Chris

Idle Thumbs 156: The Holo-Violator

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FRACT transporter crash course (hidden for those who want to figure it out on their own):

 

The world is divided up into three main areas, each with its own color. Each area has a central part (large orb), and four sub-puzzles (small orbs), each of which has a transporter pad, with the exception of blue, which has a fifth intermediary pad for some reason. The pads don't activate until you step near them for the first time, and the orbs remain grayed out until the corresponding station is active. Clicking on the lit orb for an active pad makes you fly there. Sub-puzzle solution is pretty linear, with one opening a door to the next when it's solved. The symbols on the orbs show the order the pads will be encountered, with the amount of lines in the symbol showing the number: line = 1, chevron = 2, triangle = 3, etc. You can also click on the center post to return to the pad at the entrance elevator/pillary thing.

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The Atari Indiana Jones game that the ET guy made WAS awesome.  It was single player but used two controllers!  It had an inventory, shops where you spent loot, multiple paths.  Impressive for an Atari game.

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FRACT transporter crash course (hidden for those who want to figure it out on their own):

The world is divided up into three main areas, each with its own color. Each area has a central part (large orb), and four sub-puzzles (small orbs), each of which has a transporter pad, with the exception of blue, which has a fifth intermediary pad for some reason. The pads don't activate until you step near them for the first time, and the orbs remain grayed out until the corresponding station is active. Clicking on the lit orb for an active pad makes you fly there. Sub-puzzle solution is pretty linear, with one opening a door to the next when it's solved. The symbols on the orbs show the order the pads will be encountered, with the amount of lines in the symbol showing the number: line = 1, chevron = 2, triangle = 3, etc. You can also click on the center post to return to the pad at the entrance elevator/pillary thing.

I could be wrong about this since its been a few days since I've messed around with it, but I think

in addition to activated/non, a filled in orb indicates the puzzle thing there has been solved completely whereas an outline indicates that there's something in the vicinity of that destination that hasn't been solved?

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I could be wrong about this since its been a few days since I've messed around with it, but I think

in addition to activated/non, a filled in orb indicates the puzzle thing there has been solved completely whereas an outline indicates that there's something in the vicinity of that destination that hasn't been solved?

I think the solved or not indicator is the little geometric shape (the symbol for that particular location) below the orb either being lit or not. I could be misremembering.

 

The aimless wandering factor is killing the game for me. Like Chris, I'm frustrated by the time lost when I go through great effort to get somewhere to find that there's nothing there. Also, I never thought I'd say this about a game, but I wish you could jump, it would make some of the terrain geometry less annoying to deal with.

 

I'm constantly finding ways to reach places that I'm not sure if you're supposed to be able to reach or not, with the answer always being no, this path does not lead anywhere. I feel like a hypocrite, because I always think I want more free exploration and less direction in games, but in this case I'd really like a little more direction. Going in circles forever is pretty frustrating.

 

I do like other aspects of the game very much. I find it visually interesting, and the musical aspects are neat. As an amateur synth guy, I want more tools to mess with in the studio! The screenshot in the first post suggests that there's a point at which they drop the cute labels and reveal the proper oscillator, filter and envelope controls, which is cool. I just want to make shitty music in this thing.

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I do like other aspects of the game very much. I find it visually interesting, and the musical aspects are neat. As an amateur synth guy, I want more tools to mess with in the studio! The screenshot in the first post suggests that there's a point at which they drop the cute labels and reveal the proper oscillator, filter and envelope controls, which is cool. I just want to make shitty music in this thing.

 

There's an option in the menus somewhere to just unlock everything in the studio without having to play through the game, if you're getting impatient.

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There's an option in the menus somewhere to just unlock everything in the studio without having to play through the game, if you're getting impatient.

Neat, thanks! 

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Okay okay, sorry to go back to Mad Men, but it just occurred to me that Sean's approval of the last episode's ending means Sean's favorite way for a piece of fiction to end is

a two second or so shot of the protagonist's face before he or she says, "okay", and then a cut to the credits.

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Alternative ending to the Walking Dead season 1:

 

"How are you holding up?"

 

"...... okay."

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I'm constantly finding ways to reach places that I'm not sure if you're supposed to be able to reach or not, with the answer always being no, this path does not lead anywhere. I feel like a hypocrite, because I always think I want more free exploration and less direction in games, but in this case I'd really like a little more direction. Going in circles forever is pretty frustrating.

I don't find this to be hypocritical. If a developer gives us a space to explore, the implicit understanding should be that it's a place interesting enough to explore. Otherwise, why are we there, and why can we explore it?

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There's a book by Ian Bogost about Atari development called Racing the Beam that the Thumbs would probably enjoy a lot. It really puts a lot of terrible Atari games into perspective when you realize that the machine was only ever designed to render Pong and that virtually everything released for the system was based on clever hacks and loopholes.

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"Luke..... I am your father"

"...okay"

"Anakin, don't! I have the upper ground"

"...okay"

"Minda tricks don'ta work ona me, only money"

"...okay"

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OK, so I feel like a crazy person, because in the past few days not a single person on any of the many gaming podcasts I listen to has talked about that documentary Microsoft is creating without claiming (implicitely or explicitly) that it is a movie about the ET game. Unless I'm completely crazy and making shit up in my memories, It isn't. The documentary is about the video game crash, and what was going on during that era...and ET coincidentally is a Thing That Happened that also happens to be a visible part of all that shit that went down, and therefore is also in the documentary.

