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Idle Thumbs 68: That's the Stuff

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Idle Thumbs 68: That's the Stuff

Idle Thumbs traveled to QuakeCon 2012 for the express purpose of casting a pod at you live in real time (and also to check out Dishonored). With special guests Nick Breckon and Steve Gaynor. (You can watch a video of the live recording at http://twitch.tv/idlethumbs.)

Games Discussed: Dishonored, CLOP, Diablo III, Torchlight, Quake III: Arena, Unreal Tournament

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A future episode of The Walking Dead should have an easter egg where you pick up a banana and the voice of Sean declares that it is, in fact "the stuff". You can make this happen, you have the power.

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Did somebody say inappropriate achievement? At some point the story lets you pick up a banana, at which point you se the "Achievement Unlocked: That's the Stuff" popup.

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This episode was a good example of what I enjoy most about Jake - totally not afraid to go there. Like in any context. MS-DOS vs. Windows? Quake vs. Unreal Tourney? NASA logos?

I hope the weather in my shitty state didn't impact your guys' time here for QuakeCon too much.

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A future episode of The Walking Dead should have an easter egg where you pick up a banana and the voice of Sean declares that it is, in fact "the stuff". You can make this happen, you have the power.

I think I'd actually be more amused by hearing Lee say "That's the stuff" upon picking up a banana.

It makes sense! Food is scarce! He'd be pleased to find a banana! That could totally go in.

P.S. The "worm" is clearly the best NASA logo.

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I feel like the conversation about digital distribution being the future that everybody is just going to have to accept and live with is overlooking a few things. For one, there's the matter of ISP's pushing back hard against bandwidth hungry content delivery services by imposing strict bandwidth caps on their users. Digital distribution cannot be the primary method of providing games when many markets are being constrained by such caps.

Like, Canadian here, and my bandwidth cap... Is seriously confusing, it seems to change every time i go check what it is, but i think it's around 80 gigabytes right now.

You show me Max Payne 3 being a 30 gig download on Steam, and it it's just NOPE. Not happening.

I mean, and there's another issue with there being a massive, shocking disparity between the number of registered users on Live and the number of 360's apparently out in the wild. (Like less than half, the last i checked.) There's probably a ton of RROD'd 360s in there, admittedly, but somewhere out there is a huge market of people that is not plugging their systems into the internet at all. This is probably not a market you can sell digitally distributed games to.

Not trying to make a stubborn argument in favor of physical media or the consoles, but i feel like the all-digital future is further away than people want to believe it is. (You know, and honestly, i do still prefer having a physical thing. I feel like the digital distribution services are a horrible quagmire of user rights issues just waiting to happen.)

Also - Quake 3 Arena is totally better than Unreal Tournament.

I mean, but it wasn't so much the gimmicks that bugged me, i always thought Unreal had an incredible and nuanced roster of weapons. (Though there's something to say for the purity and simplicity of Q3A's approach to everything.) The problem i actually had with UT is that it just felt so clumsy and sluggish in comparison to the ultra responsive and precise gameplay of Q3A.

I was absolutely hooked in hard by UT2k4 primarily because it felt more like Q3A to me. (Personally, i think UT2k4 is the high water mark for that style of shooter.) Even there, though, raw deathmatch was probably the thing i spent the most time with, and when i later got into Halo, it was again Team Slayer and Team Doubles that i spent the most time with.

Q3A was kind of a game made for people like me, i guess. I still really admire the purity of purpose Q3A had, that is a game that knew exactly what it was.

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In the Q3A vs UT battle, UT gets my vote. Overall level design of UT was much better (although there are quite some shitty levels, specially for team based games). UT also had better weapon balance, or at least, different people could be equally powerful even though they specialized on different weapons.

UT also had much variation out of the box, not just the number of game modes, but also the added twists that mutators gave. I mainly played InstaGib CTF. Q3A was quite simplistic compared to that.

Made that's the thing, Q3A was more about simplicity (considering how the average Q3A player had their client configured), and UT was more about variation.

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Excellent. So good to see iTunes update with a new Thumbs after getting home from work.

Looking forward to the Diablo 3 talk. I haven't touched it, but I know how much Chris loves D2 and I'm aware of the lukewarm response from fans for D3.

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In the Q3A vs UT battle, UT gets my vote. Overall level design of UT was much better (although there are quite some shitty levels, specially for team based games). UT also had better weapon balance, or at least, different people could be equally powerful even though they specialized on different weapons.

UT also had much variation out of the box, not just the number of game modes, but also the added twists that mutators gave. I mainly played InstaGib CTF. Q3A was quite simplistic compared to that.

Made that's the thing, Q3A was more about simplicity (considering how the average Q3A player had their client configured), and UT was more about variation.

