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Chris

Idle Thumbs 97: The Dash Rendar Synergy

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Oh sweet, I didn't realize jake basically said what I was saying while I was writing my reply. Good thing he did, he's nicer than me apparently.

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I haven't listened to the podcast yet, and I haven't even played Kentucky Route Zero yet, but "pretentious" as regards KRZ seems like it might be reaching, at least insofar as we're talking about "aiming for higher art/culture" as Jake described it. http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2013/02/on-limits-and-demonstrations-and-games.html'>It seems pretty clear from even the limited exposure I've had to the work of the developers that they certainly know enough about "art" and "culture" to do more than just pretentiously ape it.

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Count me on the "was disappointed at the official Zelda timeline" bandwagon. I always entertained the notion that it was supposed to be one basic story told by different cultures.

 

 

The talk about exchange rates reminded me of a conversation I had with an Argentinian friend about the same thing. Apparently as far as cost of living, AR$1 roughly equals US$1, as in if you buy a hot dog off from a street vendor you'll spend about the same amount of pesos as dollars. However, in terms of exchange, back when we spoke, it was about three pesos to the dollar. Argentina has jack shit for national industry, so most manufactured goods have to be imported at ridiculous cost. My friend's boss wanted a custom self-inking rubber stamp, and ended up importing one from Germany, which after exchange and shipping cost AR$80. That shit's crazy.

 

The Canadian dollar has hovered around the same value as the US dollar for ages (and was significantly higher for some time), but we still pay a massive markup on certain items for some reason. Lots of people will actually cross the border just to go shopping.

 

 

 

The story about trading in the PS for the N64 made me wince a little. Don't get me wrong, some of my all-time favourite games are on the N64, but owning a 64 meant long waits between anything worthwhile. Maybe it's different if you're in the UK and have some kind of civic duty to enjoy Rareware.

 

Also, I'm pretty sure that the launch era game that everyone was searching for was Pilotwings. It was the only game available at launch apart from Super Mario 64 and a Japan-exclusive Shogi game.

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Pretentious as "aiming for the sound and feel of something from higher art or culture for its own sake or for the sound of it, without the meaning or maybe even raw talent to back it up" is what I think people mean when using pretentious that way, not "I don't like it." I think they're trying to say "your attempt to elevate your work tonally came off as affectation, not as genuine to me," and are shorthanding it in a way that doesn't always work. Honestly, I think people mean something close to that more often than not when they use the word "pretentious" as a pejorative, and that is a far more specific criticism than "I don't like this," so dismissing it out of hand as people not having anything to say seems... too dismissive.

I think that's definitely how it is used sometimes. However, the tone in which it is said, especially on internet forums, does tend to itself be extremely dismissive and not conducive to legitimate discussion, as Argobot says.

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According to Internet Football Documenting website Kissing Suzy Kolber, it was sadly not Ndamukong Suh who was on Wild and Crazy Kids, it was D'Brickashaw Ferguson.

 

http://kissingsuzykolber.uproxx.com/2013/02/dbrickashaw-ferguson-once-appeared-on-wild-crazy-kids.html

 

 

Maybe that's not sad, as his name is even more fun to say than Suh's. It is sad that there doesn't appear to be video on the internet.

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Re:  the brief conversation about Celebration:

 

I went to Celebration, FL once to give a training (my then-boss' alma mater had a branch campus there).  At the beginning of the lunch break, one of our attendees had a fender-bender in the parking lot.  

 

The impact of the accident caused a snake to poke its head out of her dashboard, where it had been hiding, and we spent the rest of our break watching as the police/fire department tried to coax it out without getting bitten.

 

CELEBRATION!

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I also just received Tammany Hall in the post, and actually got two games in recently. It is great fun!

 

The game plays pretty quick and the tight number of wards forces interaction and conflict between the players. Plenty of room for bartering and bickering with your fellow Bosses. The sparking up of rivalry's between the players and potential for tit-for-tat responses really brings out the theme of dirty politics. I think you guys will really enjoy it!

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I am an Eagles fan (as seen in forum avatar), and I do love me that video of young Andrew Ried.

 

Ah, those were better times.

