Jake

Idle Thumbs 182: I Am Suspicious of Myself

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Idle Thumbs 182:

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I Am Suspicious of Myself

A lot of aliens were defeated this week, but at what cost? Danielle finally reaches the end of Alien: Isolation, having given the game a complete day of her life. In Beyond Earth, Jake, Chris, and Nick have shot some giant worms and roving green animals, but aren't sure what that means, or why they're there, or who they are, or where the UI is. Sean has announced his departure from Idle Thumbs for a lucrative career in robbing banks, and pontificating on the works of Don Bluth.

Things Discussed: Payday 2, Due Process, Civilization: Beyond Earth, The Sims 3, Alien: Isolation, The Last Door, Return of the Obra Dinn, All Dogs Go To Heaven

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Ha I sent in an email suggesting obra dinn, but guess y'all already got to it.

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Regarding the mask system in Payday 2, some awesome/awful things can be wrought, like the game that SAM, JonCole, Jason, and I just played tonight:

 

EfK0TjJ.jpg

 

The four horsebags of the apocalypse.

 

Also, with regards to how Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri handled the tendency of sci-fi technology to be bland and contextless, two things come to mind. First, every tech was accompanied by a quote, usually one that used history to ground the technology in a certain morality or ideology. Even if it's hard to imagine on the face of it how "Cyberethics" relates to the colonization of an alien world, we know Saint Augustine and his Confessions, so we have some cues on how to react. Even the technologies that didn't have historical quotes had ones given instead by the game's faction leaders or their underlings, all of whom distinct personalities and ideologies. Basically, with all but a few technologies ("Retroviral Engineering" and "Industrial Nanorobotics" come to my mind) there is a strong and clear tone given for a technology via the quote that firmly establishes its specific utility in the player's mind.

 

The other way, of which I'm quite fond even though it's less impressive and somewhat inimical to more modern designs like Beyond Earth, was the category mechanic that's built into the blind research system. Basically, in Alpha Centauri, research is conducted by default through allocation of research points to four broad categories: explore, discover, build, and conquer. A technology, like "Industrial Automation," is rated with a category and a number, like "Build 3." That represents the tree it's on and its position on that tree. Techs can easily cross trees, but you always have the category (to tell you what strategy the tech helps the most) and the number (from 1 to 16) to tell you how advanced it is, if you need a simple way to break it down. A lot of other sci-fi games like to obfuscate how important their individual techs are to preserve a sense of wonder, but Alpha Centauri gave you a system that you can use to understand the mechanical function of the tech if the aforementioned thematic function fails. Then again, most sci-fi games don't have the faith in their fiction that Alpha Centauri had.

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Please please please... stream a Payday 2 heist complete with a pre-game whiteboard planning of the job.

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That Koko discussion was a total blindside, but in a good way. Now I'm actually concerned about what Koko will find out and how.

 

Edit - Things I'm super curious about now: How far does Koko's desire for knowledge and/or understanding run? If she's presented with a brief or vague piece of information about something changing in her life or around her, how much does she question it? Does she care? Does she know she can ask questions? I've never really learned much about her beyond her being able to communicate via sign language but now I want to know more about the person she is.

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That Sims H&M pack review was by Steve Hogarty in PCZone magazine, for anyone wondering. 

 

https://twitter.com/misterbrilliant/status/483224360418041856

 

I remember reading that in the magazine years ago. I was in tears. 

 

Dammit, beat me to it. Steve is also the guy that took that goofy photo of himself in a karate outfit recently and was taken super-seriously. His writing is hilarious, well worth browsing. 

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Oh man, so hilarious you should mention that!!! That has been driving me crazy since I was a child. I used to wonder why every halloween Batman costume always looked lame until I figured it out, eye makeup. 

 
I am a huuuuuuge Batman fan, I`ve watched everything since Lewis Wilson to Bale`s grumpy marble chewing crusader. And a moment I`ll always cherish is when Michael Keaton removes his mask at the end of Batman Returns to show Selina Kyle to try to convince her to stop. The funny thing is that you can see all throughout the movie that he is wearing the famous eye makeup, but in that shot, just before he removes the mast, he is not (the make up has magically dissapeared) so that only his clean face is showing when he takes out the mask. 
 
