Idle Thumbs 109: Prepare for the Jelly

[Max Ernst]

The only way to do TF2 melee is to force everyone to be soldier and have their only weapon as the shovel. Watch as 30 soldiers meet on the 2Fort bridge and scream and yell and make "thunking" sounds as shovel smacks helmet. 

 

Also, The Swapper is a terrible title and all I can think of is seeing a game box written as "The Swapper: The Man who Swaps".  

[plasticflesh]

What if it was " Swappin' " ?

 

"Swap Quest" ?

[tegan]

I like it when the Thumbs discuss terrible names. I was a little disappointed that after devoting so much time to mocking Rayman Origins they never once made fun of the sequel being called Rayman Legends.

[tberton]

I really enjoyed the discussion about titles, especially since i just finished the postscript of The Name of the Rose, which I also found fascinating. I get big kick out of good names for things. I'm so bored of one-word titles. I find them to be very unmemorable most of the time and prefer the "evocative phrase" still titles, with bonus points for avoiding the use of "The". A couple great examples: It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, a graphic novel by Seth and A Few Acres of Snow, which is a board game. My enjoyment of both of those works is greatly increased by how interesting their titles are.

[sclpls]

What if it was " Swappin' " ?

 

"Swap Quest" ?

 

Swap Quest, the newest Sierra adventure game

[Sno]

Replying to the discussion in the thread regarding crouching - I don't think it takes a sim for it to be useful.

It's a huge part of Halo, both in campaign and online, for ducking behind cover and for stealth. (It lowers your profile, but it also caps how fast you can move, making it easier to stay hidden from other players' motion detectors.)

Or in Left 4 Dead, if you're up front, you crouch so that the person behind you can have a clear shot.

It's something i definitely miss whenever it's not there, even in faster paced shooters. The role it usually plays is subtle and often ignored, but i don't think that's reason for it to not be there.
 

You would love Xenoblade. Seriously. It's the only time I've ever had an emergent gameplay moment in a JRPG; when a small, underleveled monster that I hadn't bothered to kill earlier got chased halfway across the area by a level 99 T-Rex thing and led it straight to where I was.

I adore Xenoblade, and after some consideration it ended up being my favorite game of last year. It's a JRPG combat system and a JRPG story, it's still that stuff that you're either going to be on board with or against, but it's a beautiful, enormous game that felt like it was actually trying to address a lot of the dumb bullshit that JRPG's had become mired in. (Admittedly, to varying degress of success, but i think it succeeds far more than it fails.) It felt unmistakably modern in a genre that hasn't felt that way to me for years.

[TheLastBaron]

I bought Xenoblade when it came out, but decided I wanted to play it via Dolphin because it's super gorgeous looking and I wanted it to look as good as possible.  I then saw that that there's a really good looking HD texture project for it that you can use with Dolphin (and I don't even normally use/like hd texture packs), but the end result was that my PC couldn't run the game at a playable framerate.  The current plan is to play it when I get a new PC at some point in the future, but I would probably enjoy it just as much if I were to just play it the old fashioned way now.

[Sno]

And now i've listened to the podcast.
 

I love the term 'genre ossification' and totally agree with Chris' thoughtful nuancing. I have a history of disliking JRPG's for much the same reasons, though my emphasis was always on figuring out how it came to be that the genre incorporates all those weird elements (random battles against invisible enemies, overblown storylines, seperate battle arenas). I see those as coming from the founding days of the genre, when Japan got heavily influenced by the western Wizardry series. At the time, technology was not advanced enough to create a super detailed and sophisticated world, so many of these aspects were developed to work around those limitations. Then they got set in stone by tradition. Having those same self-imposed work-arounds nowadays, when there is no need for them at all, is such a jarring experience.

And now i have this thought stuck in my head where i can't help but think of JRPG's as all being like Super Black Bass, these things built up on all these little disparate pieces to try and hint at a greater whole.

[Salacious Snake]

In light of the perfunctory design question, I liked the new trailer for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain as shown at the Microsoft thing today. It lists a bunch of features, but then shows how they actually contribute to the core design of the game (tactical espionage whatsit).

 

For instance, it mentions dynamic weather, which is usually good for atmosphere at best, but the mention is immediately followed by Snake using the cover of a sandstorm to steal a jeep out from under someone's nose. I saw that and was like, "Heck, yeah."

 

http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/06/10/metal-gear-solid-v-reveal-trailer-e3-2013-microsoft-conference

 

It's funny, because Metal Gear games do tend to have a lot of seemingly extraneous stuff.

[Nappi]

This might have been mentioned already, but Gunpoint actually has an achievement called

 

Title Finally Relevant

Help justify my early, not entirely wise choice of game name by holding someone at gunpoint with the Resolver.

[Justin Leego]

Will the next episode be called 'Idle Thumbs 110: The Jelly' ?

[I Saw Dasein]

Idle Thumbs 110: We don't use jelly.

[80's Bad Guy]

I love JRPG's, but the cultural argument is irrelevant when discussing extraneous mechanics. 

 

Flare 1 does not need to be fed with warmspring leaves to power up because of Orochimaru's senpuku. It does because the game needed more padding. 

[thestalkinghead]

The sad thing is, that's really the best reason I can think of.

you need crouching in an fps shooter game for many reasons (just like you need jumping), maybe the most important reason is because it is something a real person can do and would do in in the scenarios presented in an FPS shooter, then there are tactical reason like cover and more precise aiming, then there are things like the ability to design a level that has a small tunnel like things in it etc. 

 

a demonstration (man) of why crouching in TF2 is important

 

without crouching i couldn't have hid behind the cart (simultaneously becoming a target and well covered) and basically crouching feels like a natural thing to do so without it it feels frustrating just like no jump (which is also a game equivalent of climbing) 

[melmer]

I just found out the swapper is a 2d platformer?

 

The whole time you were talking about the swapper i was imagining a first person game. clone/teleporting around like blinking in dishonoured. weird

[thestalkinghead]

I just found out the swapper is a 2d platformer?

 

The whole time you were talking about the swapper i was imagining a first person game. clone/teleporting around like blinking in dishonoured. weird

 i bet you could make a decent 3d game exactly like the swapper, but it would need very constrained level design else the extra axis of movement could be infuriating to handle