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Jake

Idle Thumbs 135: That's My Goof

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Idle Thumbs 135:

 

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That's My Goof

I know you read about this episode, but that's not quite how it happened. Jake was unable to resist the temptation of Super Mario 3D World and became completely enveloped by it. Sean was charmed by Call of Juarez: Gunslinger but wants to play more to see how far it goes. Chris did get the good Internet at home. No no, they didn't play Assassin's Creed 4; they just talked about it a lot. That's my goof.

 

Games Discussed: Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Super Mario 3D World, Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, Mushroom 11, XCOM: Enemy Within, Star Citizen, TI-86 Mario

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Halfway through this episode everyone mentions how they feel guilty playing games other people already talked about on the postcast.  Don't worry about it too much, really.

 

Maybe some people mind it, but I would much rather hear about the same game over and over if that's what people are genuinely excited about.  

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I actually just had a similar conversation with a bunch of coworkers about how insane the meta-narrative of Black Flag is. It's got to be at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek considering you overhear board meetings discussing the very same things you guys postulate on like the modularity of the franchise. "Something something pirates are trendy therefore: let's make a pirate game! Ninja's are so last year etc etc." It's fucking insane. Unfortunately there aren't many meaningful interactions in the space besides hacking into coworkers computers via minigames in order to watch weirdly boring fanservice that delves into the terrible lore that was also mentioned on the cast.

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Hot off the presses:

VERY IMPORTANT!!!!.txt

[maximize this window, or the title below will display wrong]

    ________   ___
   /  _______\/\  \
  /\  \______/\ \  \
  \ \  \       \ \  \
   \ \  \       \ \  \_______ ___  ____ ___     ___ __________ ___________ ________  ___  _____
    \ \  \       \ \   ____  \\  \/ ___\\  \   /\  \\   ______\\____   ___\\   __  \/\  \/ __  \
     \ \  \       \ \  \__/\  \\   /___/ \  \  \ \  \\  \_____//___/\  \__/ \  \/\  \ \   /_/\  \
      \ \  \       \ \  \ \ \  \\  \    \ \  \  \ \  \\_______  \  \ \  \  \ \  \ \  \ \  \ \ \  \
       \ \  \_______\ \  \ \ \  \\  \    \ \  \__\_\  \ _____/\  \  \ \  \  \ \  \_\  \ \  \ \ \  \
        \ \_________\\ \__\ \ \__\\__\    \ \________  \\_________\  \ \__\  \ \_______\ \__\ \ \__\
         \/_________/ \/__/  \/__//__/     \/_______/\  \_________/   \/__/   \/_______/\/__/  \/__/
                                                    \ \  \
	 _   _   _  ___   ___                        \ \__\
        | | | | | |  |     |                          \/__/
	|-  |-| |-   |     |
	|   | | | |  |     |
	|   | | | |  |    _|_


Chyston is a trilogy of Super Mario worlds, precisely engineered to create some of the toughest levels around.  I'm not going to give you Parts II and III until you prove you beat Part I.  When you do, email me ([email protected])
with the ending that you, of course, wrote down, and I'll email you part II.  Then beat Part II, email me the end,
and I'll send you Part III.  If you then email me the Part III ending, I will be amazed. Not that
it isn't possible, it's just quite difficult.  Well, here you go...

+---------+
|+++DATA: |
+---------+-------------------------------------+
|+++NAME:	Chryston Part I		    	|
|+++AUTHOR:	Chris Remo		    	|
|+++LEVELS: 	8			    	|
|+++SIZE:	2207			    	|
|+++DIFFICULTY:	Really hard (or so I've heard)	|
+-----------------------------------------------+

                               _______________
 _____________________________/\              \____________________________
/\                            \ \ HALL OF FAME \                           \
\ \  BEAT WORLDS 1-3:          \ \______________\  BEAT JUST WORLD 1:       \
 \ \                            \/______________/                            \
  \ \  1st: Jay                                      3rd: Lance Underwood     \
   \ \  2nd: Jonathan Chen                                                     \
    \ \_________________________________________________________________________\
     \/_________________________________________________________________________/

These three so far are the only ones who have sent me endings for any worlds.  Can you be the next Hall-of-Famer?  Next time I update this .txt file, I will include all of the most recent "winners."

