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Jake

Idle Thumbs 83: Free Macintosh Warez

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I totally respect where Chris is coming from on Mark of the Ninja, but personally, I loved how the game rewards a more lethal style.

In most stealth games, the “best” way to play is to be a ghost. Never kill anyone, never get detected. Anything less than that makes you feel like you’re playing poorly or taking the easy way out.

Sometimes that’s fun. Sometimes, I do want to be the badass ninja that infiltrates, assassinates, and then vanishes without anyone ever knowing I was there. But other times, I want to be the badass ninja that kills everyone in the room in the span of a light-flicker.

Mark of the Ninja makes a strong effort to show the player that both styles are totally acceptable. You can get just as many points killing a guard as you can avoiding him. They also give you lots of lethal challenges that reassure you, “No, really. It’s OK to kill guards.”

As someone who enjoys lethal/predator stealth (e.g., Splinter Cell: Conviction, Arkham City) just as much as non-lethal/ghost stealth, I really appreciated Klei’s all-inclusive design.

(I also loved the different outfits, which completely change the way you play the game. They too help reinforce the idea that all play styles are not only viable but welcome.)

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Oh and by the way Jake the coop in Halo isn't the same as the single player storyline. It's kind of a bummer.

What are you talking about? You can totally co-op the campaign, i played through the entire game with friends. It was great, it's a good campaign.

If you mean the free episodic co-op campaign, Spartan Ops, that's a completely different thing, and is more the thing Halo 4 is doing in lieu of Firefight. (For which it is a currently disappointing replacement. Things may improve though, patches have been promised and only two episodes have even been released so far.)

About the control scheme conversation, one of the things that has always driven me crazy about console shooters is having jump mapped to A, which prevents you from being able to aim while jumping.

Coming from a Quake background, i want to never not be jumping.

Bumper jumper in Halo was a great option for a while, but since Reach, it's not doing what i want it to do. (Bumper jumper takes armor abilities off the top buttons, which you also really, really need up there.)

So now i'm looking at increasingly insane solutions, like high-end competitive game pads, when really all i want to do is to be able to remap the controls to my personal preferences.

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I forget the name of the control scheme, but I use the one that maps Sprint to X, Crouch to LS, Melee to B, Reload to RB, and Armor Ability to LB.

It's not ideal, but I needed Crouch on LS, and this was the only control scheme I could live with that did that. I don't understand why they don't just let you remap everything to your liking. I don't mind Sprint and Jump being on the face buttons, but it'd be nice if I could aim while trying to punch people.

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Sno, yeah I was told the wrong information. I was supposed to campaign with someone and he started complaining that it's a totally different story line, but he was talking about the Spartan Co-Ops. But he was misinformed, so, I played through the campaign by myself. I actually really enjoyed it.

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You know what games really got me thinking about game design? TI-83 plus calculator games. That was the first time I had a computer and realized that I could actually write and mod programs. I didn't understand it at all, but the fact that here was this platform that people were making these simple, refined little games, and that there was this odd little noncommercial student community spreading it all around sharing the best games and actually competing for high scores, that was crazy and formative. ticalc.org was my Macintosh Shareware site.

Oh man. Phoenix. Block Dude. Cave. So many games I can't remember their names. It funny, cause the whole paper airplane thing really struck a chord for me like that. I think that TI calculator games are too fundamentally limited to really provide a robust game design background, but it was still really cool that there were a hundred variations of "don't touch the walls" and looking for the best ones, I really started forming cohesive thoughts about what I liked and why. I think I still have folders of college-ruled notebook paper where I would write and think about why Cave was so great. When I think back on it, I think that my idealistic notions about perfecting mechanics led me down the wrong path, but I can certainly say that it got me thinking.

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Oh man. Block Dude. YES. I still have my TI-83 Plus with PuzzPack and MirageOS. :D

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I forget the name of the control scheme, but I use the one that maps Sprint to X, Crouch to LS, Melee to B, Reload to RB, and Armor Ability to LB.

I use that one, too, and I believe it's Recon. Starting with Halo 3, they've switched up control schemes pretty much every game because of things like dual-wielding, equipment, and armor abilities, and I always have to switch to the one that I find is the closest to the original. I almost never have problems learning new control setups for all sorts of games, but when there's a series that I'm used to a specific style on, it's hard to adjust. I still sometimes sprint in Halo 4 when I mean to reload.