Q3A was very much about distilling multiplayer deathmatch down to its core and make that as tight and consistent as possible, while UT seemed more about trying to expand outwards from that core and see what's going on. At the time, the clean simplicity of Quake was way more appealing to me, both as a gaming experience in and of itself, and as a clean slate for modificiation. UT just seemed messy to 13-years-ago me. If both games came out at this point I don't know what I'd prefer (or if I'd just play both, or neither).

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I feel like the conversation about digital distribution being the future that everybody is just going to have to accept and live with is overlooking a few things. For one, there's the matter of ISP's pushing back hard against bandwidth hungry content delivery services by imposing strict bandwidth caps on their users. Digital distribution cannot be the primary method of providing games when many markets are being constrained by such caps.

Like, Canadian here, and my bandwidth cap... Is seriously confusing, it seems to change every time i go check what it is, but i think it's around 80 gigabytes right now.

You show me Max Payne 3 being a 30 gig download on Steam, and it it's just NOPE. Not happening.

I mean, and there's another issue with there being a massive, shocking disparity between the number of registered users on Live and the number of 360's apparently out in the wild. (Like less than half, the last i checked.) There's probably a ton of RROD'd 360s in there, admittedly, but somewhere out there is a huge market of people that is not plugging their systems into the internet at all. This is probably not a market you can sell digitally distributed games to.

Not trying to make a stubborn argument in favor of physical media or the consoles, but i feel like the all-digital future is further away than people want to believe it is. (You know, and honestly, i do still prefer having a physical thing. I feel like the digital distribution services are a horrible quagmire of user rights issues just waiting to happen.)

If the world goes a certain way, stuff like bandwidth caps are just going to go away or change in how they are applied. The inertia of many major entertainment industries isn't going to be stopped by ISPs having some technical or economic kinks to work out. It would take something a lot more fundamental than that. There are always changes in infrastructure, convention, and business models that have to change when major shifts occur.

I similarly wasn't making an argument for or against anything based on personal preference or taste. I'm just saying that this is clearly the way things are moving. I buy all my books in hardcover, and yet as of last month, e-books just overtook physical books in fiction sales. I almost never buy music digitally, and yet the music industry has long since reached the tipping point in that area. Film and television are moving in that direction as well. I just think it's kind of silly to assume that video games--which unlike ANY of those forms are actually digital in fundamental nature--are somehow going to hold out.

I'm not saying it's going to happen immediately. I made a point to say there's no way it's going to happen in the next generation--and as we've seen over the last seven years, a single generation can last a while these days. But it's definitely going to happen.

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I played UT much later than it came out, but I mostly played InstaGib, so the weapon selection didn't matter. I preferred it to Q3, though. But I was very much a casual player of either.

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UT also had better weapon balance, or at least, different people could be equally powerful even though they specialized on different weapons.

It's more a matter of individual weapons in UT being more flexible, having more tricks and being applicable to a broader range of situations. You can pick your favorite and stick with it.

You have to be much more holistic about how you play Quake 3, you have to understand when to apply the different weapons available to you.

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Unreal Tournament was actually the game that got me into shooters proper. I had to bike through the icy cold, to the city, and holy shit were my hands freezing. Just playing botmatches on Face and getting headshot monster kills. So yea, at the time I was totally a UT person. It wasn't until I was older that I could even appreciate Q3 which I do think is the better game now.

Does anyone remember Tactical Ops? Some mod for UT that later went retail. I played that so damn much. It was in essence a more arcade version of Counter-strike. I think that is still my most played game in terms of hours. Clan wars and everything. And my best friends mom being worried that we were in a Clan, thinking it was some kind of cult-ish thing.

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I feel like the conversation about digital distribution being the future that everybody is just going to have to accept and live with is overlooking a few things. For one, there's the matter of ISP's pushing back hard against bandwidth hungry content delivery services by imposing strict bandwidth caps on their users. Digital distribution cannot be the primary method of providing games when many markets are being constrained by such caps.

Like, Canadian here, and my bandwidth cap... Is seriously confusing, it seems to change every time i go check what it is, but i think it's around 80 gigabytes right now.

You show me Max Payne 3 being a 30 gig download on Steam, and it it's just NOPE. Not happening.

I mean, and there's another issue with there being a massive, shocking disparity between the number of registered users on Live and the number of 360's apparently out in the wild. (Like less than half, the last i checked.) There's probably a ton of RROD'd 360s in there, admittedly, but somewhere out there is a huge market of people that is not plugging their systems into the internet at all. This is probably not a market you can sell digitally distributed games to.

