Idle Thumbs 104: Emblematic of the Dissonance

[Jake]

Idle Thumbs 104:

 

 

Emblematic of the Dissonance

This week on the Thumb, all is laid bare in the weeks-long game of Neptune's Pride, Sean and Jake break out of jail, rob an embassy, and learn something about themselves, and a person is killed inside a video game and it is surprising and meaningful.

 

Games Discussed: Grand Theft Auto V, Sleeping Dogs, Monaco, Neptune's Pride 2: Triton

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[Gormongous]

It was great to hear you guys talking about Monaco, though I think Sean's being too hard on the game, in terms of identifying a fail-state. Even if you're pretty good at Monaco, you're going to get seen all the time, but bushes, disguises, smoke bombs, catwalks, windows, and just running the fuck away are all methods for managing that. The guards only pursue you to your last seen position, marked by an exclamation point, so even turning two corners in quick succession or ducking into a bathroom can save your skin.

 

I do wish the game was better about tutorializing some things (the right time to sneak, the right time to run, the rules for disguises, etc.), but I think in the end that Monaco is a lot like Hotline Miami: when you're playing both right, you feel constantly on the verge of failure, like you fucked up thirty seconds ago and have yet to realize it.

 

Hopefully some more Thumbs will be playing Monaco this week and weekend. I sure hope to play a few more full-roster games soon, even if I'm still stuck playing the Gentleman.

 

 

EDIT: Oh man, and Sean's ad-libbed Kickstarter pitch at the end! You're forgiven.

[mikemariano]

Nice job sending out text messages while Nick was talking at the end there, whoever that was!  Poor Nick!

[Sean]

That was my iPad that had the Little Miss Sunshine song queued up getting an iMessage - it's normally on silent and I took it off for the stupid bit about Kickstarter and then was the rudest man. Bah.

[thestalkinghead]

"first day of may twenty thirtay" sounds like you are 17 years off, save that for you kids, I'm sure they won't appreciate it 

[youmeyou]

Holy shit, golf clap for the kickstarter little miss sunshine bit. I kind of even feel inspired even though it's total bullshit... feels like kickstarter!

 

Also agree with Gormongous on Monaco. Being seen is far less game-ending than in most other stealth games - guard AI is very forgiving once you recognize its patterns. The difficulty curve for Monaco is fairly steep though, which is what accounts for much of the early game frustrations. I went back and played the first few levels with a friend and kind of realized that while Monaco follows many of the tropes of stealth games, it's more about the franticness of the near miss and the chase and the panicked shotgun blast as you turn a corner into a guard's flashlight than it is about Splintercelling around a map, totally unseen. Which is also why it's such an incredibly fun multiplayer game; every level is an opportunity for multiple ways to pull a leroy jenkins and then just barely manage to get out alive as darts and bullets fly over your retreating heads as silly piano music plays.

[CaptainFish]

Wow, one of the best outros to an Idle Thumbs ever! Brilliant to just let it end instead of riffing on it. Inspired.

[Henroid]

I'm listening right now but I need something clarified - your guys' NP2 game ended because a cheater was discovered?

[thestalkinghead]

I'm listening right now but I need something clarified - your guys' NP2 game ended because a cheater was discovered?

 sounds like someone just got butt hurt by a devastating move and they all decided that this kind of stress and deception isn't good for a workplace

 

 

i would say that GTA IV got too serious for itself, i was disappointed that there weren't jetpacks and stuff like that i think san andreas and vice city matched the tone of the game better than GTA IV, you can't have a serious game if at any point you can get in a car chase with tanks, swat vans and helicopters then rocket launcher them all to death then walk into your house and sleep or repaint your car and they totally forget about it.

 

kerbals design works because it doesn't feel as bad to strand or kill a kerbal in space, i feel l like they live for space travel so a space death would be kerbarable  (made up word  kerbal+honorable and is googlewhack)

[Henroid]

Wow okay, so you guys talking about Monaco, you got the wrong impression I think. Yes it is a stealthy game but not purely. As you go later into the game, getting spotted on purpose is part of the strategy. The game is built to support stealth and brazen gameplay. You have to rely on both interchangeably. If you guys give up because you get busted once, you're missing out on the spirit of things and it doesn't mean you've failed or have less change for success.

[Problem Machine]

Okay I'm like 10 minutes into this and I want you guys to play Neptune's Pride forever. Listening to this absurd Game of Thrones bullshit from the Telltale offices after the fact is just the best.

[Gormongous]

Okay I'm like 10 minutes into this and I want you guys to play Neptune's Pride forever. Listening to this absurd Game of Thrones bullshit from the Telltale offices after the fact is just the best.

 

I didn't want to say anything, but I've actually started feeling the opposite. The Neptune's Pride discussions are all about people I don't know interacting with each other and seldom about the game they're all playing, so there's not too much for me to dig into. A few episodes of it have been fascinating, but I'd almost rather the Thumbs talk more about Dota 2, which I don't care about but has multiple points of intersection with other games, than what amounts to a bunch of he-said-then-she-said gossip... in space.