This world is quite difficult, and even I, as its creator, have trouble with it sometimes.  Don't expect just to run through it holding down the jump button like you can with some worlds.  If you beat even the first world, you're good.

 Good luck
-Chris Remo  aka  ChrisMan

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Maybe it's just me but I'm weirded out by how normal the word "lore" is treated in conversation.

 

I wanted to end that sentence with "nowadays" but I'm a bit too young and self conscious for that.

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Congrats to Jay, Jonathan Chen, and Lance Underwood!

 

Also I agree that Sean should just talk about games he's playing, regardless of whether they've been covered in the podcast, or if they are old or whatever. I recently picked up and played Papa & Yo based on Sean's enthusiasm for the game, and I'm really glad I did! I avoided it because a lot of reviews seemed to regard the game as mediocre, but it turns out those reviews are focused on weird technical things like slightly imprecrise controls or the occasional framerate hiccup that I wasn't concerned about at all, and didn't detract from what was a really cool experience.

 

As far as how developers regard lore, I feel like there has to be a difference between how people treat it when they've picked up a license vs. something they've created. Like, as generic as Blizzard's lore comes across to me, they seem to genuinely be in love with it. If another company worked on a game like Starcraft or Diablo though, I imagine they'd be like, "are you fucking serious?" In the case of AC though I think it probably is the case that they just came up with this weird conceit in the first game for whatever reason (my speculative theory: Ubisoft felt a need to create a layer of irony to avoid the game becoming controversial/in poor taste after 9/11 in a game where you were a Muslim character killing dudes), and then were basically stuck when the game turned out to be incredibly popular and they decided to make a bunch of sequels.

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Maybe it's just me but I'm weirded out by how normal the word "lore" is treated in conversation.

 

I wanted to end that sentence with "nowadays" but I'm a bit too young and self conscious for that.

I think every time we (or at least I) use the phrase "lore" it's with an implicit bafflement that it is such a normal part of discourse in video games.

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The conversation about content and stretch goals is why I started to lose interest in Starbound - at least as far as keeping tabs on how its development is turning out. When they did a crowdfund/ presale for it, they started adding stretch goals and then daily development blog updates. Before then, the game had so much going for it that it was enough. All I wanted was for them to finish it up and ship it. But then it started to be a new feature fest, and the oversaturation of messaging was just obnoxious to deal with. It was kinda surprising to 180 on a game I was so excited for. And I still am, but I just stopped looking for the last half year because enough is enough.

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Bissell's review of Skyrim contains a fantastic breakdown on the weird adherence to lore in some games.

 

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7290527/one-night-skyrim-makes-strong-man-crumble

 

Because no one cares. Not really, they don't. And they don't care because it's not important. Dense expositional lore has no place in video-game stories — especially stories that go without highly wrought cinematics — and it seems increasingly clear that video games are neither dramatically effective nor emotionally interesting when the player's role becomes that of a dialogue sponge. More simply put, the stories of Demon's and Dark Souls are told in a way that only video games can tell stories. They don't suffer in comparison because there's no comparison to make. The story of Skyrim functions like that of a fantasy novel with digital appendices — and these digital appendices are the only reason anyone's reading it in the first place. If you threw most of the fantasy novel away, it wouldn't matter, because it's not nearly as good as an actual fantasy novel — and as fantasy cinema it's a pathetic joke.

Maybe some of you love Skyrim's expository lore. I suppose this is possible. But I'm willing to wager that the sort of person who loves Skyrim's expository lore loves expository lore of all kinds — loves expository lore in principle. Asking an expository-lore-loving gamer whether there should be expository lore in a game like Skyrim is like asking an alcoholic if he'd like a drink. (He would.)

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Bissell's review of Skyrim contains a fantastic breakdown on the weird adherence to lore in some games.

 

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7290527/one-night-skyrim-makes-strong-man-crumble

 

Counter-point: It does work a lot of times. Hunting and exploring for strange bits of lore was fun for a lot of things in WOW (the AQ gate opening race for sure.) Also, reading all the random logs and bits of story in Deus Ex or System Shock 2. When you can get people to imagine how a set-piece came to be, or how the world we are living in transformed into one like Deus Ex, but can't actually develop the content, just having expository lore laying around works really well.

