Jake

Idle Thumbs 182: I Am Suspicious of Myself

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The weird thing is gorillas all look like people in RIck Baker gorilla costumes to me now.

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Super Briefly actually sounds exactly like Half-Minute Hero. Except that game gives you 30 seconds and it's a fantasy setting. The core concept is the same though. A villain is casting a spell to end the world, and it takes 30 seconds to cast. You have to perform the requisite RPG quests (find a weapon, obtain transport, defeat random encounters) and then take down the bad guy. If Super Briefly sounded appealing, you might want to check it out. If you don't have a PSP, try the XBLA or Steam versions (which have amazing titles).

 

Half-Minute Hero is a good RPG comparison, but when describing it as a time limited Super Meat Boy then what comes to mind is 10 Second Ninja and the Time Trial mode in Towerfall: Ascension.

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The weird thing is gorillas all look like people in RIck Baker gorilla costumes to me now.

 

(In the jungle:)

 

"Wait are there any real gorillas here or are you all just people in Rick Baker gorilla costumes?"

 

"There is one real gorilla here: It's you."

 

#twitterchillers

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Has anyone played both Beyond Earth and Endless Legend? How do they stack up?

 

I am quoting you mainly to talk about Endless Legend, and I have not yet experienced Beyond Earth. While listening to this week's podcast I couldn't help but compare my experiences with Endless Legend to the disappointing aspects of Beyond Earth mentioned.

 

I find the world building to be extremely engaging for the following reasons:

  1. Every faction is unique. Each one of them has it's own back story, and purpose for being on this world. Each unit has back story which explains why it has the abilities it has, and often why it looks the way it does. A campaign has been built for each faction to provide a steady drip of objectives and story to go with it. Also, each faction plays quite differently from the next by having different strengths and resource needs.
  2. The look of the game is striking. It's the type of game you could buy based on the sole belief that it is an interactive and evolving piece of visual art. The color pallet, unit and city design, and way the topography of the map is depicted is beautiful.
  3. The soundtrack is quite nice. Again, the factions have a unique feel and tone articulated in the ambient music. This does a great job of pulling you into the world.
  4. Finally the UI. It may be the best I have ever used in a turn based strategy game. The overall design is greyscale and filled with very clear icons. Color is used to great effect to represent resources, factions, regions of the screen, and actions which can be done with the mouse pointer on specific objects. Everything is meticulously and clearly described through tool tips, and the UI can be collapsed and expanded in several ways. The tech tree, which is more like tech pools, where you research so many from Age 1 to move on to Age 2 is a great addition to the genre. The diplomacy screen is split into a semi-circle, which radiates outward. Depending on your standing with an opponent they will physically be closer or further away from you, and spaced relatively to their own allies or enemies. I could say more, but I don't know how much longer people would care to read about UI.

All of this comes together to create a very rich world that I would recommend to anyone who likes the Civilization series. The gameplay is similar, and it's not quite as deep as say Civ 5, but I don't quite recall what was all available in vanilla Civ 5.

 

I personally decided to wait on Beyond Earth until an expansion after getting into Endless Legend. It is good.

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Good episode as always, but Jake, I think you missed a quite important part in the Return of Obra Dinn demo.

 

You can actually find the log book in the demo. Inside the book you will find the list of people on the ship, and you will record their status, whether they are alive, missing, killed, or death by suicide.

If you choose killed, you also have to describe who and what kill them. The same goes for suicide, minus the "who" part. You need to do this because the character (if I'm not mistaken) is someone who works for an insurance company.

 

It's a very unique concept, but I kind of agree with Jake, I will not check the demo of this game again until the final version is released. Day 1 purchase definitely.

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I just listened to the podcast, it was amazing I laughted a lot with The Sims history.

 

Anyway (might repeat a bit of my own post in the strategy forum) about Civilization: Beyond Earth - I was divided between BE and Endless Legend, I choose the later and from what I heard and see around, I didn´t regret my choice. Later one Firaxis released the demo for Civ: BE which I give a try:

What I felt is that - yeah, its a good game - does work fine, afterall is Civ 5 after all expansions. But while didn´t exactly lacked personlity, what it did lack was "vibrancy" - because there is some flavor text and themes, but everything is just quite bland. The concept of factions which develop overtime rather that begin fixed state is amazing, however I felt there should be more drastic tones, more flavor, because it don´t appear to fully explore how crazy things are getting as each leader goes futher and futher down the each path (another strange thing, leaders do chance to reflect their affinity, but you can´t see how your own leader is looking like).