Not trying to make a stubborn argument in favor of physical media or the consoles, but i feel like the all-digital future is further away than people want to believe it is. (You know, and honestly, i do still prefer having a physical thing. I feel like the digital distribution services are a horrible quagmire of user rights issues just waiting to happen.)

OK, believe it or not I'm the guy who asked the question in the panel.

And yeah there's a ton of ways this can go down but one of the ways I can see it happening, and I briefly mentioned this in the question, is the effect that a day-and-date release might have in the console space.

As in, right now people who want an Xbox 360 game day one have to go to the store to purchase a physical copy (along with all that entails, like hoping there is a copy there, catching shit from GameStop on whether you preordered it, etc.). People who want a PC game day one usually just have to buy it on Steam and wait for it to download/decrypt (and the downloading part can be done almost completely ahead of time)

So what happened to PC at retail? It really died away. I mean yeah there's still shelves at Walmart and Target but it's nowhere near as big. Go to GameStop and it's a pariah. And yet PC game sales are still strong enough to encourage ports and exclusive games and Valve's income doubles every year thanks to Steam.

So what would happen if 360 releases came out day-and-date on digital as well as physical? Would the stores rebel? And is fear of this what keeps this from happening?

In the PC space, when Microsoft decides not to make digital gaming convenience a priority, Valve takes up the slack with Steam. In the console space, when Microsoft decides not to make digital gaming convenience a priority, then there's nothing you can really do.

Anyway the gist of my theory was that the console makers can't go all-digital because the stores would kick them out (or they'd have to make the consoles not-cheap) but they can't afford long term to not go all-digital because eventually the public will demand it.

And then I think about things like the rumored Steam Box console, or how someone could, to some extent, just go ahead and do that today. I guess really long term your TV stops being a TV and just becomes a screen with a different form factor than a computer monitor, and the device you hook up to it may or may not be what we consider a "console" today, may not be made by the companies that make "consoles" today, and may not have the line-in-the-sand distinction between PC and console gaming (i.e., today if you buy GTA4 on the PS3, you can't play it on your PC - at some point if, say, Steam was a "console" you might be able to).

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OK, believe it or not I'm the guy who asked the question in the panel.

Hello, new person!

And yeah there's a ton of ways this can go down but one of the ways I can see it happening, and I briefly mentioned this in the question, is the effect that a day-and-date release might have in the console space.

As in, right now people who want an Xbox 360 game day one have to go to the store to purchase a physical copy (along with all that entails, like hoping there is a copy there, catching shit from GameStop on whether you preordered it, etc.). People who want a PC game day one usually just have to buy it on Steam and wait for it to download/decrypt (and the downloading part can be done almost completely ahead of time)

So what happened to PC at retail? It really died away. I mean yeah there's still shelves at Walmart and Target but it's nowhere near as big. Go to GameStop and it's a pariah. And yet PC game sales are still strong enough to encourage ports and exclusive games and Valve's income doubles every year thanks to Steam.

So what would happen if 360 releases came out day-and-date on digital as well as physical? Would the stores rebel? And is fear of this what keeps this from happening?

In the PC space, when Microsoft decides not to make digital gaming convenience a priority, Valve takes up the slack with Steam. In the console space, when Microsoft decides not to make digital gaming convenience a priority, then there's nothing you can really do.

Anyway the gist of my theory was that the console makers can't go all-digital because the stores would kick them out (or they'd have to make the consoles not-cheap) but they can't afford long term to not go all-digital because eventually the public will demand it.

Let's think about this for a second though, why do retail stores like Gamestop have any power to begin with?

This is relevant, so stay with me here. What i personally believe is the real roadblock slowing adoption of a digital business on the consoles is the kind of people who buy consoles. I've seen it lots, families who have a PS3 kind of just unceremoniously shoved into a dusty corner, hooked up to a TV with SD cables and no ethernet plugged in. Next to it, a small pile of games with a copy of the latest Call of Duty game and a few random other things. It still happens all the time, and i believe the registered user counts touted by Sony and Microsoft relative to the actual number of systems sold shows that it is still an absolutely enormous market.

Simply put, people think differently about the consoles, they use consoles differently. Amongst non-gamer people i know, none have ever set up their Wii to connect to the internet. They're still toys to most people.

So back to Gamestop and other retailers, they have power because there is currently a market they can reach that digital distribution cannot. However, as that audience is gradually trained to be more receptive to digital distribution, the position held by retailers will crumble. People talk about Gamestop like it's this big nefarious roadblock halting progress, but they really don't have any power at all, their position in the industry is symptomatic of broader issues about how people interact with console hardware.