 

 But I'm willing to wager that the sort of person who loves Skyrim's expository lore loves expository lore of all kinds — loves expository lore in principle. Asking an expository-lore-loving gamer whether there should be expository lore in a game like Skyrim is like asking an alcoholic if he'd like a drink. (He would.)

 

I understand and mostly hate how the lore works in Skyrim/Oblivion, but for all the terrible/bad lore, there are still some good points. Finding the Daedric lord quests in Elder Scrolls games is usually a hoot, because they do have such determined personalities, and you wanna see how they manifest their evil differently in each game, how is Clavicus Vile gonna try to screw you over this time, etc.

 

It's reductionist to say it doesn't work. It just rarely works, and works well in a narrow range of situations, and where things are well designed to be novel and make you think "how did this get here?" It's no coincidence the Daedric lord quests are the most unique/least Fedex dungeon quests in TES.

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Regarding seeing characters in movies and having their book counterparts ruined for you: Remus Lupin from Harry Potter is commonly accepted to have noticeable facial scars because of the way he's depicted in the movies, despite his scars never once being mentioned in the books. It bugs the heck out of me.

 

zoHYBVH.jpg

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Counter-point: It does work a lot of times. Hunting and exploring for strange bits of lore was fun for a lot of things in WOW (the AQ gate opening race for sure.) Also, reading all the random logs and bits of story in Deus Ex or System Shock 2. When you can get people to imagine how a set-piece came to be, or how the world we are living in transformed into one like Deus Ex, but can't actually develop the content, just having expository lore laying around works really well.

 

 

 

I understand and mostly hate how the lore works in Skyrim/Oblivion, but for all the terrible/bad lore, there are still some good points. Finding the Daedric lord quests in Elder Scrolls games is usually a hoot, because they do have such determined personalities, and you wanna see how they manifest their evil differently in each game, how is Clavicus Vile gonna try to screw you over this time, etc.

 

It's reductionist to say it doesn't work. It just rarely works, and works well in a narrow range of situations, and where things are well designed to be novel and make you think "how did this get here?" It's no coincidence the Daedric lord quests are the most unique/least Fedex dungeon quests in TES.

 

I also enjoyed the Daedric quests best but mostly because they were the most interesting quests to play in Skyrim thanks to novel goals and lack of the somber, overwrought tones of most of the other content. The personalities of the Daedric lords are great, but I didn't read about them in a book, I observed them through play.

 

I do agree its reductionist. I think my attitude toward lore is: it's often sufficient to have lore in the backdrop of a universe without having to actually read it. I love Mass Effect's universe but I didn't spend much time reading the galactipedia before getting bored. But knowing that depth does exist provides a better stage for the personal stories that make that series truly great.

 

So it's more complicated than NO LORE EVER. There must be a line walked between lore and 'world-building'. It's like what Damon Lindelof said about character writing. Give your character a whole life story, only a fraction of which ever gets discussed. But the fact that you, the writer, know that story is there to draw from is enough to make the writing done for the character more well rounded and plausible (hopefully).

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Well let me tell you the story of how the Idle Thumbs forum got weird with its fonts in threads. It dates back to the making of Episode 48: In Space when they brought Steve Gaynor on, who 500 years ago fought in an ancient battle as a cyborg with a sweet cyborg visor (only back then it was spelled syborg, so it was a sweet syborg visor)...

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And that's a book I'm going to read past the first page someday. *puts book on shelf. can't put book on shelf, there are already 20 books on shelf. throws book on table, knocks all candles and bowls of orc dust on the floor.*

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Speaking of old files, I was looking at some of my MP3's in itunes the other day. I mostly do spotify/pandora these days but I still hold on to about a 25 gig collection of MP3's that I've curated then deleted then redownloaded or lost since my college days. 

 

Anyhow, I'm looking at my itunes collection and I right clicked on a song and looked at the info to see the encode date (aka Date Modified) and it was 2005 and suddenly I got very sad because I am 100 percent certain the person who sent me these songs was my friend who passed away two months ago. He sent them to me in a zip file and was probably like "this is a good album." It was this weird rush of emotions that hit me realizing that in some weird way these bits and bytes are a piece of a friendship from a friend I'll never see again. 

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