Chris

Idle Thumbs 178: CS Losers

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I gotta say, I think the Road Redemption guy's "we're not Ride to Hell, guys!" post really was necessary. I frequently confused the two until I watched a Let's Play of Ride to Hell. It is jawdroppingly awful, by the by.

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Yeah, Ride to Hell is pretty hilariously terrible. I'm not sure if I buy the 'too much on the plate' argument either. Yes there are a ton of bugs, issues and design flaws across systems that were due to scope, but it's also dumb and poor from a content perspective.

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I think it was mostly just Jake trying to make an interesting point about Counter-Stike, while Sean just wanted to gush about how much he loves Counter-Strike, so that they weren't so much arguing as jockeying for air time.

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I think it was mostly just Jake trying to make an interesting point about Counter-Stike, while Sean just wanted to gush about how much he loves Counter-Strike, so that they weren't so much arguing as jockeying for air time.

Sean already got the It's though.

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!!! so, i didn't realize the game was temporarily out of print so it's in it's grey-market-price-gouge span of its life BUT you should know you can play this game alone. you can sit there with all of the materials and enjoy it like a choose your own adventure game, absolutely. maybe not the best way to play but you can play, enjoyably, with 1-infinite number of people (although 2-3 has been what i've done and it was great)

 

You know what's the saddest thing I can think of? Sitting by yourself, drinking a beer, playing Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. Scratch that, make it a red wine in an oversized glass. That's the actual Saddest Thing a Person Can Do Alone.

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The CS:GO discussion this week made me try to postulate a pattern that I've noticed when people discuss competitive games like CS.  Full disclosure, I'm an esports fanatic so I'm definitely approaching it from "Sean's lens" of enthusiasm.

 

I definitely sensed varying levels of enthusiasm for revisiting CS among the cast this week.  I'm with Sean that the game is AMAZING for many nuanced reasons of keeping many things similar.  In all my discussion about the design of competitive esports games, I've noticed a pattern of all types of designers giving a game like CS:GO different levels of treatment.  Some points I noticed in this cast that come up often in similar discussions are:

 

a) It's just the same game from 1999-2000

b )The aesthetics are old / unimpressive with respect to modern games

c) This is for a breed of gamers that is not me

d) The game is amazing for reasons that would take way too long for me to engage with.

 

I feel these pattern of points indicate a level of engagement and critique with competitive games that frankly do little to uncover the true nuanced beauty of a competitive game like CS:GO.  It seems like engaging with why a robust game like CS continues to keep the same design is quickly explained away as pandering to a really hardcore competitive crowd, when there can be some real merit as to way certain "glitchy" and "twitchy" elements are kept the way that they are.  I think that it's a great opportunity to explore how gaming culture can define what they value in design and competitive play, and how that translates to what initially seems as intuitive design in games like CS and Dota 2.  

 

This is a difficult point to articulate so I may append this in the morning, but I just selfishly wish the exploration into CS had more substance into competitive play.   However, I equally enjoy hearing the perspectives of people who aren't super into competitive games as well, and overall the cast was great.  I don't intend to say that CS:GO wasn't given a fair shot, but rather the points I heard in the cast this week is consistent with similar issues that others have used to quickly explain away parts of the design. 

 

EDIT 1:

I guess a big reason why I'm bringing up this issue is because as esports gets more attention from the mainstream community, it's worthwhile to understand why a game like CS or StarCraft can remain very similar to it's predecessor design and still fine success today.  Super Smash Melee being another great example as well. 

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I gotta say, I think the Road Redemption guy's "we're not Ride to Hell, guys!" post really was necessary. I frequently confused the two until I watched a Let's Play of Ride to Hell. It is jawdroppingly awful, by the by.

 

When Danielle mentioned it, my first thought was "That can't be that worst game of 2013 thing right? She seems to be pretty happy with it."

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You know what's the saddest thing I can think of? Sitting by yourself, drinking a beer, playing Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. Scratch that, make it a red wine in an oversized glass. That's the actual Saddest Thing a Person Can Do Alone.

 

You, sir or madam, lack imagination.

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Re: Sherlock Holmes consulting detective, I'm not sure how related they are, but there was an fmv game by a similar title: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes:_Consulting_Detective

which was remastered for ios and pc:

http://www.zojoi.com/sherlock/

Also, regarding Joseph Bell, there was a bbc series in which he and Conan Doyle solve mysteries: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Rooms:_The_Dark_Beginnings_of_Sherlock_Holmes

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You, sir or madam, lack imagination.

 

You know, you're probably right. I guess with enough cocaine, a smoking jacket, and a second-floor flat overlooking a foggy street, you might have a pretty good time embroiled in what is essentially a more interactive Sherlock Holmes novel. I retract my statement. The Actual Saddest Thing A Person Can Do Alone is probably just tweet shitty things at games journalists. 

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I don't know if you're joking,  but I disagree with you. Some people absolutely love to spend some time puzzle solving alone (don't we all, to some extent, do tha while playing sp video games?!)

 

I don't think it's sad at all. If the person's enjoying it, how the hell can anyone challenge that?

