Jake

Idle Thumbs 137: Data Complete

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Idle Thumbs 137:

 

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Data Complete

A single tap on your window. You turn. A flash, and the faint sound of a woman's voice, synthesized. "Data Complete." You look down to the street and catch a glimpse of an anodized aluminum foot disappearing around the corner. You return to your video game, and notice it is tailored impeccably to your tastes.

 

Games Discussed: Starbound, DayZ, Take On Helicopters, Just Cause 2 Multiplayer Mod, Spelunky

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I haven't been looking at Starbound reactions closely but Sean's description of playing it makes it sound incredible. Nobody has mentioned to me the exploration aspects being as they are.

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Take On Helicopters is even weirder than you're imagining. When you're not flying, you're walking around your family copter business in Seattle, advancing the 'story.'

During these segments, you have the full fidelity of Arma's infantry control, so you can go prone, roll around and do all that crazy shit in your office. It's really amusing to me.

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Weird Czech guys - I love love love crazy European sentiments that lead to weird engines, styles, etc. I love that STALKER has like, DirectX11 SSAO tech and super shadows and who knows what else, but monsters that are still designed with the Quake 2 aesthetic. I love the insanity in Paradox games. American UIs, designs, etc. these days too often feel like Diablo 3, all the edges rounded and polished off to perfect marketable ISO standards

 

Graphics jumps forward - I hate how this is slowing down too. It feels too bound up with console generations now, in the early 3dfx/Geforce days, it felt like at least some game was always implementing whatever small leap forward, like UT2004 supported the ridiculous rounding out/scaling polygon thing that came with my Radeon, nowadays, if your computer does significantly more than an Xbox/Playstation, you're at most gonna get one more level of AA/AF and high resolution, because everything is so tied to simultaneous release/making as much portable between platforms as possible

 

Drugs - Don't ever fight to stay up on Ambien, it's like Memento, you are fully awake and conscious and yet continually forgetting what just happened in a total blackout, got-raped-in-the-frat-house way

 

Also, as a degenerate cannabis junkie, there are heroes in DOTA2 I can play sober (more twitchy ones) and there are more slow moving turret-like ones, like Jakiro, that I only learned how to play while intoxicated and cannot play well sober =\

 

Sunbeams effect - It's just a glow effect, like a halo in a Renaissance painting - 

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On Just Cause 2 MP. As I said in the Just Thumbs 2 thread we've been playing it a bit last monday on a 1000 player server. It was insane, but it was very smooth with all those people on screen.

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Oh man, if you guys like the sense of scale when looking at something like a big vista or cavern in Minecraft, you absolutely must play it with an Oculus Rift. The added sense of physical presence magnifies that effect tremendously. 

 

I tried it via a mod called Minecrift, and my brain was convinced that the blocks were coming up to my waist. I mean, that's what the perspective in that game suggests under normal circumstances, but it's still this little miniature world in a computer screen. Being immersed in it with the Rift is fucking ridiculous.

 

Also, the low fidelity aesthetic of Minecraft makes the shitty display in the Rift less of a hindrance than it is with other content, so it's a good experience all around.

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Great. This week's robot news made me suddenly laugh while I was eating, causing me to

belch out my semi-chewed food into a gross pile on my lap.

Thanks guys.

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That thing about a procedurally generated world seeming more like a Real Place because it wasn't all hand-designed is exactly the opposite of the way I think about it -- procedural generation is an impressive technology to me, but if I happen to know that a landscape was generated procedurally, it feels false and hollow. This is mitigated somewhat if I still get a sense that a person was quality-checking the generated maps or doing a final real-person pass. (So the addition of biomes in Minecraft helped a little, and something like Sir You Are Being Hunted where you can see the little personal details they made sure to work into the algorithms helps even more). If I play something that's fully hand-designed it feels more exciting and living to me, except in the sense that I know it's bound to be pretty finite and I'm not looking forward to bumping up against the edges of it.

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Minecraft stats (all time):

#3 Xbox360 game at 10M

#3 PC game at 13M (sold 10K the last 24 hours)

pocket" version sold 10M

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games

 

The PS3 version was released today.

And the fucked up thing is that the PS3 version will probably sell like crazy. Lots of people are hanging on to their PS3s because the PS4 can't BC (for understandable reasons).

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Doublepostin' to share more info on that - there's still going to be a PS4 version of Minecraft, and Majong is working on allowing save files to be transferable between the PS3/PS4 and 360/XB1.

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What if Chris' phone was gathering his genetic information for the Google robots?

 

The real Chris, with his original haircut, will show up next week to fight his robot duplicate.

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On Just Cause 2 MP. As I said in the Just Thumbs 2 thread we've been playing it a bit last monday on a 1000 player server. It was insane, but it was very smooth with all those people on screen.

