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Idle Thumbs 118: A Simple Litter

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Idle Thumbs 118:

 

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A Simple Litter

Did you know the President's job is to sign legislature and collect orbs? Did you know the real purpose of the BigDog is to carry Lords? Special guest Danielle Riendeau of Polygon joins us for a discussion of deep space survival, wilderness survival, and difficult to pronounce words.

 

Games Discussed: Saint's Row IV, Rymdkapsel, Don't Starve, Crusader Kings II

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Rymdkapse sounds like a tower defence game but without levels and with some base building but no ending

 

The Gashlycrumb Tinies:

 

Gashlycrumb_Tinies.jpg

 

i can't deal with the perma-death in Don't Starve, it's like every minute i play is like a minute i will lose if i die

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haven't listened to the whole thing yet, but pretty sure Chris could not sound less enthused about the merits of Saint's Row. Paraphrasing (apologies if misrepresenting):

yeah, but how is any of that...good?

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Is it just me or does Danielle sound like the female version of Kirk Hamilton?

 

Haha, do you mean in terms of the timbre of their voices, or in terms of the content of their discourse?

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Saints Row 2-4 also have online coop through the entire game. As dumb and low brow and even cringe inducing as the story and situations can be, there's still lots of fun to be had in an open world with a buddy causing mayhem. And now in SR4 jumping around buildings collecting an agility orb equivalent? Yes please. I so want this to be the real Crackdown 2.

 

You can also choose "Nolan North" as your character's voice. Which goes so far beyond dumb it's kind of great. I believe he plays himself. Or a version of himself. So Nolan North can be your super hero president.

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The thing about the Saint's Row games (particularly 3, and hopefully 4) is that their story and gameplay perfectly mesh, in exactly the way that GTA's never do. Saint's Row has every bit as many weird activities and bizarre results of playing around in the open world, but rather than try to tell an unrelated story of renouncing violence that flies in the face of the gameplay, it tells a story about runaway celebrity and fame, and the excesses and distractions that come from them.

Even more importantly, Saint's Row is entirely aware of how much of a self-parody it is, and it owns every moment of it - often while sneaking in subtle humor between the big, blatant dildo-jokes.


If you're even slightly interested, I recommend giving Saint's Row 3 a chance (especially if you pick it up through the Humble Deep Silver Bundle). If you don't get a kick out of a tutorial mission where you help a movie star prepare to star as you in your own bio-pic by taking him on a bank robbery where you hide your identity by wearing Mardi Gras masks of your own faces, then I suppose the series just isn't for you.

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The thing about the Saint's Row games (particularly 3, and hopefully 4) is that their story and gameplay perfectly mesh, in exactly the way that GTA's never do. Saint's Row has every bit as many weird activities and bizarre results of playing around in the open world, but rather than try to tell an unrelated story of renouncing violence that flies in the face of the gameplay, it tells a story about runaway celebrity and fame, and the excesses and distractions that come from them.

Even more importantly, Saint's Row is entirely aware of how much of a self-parody it is, and it owns every moment of it - often while sneaking in subtle humor between the big, blatant dildo-jokes.

If you're even slightly interested, I recommend giving Saint's Row 3 a chance (especially if you pick it up through the Humble Deep Silver Bundle). If you don't get a kick out of a tutorial mission where you help a movie star prepare to star as you in your own bio-pic by taking him on a bank robbery where you hide your identity by wearing Mardi Gras masks of your own faces, then I suppose the series just isn't for you.

That makes a lot of sense.

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The thing about the Saint's Row games (particularly 3, and hopefully 4) is that their story and gameplay perfectly mesh, in exactly the way that GTA's never do. Saint's Row has every bit as many weird activities and bizarre results of playing around in the open world, but rather than try to tell an unrelated story of renouncing violence that flies in the face of the gameplay, it tells a story about runaway celebrity and fame, and the excesses and distractions that come from them.

Even more importantly, Saint's Row is entirely aware of how much of a self-parody it is, and it owns every moment of it - often while sneaking in subtle humor between the big, blatant dildo-jokes.

If you're even slightly interested, I recommend giving Saint's Row 3 a chance (especially if you pick it up through the Humble Deep Silver Bundle). If you don't get a kick out of a tutorial mission where you help a movie star prepare to star as you in your own bio-pic by taking him on a bank robbery where you hide your identity by wearing Mardi Gras masks of your own faces, then I suppose the series just isn't for you.

 

yeah i agree with that, i think that was GTA4's biggest problem it was trying to be gritty and serious but you could do totally insane things all the time

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Oh my gosh Danielle's description of Saints Row and what it parodies. That sounds amazing.

 

I've gotta stop posting while listening to the podcast in progress.

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I want to be clear, I'm personally a huge fan of SR3, I was just amused by Chris's reaction to the description of SR4.