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I was joking. I'm sure that the game is really fun to play by yourself! I was commenting on my lack of imagination. I just think that the most exciting part of what Sean mentioned on the podcast was the interaction with the other people while playing the game. I'm a person who tends to not spend hours playing single player video games, and I like the idea of a non-competitive game that doesn't require too many crazy rules or a game board with little tokens and some intense in-game economy. 

 

I apologize! For being down on single player Sherlock Holmes! 

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I bought Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective earlier this year back when it was not out of print, and it was available for the more typical price of $50. Still not cheap, but also not eye popping expensive.

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Cushlamochree! I never would have expected to hear the name Uwe Boll uttered. Immediate flashback to 2005-2008, when Patrick Klepek was a freshfaced (well, let's be honest, Patrick still looks like a teenager--I think scientists should study him to divine the secret to prevent aging) news reporter at 1UP, and the poor soul was regularly pumping out news posts about Uwe Boll and Jack Thompson. I think he said on "Bombin' the A.M." that he ended up developing a weirdly friendly relationship with Uwe Boll, and that they still correspond from time-to-time. Madness.

 

Now I'm reminiscing about listening to GFW Radio, which greatly helped make the inanity and drudgery of high school more tolerable for me. I'm sure it's been pointed out before, but it too featured smart folks who talked about games in a much more thoughtful, analytical way, with a profusion of hilarious digressions and in-joking. Jeff Green recounting his "Lord of the Rings" inspired dream, Shawn Elliott's notorious "hero of the web" segments, and Robert Ashley's mellifluous voice... ah, good times. Now I'm post-college and listening to another set of smart folks talking about games in essentially the same way. I hope dorks will perpetually have a gaming podcast featuring witty, sardonic, insightful discussion from cool folks.

 

Really enjoyed Chris talking about the mystifying qualities of "Desert Golfing," and his articulation of video games' inherent ability to present secrets (whether intentional or not) in a more captivating way than any other medium. I think the spatial dimensionality, interactivity, and visuality of them helps in this regard. Both prose and verse can contain secrets that can be uncovered, but it's much more abstract/intangible. Film, art, and comics do a better job, but in them it feels more like something to be noticed rather than actively discovered. Everyone is aware that Pixar crams tons of visual references, details, allusions, and various bric-a-brac in their movies. (And it seems like a lot of their employees are more well-versed in video games than most other filmmakers, which perhaps partially accounts for why they do so.) Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder filled their paintings with incredible detail and hidden visual gags and secrets. (Breugel the Elder's "Netherlandish Proverbs" is a personal favorite, offering well over a hundred visual depictions of proverbs and idioms, many of them derriere-based.) Will Elder was known for filling his comic strip panels with "chicken fat," or hidden details and background gags.

 

And the great Roger Ebert hosted a film analysis event at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1969-2006 called "Cinema Interruptus," wherein a film would be screened normally on Monday, and then for two hours every afternoon from Tuesday-Friday he and an auditorium of nearly a thousand people would dissect the movie nearly frame-by-frame. Anyone in the audience at any time could yell out "stop!" and then comment on something they noticed. Learning this inspired me to more frequently rewatch favorite films and specifically try to notice any hidden visual details. Perhaps my favorite is from Jacques Tati's "Playtime," which presents a futuristic vision of Paris as being cold and sterile, filled with lifeless steel and glass high-rise buildings. There is a scene forty-three minutes and twenty-five seconds into the movie where characters are navigating a "Voyage Tours" travel agency, and there are posters adorning the glass walls which depict various places around the world, such as the USA, Hawaii, Mexico, Stockholm, Holland, Japan, Germany, and so on. Like you would expect at any travel agency, these posters are supposed to advertise the visual differences between all of these places. But in the world of "Playtime," these places are all depicted as featuring only a single lifeless steel and glass high-rise building, which all look identical to one another. It is god damn hilarious and brilliant. There's other incredibly ingenious hidden visual gags in the movie, such as very brief glimpses of a past Paris that actually had some greenery and life, and tons of fake Monsieur Hulot look-alikes wandering around the city (a clever twist on Hitchcock's famous cameos in his own movies). Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd all had great hidden visual details and gags in their films, as well. 

 

But nothing is better or more satisfying than discovering secrets contained within video games. (Again, because it feels like you are actively discovering them, and they seem more tangible.) Of course everyone recalls stumbling upon secret rooms in Mario, Zelda, and Castlevania games. My favorite games with secrets are actually more contemporary, though: "Super Meat Boy" and Fez." The warp zones and glitch levels in the former felt brilliant. And I'll never forget the experience of decoding the world and language of "Fez" and achieving a 209.4% completion rate. The amount of hidden content in that game, which is deftly implied within the regular, non-hidden world in which the game takes place, is just staggering. The process of figuring it out and seeing it all was incredible. An unparalleled achievement. Also, even though I didn't play "Spelunky" myself, I greatly enjoyed watching Chris play it when he was regularly streaming it and learning about the insane amount of layered secrets within it.

