Jake

Idle Thumbs 66: It's Broadcast Jones!

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Heroes of Newerth looked so much better, but the people were awful. I only played Dota 2 briefly, but I really don't need to spend what little time I have to play online games getting my ass handed to me.

You realize, of course, that HoN and Dota 2 are nearly identical, mechanically speaking? I'm not saying they're the same genre... I'm saying HoN literally copied well over 90% of its mechanics straight from DotA proper, but gave it a new skin. They did this intentionally and were completely upfront it. There are some mechanics tweaks hither and thither. The biggest difference between the two is HoN is horrifically ugly and Dota 2 has some eye-pleasing aesthetics.

Also:

Yeah, but LOL is a fun experience that you can actually play here and there and be generally relaxed about.

My friend and I just spent two games being completely awful and trying utterly stupid things and we had a lot of fun. (This runs counter to my previous statement that Lords Management games are not fun, but that's because I was mistakenly forgetting that I don't always take the game seriously.) One could certainly argue that we were being assholes and probably even intentionally feeding, but, well, sometimes it's nice to relax, as you say. A game experience is as relaxed as you make it! We won one of the two games, too!

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LoL's barrier for entry is most definitely lower and that is really appealing if you know you're not spending much time with it. For me it eventually just wasn't enough game, but having played LoL gave me a great leg up when I got my dota 2 invite since I had some idea of basic tactics. That said it still ultimately amounts to learning what every single lord does, it's just dota has a lot more complexity in the general sense of the game and can be a little overwhelming if you're going in alone.

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I have 500 hours of dota2 played, probably thousand hours+ of HoN and a few hundred hours of dota1, hundreds of hours spent watching videos and casts. I still feel like I'm really bad at dota. :(

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... While I've never worked on a racing game (at least one that has shipped) ...

So it was only Video Games Rodkin who cut his chops in the Sam and Max S1 sequences then?

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On the topic of Dark Souls:

I think the most amazing thing about the game is the multiplayer. You spend so much time memorizing enemy locations and attack patters, so that you can mow through them with ease. The battles become rote and simple, but the game would still be amazing if that was all it had.

However, if you're human and trucking around, you can be invaded by another PC. Somewhere, in your world, there is now a new, more deadly enemy who is bent on killing you. They aren't restrained by needing to be approached by you and getting triggered. They are cunning and malicious. They make all other enemies in the game benign because your heart rate will never soar as much as the instant you are invaded. It's amazing. At this point in the game, chances are that you'll be invaded by someone who really knows what they are doing and are equipped with a scary amount of equipment. That means that your chances of survival are zero, but you still have hope that you might fight them off. As we all know, that's the best way to teach despair: give the person some hope.

I can't get over how amazing this game is.

The way Dark Souls plays around with the rules of the online stuff is really, really brilliant too.

I mean, like the forest covenant teleporting in active members from wherever they are in the game to go hunt down unaffiliated humans wandering into that forest area.

So as a player unaffiliated with that covenant, i remember going into that forest as a human hoping to be able to find co-op summon signs to help with the area boss.

I hung around the main door to that boss encounter for a while, just looking for summon signs, and ended up being invaded i think like three times in a row for my trouble. (Once on the way there, twice after i arrived.) Decided to stop tempting fate and just fought the boss alone and managed to pull out a victory regardless.

Fought off three player invasions and beat a boss all without dying, with a whole lot of souls and humanities on the line. I'm pretty sure i was shaking.

Dark Souls might be one of the scariest games i've ever played because of things like that. You get that alert message while you're in the middle of a dark forest that is completely open on all sides to you, no corner to back yourself into. You're being hunted by an intelligent opponent, and you actually have something to lose.

Holy shit, guys.

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A police officer goes into a coma and creates a dream referencing a bunch of films about cool cops, where he gets to have cool car chases, and everything he does is just and nobody gets hurt in any of it? I thought that was the joke.

E> and the whole world is ridiculously clean and pg?

and his partner is his best friend, but not quite as cool as cool cop Tanner Driver…

The previous games didn't have the coma conceit, and yet the same descriptions would apply to that world as well. The non-dream version of that world is just as crazy and inconsistent as the dream one, apart from being able to leave one's body and fly around and possess people. (You even get a taste of this in Driver: SF prior to the big accident.)

You're giving the creators too much credit if you think any of what you point out is intentional (although it is a cool way to look at it).

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The previous games didn't have the coma conceit, and yet the same descriptions would apply to that world as well. The non-dream version of that world is just as crazy and inconsistent as the dream one, apart from being able to leave one's body and fly around and possess people. (You even get a taste of this in Driver: SF prior to the big accident.)

