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Chris

Idle Thumbs 158: P is for Podcast

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Idle Thumbs 157:

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P is for Podcast

This week choice rules on Idle Thumbs. This week YOU decide your podcast experience. Do you want a small robotic camera to watch you for the duration, or would you prefer to save the hundred dollars? Would you like to experience the podcast while wearing an iconic hat available only with one of eleven pre-order options, or maybe pick that up later as DLC? Is it more to your tastes that the title of this episode is a reference to a hypothetical children's book, or to an alphabet-themed series of murder mystery novels?

Things Discussed: Watch_Dogs, Kinect for Xbox One, DayZ, You Have to Win The Game

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Short episode! You Have to Win the Game sounds really fascinating though.

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Whoa it's only an hour. It felt very long when we were recording it.

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Also, Mario & Wario is an actual game. It was a Japan-only Super Famicom game. It's predominantly recognized by US audiences as the game that the player describes in Pokémon Red and Blue if they inspect the SNES in their room.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tTuQvkKui4

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Whoa it's only an hour. It felt very long when we were recording it.

 

It felt super short to me! I was surprised when exporting it that it made it to an hour.

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Also, Mario & Wario is an actual game. It was a Japan-only Super Famicom game.

 

Wow, that never came out in the US?  They definitely showed a picture of it in Nintendo Power.

 

I thought it was a SNES Mouse game, but that footage uses controller moves.

 

EDIT: Here's what I read 21 years ago and didn't bother to verify with Wikipedia.

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I thought I read somewhere that uplay was being phased out, but it's still alive and kicking. Trials Fusion on PC was released a few weeks ago and is saddled with that garbage. And of course it sounds like Watchdogs will have it, too. It's really bad for something like Trials where the entire game revolves around leaderboard competition, which means another account / login / friends list to maintain, separate from Steam.

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Can I just ask before I listen, what is "The [blank] zone where [blank]s rule" a reference to?

 

I've definitely heard it before, but I can't find out where from.

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I'm pretty sure the lower half of that Watch Dogs table is all physical real-world tat. "Aiden Pearce's iconic cap" refers to something that goes on the actual player's actual physical real-world head. The important artistic decisions regarding the protagonist's headwear remain intact. What this item actually offers is a way for purchasers to publicly declare how much they were willing to pay for the game.

Even if it had been an in-game item, I wouldn't share Chris' disappointment. Sure, it theoretically limits the importance of the decisions the character designers are making, but no more than any game with user-selectable costumes. In the more recent Assassin's Creed games you unlock various outfits throughout the game, and can choose at pretty much any time what your character should be wearing. This is would just be that plus a cynical business tactic (indeed, I imagine there were some edition-exclusive costumes in AC). It's implicitly understood that the default outfit is the canonical one, but you can choose to spend all of AC3 in your sailor outfit, if you choose. I guess the difference in Watch Dogs' case would be that it's specifically his "iconic" cap, and therefore the canonical choice, but still, I think the point is that it a lot of games the character design isn't really exercising the kind of control Chris is talking about (a possibility that he acknowledges, to be fair).

Historically I've been quite susceptible to these kind of tactics, at least when it comes to in-game content: I'd look at the whole selection of available material, and consider anything less than that as "missing out". I'd think of it as a subtractive thing. I think this is how a lot of people think, and it's what this ploy preys on. But really these sorts of things are in almost all instances additive. I don't think any developer or publisher would deliberately risk restricting anything that would have any real bearing on review scores to a non-standard edition. I think it is like bonus tracks for an album: you might enjoy the additional content, but it's just additional stuff thrown on top of an already complete thing. Perhaps that's obvious, but it's still something I have to remind myself of whenever I'm presented with any of these stupid edition catalogues. Even if it's weapons you can use throughout, theoretically changing the nature of the whole game, it's never something the game actually needed in the first place. (I have no evidence for this other than personal experience.)

Incidentally, I know publishers sometimes pull dumb stunts when posting stuff to journalists (was it a Bulletstorm promo that got packaged in a bunch of meat?), but so they send reviewers fancy editions in the hope that they'll review that? Even if so, I'd hope any reviewer worth her or his salt would differentiate the core content from any add-on nonsense.

I just had a thought: do you think a preponderance of options might be in part an attempt to ease customers towards more expensive editions: "if you spend £5 extra you can give your character a sweet trenchcoat, and once you're there it's just another £5 for the double-barrelled shotgun, and a mere £5 beyond that there's a bonus mission, and now that you've come this far you might as well throw in another £30 for an artwork and a figurine you won't know what to do with". Obviously that doesn't account for region or retailer exclusives. Perhaps it's nonsense. I am not a marketer.

I guess something I can agree with is that all this stuff does quite clearly indicate that the publisher is thinking of the game as a product more than art or a creative endeavour or whatever. That should come as a surprise to no-one, but I suppose it can be a problem in the way it shapes public perception. Not that I think Watch Dogs is going to be a strong artistic statement, but in general it'd be nice if we were more inclined to approach games as deliberately a designed whole rather than the rightly maligned collection of bullet points.

