Sean

Idle Thumbs 90: Passive But Deadly

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Idle Thumbs 90:

Passive But Deadly

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Triangulated coordinates. An esoteric puzzle. An impossible cipher. The door opens to reveal your captor -- a man; a beard; mirrored shades; the infallible dictator of a banana republic. But upon second glance you realize it's not a fearsome generalissmo -- it's just Nick Breckon.

Games Discussed: Miasmata, Escape From The Mysterious Room, The Ship, Tropico 4

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Who is Nick Breckon and why should I hate him? This for me is the illusive final missing puzzle piece to understanding idle thumbs

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I imagine my realisation to go somewhat like this

But instead of a solar system it'll be floating text that reads "Congrats Nick"

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Chris mentioned that the Amnesia Fortnight prototypes seemed to be more system-driven than what's usually considered to be Double Fine's traditional fare. Do you think that's, in some ways, an artifact of the pitch process? It seems like it's a lot easier to describe and get excited about synonymous systems to games we've already played, and I think we saw that a lot more in both the pitches themselves as well as the ones that got lots of votes.

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Guys, I really like fruit cake.

You should organize a playing of The Ship.

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This episode basically negates my need to drum up a blog post on interaction scale in open world (or any, for that matter) games. It's interesting to look at the spectrum from Miasmata and something like theHunter (From the Just Cause 2 guys. Look it up, it's more awesome than you think.) to Far Cry 3 and then on to Just Cause 2.

In Just Cause you can go from walking down a dirt path to hovering at an altitude of 10,000 ft (in a rocket equipped jet craft) in a matter of seconds. In Miasmata, if you try to hop over a dry creek bed, you're likely to trip and drop all of your carefully picked flowers.

As an LD, I love to see space mean more in a game, and every square foot has one or more meaning units (MUs) embedded in it. Minecraft is somewhat similar in the material properties of each tile in survival mode, and how you can use those for different purposes, but Miasmata's space impacts your goals (are these the flowers I want?) as well as how you approach those goals (that hill is too steep, I should follow this stream). It has adverbs ingrained in the space in addition to verbs and nouns, I guess.

On a different note, I love how they convey goal information in the world. I was pleased that late into the game I was out of leads on certain plants but I was able to formulate a plan instead of just wander aimlessly. The camps are sources of info, this one note mentions a certain camp that was researching the plant I'm interested in, there must be a note there that I missed. Sure enough I went there, scoured the area and found a tent off to the side I'd missed.

Also did not see that helicopter battle at the end coming. Who knew it was all set in the distant future?

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"This is the last dateline"?

Say it ain't so. I like the datelines.

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If the episode was recorded after the Dead Island zombie bust thing it wouldn't have been the last dateline. Oh well!

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I'm pretty sure you've said "this is the last dateline" or something like that on a cast before. Have you started reusing material? Can't wait for "Richard Garriott is in space 2"

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Halfway through, so far I've had to ask google to define "Trepidatious" and "Fastidious". I already knew what "Diegetic" meant from last episode, so that was a personal win.

Probably a good job I don't listen to the book cast.

This dude. This is your Miasmata dude at work—

Fabrication d'une lampe-triode

This guy is the coolest.

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Also, pst, you guys, are kinda still all press what with a popular podcast media empire you moonlight with...

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I feel ashamed for immediately knowing what manga that was in the crazy room escape thing.

It was Death Note, wasn't it?

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Somehow I never got The Ship. Huh. Let me in on that fruitcake when it comes about.

Speaking of, I bought 8 copies of Thirty Flights of Loving to give to friends because I'm a tool.

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Yeah, I've been craving some fruitcake too. If anyone has a spare copy of The Ship, I'll be your lackey (unless you're my target).

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Good discussion on Tropico 4 guys!

I'll quote my ultimate Tropico moment here because it ties in with the discussion:

Tropico is a very interesting game in that respect. My goal was always to make the lives of the inhabitants as comfortable as possible given the circumstances. I soon found out that this is achieved by building lots of mines and/or tobacco, coffee and sugar plantations early on. When that investment started paying off, I could focus on the necessary infrastructure to support my petty society.

In fact, one of my most memorable video game moments was in Tropico 3: My economy was booming, relatively speaking anyway, and I had a serious shortage of work force. To solve this problem, I issued an open doors policy in my immigration office. The nationalist faction soon grew pissed because of the filthy foreigners had stolen their work and women, or whatever. The situation got quite bad. Finally, my advisor Penultimo suggested that I should issue an order of rebranding all the immigrants with local names, so that the nationalist wouldn't know who to hate anymore. I agreed to this plan and it actually worked perfectly... for a while. The immigrants were absolutely enraged.

Now all of this was obviously scripted as hell and presented in quite a goofy way. Still, I was completely shocked to discover how easy it was for me to strip a large group of people of their identity just to silence a bunch of dickheads. Like I said, I always tried to think what was the best for my people. Still, I somehow had managed to distance myself of the hundred or so inhabitants of the island enough that it didn't even occur to me how sick and gruel the plan I had agreed on was.

I don't know if this was what the developers had aimed for. It was very impressive nevertheless.

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