You're giving the creators too much credit if you think any of what you point out is intentional (although it is a cool way to look at it).

Eh, authorial intent is overrated anyway.

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Eh, authorial intent is overrated anyway.

While it's fun to read things counter to authorial intent, the thing with games is that they usually have none in the first place. That's a problem.

A weird analogy: I can have a conversation with someone who has bad taste, but it's hard to do so with someone who has no taste.

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While it's fun to read things counter to authorial intent, the thing with games is that they usually have none in the first place.

Well, that's not even remotely true. It's just that the author is usually a group of authors, and they all suck at authoring.

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I don't give a shit what they tried to make, they ended up making a game about the juvenile fantasies of some weird cop.

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I love when you guys talk about gameplay mechanics undermining or reinforcing the story or the world. (Imagine a Max Payne game where you got glimpses of the world reacting realistically to a lone gunman killing hundreds of people and evading capture for days or weeks. "Sir! There's something happening on Mars!") GTA4 is a famous example: Nico in the cutscenes fretting about whether or not to kill someone right after the player has been driving on the sidewalk, mowing down dozens of pedestrians. And there's stuff like this Stolen Pixels comic where the player shoots dozens of goons but then in a cutscene just stands there while the boss talks for ten minutes about her evil plan and then escapse ("I was pointing my gun at her as hard as I could!")

I thought it would be worth listing some games that do it well and what they do that works. Here's a few ideas:

* X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Freespace -- these are games in which the "mission structure" of the game fits well with what a pilot would really be doing. Also it makes sense that the pilot is someone on the periphery of a narrative that he hears about during briefings or over the radio. Playing the game in the cockpit realistically limits the ways the player can interact with the world and with other characters so you're not always running into mimesis-breaking walls or characters or static scenery.

* Psychonauts -- The cartoonishness of the characters and the exageratted silliness of the story help avoid a lot of the problems you get when attempting to do a serious story with photo-realistic characters. And yet (as Pixar also demonstrates) cartoonishness and humor don't have to preclude serious drama and emotions. Also the surreal "enter and explore someone's mind" conceit fits really well with the platforming around crazy environments fighting weird creatures and collecting bizarre stuff.

* Games with diaries, audiologs, etc. This is getting a bit cliche, but breaking a story up into puzzle pieces for the player to find and assemble fits really well with almost any style of game (FPS, RPG, puzzle game, adventure game), especially if some of the pieces are things the player sees in the gameworld instead of only relying on chunks of text. David Shute's Small Worlds is one of the greatest examples of doing this without words.

Bioshock uses this technique very well; I think the main problems with Bioshock's storytelling are the people talking directly to the protagonist and the events he's directly involved in. In fact the big issue with this technique is how you connect the player's actions to the history she's slowly uncovering. Maybe you don't need to?

* Braid - Using gameplay mechanics as metaphors for elements of a story. I think this part of Braid's storytelling is well done. The written bits are not as good, but I wonder if anyone would have noticed the metaphors without them? Would the paintings have been enough? The last level with the girl is a triumph of fusing gameplay with storytelling that really doesn't require reading any text at all.

* Half-Life (The First One) -- Where this succeeds and so many other shooters-with-scripted-events fail (even Half-Life 2 is not as good) is that Half-Life doesn't try to add a bunch of characters and plot and dialogue on top of the main storytelling device: Put the character in a convincing location with a good sense of place and then have a bunch of crazy events happen directly to and around him. Why are the aliens invading? What were the scientists experimenting with? Why did the send in the army? Who is the G-Man? What's going on elsewhere? None of that matters. and it's really unlikely Valve or anyone else could think of answers that are more satisfying than vague hints Half-Life provides. The story is just "Gordon Freemen is caught up in and tries to survive some crazy shit," and that was more than enough for a satisfying game.

* Portal, System Shock 2 -- These games rely more on an interesting, well-written character / nemesis more than a narrative to give meaning and context to the player's actions.

* Games with systems that generate interesting events (Far Cry 2, Minecraft, Spelunky). Even though we say that these games create these great, unique "stories" for us to tell about what we did and what happened to us, and I actually prefer these kinds of experiences to most actual video game stories, I think these belong in a different category from games with authored stories.

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Since you guys talked a bit about Demon's Souls, you should definitely enjoy Dark Souls as well. It's the same but better in pretty much every way, and also has an open world as opposed to the Nexus and different levels as in Demon's (not that Demon's way was bad, I just enjoy open worlds a lot more). Also, it takes place in the same world as the old King's Field games, which I think is really cool despite never having played them.