 

I hope you Idle Thumbs folks that are part of Campo Santo will consider embedding some of this type of secret content into "Firewatch." In the trailer we see Henry rappelling into a cave, implying that this will be an environment explored in the game. I think at the very least there should be some type of nod/allusion to Chris's obsession with "Spelunky" in this section. Even if it's just a small room that contains some gold bars and rubies in a treasure chest that has the smug Chris "Spelunky" painting hanging on the wall directly behind the treasure, that would be satisfactory. (Perhaps there could be an arrow trap placed alongside the entryway to this small room that the player would have to jump over to set off/get past to obtain the treasure/see the painting? And perhaps there could be some large bees protecting the treasure that you have to somehow kill? And a soundclip of Chris saying "Fucking bees, in the dark!" could play once you jump over the arrow trap and first see the bees? I don't know; I might be getting carried away here.) Would be cool to see something along those lines, though!

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For people into the analysis done in that CS:GO video, you'd probably love Rapha's breakdown of his Quake Live duel against Cooler:

 

 

It's far and away my favorite bit of e-sports (and not too long). Also, Quake Live *was* just added to Steam recently...

 

EDIT: Re-watching it, I swear every time I'm more and more amazed by the precision in that game and the level that they think at. If you haven't watched Quake duels before, basically controlling the respawns of items is everything (to strengthen yourself and choke out your opponent).

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Haven't listened to the whole episode yet, but is the word that Chris and Sean are looking for at the ~17 minute mark "spandrels?" If so, it's not really newly made up, just recently (late 1970s) co-opted from architecture for use in evolutionary biology. The paper by Gould and Lewontin introducing this term is an amusing read.

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spandrels

Now there's an architecture dept. cover band just waiting to happen: "Spandrel Ballet"

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RPS recently linked to this Rapha match where someone else (the interviewer from that other video?) analyses:

 

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Now I'm reminiscing about listening to GFW Radio, which greatly helped make the inanity and drudgery of high school more tolerable for me. I'm sure it's been pointed out before, but it too featured smart folks who talked about games in a much more thoughtful, analytical way, with a profusion of hilarious digressions and in-joking. Jeff Green recounting his "Lord of the Rings" inspired dream, Shawn Elliott's notorious "hero of the web" segments, and Robert Ashley's mellifluous slacker-stoner voice... ah, good times. Now I'm post-college and listening to another set of smart folks talking about games in essentially the same way. I hope dorks will perpetually have a gaming podcast featuring witty, sardonic, insightful discussion from cool folks.

 

This was pretty much exactly my experience too. I regularly drop "You're not the Lord of the Rings!" or sing the tunnel full of dicks song.  It was pretty much unbeliveable to me at 14 that there were people speaking critically, smartly, and thoughtfully about video games. Like when as an April Fools joke they decided to not attach review scores, and liked it so much thtat they just decided to keep doing that.

 

Those dudes meant so much to me as a teen that I've continued following them & their careers since. The Olly Moss poster for ALWW #7 (Work) is one of my most prized possessions, and I contributed to the I Come to Shanghai kickstarter. I had to stop following Elliott on twitter 'cause he just made me mad more often than he made me laugh, but I wish that dude the best. I think he has a personality that works best in a cast rather than as a solo voice. Jeff Green's Dark Souls livestreams are A+ comedy.

 

After the Brodeo ended, no video game podcast really stuck for me, either because I grew out of a show, or they would stop making it, until Idle Thumbs came into my life in November 2013 or so.

 

Man, now I just miss all of the 1UP shows I used to listen to.

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Anyone looking for a copy of consulting detective could also take a look at used book stores. I was able to track down one of the printings from the 1980's for about $40 online. There was also a Raymond Chandler-esque sequel that seems like it could be interesting but has proven harder to track down a reasonably-priced copy of.

 

edit: It also seems like the original publisher of the game was based in San Francisco. An ISBN search from that image turns up some really inexpensive copies on Amazon.

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Danielle it was really fun to watch you and Patricia stream for a few minutes before I went to bed. It was cool to chat with you. The systems in Shadow of Mordor make it a surprisingly watchable experience because it has (dare I say it) Far Cry 2-esque open world bullshit where you're trying to do one mission and focus on one captain, but then another captain shows up so you let a caragor loose and then someone sounds the alarm and then ghuls appear and then...

 

I feel like it's worth pointing out that you actually learn the stealth kill mechanic from stealth killing an orc about 3 minutes after you sneak up on your wife with a birthday present. I'm surprised that little sequence raised eyebrows, I thought it was kind of sweet. No one seems to mind that you learn how to build a chain combo by hitting your son with a sword right before that.

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Haven't listened to the whole episode yet, but is the word that Chris and Sean are looking for at the ~17 minute mark "spandrels?" If so, it's not really newly made up, just recently (late 1970s) co-opted from architecture for use in evolutionary biology. The paper by Gould and Lewontin introducing this term is an amusing read.

 

I was guessing the word was skeuomorph: "a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues from structures that were necessary in the original." Apparently it's been around since the 19th Century, but I think it became a popular term more recently because Apple applied that design philosophy a lot.

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