Same is the aliens, they are ok not much else, they missed such chance to thrown in a really Kaiju or exotic style monsters. While some designs are great, like the Supremacy Infantry units, the giant robots look timid. if the are still using terms as "melee" they might go for it and just thown some swords around... What I really felt if they aren´t really going for the same route as Alpha Centauri, something I could perfectly understand, they should at least tried something more vibrant or fantastic, given they focused more in optimist view of the game.

 

Now it´s funny, how Endless Legend is almos the oposite of Beyon Earth, Its exactly as Theschap said, EL fell very unique and full of personality in both gameplay, visual and music.

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Oh man when Nick off-handedly said he was rewatching The Wire with his girlfriend in my head I was screaming The Wire Rewatch Podcast!

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  1. Every faction is unique. Each one of them has it's own back story, and purpose for being on this world. Each unit has back story which explains why it has the abilities it has, and often why it looks the way it does. A campaign has been built for each faction to provide a steady drip of objectives and story to go with it. Also, each faction plays quite differently from the next by having different strengths and resource needs.

 

It can't be overstated how excellent the faction diversity is in endless legend. It goes a long way towards ameliorating the classic 4x late-game trudge. I personally enjoyed playing as the cultists - a faction which can only build one city, but with the capacity to grow their capital far beyond any enemy cities. It's plays remarkably differently to a classic settle-expand faction and almost every faction has a major distinction like this. That being said, if you're a serious 4X aficionado, it's probably worth waiting until they improve the AI (which they say they are working on) as it's a bit crap currently.

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Good episode as always, but Jake, I think you missed a quite important part in the Return of Obra Dinn demo.

You can actually find the log book in the demo. Inside the book you will find the list of people on the ship, and you will record their status, whether they are alive, missing, killed, or death by suicide.

If you choose killed, you also have to describe who and what kill them. The same goes for suicide, minus the "who" part. You need to do this because the character (if I'm not mistaken) is someone who works for an insurance company.

It's a very unique concept, but I kind of agree with Jake, I will not check the demo of this game again until the final version is released. Day 1 purchase definitely.

Holy shit how did I miss the actual book. Ugh! I wi play it again.

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I was able to piece together the idea of babywalling Lindsey from a history of playing the Sims and knowing the wall to kill trick. But I went back to listen to episode 93 to get the in Idle Thumbs canon explanation of what babywalling is. The realization by Sean that what he is explaining is horrifying is just the best kind of moment. Highly recommend relistening to that episode.

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Nice jennegatron! Starting at 7:30, talking about SimCity (5) traffic patterns...

 

 

 

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Loved the conversation about trying to interact/understand beings with completely different modes of comprehension and perception. It's always a bit irritating when I see sci-fi touch on this concept but then sidestep it with technological magic or whatever. The Elcor in Mass Effect, for instance, talk in that monotone way b/c they have a variety of other signifiers- including odors and sub-vocal tones- to convey meaning... but they also have mouths so I guess all that interesting stuff can be avoided. Dead Space 3 had a neat sequence towards the end where you had to open the doors made by a species that communicated in musical-like tones. While the puzzles are simple, the idea is floated in the game somewhere that the species communicated by sounding multiple notes at once and having a sonic range that went beyond humans' natural hearing. I'm also reminded of a Voyager episode where the crew encounters a photon-based species that only communicates with the ship's holograms as they've not encountered carbon-based life.

 

But anyway, I've turned to rambling.

 

I was excited to read about Lem in the thread; I'll definitely check out his books as they seem to focus on this topic. Also, this was a fantastic episode that spanned the range between goofiness and insight that makes this my favorite podcast. Great work!

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I want there to be a game like Alpha Centauri or Beyond Earth where the gameplay focuses on colonization and terraforming instead of combat. I loved tinkering with terrain in Alpha Centauri and would happily play a whole game about that. That kind of exploration and challenge is what is interesting about colonizing a new planet, not shooting guys with ray guns or whatever. 

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I want there to be a game like Alpha Centauri or Beyond Earth where the gameplay focuses on colonization and terraforming instead of combat. I loved tinkering with terrain in Alpha Centauri and would happily play a whole game about that. That kind of exploration and challenge is what is interesting about colonizing a new planet, not shooting guys with ray guns or whatever. 

 

Coincidentally, Arcen Games just announced a new science fiction 4X-style game with no units and no conventional combat.

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