I never knew it was set in that world, that's a great touch! (despite the fact I've never played King's Field either and judging by the gameplay videos would struggle to persevere with them)

Minor point about the world though, I wouldn't really describe it as open. It's definitely persistent, but open implies something quite different. Though from what I've played I prefer Dark Souls overall, I felt the levels being discreet units in Demon's Souls was more in line with the overall ethos and balance of the series. If I recall correctly this meant it was slightly harder to accrue and retain souls but the stages seemed better paced and therefore easier to "learn". Maybe this was an unconscious result of the design decision leading to more compartmentalised development on the earlier game, but I suppose in the end it comes down to where you prefer the emphasis within the systems.

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The "games discussed" list for this episode should probably have DEFCON, considering all the great commentary about it in here.

Also, it was fun to hear Jake say he's watching Veronica Mars. The first two seasons especially are pretty great neo-noir.

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* Half-Life (The First One) -- Where this succeeds and so many other shooters-with-scripted-events fail (even Half-Life 2 is not as good) is that Half-Life doesn't try to add a bunch of characters and plot and dialogue on top of the main storytelling device: Put the character in a convincing location with a good sense of place and then have a bunch of crazy events happen directly to and around him. Why are the aliens invading? What were the scientists experimenting with? Why did the send in the army? Who is the G-Man? What's going on elsewhere? None of that matters. and it's really unlikely Valve or anyone else could think of answers that are more satisfying than vague hints Half-Life provides. The story is just "Gordon Freemen is caught up in and tries to survive some crazy shit," and that was more than enough for a satisfying game..

Gordon is a wordless sociopath in the second one too, but I really dug how Breen's PSA's became increasingly strident about your rogue status and weird physicist-to-killer trajectory. One of the few touches to the game where it felt like, yep, consequences.

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Gordon is a wordless sociopath in the second one too, but I really dug how Breen's PSA's became increasingly strident about your rogue status and weird physicist-to-killer trajectory. One of the few touches to the game where it felt like, yep, consequences.

I found that to be a little bullshit, actually. One of his lines is something like "you have destroyed so much, Dr. Freeman, but tell me, what have you created?" It's like, look, I have a degree in theoretical physics from MIT so presumably I created enough stuff to get hired at Black Mesa, and then from that point out I was busy either fighting for my life or being in magic G-Man stasis. For all I know, I created a lot of stuff before the series started, and from that point on I haven't had a chance to create. So I wanted to yell at Breen "I would create a bunch of stuff if you'd stop trying to kill me!" or something, but nope, Gordon can't talk.

I agree with Urthman that the first Half-Life was the one that really did this right. The part in Questionable Ethics when you find the houndeye cages is a stupendous example of storytelling in an FPS. Half-Life 2 (and especially the episodes) have plenty of this too, but they also have a bunch of really stupid "Alyx talks at you for 10 minutes" stuff that didn't work at all.

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Since you guys talked a bit about Demon's Souls, you should definitely enjoy Dark Souls as well. It's the same but better in pretty much every way, and also has an open world as opposed to the Nexus and different levels as in Demon's (not that Demon's way was bad, I just enjoy open worlds a lot more). Also, it takes place in the same world as the old King's Field games, which I think is really cool despite never having played them.

I never knew it was set in that world, that's a great touch! (despite the fact I've never played King's Field either and judging by the gameplay videos would struggle to persevere with them).

I don't think Dark Souls is actually set in the King's Field fiction. My understanding of it is that while there are tons of allusions in Dark Souls to From's previous RPGs, including Demon's Souls, King's Field, and others, nothing quite lines up enough to be able to say it's definitively a shared universe.

It might be something like Bungie flooding Halo with narrative allusions to Marathon, a bunch of wink and nod gestures for the fans to geek out over.

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Oh, on the subject of shops with bad names... There is a shop in town that sells stuff for runners, like trainers and lycra etc called... Sweat Shop. Really guys? Half the crap you sell is probably made in a sweat shop :(

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Ok, a lot going on here.

First, I hope it don't come across like we were dumping on the games -- as someone who makes games I sensitive to it coming across like that -- and want to say thanks for piping up and saying "hey I worked on that" and providing some insight. While I've never worked on a racing game (at least one that has shipped) did you find that the technical needs for an actual street (ie: it needs to be x wide and have y field of view, etc) was constraining you from making a city that evoked the things that people conjure up when thinking of the streets of SF? (Sharp, downright dangerous hills, tight corners, narrow alleyways, ever-present skyline and landmarks, etc.) Did you guys have any "does this feel like SF" discussions at all? Perhaps the game opens up to feel like SF towards the end (I only played a few hours) but the game's title location didn't make a big statement in the beginning (which seems like the place you would want it to). Anyway, I'm just curious as to how these types of larger budget genre-games get made and what, at the end of the day, is the most important in their execution.

