Chris

Idle Thumbs 180: Wars and Pieces

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Re: just liking a thing versus having to talk about why you like a thing, I remember reading about a study about that a while ago that I can't find now, but it concluded that people would choose a different thing when they were told beforehand that they would have to explain why they chose the thing, and deliberately chose things they could explain well instead of what they actually liked.

 

This is about the same thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion#Attitude_change, the last paragraph kind of sums it up.

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How about an Idle Thumbs relisten podcast?

 

The amount of subtitles and self referential looping would be insane.

 

Idle Thumbs Relisten 1: Idle Thumbs 1: Let the Games Begin: Let the Games Begin Again

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I can't not read this in my mind and hear "Wars and Feces."

 

Funny Sean seems to think adventure games of this style function only as unbelievable set pieces as my main problem with any other game that is story based, like RPG or action games is that you can instead deal with clones, people that just kind of wander on a set path, or people who are apparently never doing anything in their world. It takes me out of the believability even more and seems hard to do in an action game without some sort of nice budget just as much as an adventure.


Although maybe I did not understand what type of game he was exactly talking about since he was saying David Cage types as part of it, which I don't really classify as the more traditional adventure game where characters have idle animations in their places and also function as set pieces. It can also be kind of obnoxious if the characters do run around but my only frame of reference for that is the old Revolution games Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky where people were possibly anywhere in the city and half of the game was spent tracking down the person you needed to talk to. Perhaps that has been done better since.

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It can also be kind of obnoxious if the characters do run around but my only frame of reference for that is the old Revolution games Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky where people were possibly anywhere in the city and half of the game was spent tracking down the person you needed to talk to. Perhaps that has been done better since.

I don't remember tracking people down in BASS bothering me, but I also played it while traveling and bored, might have felt differently if I was sitting in my house.

The game that does it well is Deadly Premonition, where most of the townfolk go about their day. They get up, have coffee in their house, go to work, maybe catch lunch at the diner, go shopping after work, grab a beer at the bar or just go chill in their houses in the evening with friends or family. But you never have to track anyone down, it just goes ahead and gives you a map which lists everyone's location. Which, while completely unrealistic, makes sure that you aren't just wasting a ton of time wandering around. Also, a lot of people have unique conversation options based on when and where you talk with them.

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I never have anything of worth to contribute in these episode threads, but...

 

Darth Ickius and Darth Insanius just sound like the bumbling Saturday Morning Cartoon henchmen of the big bad Darth Vader.

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I can relate to some of Sean's frustrations with a lot of adventure game conventions like characters standing around like sign posts. What's frustrating is we have an example of a game that doesn't do that: the Last Express. That comes with its own set of design challenges, but I wish some developers somewhere would try to develop a game that adopted some of the design choices used in that game.

 

Also I basically completely agree with the Crate & Crowbar complaint about Sherlock Holmes games. Drives me nuts when people don't think through the fact that Sherlock Holmes is a literary character, and that means he gets to pull things off thanks to literary conceits that you can't convincingly do in a game. Detective games in general frequently run up against this problem.

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Oh yeah, you go to Xibalba in Tomb Raider Underworld, but it's also Avalon and Valhalla at the same time, so only the outer shell of the tombs before you pierce the inner world is actually Mayan feeling.

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I haven't tried Crimes and Punishments yet, but it was cool to hear Sean talk about it, especially from an adventure game designer's perspective.

 

All the Sherlock Holmes games have been plagued with bad design and puzzles around a few smart moments. Silver Earring I remember being a pretty decent take on a Sherlock Holmes story, but it was heavily flawed. The idea that the games are more about replicating Watson's experience than Sherlock's seems to be built in to the series, though,at least in part. You're often taking the role of Watson investigating certain areas and often when you're piecing together the facts it's as Watson with Sherlock waiting to tell you if you got it right or not. It works pretty well in some circumstances as replicating the dynamic from the stories where Sherlock has already crystallized 99% of the circumstances behind a case, but uses Watson as a sort of talking evidence record to use as a sounding board (or sometimes just as a way to pass the time until the next character appears).

 

But yeah, when you are in Sherlock's shoes, the puzzle design can be so obtuse and pixel hunt focused that you usually feel like the opposite of the great detective, oscillating between 4 locations struggling to find the hotspot to proceed. And like Sean says, when you control him there's always a disconnect between the player's bumbling and the character's hyper-deliberate actions. They really fall down flat at making you feel like Sherlock, but I don't really know how you accomplish that, because that character is basically an opaque black box you put evidence into so that you can open it for the big reveal later.

 

The games succeed the most during crime scene analysis when they get as far away from generic adventure game design and performing pointless fetch quests. Each game has its own systems for actually observing the crime scene, and then you have to piece together what the evidence you discovered actually means by answering questions or matching deductions to circumstances on a fairly complex board.