 

Am I crazy? ... I might be crazy.

 

EDIT: Also, apparently Firefox refuses to spellcheck on these forums. Dunno why. It spellchecks everywhere else, including another forum I was posting on maybe 5 minutes ago, tops. Odd.

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These are not the lines you're looking for.

 

Okay...

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Strictly speaking, Kenny Cosgrove wasn't driving the lawnmower that ate that Brit's foot. It was the nervous, mousy secretary. I believe Ken did ride it into the office though.

 

I liked that somebody was happy to see Don. They've established before that Ken is pretty much the only person at the company that isn't a terrible human being, but he also almost uniquely has nothing to lose if Don comes back.

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Ken was horrible to Joan in the first episode of season 7.

I didn't really get what was going on, because the last time we saw Joan she was obviously a partner and was starting to take on her own accounts/clients. Fast forward 6 months and Ken Cosgrove is telling her not to interfere and stay out of my office :/ perhaps they were showing even though job titles have changed the relationship between these two characters haven't.

I thought Ken didn't care about the job and wanted to write sci if short stories, then he gets shot in the face and gets really serious about his job :/ I don't really buy any of that.

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I think you're glossing over that he became a father? Seems significant, no?

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I think losing an eye would be a far more significant life event then having a planned child and would cause a change in his character

The whole tap dancing "it's my job" thing he did after he got shot, he saw his job for what it really was and just cut out all niceties. Works work. Seeing Don in the office was a social event, I can see him now having a clear divide between being a super nice guy outside of work (where you don't get shot in the face fluffing clients) and a cut the shit business man in work

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Ken's desire for work/life division has been pretty long established, and the sci-fi stuff was part of that. He was also the most reluctant to exploit his family connections for clients. At one point he flat out refused to solicit his father in law for business.

Ken was horrible to Joan, but he was totally in the weeds. He's far from perfect, but as I mentioned, I think he's among the least bad people in the office in terms of terrobleness.

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If a film/TV show episode is going to end with someone saying "...ok.", and a smash cut to to credits, this should be playing and the smash cut to the credits should happen at the 12 minute mark.

 

 

ART.

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Ken was horrible to Joan in the first episode of season 7.

I didn't really get what was going on, because the last time we saw Joan she was obviously a partner and was starting to take on her own accounts/clients. Fast forward 6 months and Ken Cosgrove is telling her not to interfere and stay out of my office :/ perhaps they were showing even though job titles have changed the relationship between these two characters haven't.

I thought Ken didn't care about the job and wanted to write sci if short stories, then he gets shot in the face and gets really serious about his job :/ I don't really buy any of that.

 

I completely did not read that episode as showing a negative relationship between Ken and Joan. He trusts her enough to step in for him with another client, and his "stay out of my office" comment scanned more as a light chastisement that was masking a deeper gratefulness for Joan fixing a messy problem. But I agree, Ken needs to write more short stories.

 

The fact that every other man who Joan interacts with in that episode makes a point to directly reference her beauty, while Ken just treats her like an equal, really makes it hard for me to see him as acting rude. It also reminds me that Joan is by far one of the more interesting characters: Here is an obviously intelligent woman is only noticed for her physical attributes. She's managed to play within the system and use that perception to quietly advance herself, in contrast to Peggy who has never been bound by social norms or Betty who blindly follows the rules with consistently tragic consequences. Tracing Joan's arc from the beginning has been one of the more rewarding parts of this show for me. It also shows how little society has changed from this era because I can't ever read an article about Christina Hendricks without seeing the author comment on her body as if it's the only thing about her that matters.

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I completely did not read that episode as showing a negative relationship between Ken and Joan. He trusts her enough to step in for him with another client, and his "stay out of my office" comment scanned more as a light chastisement that was masking a deeper gratefulness for Joan fixing a messy problem. But I agree, Ken needs to write more short stories.

The fact that every other man who Joan interacts with in that episode makes a point to directly reference her beauty, while Ken just treats her like an equal, really makes it hard for me to see him as acting rude. It also reminds me that Joan is by far one of the more interesting characters: Here is an obviously intelligent woman is only noticed for her physical attributes. She's managed to play within the system and use that perception to quietly advance herself, in contrast to Peggy who has never been bound by social norms or Betty who blindly follows the rules with consistently tragic consequences. Tracing Joan's arc from the beginning has been one of the more rewarding parts of this show for me. It also shows how little society has changed from this era because I can't ever read an article about Christina Hendricks without seeing the author comment on her body as if it's the only thing about her that matters.

This is spot on I think. I also agree about Ken's reaction to Joan. Mad Men is one of the few shows on television that consistently represents this kind of deceptively subtle social interaction rather than overly broadly telegraphing the clear and obvious meaning of a given exchange.

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There's a book by Ian Bogost about Atari development called Racing the Beam that the Thumbs would probably enjoy a lot. It really puts a lot of terrible Atari games into perspective when you realize that the machine was only ever designed to render Pong and that virtually everything released for the system was based on clever hacks and loopholes.

 

Yeah, from what I've heard, Atari games had to be developed by a single person, because the hacks they used (tricking the system into displaying more than three objects by exploiting the raster beam's draw times) required such specific timing that having more people would completely screw it up.

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