[Problem Machine]

Well, as enjoyable as I've found it, and as much as I do think it is game-talk of a maybe different sort, I do appreciate that it's somewhat off the mark of what people come to the podcast for. I will say, though, that if there was a podcast of just insane office video game soap opera antics, I would probably listen.

[Gormongous]

I think I just might be sensitive to it right now. We have a department Diplomacy game ongoing, so I get enough "Did you hear Phil was the one who told everyone to attack you because he heard you say you didn't have to worry about him eight turns ago" on my own.

 

Far be it from me to dictate the content of my favorite video game podcast, of course.

[shammack]

I actually really like the weirdly inconsistent tone of GTAIV. Some of the actual jokes are a bit too broad for my liking, but the contrast between the cutscenes' attempt at telling a poignant story and the ridiculous things that happen when you're actually playing the game is just amusing to me. I guess if I were heavily invested in the story in the first place, that might take me out of it a bit, but as it is, it just gives the game a unique and memorable feeling. When I play something like Saints Row where the whole thing is intentionally over the top, it all just starts to feel a bit "samey" and I don't get into it as much. I know there are lots of games that take their story way too seriously for what you actually end up doing in the game, but for me, GTAIV got the balance just right. I think I feel about it the way Chris felt about Red Faction Guerilla way back when, where the incongruity actually increases my enjoyment.

 

(P.S. How can I get on whatever office mailing list is being used to organize these games?  )

[CaptainFish]

I have to give my condolences to Nick and Sean (correct order) for the game ending with cheating. I played only one game of Neptune's Pride with friends, and It was shitty just dealing with the interpersonal nonsense without bringing in anything as underhanded as that. I mean we're already talking about a game that is about forming alliances and breaking them as soon as you have an advantage, it seems unnecessary to go beyond that to pull in players that are basically understood to be completely neutral by the game systems themselves (which is what I believe going AFK does, at least in NP 1). 

[Jake]

Wow okay, so you guys talking about Monaco, you got the wrong impression I think. Yes it is a stealthy game but not purely. As you go later into the game, getting spotted on purpose is part of the strategy. The game is built to support stealth and brazen gameplay. You have to rely on both interchangeably. If you guys give up because you get busted once, you're missing out on the spirit of things and it doesn't mean you've failed or have less change for success.

 

Wow, okay, I think you're overreacting to our conversation about Monaco. We played 40 minutes of it and I enjoyed it a lot. We're not going to give up because we got busted once. We did have a lot of situations in early game play where we were going through the environments in tight clusters, we'd trip a laser and would just get beaten to a pulp by the guards in a way that we weren't skilled (or fortunate?) enough to escape so we'd just get chased around like a trapped Pac Man until the inevitable happened. I could tell (and I hope I expressed this on the cast) that there was more going on, but our early play experience was a pretty negative one because of a few things which kept happening. I want to play more of the game though, because I could tell that there was a ton of stuff happening there that we weren't quite scratching as two brand new players, playing a 4 player co-op game with only half the playercount.

 

 

 sounds like someone just got butt hurt by a devastating move and they all decided that this kind of stress and deception isn't good for a workplace 

 

 

i would say that GTA IV got too serious for itself, i was disappointed that there weren't jetpacks and stuff like that i think san andreas and vice city matched the tone of the game better than GTA IV, you can't have a serious game if at any point you can get in a car chase with tanks, swat vans and helicopters then rocket launcher them all to death then walk into your house and sleep or repaint your car and they totally forget about it.

 

kerbals design works because it doesn't feel as bad to strand or kill a kerbal in space, i feel l like they live for space travel so a space death would be kerbarable  (made up word  kerbal+honorable and is googlewhack)

Nobody outright cheated, but the admin player went and asked an AFK player to log back in for a second to move their hundreds of AFK'd ships off a star, so the admin player could land there. It's not technically cheating, but it's such an intense rule bend as to make everyone want to stop playing.

[thestalkinghead]

Nobody outright cheated, but the admin player went and asked an AFK player to log back in for a second to move their hundreds of AFK'd ships off a star, so the admin player could land there. It's not technically cheating, but it's such an intense rule bend as to make everyone want to stop playing.

LOL i bet if you found out who the AFK guy was and had the same idea it would have been a legit tactic, but i guess it was just admin abuse?

[Chris]

Wow, okay, I think you're overreacting to our conversation about Monaco. We played 40 minutes of it and I enjoyed it a lot. We're not going to give up because we got busted once. 

 

Pretty sure he was talking about giving up on a specific heist attempt--the way Sean said he wished the end state would just assert itself when you become seen and the game starts to snowball downhill. I don't think he inferred you were giving up on Monaco as an entire game because you got caught once.

[Jake]

LOL i bet if you found out who the AFK guy was and had the same idea it would have been a legit tactic, but i guess it was just admin abuse?