I start to have the Jake Problem in most stealth games, but after a minute or so of observing the patrol patterns and trying to plot out a course of action, my brain starts to get bored, says, "Fuck it, let's see if I can get to that part twenty feet away before a guard notices me" and I just bolt through the open space hoping for the best. This isn't so much of a problem in things like Deus Ex or Dishonored, though, because there are enough catwalks/vents/crawlspaces to allow me to be on the move fairly often without being seen. I got through both of those without raising alarms or killing anybody except targets/bosses with minimal quickloading.

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I'm a little surprised Thumbs are so down on Tim & Eric...

One of the toughest things for me about podcasting is that pretty much anything we say ends up being enshrined as a potential Strong Belief or All-Encompassing Opinion, and that's almost never the case for the stuff we say. I don't even remember what we (whoever it was) said about Tim & Eric, but I'm not especially down on them at all. I'm not trying to call you out--this sort of thing happens all the time, and it makes total sense why. But it's definitely super weird to realize that offhand remarks we thrown out that, to us, are often very disposable and incomplete, are actual Published Content that we release for the internet to judge.

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for the internet to judge.

Can I use that snippet out of context in the future? love it.

It is no wonder people troll on the internet with people's reactions to even offhand comments. The internet makes me lose all faith in humanity and also be so optimistic about humanity, on a daily basis.

Also the reader mail that started with "Evening chaps" made me chuckle, because I thought he was going to ask a question about leggings. Disappointing...

keep up the good work.

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Everytime you guys talk about competitive gaming, you never seem to mention fighting games. Fighting games are a highly competitive genre on consoles. Streamed events also get a hefty number of viewers.

Maybe it's just because I love SSFIV that I like to see it mentioned. :)

Bonus: Fighting games let you re-map all the buttons.

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I do enjoy the discussion of older and indie games, but I wish the fellas would discuss so more AAA titles as well. This podcast can deftly tease out and analyze all the things that we often take for granted in these kind of games - in terms of mechanics, story, presentation, marketing - leading one to experience these things with whole new perspectives.

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Well, they talked about Dishonored on this and the past three episodes. They frequently enough talk about Dota 2. There was also XCOM for a time. U:

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I do enjoy the discussion of older and indie games, but I wish the fellas would discuss so more AAA titles as well. This podcast can deftly tease out and analyze all the things that we often take for granted in these kind of games - in terms of mechanics, story, presentation, marketing - leading one to experience these things with whole new perspectives.

This upcoming weeks got a lot of Halo series (including 4), GTA series (including 5), Demon/Dark Souls, and some other bigger stuff. Also we talk about yet another unreleased indie project no one else can play just to balance out.

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I use that one, too, and I believe it's Recon. Starting with Halo 3, they've switched up control schemes pretty much every game because of things like dual-wielding, equipment, and armor abilities, and I always have to switch to the one that I find is the closest to the original. I almost never have problems learning new control setups for all sorts of games, but when there's a series that I'm used to a specific style on, it's hard to adjust. I still sometimes sprint in Halo 4 when I mean to reload.

Yeah. Recon. That's the one.

I know what you mean about adjusting. Recon isn't ideal. but Crouch on LS was mandatory for me. The default scheme had it on B, which just doesn't work if you're as sneaky and conservative as I am in multiplayer. I'm constantly crouching to take myself off people's motion detector. (It also works really nicely with hologram, my favorite armor ability.)

Halo 4 makes me wish the 360 controller had one more non-face button. I'm totally fine with Sprint on X and Jump on A, but Melee on B means that I miss a lot of punches. Ideally, I think I'd have B: Sprint, X: Use/Reload, RB: Melee, and leave the rest the same as Recon. Too bad there are no control schemes like that. :-/

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I really liked the discussion about geographical determinism in history and games. It was especially a good point Chris made about America's luck in getting out from under the colonialist thumb before the second and more intense phase of imperialism turned Africa, the Middle East, and South/Southeast Asia into the mess they are today. I mean, look at what havoc a little brushfire conflict like the French & Indian War wrought on the American colonies.

