Jake

Idle Thumbs 163: A B C D E3

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Star Citizen: it's hard to imagine that even with 45 million + X (split what, 8 ways?), we're not going to wind up like 4 different video games with a tunnel you drive through to connect them.

 

Ya the more info I hear about this game, the more skeptical I become of it. I backed early, and have been super excited for it, but it's sort of hard to believe they'll manage to make a cohesive experience out of a space combat, fps, economic sim, etc, etc all combined.

 

Maybe that wouldn't matter. My life isn't a tonally consistent, cohesive experience, so presumably they're going for life in space or something approaching it. But ya I have a hard time believing this will all work together very well. Hopefully I'll be blown away.

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God Splatoon looks pretty cool actually...I find myself wanting a Wii U more and more...someone please stop me from making a dumb decision.

 

My Wii U is my most played system, and I had the exact same thought when I bought it.  Mario 3D World, Donkey Kong, Pikmin 3, and Mario Kart have made it worth it.  Try and find one used for a lower price to ease your conscious.  That's what I did.  

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God Splatoon looks pretty cool actually...I find myself wanting a Wii U more and more...someone please stop me from making a dumb decision.

 

I you buy one and get Mario Kart before the end of next month, you can get another game for free through Club Nintendo.

 

(get Pikmin 3)

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That's the first time I've seen the thing that Peter Dinklage voices. That's... not really a "cube."

 

I don't know what it is.

 

Dinklohedron?

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Really surprised Danielle didn't bring up Yoshi's Woolly World along with Kirby. The graphics in both of those fucking floored me. Look at the Yoshi stuff, it's fucking GORGEOUS. Something about looking like a physical toy you might play with just  charms my socks off.

 

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So, the star citizen discussion on this episode reminded me of something I wanted to talk about from the last time it was discussed, but forgot to. I have been peripheralyl aware of star citizen, but haven't looked into it at all, and found it super baffling and sort of unconsicously dismissed it as a game for crazy people, I'd look into it once it came out. Most of the discussion did nothing to dissuade me of that notion, but Chris mentioned "hardpoints" and suddenly, and very strangely, something clicked. I thought to myself "oh, hardpoints!" and felt more comfortable with the game was, and the realized what a weird reaction that was. The familiarity with that comes from the fact that I used to play a lot of EVE, but the fact that that single word triggered that is strange.

 

More germaine to this episode, one of the reader mails mentioned "high sec, low sec, null sec" which is a concept that, as a former eve player, is also incredibly familiar. All in all, simply referencing things I recall from EVE, even though I no longer play that, made this crazy game make more sense to me, or at least feel like it makes more sense. I'll probably buy it once there is a concrete thing I can buy, however long that takes.

 

In unrelated news, I love that bungie talk brings up old mac games, like Marathon and even Pathways into Darkness. As a kid, we had macs in the house, and that is what I grew up playing games on, so I love to hear Jake talk about old mac gaming.

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When Chris mentioned Dune for like, five seconds in the podcast I realized that this is exactly what I want in every science fiction video game: I want Dune. I want real science, combined with a light dusting of mysticism. I don't want moon wizards. I want religious fervor stretched tightly against a backdrop of political and human drama. I want space travel to feel like what it actually is: difficult and mysterious. I want houses and intrigue and the uninterrupted flow of spice. I try to re-read Dune once a year, and each time I open it up it just feels so right, and it's absurd that more game designers haven't ripped it off wholesale. Chris, perhaps you have heard this from other people who are far more influential on your life than I am, but re-read Dune. Make it an Idle Book Club selection. I have one million things I could say about that incredible, perfect piece of fiction.

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When Chris mentioned Dune for like, five seconds in the podcast I realized that this is exactly what I want in every science fiction video game: I want Dune. I want real science, combined with a light dusting of mysticism. I don't want moon wizards. I want religious fervor stretched tightly against a backdrop of political and human drama. I want space travel to feel like what it actually is: difficult and mysterious. I want houses and intrigue and the uninterrupted flow of spice. I try to re-read Dune once a year, and each time I open it up it just feels so right, and it's absurd that more game designers haven't ripped it off wholesale. Chris, perhaps you have heard this from other people who are far more influential on your life than I am, but re-read Dune. Make it an Idle Book Club selection. I have one million things I could say about that incredible, perfect piece of fiction.

 

Dune is one of my favorite books. I think part of that is because its amazing, part of that is because it was a pretty formative reading experience for me, I read it for the first time in 4th or 5th grade, it was on the bookshelf in the classroom. I have since read it again, I think twice. I never got into the rest of the books though, I read its direct sequel, Dune Messiah, don't recall a whole lot about that. But Dune itself stands alone very well. I've often wondered why required high school reading doesn't incorporate some classic scifi like Dune, or perhaps Asimov.

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I started to read the sequels a few years ago, and the books have super diminishing returns. I think that it would be fantastic for high school students to read something like Starship Troopers and then Old Man's War, especially if they're in the year of high school where they take American history. I also think something like The Left Hand of Darkness would be an excellent high school book, providing that parents don't hear that a school is making kids read something with BIZARRE SEXUALITY. 

