trials, Team Fortress 2, Super Mario World, Half-Life Episodes

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Shame to hear about buggy Empire: Total War. It is also pretty interesting in one way: I remember reading someone from Creative Assembly explaining that the reason Rome: Total War (and possibly Medieval: Total War) patch taking so long because "they had to make it right the first time". I understood they could only release one or two patches (possibly because of the publisher?) at the time and I thought it was just crap. On the other hand, that obviously forced them to try a bit harder.

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I understood they could only release one or two patches (possibly because of the publisher?) at the time and I thought it was just crap.

Publishers, I imagine, don't like paying developers to spend their time making patches. I don't really know, but I'd suspect that contractually publishers only pay for so many of those, before they stop, and since publishers often own a game and its IP, the developer basically would have to stop patching it once the publisher told them to stop working on it.

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Yeah. I just hadn't encountered a title before where this had been such big and clear an issue. With all the multiplayer unit balancing and stuff like that it just seemed "unfair" and some of the players very pretty frustrated.

That said, I didn't encounter any big bugs or glitches in my single player experience (maybe in part because of this exact thing).

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Publishers, I imagine, don't like paying developers to spend their time making patches. I don't really know, but I'd suspect that contractually publishers only pay for so many of those, before they stop, and since publishers often own a game and its IP, the developer basically would have to stop patching it once the publisher told them to stop working on it.

In this case, Sega owns the whole studio. That seems like it would be less hard to convince them to spend more time on a patch--they're all fully paid by Sega full-time anyway, so it's slightly better than having to actually contractually retain them for longer.

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I wish there were more long single player games. It sucks to find a new game to play every 2 weeks. I'm actually at this very point right now. I finished Fallout 3 recently (did pretty much everything in the game, and damn it's a short game). And now I'm having problems finding a new interesting game. I will probably buy The Maw when I get back home, played the demo yesterday and it was fun.

Considering the part universe revolving around the avatar. Were you talking about GoW2? Because in GoW I didn't really have the feeling the universe was about me. This was probably because there wasn't a lot of interaction with others. Fallout 3 did have the annoying thing of the universe revolved around you. Almost everybody knows about you, even though they never saw you before, and you didn't say you were the vault 101 guy. This is specially made clear buy the assassination contracts put out on your head.

Also to extend this initial point, what I also dislike (besides everybody knowing about you), is the world made specially for you. I think this was covered in a previous episode, with Prince of Persia showing all those marks on walls.

About the procedural content generation. I think it will put anyone out of business. Because it allows you do increase the amount of content without much effort. Which means larger games, or more focus on certain details of the game. Even outsourced treeguy is still needed to create the base trees.

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In this case, Sega owns the whole studio. That seems like it would be less hard to convince them to spend more time on a patch--they're all fully paid by Sega full-time anyway, so it's slightly better than having to actually contractually retain them for longer.

I wonder how often people actually think like that (as in, think practically) versus how often complete dumbness happens, in the name of a fairly arbitrarily decided budget. It's sad but true that companies, especially bigger ones, have a tendency to behave even more bureaucratic than they actually are or have to be, and even when they have a situation similar to this where they own the budget and the people and the schedules from end to end, from development to distribution, they might still be dumb, and reality will get buried underneath a dozen layers of arm-waving managers who have 8 reasons why they dont want to bother, until eventually anything useful about their situation is smothered. That's way too much to actually read into this particular situation, but company tendencies to do that in general really bothers/tires me out.

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I wish there were more long single player games. It sucks to find a new game to play every 2 weeks. I'm actually at this very point right now. I finished Fallout 3 recently (did pretty much everything in the game, and damn it's a short game). And now I'm having problems finding a new interesting game. I will probably buy The Maw when I get back home, played the demo yesterday and it was fun.

I fucking hate that games nowdays are like "an incredible 12 hours of gaming" and you're like... Yeah you better make that infuckingcredile to the power of ten because for me to buy a 12 hours game that will last me 4 days...

Anyway, games being easier and shorter, I guess that's reason enough for devs to turn to downloadable games... The occasion market is raped in the ass by downloadable content.

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Hawx... What is wrong with this game?

Powersliding in a jet from a 3rd person perspective.. Thats a winning combo.. I could rant about this game for quite so time but I won't.. Suffice it to say I felt jipped just downloading the demo. Had I shelled out the full game price thinking I was getting anything remotely sim-like I'd have to be placed on 24hr suicide watch. This makes Ace Combat feel like Falcon 4.0..

Lets fire up some Afterburner..

I havent been turned off by another game this much in years. I think it sucks even as an arcade flier.. Demo at your own risk..