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This upcoming weeks got a lot of Halo series (including 4), GTA series (including 5), Demon/Dark Souls, and some other bigger stuff. Also we talk about yet another unreleased indie project no one else can play just to balance out.

What about Frog Fractions? We need more about fractions and frogs.

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As for branching storylines and content I'll never see, I got the feeling there were 3-4 times more content in Alpha Protocol than what I actually played. It's unrealistic that that is the case but I got the feeling so well done Obsidian for making me think that.

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As for branching storylines and content I'll never see, I got the feeling there were 3-4 times more content in Alpha Protocol than what I actually played. It's unrealistic that that is the case but I got the feeling so well done Obsidian for making me think that.

I played through it a couple times out of curiosity when it came out and I recall there being 2 or 3 significantly different possible arcs through the game, but with a lot of the sub plots kind of just crashing into unresolved dead ends, pretty clearly having been unfinished in development.

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As for branching storylines and content I'll never see, I got the feeling there were 3-4 times more content in Alpha Protocol than what I actually played. It's unrealistic that that is the case but I got the feeling so well done Obsidian for making me think that.

It's actually not unrealistic - you DID miss most of the game, or more accurately you missed most of the ways the conversations and story could play out, and unless you play 3-4 times you'll miss much of what the game has to offer. Alpha Protocol is one of my favorite games of all time because of all the amazing stuff that's in there that isn't force fed to you - you discover it because of the choices you make, and this makes those choices matter.

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Your comments about how having content you don't see adds value were interesting. However, I don't think it's just a case of the audience being insufficiently sophisticated, or unused to having multiple paths that causes some players to be unhappy with the thought of missing content.

A big part of it is that you have to ensure that the game mechanics reinforce the idea of having multiple exclusive paths. For instance, in Mark of The Ninja, there are those Haiku scrolls hidden around the levels. This means that the player is actually being explicitly told _not_ to allow any path to be unexplored, because the scroll might be hidden there. As a result, unexplored paths become not tantalizing hints of what could have been, but a big empty box on a checklist.

Also, Bartle's player types, explorers,etc. That hardly needs to be mentioned.

I will say that as a sometimes producer of games, I feel bad when I know that there's content that I haven't seen, not just for myself, but for the developer hours that must have gone into making that content. It feels disrespectful to the developers not to see everything.

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One of the toughest things for me about podcasting is that pretty much anything we say ends up being enshrined as a potential Strong Belief or All-Encompassing Opinion, and that's almost never the case for the stuff we say. I don't even remember what we (whoever it was) said about Tim & Eric, but I'm not especially down on them at all. I'm not trying to call you out--this sort of thing happens all the time, and it makes total sense why. But it's definitely super weird to realize that offhand remarks we thrown out that, to us, are often very disposable and incomplete, are actual Published Content that we release for the internet to judge.

I agree with everything you're saying... with podcasting you want a free flowing conversation generally, so if you were in a position where you had to carefully consider every single utterance that would be antithetical to the process, but since it is a recording, that does create a somewhat tricky balancing act.

I don't remember the exact context of the Tim & Eric comment either, it was just a sort of casual offhand comment that allows the podcast to be what it is, but I guess also creates lots of opportunities for misinterpretations. For what it's worth, I'm not actually a fan of theirs either (I appreciate what they do, but it's not something I really seek out), but for some reason I imagined their comedic style would be something you guys would be really into, maybe because it seems so Python-esque to me, and I know that's something you guys have mentioned approvingly on the show.

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I don't remember the exact context of the Tim & Eric comment either, it was just a sort of casual offhand comment that allows the podcast to be what it is, but I guess also creates lots of opportunities for misinterpretations. For what it's worth, I'm not actually a fan of theirs either (I appreciate what they do, but it's not something I really seek out), but for some reason I imagined their comedic style would be something you guys would be really into, maybe because it seems so Python-esque to me, and I know that's something you guys have mentioned approvingly on the show.

The context was if Frog Fractions was just its first part, where the humor is entirely in nodding and winking at how lame a game it is. I thought it was a fair comparison, but then I'm not crazy about Tim & Eric myself.

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