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Yeah, it's part of the EU CE. It's a physical cap, not an in-game item.

 358423.jpg 

 

I think the main thing to take away from this graph is that different areas expect and want different things from their CE's. How they worked this out I don't know. 

 

Dark Souls 2 had 2 different CE's too, With a replica set of weapons and shields for japan, and a figurine for the rest of the world. I don't feel cheapened by my Dark souls 2 experience coz I didn't get the replica weapons. Although the figurine was sweeeeet.

 

Finally, This isn't the first time Ubi's done shit like this. I'm pretty sure it's the same for every AC game since revelations. Check out that game's crazy graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin's_Creed:_Revelations#Retail_editions

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 thought it was a SNES Mouse game, but that footage uses controller moves.

It is, it's probably just being played on an emulator.

 

All of the ridiculous special edition bullshit surrounding games make me glad I don't buy physical copies of anything anymore. Unless a game comes with a controller or something, I just don't have it in me to care.

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I still play CS 1.6 at 640x480 on a CRT (it's the best resolution for CS, 800x600 is alright too).

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All of the preorder and bonus content is extremely frustrating to me.  It seems like that added content rarely adds a whole lot (Assasin's Creed 3 had a short Mayan temple where you got a sword at mission end) but there are certainly cases where it felt like actual game content was pulled out as a special edition feature.  The glaring offender to me was the squad member Javik in Mass Effect 3.  It was frustrating to hear how much he added in party dialogue as reviewers remarked that it seemed a strange omission.  

 

I fully understand major game companies desire to exploit fans who have fully bought into a universe's lore and want to provide additional content to satisfy those desires but I wonder how often it pushes folks away from the franchise, rather than ensnare them further.  I know it certainly hasn't improved my opinion of any AAA game.

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"Milo is the Problem Child of Kinect—like literally, not figuratively," just had me laughing out loud on the train, causing someone to choose not to sit next to me. Well done!

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The thing that's blowing my mind is that there's an A/NZ special edition that contains a piece of content called the Dedsec pack, and a Dedsec edition also available only in A/NZ that does not contain the Dedsec pack.

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I'm glad somebody brought up Minerva's Den, since I think it is the odd case where a piece of DLC is more memorable than the main game itself (nothing against Bioshock 2, I just really like Minerva's Den). Chances are, the white hat pack or whatever will just be a series of missions where a voice comes over your radio and says "I've hidden ten things around the city, go find them to prove you are a real white hat hacker!" but maybe not. Maybe one of them is actually a smart piece of design that is worth seeing, which would be unfortunate because I'd likely never play it.

 

I think James make as a good point above about trying to appeal to the player who wants to play the "full game" as I used to do that all the time. When LA Noire came out, I wanted all the cases, so I got the PS3 edition as opposed to the 360 since there were extra missions.

 

These days, I haven't thought about DLC much as I rarely finish most larger scale games I play, which probably isn't that great of a thing to do. I'm also more hesitant to go back to games I've finished even if I've finished them to play new content like AC4's Freedom's Cry which I hear is interesting (if weird in spots about its handling of slavery) or Bioshock Infinite's Burial at Sea which I am vaguely curious about. If I can't be bothered to seek out DLC that I've been told are actually good, I can't really be bothered to look into a bunch of (probably) mediocre Watch_Dogs side content.

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I'm probably not representative of many consumers, but the inclusion of a bunch of premium preorder DLC tends to cause me to wait for the GOTY edition at $30 that generally includes most of that content (often along with a "season's" worth of post-release DLC) instead of buying what has the appearance of being an incomplete game at release for $60.

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You Have to Win the Game sounds really fascinating though.

 

Yeah, the aesthetic is such a weird thing to think about.  I played Commander Keen in CGA so what was supposed to be a colorful adventure was just turquoise and purple to me.

 

ega-vs-cga.jpg

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Jake: the hard drive wasn't removed from the Xbox 360. The "core" version of the system, without the hard drive, was available from day one. So your timeline with that in parallel without the download limits doesn't really make sense. What seems more likely is that the limits were there because Microsoft didn't want the hard drive to be essential, so they didn't want downloadable games that couldn't easily fit on a memory card, not realizing how big that market would become.

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I enjoy the fact that the Xbox Arcade edition came with a 256 MB memory card and relatively quickly not many Xbox Arcade titles could fit on that.

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Quite a hilarious episode, thumbs!

 

I feel like horrible failure is the right way for a Year of Luigi to end. It's in character.

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I enjoy the fact that the Xbox Arcade edition came with a 256 MB memory card and relatively quickly not many Xbox Arcade titles could fit on that.

 

The 360 had memory cards?!

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Yep. I was sick of "recovering" my gamer profile on my work 360 and my home one so I just bought one that only housed my Live profile.

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