Jake

Idle Thumbs 182: I Am Suspicious of Myself

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Ito's The Thing That Washed On Shore is a great weird short story.

I really love Ito's short stories; actually, Ito and Nakayama have cartooned great horror/weird short stories.

 

The best thing about Ito is that he draws his slice of life autobiographical series about living with his new cats in the exact same style as his horror manga.

 

tgpFFeA.jpg

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I guess I'm probably in the minority here, but I couldn't stand Payday 2 (never played the first one). I basically found it to be a video game ass video game, and super immersive breaking. I definitely never had the feeling Sean described of feeling like I was in an awesome heist movie. Instead I felt like some idiot holding down the F key or whatever waiting for the various buckets to fill up, and shooting ten million cops since so many of the stealth systems felt weird and finnicky so carefully laid plans always got messed up really badly. I gave up after about 4 tries with the game. My friends kept insisting that the game gets better as you progress along the skill tree, but I don't have the patience for that. The game didn't give me anything cool to work with right off the bat, and I can't handle having to grind or whatever to get to what is allegedly good about the game.

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Five minutes into the episode, and it's already sending me down a weird rabbit hole. Here's that New Zealand interview.

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Probably the best attempt to do justice to the interacting/developing a lexicon with aliens theme i can think of is a iOS/andriod game called Ledoliel

 

it's far from perfect and sometimes it just feels like your not being given a fair chance but still there's not all that many thinks out there that even attempt to do what it does, and i really like the clean black and white vector art work, although they do look a bit like villains from Hellraiser (who's name i shall not even attempt to spell  :P ), which is perhaps apropriate because boy do they love killing you in horrible ways.

 

screen480x480.jpeg

 

killscreen does a better job than i do giving a quick summary of it 

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/ledoliel/

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Love the Koko discussion at the end, but it's worth noting that this isn't Koko's introduction to death. Koko has had pets, the first being Koko's pet kitten "All Ball" (so named by the gorilla because the cat had no tail), who was hit by a car and died. Koko's trainer, Dr. Francine Patterson, reported hearing Koko weep over her pet's death.

 

It's weird. Koko the gorilla is weird. 

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Probably the best attempt to do justice to the interacting/developing a lexicon with aliens theme i can think of is a iOS/andriod game called Ledoliel

 

Man, I was about to bring up a quote I've mentioned here before in response to that, only to find it in the text of that Killscreen article.

 

He's ensured that each conversation in Ledoliel is deliberately elliptical, as if to demonstrate and teach Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical notion that "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him."

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Gah! Aliceffekt, the dude who made Ledoiliel, also made a crap ton of other games/languages/apps that are focused on patterns of cognition and how they are expressed. Check him out, he's awesome.

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I was always wary of the Payday games and only finally bit this past June along with a friend when nothing else was really calling to me during the Steam summer sale. Having absolutely no relationship with its masked-up-bank-heist ancestral media, I was as surprised as anyone to find myself so compelled by the game and now, over five hundred hours later and one of the four horsebags. My early hours with the game were quite oblique and playing with strangers is essentially asking to have a foul time, more so than in similar games such as the perennially comparable Left 4 Dead - as Payday is far more demanding of coordinated teamwork from players, regarding the completion of multiple, disparate objectives and utilizing complementary skills.

 

While the game's first person shooter violence is fairly easy to comprehend due to its ubiquity, the language of its stealth is particularly difficult to acclimate to and many missions will have unique fail triggers that will frustrate new players until they becomes old hat - at which point they themselves will be frustrated by the next crop of new players wrecking the heist. However, that amount of difficulty and minutiae also begets a huge amount of informational resources [1] [2] [

] if you care to delve into it. Payday 2 is actually rather like Dark Souls II in that way for me, I went through a phase of watching any Twitch stream of it that I could, tearing through its wiki, just trying to be an encyclopedia for the game - I suppose the difference is that I've found Payday 2's DLC output continually stimulating (and relatively evenhanded), so I'm still engaged.

 

So, in summary, I echo the recommendation that anyone intrigued by Sean's excitement check out the multiplayer networking thread for the game we've had going. I personally am definitely always willing to play whenever I'm around, and I try my best to be a good ambassador of the game for newcomers.

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So, in summary, I echo the recommendation that anyone intrigued by Sean's excitement check out the multiplayer networking thread for the game we've had going. I personally am definitely always willing to play whenever I'm around, and I try my best to be a good ambassador of the game for newcomers.

 

And if someone wants a buddy they can learn with, I just got the game last week, am going to be pretty available over the next couple months, and would like to really dig into it!

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My main memories of Payday 2 are from around last year's Halloween event. They added in four new monster masks that dropped at the end of missions like everything else does. Of course, because people really wanted those masks, they found a way to quickly grind missions to get them. There's a jewelry store mission that, if you grab the minimum amount of loot, can be over within a few minutes, usually without any casualties or cops showing up. I matched into a group of other people doing this, and stuck around with them for about an hour or so, over the course of which we started to get better and better at the heist. It got to the point that we were all holding the "don mask" button as the heist loaded so that they were on as soon as possible, sprinting up to the store, letting one person disable the security guard while the rest of us grabbed jewelry, and then bucket-chaining the bags back to the van while cleaning out the last of the store's easily-found loot (there was small a safe in the store's office, but we never bothered with it). In and out in 2-3 minutes, tops. Being able to pull off a quick smash-and-grab so quickly and professionally was incredibly satisfying.

 

 

villains from Hellraiser (who's name i shall not even attempt to spell  :P )

 

"Xenomorph."