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On the topic of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter:  The hokey writing and plot is more considered and deliberate that you give it credit. It's difficult to explain further without massive spoilers, but the things you found unappealing are re-contextualised near the end of the game. It sounds like Chris isn't going to finish the game, but I would have love to hear his opinions if he does (perhaps he could watch a let's play of the final act).

 

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On the topic of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter:  The hokey writing and plot is more considered and deliberate that you give it credit. It's difficult to explain further without massive spoilers, but the things you found unappealing are re-contextualised near the end of the game. It sounds like Chris isn't going to finish the game, but I would have love to hear his opinions if he does (perhaps he could watch a let's play of the final act).

In general this isn't something I have a lot of patience for. "All this stuff you found scattered and unappealing totally makes sense if you just play it for hours and hours first." I'm not playing the game as a preparatory exercise to have my mind blown six hours later, I'm playing to enjoy myself throughout. I am not a fan of "the twist" as a justification for any number of convoluted things prior to the twist. I am totally fine with works being dense or subtle or nonlinear or whatever, and I'm fine with totally recontextualizing something that is already interesting—then you make it interesting in a totally different way. That's great!

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In general this isn't something I have a lot of patience for. "All this stuff you found scattered and unappealing totally makes sense if you just play it for hours and hours first." I'm not playing the game as a preparatory exercise to have my mind blown six hours later, I'm playing to enjoy myself throughout. I am not a fan of "the twist" as a justification for any number of convoluted things prior to the twist. I am totally fine with works being dense or subtle or nonlinear or whatever, and I'm fine with totally recontextualizing something that is already interesting—then you make it interesting in a totally different way. That's great!

I agree that this structure shouldn't automatically justify what precedes itself, and my intent wasn't to defend the game in this regard. However, your analysis took on an extra significance to me as someone who's finished the game.

Big spoilers ahead:

Throughout the game you find puzzles based on story fragments authored by Ethan. The third act reveal is that Paul Prosporo is the protagonist of one of Ethan's stories - and this murder mystery is Ethan's coping mechanism for a family that is best distant from, and at worst abusive to, Ethan. In that light it makes more sense that Prosporo reads like a "Dime store detective novel character" - he is.

 

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I agree that this structure shouldn't automatically justify what precedes itself, and my intent wasn't to defend the game in this regard. However, your analysis took on an extra significance to me as someone who's finished the game.

Big spoilers ahead:

Throughout the game you find puzzles based on story fragments authored by Ethan. The third act reveal is that Paul Prosporo is the protagonist of one of Ethan's stories - and this murder mystery is Ethan's coping mechanism for a family that is best distant from, and at worst abusive to, Ethan. In that light it makes more sense that Prosporo reads like a "Dime store detective novel character" - he is.

 

 

The problem with this, I think, is that

Bad writing + 'Oooooh, it was imagined by a kiiiiiid' = Bad writing, just with a disclaimer.

 

Also, the story is supposed to have been imagined by a kid, but it was still written by adults. And I (and others, apparently) found it mediocre.

 

I don't actually think that the twist ends up redeeming it either. Yes, there is a suggestion of abuse/neglect: his uncle calls him a faggot, his grandfather is an alcoholic, his parents are distant. But adding the context that the story is all in his head just means that he is imagining the brutal murders of ~5 of his family members. I think this makes the story much weirder/worse than if the designers just thought dime novel tropes were cool.

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The problem with this, I think, is that

Bad writing + 'Oooooh, it was written by a kiiiiiid' = Bad writing, just with a disclaimer.

 

Also, the story is supposed to have been imagined by a kid, but it was still written by adults. And I (and others, apparently) found it mediocre.

 

I don't actually think that the twist ends up redeeming it either. Yes, there is a suggestion of abuse/neglect: his uncle calls him a faggot, his grandfather is an alcoholic, his parents are distant. But adding the context that the story is all in his head just means that he is imagining the brutal murders of ~5 of his family members. I think this makes the story much weirder/worse than if the designers just thought dime novel tropes were cool.

 

I didn't think it was great either, but perhaps not as hackneyed as everyone else seems to find it. I just found the thumbs' discussion interesting as it made me consider unintentional cliché as opposed to deliberate cliché. It was Sean's point that "You could write that well" that compelled my comment, I appreciate why they might want to intentionally overdo it (to serve their overall conceit), even if it ultimately didn't work.

He also mentioned he was hoping it would be an "Adult world", and it's failure to achieve that in this case isn't purely a shortcoming of the writing, it's in service of something.

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. Come to think of it, the Nemesis system would work brilliantly in STALKER.

 

Also, if you renamed Castlevania: Lords of Shadow to Castlevania: Shadow of Lords, you would have something pretty great.

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