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I couldn't stop thinking of the Destiny Cube A.I. as anything but this guy:  :rubik:

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Aaagh! I hate that smiley!

 

io9 made some good points defending Dinklage's performance - he's going for a HAL style delivery, and they hadn't put any robotic filters on his voice yet in the infamous Moon Wizard clip. I'd further point out that he's lumbered with a huge amount of terribly written info-dumps, which would be bad anyway but are exacerbated by giving them to an impassive AI character.

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I'm kind of fascinated on how quickly the general attitude towards the WiiU has shifted around here.  Even I'm getting interested in one, and I haven't wanted a piece of Nintendo hardware in a couple of decades. 

 

Not to sound overly cliché hipsterish, but I never did get why the Wii U was so outright trashed. It's always had genuine exclusives, even with a couple non Nintendo games if admittedly the vast majority is Nintendo. Obviously it's still got problems that people have talked a lot about, but nothing about the PS4 or XBONE suggests that they're realistically doing any better.

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Finished listening to the episode this morning, and I think I get what Chris was referring to with his "boardgame for children" analogy for Splatoon and some of Nintendo's other original works. FlingSmash, a 2010 Wii game in which you fling a character around the screen and smash obstacles, is the foremost example in my mind.

 

Some others: Steel Diver (you're a submarine), Fossil Fighter (pokemon with fossil-hunting), Excite Trucks & Excitebots (racing games with trucks and robots respectively), Battalion Wars (3d action game based on Advance Wars), Rhythm Heaven (collection of rhythm minigames), Drill Dozer (you use a drill to dig), Custom Robo (I bet you customize a robot). A lot of them are actually solid games, so I hear, but there's something disposable in how Nintendo of America chooses to name and market them.

 

They've also published some questionably-named digital-only 3DS games recently, like Dillon's Rolling Western, Kersploosh!, Sakura Samurai, and Ketzal's Corridors. Yeah, I dunno.

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Man I haven't thought of Custom Robo in a long time. I loved playing the Gamecube version's competitve multiplayer with my friends. It was so good.

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"Ruin your slogo today" sounds like something senor cardgage of homestarrunner dot com would say

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Man I haven't thought of Custom Robo in a long time. I loved playing the Gamecube version's competitve multiplayer with my friends. It was so good.

 

I would be very, very surprised if there weren't a new Custom Robo game in the works since that game is absolutely perfect for NFC figures.

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Oooh nice call. I'd be so into that.

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When Chris mentioned Dune for like, five seconds in the podcast I realized that this is exactly what I want in every science fiction video game: I want Dune. I want real science, combined with a light dusting of mysticism. I don't want moon wizards. I want religious fervor stretched tightly against a backdrop of political and human drama. I want space travel to feel like what it actually is: difficult and mysterious. I want houses and intrigue and the uninterrupted flow of spice. I try to re-read Dune once a year, and each time I open it up it just feels so right, and it's absurd that more game designers haven't ripped it off wholesale. Chris, perhaps you have heard this from other people who are far more influential on your life than I am, but re-read Dune. Make it an Idle Book Club selection. I have one million things I could say about that incredible, perfect piece of fiction.

 

https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/9458-dune/

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My interest in the Alien game sharply reduced when I found out it was being made by Creative Assembly. Wasn't it just 6 months ago that everyone was talking about how Rome II was a buggy pile of garbage, and a couple years before that when Empire:Total War was a pile of buggy garbage too? Where does the Creative Assembly love come from?

The love comes from the fact that Creative Assembly makes a unique kind of game: war and empire building on big campaign maps with cities and armies and navies but then cinematic real time battles with thousands of men when forces collide.  As bad as some of the Total War titles are, no one else has come close to doing what they do. 

 

Not to promote their current work because Rome 2 is a disgrace in my opinion, but there were two fairly decent Total War games released in the five years between 2009's Empire and Rome 2: Napoleon (2010) and Shogun 2 (2011).  Both were smaller scale than Empire or Rome II which may have helped them realize a higher level of polish and game balance.  

 

Regarding Alien, it's my sense that the Total War group (PC) and the Alien group (console) are entirely separate operations.  They occupy separate floors at the company's Horsham UK offices and have different teams. 

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Really surprised Danielle didn't bring up Yoshi's Woolly World along with Kirby. The graphics in both of those fucking floored me. Look at the Yoshi stuff, it's fucking GORGEOUS. Something about looking like a physical toy you might play with just  charms my socks off.

 

 

I'm surprised too, because it was definitely on my list, and I actually played a bit more of Woolly World than Kirby.  I'm ashamed to have forgotten about Yoshi, so, as penance, I'll stare at this for a few minutes:

 

http://www.mariowiki.com/images/f/f9/ToadBabyYoshiNSMBU.PNG

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To me, Splatoon seems like an indie game from 2007, but with a budget and design experience behind it. The fact that it's being made by Nintendo would probably also solve the biggest problem indie multiplayer games from 2007 had, which is that only 10 people ever knew about them so you couldn't actually play.

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