Idle Thumbs 136: No Man's Guy

[Jake]

It exists! You listened to it! Let's hang out.

[mikemariano]

I think we've finally passed the point where there are more episodes about Nick Breckon than episodes that feature Nick Breckon.  Either way, it will be fun to hear him guest star on a Terminal 7 podcast.

 

Also, the 2D cracks between worlds in A Link Between Worlds only show up because of the actions of the evil painting dude; no architect planned them!  And I can't hate the art style because it gave us the cutest Dampé in the Zelda series!

 

[tegan]

Also, the 2D cracks between worlds in A Link Between Worlds only show up because of the actions of the evil painting dude; no architect planned them!

 

I think they mean the dungeons and buildings and stuff themselves rather than the portals, which do totally have random slits in the walls and areas that nobody could possibly access without turning into a painting.

 

 

Great episode this week. I was also lacking in Allard knowledge, and the crash course helped immensely.

[tberton]

Jake, you should totally watch the Massive Chalice streams. I'm not even a backer and I've been watching them. They're fascinating.

[Henroid]

That discussion about in-progress video games via Early Access (or outright alpha / beta testing) (the aesthetics at least, about 3D models / animations) had me thinking about a really annoying trend I'm noticing about people who get Early Access games.

 

It's clearly not a finished product, but people complain as if it is. It'd be one thing if it was "this is something they should fix / change while working on it" but it's frequently like, "this game is buggy wtf." Like people don't get it I guess? Is "Early Access" not clearly defined or displayed when people are purchasing the games?

 

I asked someone of Starbound yesterday, "Did you get it now to help beta test it, or just to play the game?" Their answer was the latter so I suggested they wait for the game to be actually done so things like character wipes stop happening as a part of the testing process. They then got mad at me because Early Access is a thing that exists (i.e. "if it's not done why is it for sale"). I didn't have the heart to have to explain the benefits of the process.

[SecretAsianMan]

I listened to the first 30 minutes or so on the way into work this morning and I had a stupid grin on my face the entire time.

 

Link to the Past is my favorite Zelda game so I'm pretty familiar with it.  The overworld of Link Between Worlds is almost identical but there are some differences, such as the location of Turtle Rock (although it's considerably more turtlely now) and the depth of Zora's Domain.  Of course none of that actually matters for the game.  I'm also not really a fan of the art style.

[baladec]

Very surprised this episode was not titiled: “Allards, kings, men."

[melmer]

Regarding Normans Sky

 

This is the video game I have been dreaming of for the past ten years

 

guess i have the mental age of an 8 year old

[tberton]

In my mind, Norman Sky is the hard boiled detective tasked with taking down the notorious, date-based assassin, Max Ides.

[Cordeos]

The discussion of games that had extreme makeovers reminded me of Dark sector. The initial videos they released showed a sci-fi stealth action game set in space where you are in a crazy suit sneaking around and killing enemies in interesting environments.

 (Dark Sector Original)

 

Then they changed every aspect of the game and turned it into a mediocre 3rd person shooter set on Earth.

 (Dark Sector Release)

 

I was so disappointed with this. I was so interested in the original game design. I did try a demo and was unimpressed. I remember being concerned about the changes to Borderlands, but in that case they didn't change the core game as much, mostly just the art style.

 (Borderlands old art style)

[elmuerte]

no picture? no title?

[Henroid]

no picture? no title?

Idle Thumbs 136: Jake Calls It Quits

[melmer]

Idle thumbs 136: Cock it

[Nappi]

Cool, Samorost 3! Is Tomáš Dvořák involved with the soundtrack?

 

Edit: To answer my own question, yes!

[elmuerte]

I'm not sure if I ever finished a Samorost game. I've played them both a couple of times. I did finish Machinarium and Botanicula. I really liked Machinarium, and it's music was awesome. So I'll be looking forward to Dvorak's music for Samorost 3.

[vimes]

Just want to drop that a team like DoubleFine sharing their bi-weekly progress is also extremely valuable for dev in the triple A space, or at least for devs who have been in the same structure/paradigm for a while: it challenges a lot the perception of how a game comes together,  how it ought to look at certain stages of the process or when key aspects are commited to.

I love it but I've got the slightly irrational fear that trying to educated the players about the process will also make them more willing to accept subpar results because they know it's hard... and frankly, I want players to judge a game by how they experience it vs. putting it in perspective of the process they witnessed.

As for the visual look driving Kickstarter, I think that it's very true: even though I nearly always use Kickstarter as a patronage platform (i.e. giving money to people to do what they want), I know that I didn't back Kentucky Route 0 when it came on KS because the money was for hiring and artist and their very target footage's art direction really turned me off:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm-v69Dqf_Q

Thankfully, they changed it completely (along with the audio direction) and that was for the absolute best. But given the original display and the goal of the funding, I wonder how the backers reacted to the change.

 

 

[SecretAsianMan]

I was only half listening to the discussion of Reggie and Allard so in my mind they merged to become this amazing entity that became the frontman for both Nintendo and Xbox while getting TCP/IP into Windows.

[Nelsormensch]

Ah ha, it was Silent Conversation by Gregory Weir was the spatial text game that reminded me of Device 6: http://futureproofgames.com/games/silent/

[tberton]

Hey Nels, what decks to you use to teach Breckon Netrunner? Basic Core decks, the decks your running now or do you have some special teaching decks made?

[juv3nal]

Some other sound-only ios games:

Freeq (haven't played this one)

Codename Cygnus - a choose your own adventure spy story. There's not a lot of branching here and it's fairly short, but it does a neat thing where you can input your choices by speaking them into the microphone.

[Ben X]

I'm surprised Chris hadn't heard of Day Of The Triffids, especially as that's (presumably) what the game title "Day Of The Tentacle" is riffing on.

[osmosisch]

Did we ever find out what the giant email was? If it's mine and it's too long to read I can just post it.