Later.

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1. This was the first Thumbscast I brought with me to the gym on my iPod. I actually had to stop listening, out of fear that I would drop a weight on myself in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. It was around the Will Wright/John Carmack speech discussion.

2. Wright's "Soviet Space History Minute" was one of the highlights of last year's GDC. He explained why cosmonauts still carry handguns into space with them. It was glorious.

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Yeah Wright's "Soviet Space History Minute" has showed up in a couple of presentations and has become somewhat of a tradition. I love it.

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Another great cast. I'm glad the Mirror's Edge DLC was talked about. I just borrowed the game from a friend.

I was excited by what the demo proposed; I just didn't feel it was worth $60, and used prices aren't dropping very fast. For $10, the DLC might just be worth it. It costs anywhere from $8 and up to rent a game, so in essence, I can spend my "rental money" on the DLC and still come out ahead.

Total War is one I'll probably skip. It would be my luck to be the 1% who get to experience 100% of the bugs in all their glory with my PC. :hah:

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Currently the development team is busy with various projects with priority on Darwinia+ and of course Multiwinia Mac. With so much going on the development team have decided to adopt the use of more screens to make sure a lot more work is going on at the same time. The photo below is of Johnny K showing us how it is done. Some say Johnny K is in fact a robot sent from a distant planet, I like to refer to him as the Wizard.

http://www.introversion.co.uk/blog/index.php

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Oh man, SimTower was the first Sim game I ever played. Played it more than SimCity, actually. Bloody brilliant game.

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Great episode. I don't know if you're aware, but Neil Young currently did an interview with John Davison for the What They Play podcast. No tears in the works, just more Rolando sequels. Let's see what the countdown to tears presents.

Secondly, speaking about bugs in referrance to the Total War series, I installed Shogun Total War recently. Suffered the same end turn bug Nick did. It's rather sad this bug has lasted through several iterations.

Finally, on previous episodes, there was a running joke about what went through Gordon Freedman's mind in different scenarios. There's a machinama based around that concept called Freedman's Mind. It's rather interesting.

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I fucking hate that games nowdays are like "an incredible 12 hours of gaming" and you're like... Yeah you better make that infuckingcredile to the power of ten because for me to buy a 12 hours game that will last me 4 days...

Oh, man, I'm like the exact opposite. I am loving this trend of condensed game experiences, to the point where I have to be really, really convinced that a game is worth my time if it's over 8 hours long, if you're an RPG you can go up to 30 but that's still pushing it. I've never played a game that lasted over 10 hours that didn't feel like it could have cut at least an hour and made a better experience. Long games need to die and go to hell.

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Oh, man, I'm like the exact opposite. I am loving this trend of condensed game experiences, to the point where I have to be really, really convinced that a game is worth my time if it's over 8 hours long, if you're an RPG you can go up to 30 but that's still pushing it. I've never played a game that lasted over 10 hours that didn't feel like it could have cut at least an hour and made a better experience. Long games need to die and go to hell.

Short games need to be raped and sent to the purgatory in repentance for their sins against mankind... I can't begin to describe how pained I am when I payed 70 FUCKING EUROS and get 8 hours worth of gameplay... Remember a few years ago when the game industry used to brag about "hey, at least we're fucking less expansive than the movie industry" and nowdays, even at a stunning 10 FUCKING EUROS a movie ticket, you're better off seeing 7 movies of 2 hours than buying a aweful lot of the game that come out...

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There's no point of playing hours and hours of a bad game. I'd much rather a shorter better 'experience'.

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Then you probably never played good long games. Yes, a lot of games have tedious padding, actually, short games also have that. But there are a lot of good long games that don't contain a lot of (required) tedious padding.

I don't have a clear knowledge about the time I spend on games the first time I played them. But I think Anachronox is a example of a good long game which didn't contain a lot of tedious padding.

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Elmuerte, you are just saying 'well, there's exceptions to that'. Well, no shit.

I think we can agree that the vast majority of long games have loads of padding?

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Thing is, SOME experiences are mostly suited to short term pleasure, but if you are just looking for the pleasure of completion, then you'd be logically looking for shorter games, but you'd have to admit that if a game can suck you up for 30 hours, then this game has the potency to make you cry or laugh or anything because it's long. Instantaneous short term games make me feel like it's just in and out feeling, you just taste a bit of pleasure and then switch to something else, I'm more of a long term relation guy with games where passion turns into something longer

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I think it just depends which is more valuable to you; your time or your money. As you get older money becomes easier but time becomes more scarce.

And the core gamer audience is constantly ageing. Accordingly there should be more shorter games around to cater for them.

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