To be entirely fair, SR3's missions do take a dip in quality after the opening, but later missions recover and the mission "Deckers Die" especially is legit AMAZING.

 

Also the wrestling move attack animations are pretty rad:

 

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Oh man, Don't Starve. I have so much to say about this game, especially since I watched it evolve over beta and what Klei's design philosophy appears to be. And the philosophy is actually important to figuring out what the goal of playing the game over a long period of time is.

 

Basically they try to stamp out any sort of automation / low-investment to survival. Even as you gain conveniences like refrigeration to prolong food freshness the game continues to ramp up in difficulty in other ways. Two of the biggest things for Don't Starve is surviving the winter season and surviving wild dog attacks. I should probably explain the latter first because it was the first aspects to be employed.

 

Every few days, wild dogs just spawn around you (off screen) and attack. The further along you are in the game, the less warning you have (the warning being audio of dogs barking in the distance, also your character makes a remark about hearing something) and also the more dogs come running at you. That's a pretty straight forward approach, and if you're in your camp you can actually have traps set up to make it a non-issue. It's primarily meant to be a danger if you're busy foraging for more food or other supplies. But even in your camp they came up with something new - fire dogs. When they die, they drop fire all over the place, which can burn down shit you've built or things you have laying around on the ground.

 

Winter I actually haven't played through yet, I keep coming back to the game as content is added but get distracted. But I at least play enough to know the context. Winter adds needing to stay warm. At night this is pretty easy, you just need your fire going. During the day though, you need to have particular pieces of clothing on or else you'll freeze to death. And you can't wear your grass / log / marble suits (armor that reduces damage) at the same time, so you are particularly screwed if danger comes around. Especially if the hunter walrus character finds you. Yes, a walrus person.

 

Mass-storing of items is a pretty hard thing to orchestrate. You can't just spend ten days straight gathering wood in massive amounts. You need to feed yourself, tend to your farm, gather silk from goddamn spiders that may kill you - you really have to work at things and I really appreciate Klei's attempts at stamping out, "WHATEVER MAN THIS GAME SUCKS, JUST DO X, Y, Z AND YOU WIN FOREVER."

 

I got into an argument with someone about this game a couple of days ago. A mutual friend was asking if Don't Starve was a game worth getting. I said yes, the guy said no. I asked him why he was saying no, and he described the game as "you just click the same thing 100 times and then you die." It took some prodding to get answers but I finally got him to describe how he plays the game - all he does in it, ever, is build simple traps to capture rabbits in and gathers enough wood to have camp fires at night, and that's it (and he's supposedly played it for hours and hours). He purposely avoids diving any deeper into the game and plays it in the most monotonous way ever, which is a really bad thing to build an opinion of an interactive thing on.

 

There is a sort of story / campaign mode to the game though, if you feel you've mastered the sandbox survival. There's a few stages where you enter different worlds, and each one has traits to it that make it harder to survive while looking for the next gate. The good news about dying in the campaign levels is that you just get thrown back to your sandbox world and can try again (dying in the sandbox world is permadeath).

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The thing about the Saint's Row games (particularly 3, and hopefully 4) is that their story and gameplay perfectly mesh, in exactly the way that GTA's never do. Saint's Row has every bit as many weird activities and bizarre results of playing around in the open world, but rather than try to tell an unrelated story of renouncing violence that flies in the face of the gameplay, it tells a story about runaway celebrity and fame, and the excesses and distractions that come from them.

Even more importantly, Saint's Row is entirely aware of how much of a self-parody it is, and it owns every moment of it - often while sneaking in subtle humor between the big, blatant dildo-jokes.

If you're even slightly interested, I recommend giving Saint's Row 3 a chance (especially if you pick it up through the Humble Deep Silver Bundle). If you don't get a kick out of a tutorial mission where you help a movie star prepare to star as you in your own bio-pic by taking him on a bank robbery where you hide your identity by wearing Mardi Gras masks of your own faces, then I suppose the series just isn't for you.

 

Imo, 3 became a little bit too self-aware for it's own good. In 2 the story doesn't fly in the face of the game play because it has a certain amount of lets say, "wackiness", but it plays it completely straight and still manages to have a several legitimately well executed emotional moments. In 3 however it just felt like it was slapping me in the face with it's own 4 foot rubber dildo. It had good moments but they were mostly drowned out by bombast and dick jokes.

 

It probably doesn't help that I played 3 with all the DLC because it was 75% off in a Steam sale.

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I got into an argument with someone about this game a couple of days ago. A mutual friend was asking if Don't Starve was a game worth getting. I said yes, the guy said no. I asked him why he was saying no, and he described the game as "you just click the same thing 100 times and then you die." It took some prodding to get answers but I finally got him to describe how he plays the game - all he does in it, ever, is build simple traps to capture rabbits in and gathers enough wood to have camp fires at night, and that's it (and he's supposedly played it for hours and hours). He purposely avoids diving any deeper into the game and plays it in the most monotonous way ever, which is a really bad thing to build an opinion of an interactive thing on.