Still, I do think mindsets will change, consoles will gradually shift more towards digital distribution, as has already been happening over the course of just this console generation. (For the 360, XBLA launched as a novelty, and On Demand was never part of the original plan.) The Video game retailers of the world will and already are doing dumb and reactionary things to protect their increasingly irrelevant businesses, but they won't have any power to stop the changes.

Right now though, retail is still the main avenue for the consoles, and the platform holders appear to have taken the position of not wanting to rock the boat. (Interestingly though, NSMB2 on 3DS eShop will be day and date with the retail release.)

I don't think we're going to see any radical shifts in the next console cycle, i believe the current business model has probably at least another decade in it before anybody is forced to adapt or die.

That is, of course, assuming that bandwidth caps don't grow more ridiculous. In which case, everything is fucked. Stagnation, yay.

And then I think about things like the rumored Steam Box console, or how someone could, to some extent, just go ahead and do that today. I guess really long term your TV stops being a TV and just becomes a screen with a different form factor than a computer monitor, and the device you hook up to it may or may not be what we consider a "console" today, may not be made by the companies that make "consoles" today...

Oh we're definitely already in the midst of such disruptive shifts. Look at the new handhelds, whose biggest threats are not eachother, but the smart phones.

...and may not have the line-in-the-sand distinction between PC and console gaming (i.e., today if you buy GTA4 on the PS3, you can't play it on your PC - at some point if, say, Steam was a "console" you might be able to).

This is a whole different, lengthy debate in and of itself.

Personally, i do not think the one-console future will ever happen. There will always be issues of technological drift creating compatibility problems, it's endemic to the medium. Just look at iOS and its successive versions, where everything was supposed to be compatible and straightforward, but instead has all just quickly spiraled totally out of control.

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I don't often comment on episodes threads, but actually there's some good discussions here, I should check them out more! I'm also excited that I feel I have something I can add here, but usually there's a billion other posts preceding mine that make what I'm bringing up pointless.

Simply put, people think differently about the consoles, they use consoles differently. Amongst non-gamer people i know, none have ever set up their Wii to connect to the internet. They're still toys to most people.

I find this slightly sad yet true. I know I can't expect everyone to be technologically savvy, but I'd like to think that people know what they can do with the hardware they own. Sure I don't expect every PC owner to understand what a Razor mouse is, but you'd think people would know the possibilities and limitations of their own devices.

Just a couple weeks ago I was spending a night at my friend's house when we decided to play some Super Smash Bros. Brawl. An error code popped up and we needed to find a solution to our problem. I suggested that loading up his computer would take too much time, and proposed to just use the Wii's Internet Channel instead. He however, didn't even know this existed. This was somebody that is quite a bit of a gamer, and especially follows Nintendo. He's played just about every Zelda, Pokemon and Super Mario game there is, and yet he didn't have his Wii hooked up to the internet and didn't know of some of the functionality of his device.

Besides the people who don't have their consoles hooked up to the 'net, or don't have access to it/download caps that make downloading games feasible, there's a ton of people who have no idea that you can download games. Since their creation games have been sold as physical media, and the digital downloads service is quite new to consoles.

Personally, i do not think the one-console future will ever happen. There will always be issues of technological drift creating compatibility problems, it's endemic to the medium. Just look at iOS and its successive versions, where everything was supposed to be compatible and straightforward, but instead has all just quickly spiraled totally out of control.

The one-console future is a probability. I think the problem with it is the competitive environment console creators have placed themselves in. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft (and possible even Boxer8 in the future) are all throwing ridiculous amounts of money at their consoles in order to prove to the rest of the world that they are the best. In truth, if one of those consoles fades away, those developers are likely going to suffer massively from the loss of one of their main products.

I'd like to see the digital future, I want it to happen. I want a future where everyone is a bit more knowledgeable of the things they can do with their machines and so-on. We live in a wondrous age where the internet can be put to such great use by many different people, and yet many choose instead to play FarmVille... :tdown:

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Ah crap, I listened up all the recent thumbs, now it's Wednesday n I'm high & dry! Lackluster cast management on my part.

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Unreal Tournament is the gold standard for my level of cursing. If a game can make me burn ears in excitement, frustration, and anticipation like UT did for teenage Badfinger, that's pretty fucking good. On top of that, original-style Assault and its levels might be the best FPS game mode ever made.

There was also the fact that I had friends who made entire levels dedicated to our own game mode we made up, and a friend who replaced about 3/4 of the bots with customized bots that were named after Alien franchise characters and had the appropriately scaled deadliness to those characters. That's not a flaw against Quake's lack of those things I suppose so much as super bonus points to UT's customization and the ability to grab high school juniors and not let go.

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Unreal Tournament is a sort of chaotic frenzy of FPS that I can't enjoy easily.

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You are really good at this entertainment format you have invented.

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