Jake

Idle Thumbs 155: The Satisfaction of a Job Well Done

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Idle Thumbs 155:

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The Satisfaction of a Job Well Done

The lights dim and the curtains rise on the two competing teams. The players, who cannot hear the deafening crowd from their sound-proof booths, tense and untense their hands in anticipation, their fingers dancing over the keys and mouse. The buzzer. They snap on their work gloves, some pick up mops and buckets, and spread out, ready to work -- this docking bay won't clean itself. In the audience a father leans over to his son and says, "See, this is how it's done. You should do this." His son clutches his Meepo figurine tighter, deliberately ignoring him.

Things Discussed: Hitman: Go, The Last Express, Viscera Cleanup Detail, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Deus Ex: The Fall, FTL Advanced Edition, Die Augen der Welt, Jurassic Park plastic cup

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Hitman GO sounds pretty cool. I'm pleasantly surprised to hear it doesn't have a bunch of gamey animations for the characters. Regarding the discussion about why games add unnecessary animations in the first place, I think a lot of it probably comes down to budgeting. From a budget standpoint in a traditional studio setup (which'll have 1-3 teams with similar makeups, each of which contains animators) character animations theoretically add value to the product, and if you'd otherwise have animators that you're paying wages to sitting on their hands, it makes way more sense fiscally to have them adding value and "polish" to the game.

By having numerous smaller teams with more diverse makeups Double Fine minimizes that issue, and it makes sense then that they were more predisposed to make a game like Stacking.

My guess is that Hitman GO must've come out of a skunkworks-style team a bit similar to the Henry Hatsworth team at EA; a group of devs splintering out of one of the larger teams, which would have been able to pick and choose which elements of a traditional team they wanted (or maybe they didn't even have the choice to grab animators off whatever project the larger team was working on, and had to work around the constraint).

The employee role + budget conundrum is one that I think severely impacts innovation in larger studios. When you have large teams with groups of people who have predefined roles that need to have work to do, the projects that are decided on necessarily need to utilize as many members of those teams as possible; and in the planning phase you need to focus not on what individuals in that group *can* do (which you don't know), but what they have previously done (which you do know).

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I believe the comment in the reader mail segment about "thongs" and "fuck a part of australia" was related to some beef Jeff Gerstman started a while ago on the emails segment of the Giant Bomb podcast.

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Near about two thirds in Chris mentions a game with a german name and tries to spell it. I wasn't able to catch that and i cannot find it in the Things Discussed list...

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Playing FTL while I listen and found a Zoltan called Nick Breckon just as Nick was saying something really loud. Freaked me out for a second.

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I believe the comment in the reader mail segment about "thongs" and "fuck a part of australia" was related to some beef Jeff Gerstman started a while ago on the emails segment of the Giant Bomb podcast.

 

I cannot believe I'm running into cross-podcast beef. That was surreal.

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Hitman GO is weirdly fascinating to me. Took me a while to get the hang of it but it's really charming. You could basically strip away the entire visual layer and be left with a nice abstract sliding puzzle game a la Threes or something, but somehow it also tracks with what a Hitman game feels like, weirdly. I think it was a sort of 'Google 20%' project where they said figure out what Hitman on mobile would be like and they came up with this.

 

I'm really curious about the micro robot bridge-building terror now.

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I believe the comment in the reader mail segment about "thongs" and "fuck a part of australia" was related to some beef Jeff Gerstman started a while ago on the emails segment of the Giant Bomb podcast.

 

It's a weekly thing on the Bombcast. Super weird and cool and good.

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The health packs you can buy in Viscera Cleanup detail are to restock the first-aid box health pickups scattered through the level.  Which, seems like a mechanic that could have been built for Jake's amusement alone.

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Regarding FTL "early access" during the kickstarter campaign, they had a free time-limited demo up on OnLive. Like Nick, that demo is what sold me on the kickstarter.

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The health packs you can buy in Viscera Cleanup detail are to restock the first-aid box health pickups scattered through the level.  Which, seems like a mechanic that could have been built for Jake's amusement alone.

 

Haha, that's amazing.

 

Though I don't know if I want a blood-smeared janitor restocking my first aid kits.  So unsanitary!

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From watching the Quick Look it seems like the articles scattered around the janitor's office after the mission ends are how they convey how well you did.

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Was anyone else annoyed that Chris kept saying that Hitman GO was deveoped by Ubisoft Montreal when it was actually developed by Eidos Montreal, but still got Eidos Montreal as the correct developer for Deus Ex: The Fall. Also, it's listed as "FTL: Ultimate Edition" in the games discussed, but it's actually "FTL: Advanced Edition."

 

Anyway, that's my dumb grumbling. Great episode guys!

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Having played a little Hitman Go after hearing several positive impressions, it does remind me a lot of Absolution (a game I did not like) in the way that game was highly focused on vanilla stealth game sneaking around guards in levels rather than the sort of ideal Hitman gameplay hiding in plain sight and unique assassinations. It's much more palatable in Go though because it doesn't even make a claim to that legacy, while Absolution seemed like it pulled it off well in a few spots and then made a completely different game in the majority of the rest of it. Also these Go levels design around that basic guard sneaking purpose in a straightforward way, while I think a lot of guard placement and level design in Absolution was haphazard and muddy mostly by virtue of the disguise mechanic and reliance on the instinct ability.

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There's also robot news of that Japanese robot dancing for Obama.

Oh! I have a couple great vomit stories.

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Viscera Clean Up Detail sounds a lot like a student project me and my classmates did back in 2010:

 

 

You were the people who cleaned up the city after all the superheroes and supervillains had finished all their fighting.

To do this you were equipped with gravity guns with which you could lift the heavy debris and place it back where it belonged.

 

Had both co-op and competitive modes!

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I believe the comment in the reader mail segment about "thongs" and "fuck a part of australia" was related to some beef Jeff Gerstman started a while ago on the emails segment of the Giant Bomb podcast.

 

PEOPLE DON'T EVEN KNOW, MAN. JEFF BRINGING IT TO THE STREETS, MAN. 

 

 

CLACK. CLACK CLACK. BLAT BLAT BLAT BLAT.

 

HAND A BROTHA' HIS CHOCO TACO, MAN.

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There's also robot news of that Japanese robot dancing for Obama.

The robot also played soccer with Obama! Sean is already being replaced.

 

 

 

Fuck everything else in this episode, I'm gonna' talk about Happy Meal toys.

I believe the Land Before Time toys Jake mentioned actually came from Pizza Hut, not McDonalds. Personally my jam was the collection of toys based on the 1999 Inspector Gadget movie, of all things. It was a set of 8 pieces of Inspector Gadget's body that all did different things: one arm was a squirt gun, one leg was a flashlight, etc. I painstakingly hunted them all down (even ordering a few directly from McDonalds when they were discontinued) and put them all together to make this cool guy:

 

HZNVUTl.jpg

 

 

And yes, McDonalds still gives out toys. A few years back when I still visited 4chan regularly, I remember seeing a lot of threads on /co/ about Happy Meal toys. This was back when My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was just beginning to build interest and there were no official toys yet. McDonalds released their own Happy Meal toys for the show and bronies telling stories about how they would go through the drive-through and order a Happy Meal "for their niece" and ask for "the blue one." It was the best.

 

 

 

 

Also I hope Nick gets a 3DS.

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Gawd, I really want a Hitman: Kidz, Assassin's Creed: Kidz, Gears of War: Kidz or something.  It would be hilarious to take a bunch of the most violent, ridiculous video game characters and make them 8 year olds running around together. 

 

You know it would be awesome.

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