 

i think i would be more on the side of the guy that said no, and maybe play it sort of similarly to that guy, and i would say it is the permadeath that stops me from from really getting into it, in my head the question is "should i attack this spiders nest and maybe die and lose everything or should i just avoid death and find silk after something else had killed a spider" and avoid death wins almost every time, also automation to me seems like the natural thing to be aiming for when playing, at the beginning foraging and just simply surviving seems natural, but as the days go by my natural goal is to try and make life easier so i don't have to be constantly foraging and just simply surviving.

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The overall point is that if you interact with three objects (grass and twigs for rabbit traps, wood for fire for light at night + cooking rabbits caught) out of all the things you can do, purposefully, it's misleading to describe the game as monotonous and "all you do is this."

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The overall point is that if you interact with three objects (grass and twigs for rabbit traps, wood for fire for light at night + cooking rabbits caught) out of all the things you can do, purposefully, it's misleading to describe the game as monotonous and "all you do is this."

 

oh, yeah, every game can be described in a "all you do is" way and sound really bad, but i guess if you hear people talking about things in that way, it just means they are saying they didn't like it

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Amazed at the lack of any real awareness of the saints row series, especially in light of it being one of Ryan Davis favourite game series tbh. Missing out of the series over some misbegotten ideas as to what it's about, and declarations of unlikely to touch based off of those misconceptions is kind of lame. The games are fun. 

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Holy hell rymdkapsel is the first time playing an iOS game, that I thought "This is completely legit as a gaming experience."

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Holy hell rymdkapsel is the first time playing an iOS game, that I thought "This is completely legit as a gaming experience."

 

Man, I have been searching for that game with only the fuzziest idea of how the hell it was spelt.

 

Thank you!

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The thing about the Saint's Row games (particularly 3, and hopefully 4) is that their story and gameplay perfectly mesh, in exactly the way that GTA's never do. Saint's Row has every bit as many weird activities and bizarre results of playing around in the open world, but rather than try to tell an unrelated story of renouncing violence that flies in the face of the gameplay, it tells a story about runaway celebrity and fame, and the excesses and distractions that come from them.

Even more importantly, Saint's Row is entirely aware of how much of a self-parody it is, and it owns every moment of it - often while sneaking in subtle humor between the big, blatant dildo-jokes.

If you're even slightly interested, I recommend giving Saint's Row 3 a chance (especially if you pick it up through the Humble Deep Silver Bundle). If you don't get a kick out of a tutorial mission where you help a movie star prepare to star as you in your own bio-pic by taking him on a bank robbery where you hide your identity by wearing Mardi Gras masks of your own faces, then I suppose the series just isn't for you.

 

I couldn't agree more. Saints Row (basically since the second one) is smart and funny in a way that GTA has never been (at least not since San Andreas, and even that game has a cringe-inducing story line that's only saved by its myriad nods to the actual open-world insanity of the game).

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weird, i played saints row 3 and it felt super gross to me. the gameplay and story do mesh but the world it inhabits is fucked up to the point of being really off putting. I know it's trying to be this weird dumb thing and kind of light hearted even as insane, sadistic shit is going on but it ends up feeling like nothing in the world is of any consequence except for these chosen few people. 

 

For example all of the citizens of this city are just totally enamored with you and the saints, even as you're going around shooting everything and smashing through crowds of people (either on purpose or as part of a mission) and everybody thinks that it is just great and they are super excited that they could thoughtlessly die at the hands of the saints. The police don't even want to stop you and they think you're really cool too even though in the beginning you kill a ton of them as part of the story. it made me feel like a sociopath and it was unsettling. 

 

there is a really great use of music near the beginning though. There's a part where kanye west's 'power' comes on during a short cut scene as they are preparing to assault an opposing gang's hideout and then it transitions into the player controlled sequence as you approach the hideout and the music continues to play. It was really appropriate and that section was great to play. 

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I have been frantically searching for a picture of the Goldeneye N64 television screen divider Danielle mentioned, but I can only find forum posts where people describe creating their own.  One 2004 Neoseeker post describes splitting the N64 signal to four television sets, then strategically covering 3/4 of each screen with newspaper so everyone can only see their own screen.  Crazy!

 

Anyway, a story about a ridiculous video game accessory is pure Idle Thumbs, so thank you Danielle for being such an awesome guest.

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We did that with goldeneye when we were kids, we had two tv's running with bits of paper stuck on screen and three players.... so it didn't really work out

 

we only tried it once and it was shit, and actually seeing where the others players were was part of the game. and one bullet kills ALWAYS!

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