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Oh, I also love Payday 2's music. It does such a good job of starting out low-key and ramping up as things go nuts.

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As someone who's played way too much Payday 2, it's super adorable to hear them talk so enthusiastically about the basic branch bank heist. A stream would be really neat/tragic!

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I think Nick's girlfriend started following my tumblr.

 

How do I turn this against him?

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I think Nick's girlfriend started following my tumblr.

 

How do I turn this against him?

Put his story into comic form.

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My main memories of Payday 2 are from around last year's Halloween event. They added in four new monster masks that dropped at the end of missions like everything else does. Of course, because people really wanted those masks, they found a way to quickly grind missions to get them. There's a jewelry store mission that, if you grab the minimum amount of loot, can be over within a few minutes, usually without any casualties or cops showing up. I macthed into a group of other people doing this, and stuck around with them for about an hour or so, over the course of which we started to get better and better at the heist. It got to the point that we were all holding the "don mask" button as the heist loaded so that they were on as soon as possible, sprinting up to the store, letting one person disable the security guard while the rest of us grabbed jewelry, and then bucket-chaining the bags back to the van while cleaning out the last of the store's easily-found loot (there was small a safe in the store's office, but we never bothered with it). In and out in 2-3 minutes, tops. Being able to pull off a quick smash-and-grab so quickly and professionally was incredibly satisfying.

 

That jewelry store was the first mission I ever stealthed.  It's so goddamn satisfying to get there, case the place, someone takes down the security guard out back, break out the side window and storm into the back of the store, set up the drill, take care of the civilians in the store and bystanders on the sidewalk, rob that place of everything of value, and then walk out without a peep from the cops.

 

Payday 2 was a game I really liked but never played nearly enough of.  If this means more people playing Payday 2, I'll have to get back in.  Or, at least, I will once I finish this goddamn work project that is sucking my life away.

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Sean, you really need to read Iain Banks' MATTER. It is an entire narrative built on top of the complex structure of diplomacy between alien races so completely different in form that interaction takes on myriad abstracted forms.

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Danielle, do you think that if you had played Alien Isolation in one large sitting the length might have felt more significant? I wonder if this game is meant to be played in something of an awful marathon, emulating the terror and exhaustion that Ripley herself must be feeling by the end of the game.

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Danielle, do you think that if you had played Alien Isolation in one large sitting the length might have felt more significant? I wonder if this game is meant to be played in something of an awful marathon, emulating the terror and exhaustion that Ripley herself must be feeling by the end of the game.

 

I haven't yet got to that segment of the podcast, but isn't that game like 25 hours long?  Even if that was true, it would seem like poor design to count on people marathoning a game of that length.

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G_d, I love when the thumbs talk UI.  What about a yearly UI special podcast where they just blow through a bunch of games' UIs?

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The worst part about the Beyond Earth UI is how to select the air units that have been stationed at a city with no other units. There are two ways. One is clicking the little plus at the bottom right menu and selecting Military Overview then scanning through the list of military units to find the flying units, although you do have to remember what name they have after the last time their name changed from being upgraded. The other is actually noticing the tiny number above the city they are stationed in and recognizing it as the number of air units stationed there (took me halfway into my second game to see it). Clicking on that will bring up a popup of each of the identically named air units and from their you can select them from this arbitrary order. The sad thing is that I'm pretty sure previous Civ games had a similar UI for flying units but I just don't remember it being so frustratingly hidden. Of course just clicking on the city tile when there are no other units stationed there does nothing because reasons. 

 

Also one of the other major things that boggles my mind is that some of the most interesting pieces of the fiction are buried in the Civilopedia, the quotes for technologies and other things are generally too abstracted. For example to actually understand what any of the Wonders are supposed to be you have to read the corresponding Civilopedia entry, most of which are way too long to read while already playing an incredibly long game of Civilization.

 

For example The Promethean, which just gives +4 Health and +2 Culture and a free Virtue, has art that just shows you some abstract squid chair looking thing (still disappointed Wonders are now just moving drawings and not full movies) as the visual for what it is. The quote that accompanies it is actually good but still doesn't explain what the thing is: "Anansi looked at the man's genome and said 'Messy! Messy! Who can live like this?' He took a broom and swept up the genome, and when the man woke up, he felt much better." - The Uncle Nevercloned Stories. Only by reading the Civilopedia entry do you understand that the Promethean is a new human genotype that has been genetically engineered to remove all genetic flaws and succeptability to diseases, a kind of perfect human. There's all sorts of long scientific jargon in the entry but the final sentence is particularly good and should've been surfaced better: "A Promethean moves with spare grace, sees the world in colors unknown to the old Homo sapiens, ages easily and slowly, retains her faculties through the lifespan, and, when the end comes, often has left behind a legacy that could not have been achieved by Old Man." It's not even clear the Wonder is actually supposed to be real living people until you read this. 

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Yeah, it's really disappointing how bland the fiction in Beyond Earth is when compared to Alpha Centauri's masterful worldbuilding.

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I think Nick's girlfriend started following my tumblr.

How do I turn this against him?

Replace all the content on your blog with pro dota streams until she's better than Nick.

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Yeah, it's really disappointing how bland the fiction in Beyond Earth is when compared to Alpha Centauri's masterful worldbuilding.

 

Reading the manual for Alpha Centauri is especially great, because it contains a bibliography that has both notable and the obscure works from contemporary science fiction and from scientific research. It was clearly a game made by writers who read a lot.

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