Second: are you trying to say that the Driver universe is actually canonical with the Silent Scope universe?! I was making a goof. Important if True.

Hey Famous,

Don't worry about it, I developed a thick skin a while ago and it's not like I'm never negative about other people's games, plus you guys had had some valid points. It's only when people just dismiss something out of hand that it annoys me, critical analysis is always fine with me.

I should state that I didn't work on the game start to finish so my perspective may not be all encompassing. There were a ton of design documents which very much state exact distances for things like the width of the road overall, the width of lanes, optimum sizes to allow smooth weaving between traffic etc. There were plenty of meetings about that kind of thing, a lot of them above my pay grade, it was a massive team and so ridiculously enough we'd have meetings about meetings, which was where these thing tended to get passed down. I honestly couldn't say why the game isn't more like real SF, I can speculate that during early stages of development the focus was on gameplay only and as long as there was a general feeling of it being like SF then that'd do. I think with these big budget games they build up too much momentum, so much time and money has been put into them that even if you realise there's something wrong that it's too late to do anything about it. Of course this will be the same for a lot games even on smaller scales but I have reasons I shouldn't go into that suggest it was doubly the case on Driver SF.

Oh and Jake was totally right about the shift mechanic coming first and the story coming second.

As for Silent Scope, all I'm saying is that Tanner does a lot of undercover work and not all of it behind the wheel, perhaps some is behind a...

scope!

Ok i've definitely said too much now.

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So the discussion on Fez pushed me to bite the bullet, dust off the Xbox 360 and buy it. It's pretty much exactly the kind of thing I like, it turns out! I particularly enjoy how much environmental storytelling it does, for instance when you work out why the ruined city seems so familiar. I ended up getting a bunch of anti-cubes my first run through because I'd get into a room and know there was something there, and wouldn't let it go until I worked it out. I haven't cracked the writing systems yet, but early days. I've still got two whole areas I haven't explored yet.

Edit: well, my save game's corrupted so I basically just lost everything. Awesome.

Edit to the edit: no, wait, there's a workaround; you can delete the patch, move Gomez out of the room, reapply the patch and the save game will work again. Non-ironic awesome.

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A police officer goes into a coma and creates a dream referencing a bunch of films about cool cops, where he gets to have cool car chases, and everything he does is just and nobody gets hurt in any of it? I thought that was the joke.

E> and the whole world is ridiculously clean and pg?

and his partner is his best friend, but not quite as cool as cool cop Tanner Driver

and the assassin is a sexy lady

and one of the first missions is helping a kid use sweet driving skills to scare his bully driving teacher, which obviously has nothing to do with anything in Tanners childhood.

3 hours in this game is fantastic.

That was along the lines of my logic, dreams, especially conflict dreams don't tend to have a lot coherency and you find yourself doing things that make no sense. That is why I didn't bat an eyelid at some of the ridiculous thngs asked of me.

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On 7/27/2012 at 12:32 AM, Nappi said:

I really enjoyed Driver: San Francisco in all its silliness. The story was completely ridiculous of course and I couldn't help but laugh at how shitty undercover cop I was, as I hurled innocent civilians at my opponents just to win some street race that had nothing to do with my actual goal. If I remember correctly Tanner realized it was all just a dream at the very end, so until then, for what its worth, he was basically the most sadistic mass murderer in the planet.


I just got around to playing Driver:SF and had a good time with it and so when I felt like grabbing an old Idle Thumbs episode to listen to, I picked this one to remember what they said about the game.

This is big spoilers for Driver: SF if anyone cares.

 

So like Chris and Nappi and other people said this entire game you've got tons of missions where you jump into an innocent person's car for the express purpose of steering it into opposing traffic to ram head on some car you are chasing or racing against.  Even if everyone miraculously survives, at a minimum you've destroyed hundreds of people's cars.  (And yeah, of course it's just a dream, but at this point in the story Tanner is completely unaware of that.)

So then comes the big plot point where the villain Jericho also gets the power to possess any car and uses it to crash civilian cars into you. But the best, most hilarious part of it is that Tanner has the amazing gall to say to his partner:

"Oh no! Now Jericho can jump into any car like I can. But unlike me, Jericho has no concern for the safety of innocent civilians!"

And that's supposed to be a big ominous dramatic beat instead of the amazing WHAT? that it is.  It's very much like the part Chris made fun of in Max Payne 3 where Max has the completely self-unaware moment shaking his head at the stupid media for paying attention to a guy running amok and killing hundreds of people.

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