 

 

 

That's definitely why it's a grey area. It's a move which is made way easier because it's an in-office game versus a mostly-anonymous online one, but the game is also a game which (as said on the cast) seems to have very few systemic walls specifically to facilitate meta-gaming-based backstabbing and subterfuge. It feels like a cheap shot, though, because while it didn't violate the letter of the law, it violated the spirit of it as established through play up to that point.

 

Thinking about it a bit more, I honestly don't think most players in that game would have done it, if they had the same idea. They don't feel burned because it wasn't them who pulled off the clever deceitful move, they feel burned because the rules they understood everyone to be playing by were subverted. It's not outright cheating, but it is a little like when you're playing a new board game at your friends house and they neglect to tell you until half way through the game that there is an additional technique you could employ, but they didn't reveal it was even possible until they did it. You know they technically aren't cheating, but it doesn't exactly endear anyone to anyone else, nor does it make you want to keep playing the game.

 

But I guess if you want to be smarmy about it, there is an infinite well of "oh they're just butthurt because they didn't think of it first" that you can dredge from and never be proven wrong, because that's a point that is impossible to actually prove one way or the other.

[Henroid]

Pretty sure he was talking about giving up on a specific heist attempt--the way Sean said he wished the end state would just assert itself when you become seen and the game starts to snowball downhill. I don't think he inferred you were giving up on Monaco as an entire game because you got caught once.

Precisely this. At some point in the conversation the idea of quitting the mission and restarting came up.

 

Edit - As a reaction to being spotted by guards that is.

[Henroid]

An idea Jake and Sean brought up during the Monaco discussion was learning how to perceive the game, and that's absolutely a thing you have to learn to really get a handle on the game. I was having some frustration with the game, but once I learned what visual cues to watch for everything started to sail more smoothly.

 

The first thing you should get a handle of is ? marks above NPC's heads. If it appears, they definitely see you but aren't alerted yet. Get familiar with the countdown timer to when it turns a pale red, which is when the NPC moves to investigate. Then there's a bunch of interaction that can happen at this point. Continuing to see you as they draw closer will solidify the red, and then just trigger a ! alert to your last known location. But before it all goes red, you can break their field of vision and let it 'cooldown.'

 

Second thing to get a handle on is laser grids. Thin red lines that are stationary tend to blink out for a second. It's timed on a loop that you can figure out. If the red laser is thicker, it will never flicker out. Rotating / panning lasers are the most straight forward. In any case of these, when you trip a laser, a ! alert will place where it happened; as long as guards or civilians don't see you run or sneak from it, they will respond to that location, they don't zero in on you no matter what, like Oblivion's awful stealth system.

 

Third thing (by the way these aren't things to learn in this precise order) is reading the 'map' view when you don't have line of sight on anything. I've run by plenty of places, turned around a wall, and then notice that there was a safe icon or whatever else to go back for. This is something the Lookout can really help with in multiplayer. Especially in cases where tokens / coins (whatever you want to call them) are underneath stationary NPCs.

 

And I apologize to Jake, I didn't mean to sound all snappy or anything about it. I just wanna try and get people into this game. I feel compelled to because 1) it's fun and 2) the maker gave it to me randomly for free.

[Gormongous]

To add to Henroid's excellent advice, a guard that sees you running will fill up their question mark almost immediately. If you are sneaking, it will fill up at a much slower rate, depending on how close you are to them, whether you're doing anything suspicious like picking a lock, and whether there's an alarm. If you're several dozen feet away while sneaking, it's fully possible to walk in front of a guard in plain sight and leave them behind before their question mark fills up and becomes an exclamation mark, which means they've noticed you. When you get them, disguises follow similar rules.

 

Also, playing a few more levels, you'll probably get better sense for the level layout and especially for identifying "panic rooms." For me, it's usually a bathroom, a closet, or a utility room at the end of a long hallway with lots of turns. I just outrun the guards, who are going to be moving slightly slower because they're reacting to incomplete information, and piss in the toilet (no one's mentioned this in any review, I feel like. It's great, unless you're the Redhead or the Lookout) until the exclamation marks disappear.

[Henroid]

It's kinda funny how chaotic the game feels at first, especially with its presentation layer. And even knowing all of this stuff about what to look for and how to specifically dodge trouble or get out of it, the later levels really hammer you down (but not in a bullshit impossible way - it just means trying again).

 

I've beaten a couple of levels in singleplayer by getting killed as one character, doing everything I can along the way, and then picking up where I left off with the next character (you have like four lives total per stage). I dunno how mutliplayer works when it comes to everyone dying - does the whole stage reset, or does everyone pick another character and try again where you left off?

[Gormongous]

If everyone dies, they start over from the beginning. To be honest, a good team that knows the level's basic layout shouldn't see a TPK too often at all. Chances are someone either is the Redhead (resurrects teammates almost instantly) or has the bandages (instant AoE resurrection).

 

There's so much interesting risk-management gameplay going on in Monaco, which has the unfortunate side effect of being tough on neophytes. Without an awareness of all the options (and even without access to some, until about halfway through the first campaign), the game can seem cruel and unforgiving.