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P.S.  I want to hear more about this Wacaday appearance.  Was the mallet prize a Pinky Punky replica?  Also I heard Funhouse mentioned and now I have the theme stuck in my head :(

 

None of my thread replies ever have anything to do with games.  I am the worst.

 

Edit:  oh my god Timmy Mallett does paintings now.

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Ugh, everyone knows that if you beat Shadows of the Empire at a high enough difficulty, Dash Rendar survives. Come on thumbs, get your facts straight!

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Ugh, everyone knows that if you beat Shadows of the Empire at a high enough difficulty, Dash Rendar survives. Come on thumbs, get your facts straight!

I don't know if that's true or not. Either it is true or it is plausible enough to be true, both of which lead to: Games are dumb.

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Actually I only know because I looked up the game on wikipedia after listening to the podcast.

 

"A short scene before the credits show Luke and Leia on Tatooine, mourning Dash's death. If the game is beaten on the Medium, Hard, or Jedi difficulty levels, this is followed by one more scene of Dash and Leebo, who had managed to escape the blast, discussing how they plan on hiding from their enemies, with Dash saying, "It's good to be remembered as a martyr without actually being dead, wouldn't you say?""

 

Games are dumb.

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According to Internet Football Documenting website Kissing Suzy Kolber, it was sadly not Ndamukong Suh who was on Wild and Crazy Kids, it was D'Brickashaw Ferguson.

 

http://kissingsuzykolber.uproxx.com/2013/02/dbrickashaw-ferguson-once-appeared-on-wild-crazy-kids.html

 

 

Maybe that's not sad, as his name is even more fun to say than Suh's. It is sad that there doesn't appear to be video on the internet.

 

This KILLS me because I knew it was D'Brickashaw -- my fantasy football team was called D'Brickashaw's Rickshaws this year and I simply got confused and befuddled by the majesty that ist he name "Ndamukong." (Which, if I'm not mistaken, means "House of Spears." Holy shit.)

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As far as the Twilight Imperium not-quite-recommendation, I'm going to make my obligatory pitch for Eclipse, a game I very much enjoy, and one that should be receiving an iOS port sometime soon. It is also a 4X space board game with multiple ways to earn VP, but the rules are much more elegant than TI (TI is a pretty gnarly combination of Axis & Allies, and Puerto Rico). I forget who mentioned the game, but when he said it takes like 6 hours if anything he undersold it. I played a 9 hour game of it once where I was the only person that was even a little more than half way close to victory... it really is kind of too much. Eclipse, by contrast, probably takes about an hour per person the first time you play it, and then is more like half an hour per person afterwards. It is still a very robust board game experience, but it is also much more manageable.

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I won't swear I'm not the only one, but I really like the SF overlay in the Assassin's Creed games. In fact, it pretty much makes them for me. The historical stories are okay, but they're kind of a history's greatest hits affair with some fairly dramatic liberties taken with characters, places, and so on, and they don't really have the time or attention paid to make them come alive much beyond justifying the various gameplay scenarios you get up to. But the weird conspiracy stuff, hidden clues, and secret history that Desmond's uncovering through use of the Animus? That stuff is probably not going anywhere satisfying in the long run (it would take a hell of an ending to payoff all the setup they've got so far, and it's such a cash cow that the idea they'll be allowed to end it at all is suspect), but it's certainly intriguing and really good at stringing me along. Hell, I even played their Facebook game, Project Legacy, for more hints at backstory. (It doesn't even really work at this point, and they never followed through on expansion plans they'd talked up, but as Facebook games go it was nonspammy and didn't want to bleed your wallet dry over time, so that's something.)

 

And Pandemic's a solid starter coop boardgame (along with Forbidden Island, by the same people - a bit simpler, and available for <$20), but for my tastes it's a little too limited in scope, mechanics, and choices to really reward long term play. If you like that sort of thing I'd recommend eventually moving up to games like Ghost Stories and Yggdrasil, which are incredibly hard fought wars of attrition where every decision is fraught with tension because the enemy advances every single player turn but some turns have to be spent gathering resources or getting into position, and there are a variety of threats each nasty in their own unique way.

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I also like Pandemic a lot, but I agree that it is on the simpler side of things.