First server I joined, immediately see a guy named The Hardy Boys yell "haha we got away" while he took off in a helicopter being chased by 4 airplanes.  If only The Hardy Boys had been that action packed in my youth!

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Directly after listening to this episode, I listened to an episode of a KCRW pod cast called "This is Interesting" where the topic was about how AI will be the last thing humans invent, and once the machines we have made learn to code, we are basically fucked.  It's an interview with James Barrat who wrote a book called "Our Final Invention."  It was a surreal experience because of how seamless the discussion went from you guys talking about Google's robotic acquisitions and how things might be in a world where we are not the most intelligent being on the planet.  I enjoyed the experience immensely!

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Calling Terraria a 2D ripoff of Minecraft is a bit unfair. Especially since no one on the cast has actually played the game. Insofar as it's a game where you can use a pick to mine squares and then use those squares to make other stuff, sure, it's a Minecraft ripoff. But it also has its own thing going on, with a bunch of big boss fights, different biomes at different places in the world, a ton of weapons, spells, etc. It's a really cool game.

Full disclosure: I've only played about 10 hours of Minecraft, and got bored of it before I really got into any of the serious building stuff. On the other hand, I've played well over 200 hours of Terraria, beat all the authored content (bosses and stuff), ran a dedicated server for a few months, etc. That game is totally my jam.

ON THAT NOTE: Starbound is everything Terraria was, with the scope broadened to the point of absurdity. The planetary travel stuff is bonkers, the amount of cool procedurally generated shit you find is insane, and the RPG-esque gear progression is way more in-depth than Terraria's. I'm 30 hours in and I feel like I haven't seen much of the content.

I'm also running a Starbound dedicated server on my linux box, so if any Thumbs wanna come play on a multiplayer server (that currently is in use by just me and about half a dozen of my friends), PM me for the credentials.

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Calling Terraria a 2D ripoff of Minecraft is a bit unfair.

Considering they're playing Starbound, and right now Starbound is just Terraria in space (albeit with less content), I don't think it's unfair at all. That said, Terraria is more interesting as a, well, uh, I don't want to be that guy, but as a GAME, precisely for all the reasons you mention. There ain't no grapplin' hook in Minecraft! (Without mods, anyway.)

 

The way I've always put it is almost exactly how Sean put it: Minecraft is better for creativity and building cool shit. Terraria is great for exploring and finding new toys to play with. But hey that's just how I feel and YMMV.

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The future of Google robots is exploiting and enforcing the Steam trading economy.

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Minecraft sales are nuts! I think the numbers really hit me when I was visiting my sister out on the East Coast. My 3rd grade nephew was showing me the world he had made in Minecraft, but before he even did that he looked over his Xbox friends list, which was like everyone else from his school, and everyone that was logged on was playing either Minecraft or BLOPS 2. It occurred to me that most likely this is how it is for other kids across the country, and that made me realize that all the games I play are just like this weird, niche thing that has nothing to do with what most people experience in video games. For most people its just Minecraft and BLOPS 2 (and what a funny odd couple that is).

 

It was one of those things that on some level my brain probably already understood, but just the sight of that friend's list made it real for me, and it was a really humbling experience.

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Did we use the word ripoff? Saying it uses the same basic starter gameplay language of Minecraft (and saying it as praise/something interesting) is nearly infinite miles from saying its a ripoff.

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I think Jake sold me on Starbound. I totally respect the procedural free for all games, but something about the intersection of of that technology with authored purpose is really what I'm looking for. I'll remain curious about the first game that can procedurally generate some narrative. 

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If you decide to stream DayZ I hope you get Evan back.

 

There's some neat stuff in standalone, you can restrain people, take blood from them, force feed them stuff etc. and they've done a ton of work updating the map.

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the whole "taking their blood" thing is blowing my mind right now.  That sounds completely bonkers even within context let alone out of.

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Oh yeah, also playing Spelunky while intoxicated, I know what Chris is talking about. I recorded, but ended up not saving a daily challenge I did after a night of heavy drinking. My reflexes were fine, I wasn't making any mistakes in that sense. The problem was that my ability to evaluate risk was impaired, so as the game progressed I kept making worse decisions... so the game caught up with me eventually, and I even recognized  that was what was happening on the level I died in (somewhere in the jungle I think).

 

But cough syrup will seriously fuck you up.

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the whole "taking their blood" thing is blowing my mind right now.  That sounds completely bonkers even within context let alone out of.

Haha, well you need a blood bag and iv-kit/syringe, then if you administer the blood to someone with a non-matching blood type they go into hemolytic shock. There are blood test kits though, so you can see which blood type you have.

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