I am a big fan of Space Alert, which was a board game that inspired FTL, and has vaguely similar mechanics. Each player controls a space cadet dude, and you collectively have to deal with a variety of threats to your spaceship. There are two things that distinguish the game from the rest of the cooperative board gaming crowd. 1. You have these cards that allow you to either move to another room, or to activate a certain type of control (firing a weapon, rebuffering shields, transferring energy somewhere, etc.). So that becomes this sort of puzzle that you need to solve, moving and activating things in the right order. 2. The game is in real time. It comes with this CD that you play, and the CD is just the voice of the ship computer letting you know a threat has arrived (so you then draw from the threat card deck), or that the communication channel has gone offline (so players aren't allowed to speak when this happens), and stuff like that. The game has a hard limit of 10 minutes of play. The real time mechanic does an excellent job of solving two problems: it eliminates analysis paralysis from stretching out your board game session into an ungodly long time, and it also eliminates the problem that is rampant in a lot of cooperative games where one person just sort of takes charge of how to play the game, and everyone else just sort of passively agrees. The real time mechanic also makes things considerably more difficult. In your haste to put cards down before you run out of time, it is entirely possible you put a card down in the wrong order, or put down your card so that you are moving instead of activating something or vice versa. A single misstep can lay waste to all your planning. Some people will find that incredibly frustrating, but other people will find it hilarious. So its not a game for everyone, but for people that are amused by things going horribly wrong the game is great fun.

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Btw I had totally forgotten about Wind Waker's new game plus costume but I remember playing and loving the bizarre make believe story it implied (centered around Link's grandmother with dementia).

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With regards to the first Assassin's Creed, I could have sworn the whole sci-fi aspect of it was kept a secret until release. And looking back at ign.com's review they seem to confirm that as only IGN can, referring to it as a twist that "would likely blow the lid covering your brain." Which makes its inclusion even weirder. People were incredibly hyped for that game to begin with, and the futurey parts can't have been crammed in to make the game more broadly appealing, since they didn't tell anyone about it. Maybe it was to get the pitch approved by higher ups to begin with? Video games.

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I've always assumed it's just that a bunch of video game developer nerds don't think straight historical fiction is rad enough.

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Or they think historical fiction is super rad but they can't make a legitimate historical fiction game where everyone speaks in Arabic, where the entire map is open from the start, where there are no collectibles and the player dies in one sword hit, and so on, so instead of bullshitting it and saying "hey our game is legit historical" even when no video game could ever do that, they hand-wave all that stuff with "the Animus, lol" and in fact solve a lot of other problems too (why can't I go to every area of the city, how do I have a minimap, and so on).

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I've always assumed it's just that a bunch of video game developer nerds don't think straight historical fiction is rad enough.

 

I thought so too, but then again Ubisoft is willing to publish (granted, not develop) the Anno and Settlers franchises without a framing device. I wonder if it also has something to do with the potential for backlash against revisionist historical narratives, even as tongue-in-cheek as Ubi's wacky animus shit. If you're telling a sci-fi story about a historical event, you're adding one more layer of subjectivity to discourage criticism over your portrayal of crusaders or slavery or whatever.

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I thought so too, but then again Ubisoft is willing to publish (granted, not develop) the Anno and Settlers franchises without a framing device. I wonder if it also has something to do with the potential for backlash against revisionist historical narratives, even as tongue-in-cheek as Ubi's wacky animus shit. If you're telling a sci-fi story about a historical event, you're adding one more layer of subjectivity to discourage criticism over your portrayal of crusaders or slavery or whatever.

 

I dunno, there's tons of media out there that plays fast and loose with historical facts (pretty much all of it). I think it probably is just a combination of what Tycho and Chris said...nerd writing plus easy justification for gameplay mechanics. Gah I just remembered those stupid feathers in that game. It's like Max Payne and his golden guns. A crazed OCD assassin roaming the landscape with a satchel stuffed to the brim with feathers he's found on rooftops.

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This KILLS me because I knew it was D'Brickashaw -- my fantasy football team was called D'Brickashaw's Rickshaws this year and I simply got confused and befuddled by the majesty that ist he name "Ndamukong." (Which, if I'm not mistaken, means "House of Spears." Holy shit.)

It's probably for the best that Suh wasn't on Wild and Crazy Kids or else kids would have ended up in the hospital.

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