Anyway I thought it was funny how they thought a black eye batman would be totally lame and to resource to such a cheap trick, specially from Burton who was considered a good director at the time.
 
Keep up the awesome work, Long live Waluigi!!!!   

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Man, Payday 2.  There's so much I could talk about but I'll try not to get into too much detail. 

 

First off, to answer Chris's question, yes there are something similar to the special infected of Left 4 Dead.  When the police get called, the majority of them are standard SWAT guys, but there are special ones that are much more powerful.  The Taser is exactly what it sounds like, a guy using a taser.  When you get hit with the taser, not only are you stunned and locked in place until someone kills him, the act of being tased also makes your character pull the trigger on your weapon.  It's difficult to aim while being tased and if you have a fully automatic weapon, odds are you'll empty the entire clip into nothing.  The Shield is a normal enemy except he's carrying a large bulletproof shield in front of him.  There are some weapons and ammo that can pierce the shield but they're all DLC.  The Cloaker is a Sam Fisher-esque guy (including night vision goggles) that will come from unexpected places like under a car or from an air vent.  They can instantly knock you down by kicking you in the face.  The Bulldozer is the tank of the game.  He wears what looks like the a bomb disposal outfit.  He's heavily armored with a ton of health and a very powerful weapon.  They don't spawn very often but when they do it will often take the whole team to take him down.  Certain maps can also have snipers on them but they're just normal enemies that sit back and snipe.

 

One thing Sean didn't describe (unless he came back to it later, I haven't finished the episode yet) was the skill trees.  Completing jobs gets you experience which you earns you skill points you can spend on the trees.  There are currently 5 skill trees (originally 4).  Naturally, each one is aimed toward different playstyles.  Points can be placed into multiple trees at the same time so you're not locked to one specific set.  The Mastermind is focused more on healing and support.  It allows you to deploy a doctor bag that can heal your team but has a limited number of uses.  It has skills that help with crowd control of the civilians and even lets you take police members hostage and convert them to fight for you.  The Enforcer is combat oriented.  Enforcers can deploy ammo bags, wear heavier armor, deal more damage, etc.  At the higher tiers you can equip a circular saw that lets you saw open things like doors and safe deposit boxes much faster than you can pick them by hand.  The Technician is equipment focused.  He can carry trip mines that can be converted into C4 to blow open doors and safes.  He can also equip a portable sentry gun that can automatically attack enemies.  He has skills that let him upgrade the drill to make it faster and quieter.  The Ghost is stealth focused.  He can deploy electronic countermeasures (ECMs).  They block cell phones and cameras while active (20-30 seconds depending on your skills).  They move faster and do more damage with silenced weapons.  The Fugitive tree is new.  Fugitives can drop first aid kits that work like one time use doctor bags.  The Fugitive is generally focused on survivability.

 

There's a ton more stuff in the game but I won't go into it.  The last thing I'll say is if anyone wants to play (Thumbs included!) check out the Payday multiplayer thread.  Like Gormongous said, a few of us played last night.  We had varying degrees of success but it was a fun time overall.

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I'm a big fan of the Fivers! And Nick's Sims 3 story is off the damn charts.

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I hope that Chris's comment about the Fievel joke coming up his esophagus was intentionally calling forth the image of him vomiting the words.

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It sounds like the only thing missing from Payday is the subtle character subplot simulator.

Two gloved hands brushing as they pass the bag of dosh.

A furtive glance from behind opaque masks, one covering the face and another covering the soul.

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Idle Thumbs 182:

 

Sean has announced his departure from Idle Thumbs for a lucrative career in robbing banks, and pontificating on the works of Don Bluth.

 

fuck Sean

congrats Sean

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I'm definitely on board with Danielle Riendeau & Sean on Sci-fi. I have such a love/hate relationship with it, as in, that it's hard for me to find books that really connect with me; movies not such much, I think that's because I can see people and infer emotions and story from their acting.

 

I like my sci-fi to be in the background that doesn't call too much attention to it or as narrative spice that never overtakes the story or is given an interesting spin. I think this is why I'm a big fan of New Wave Sci-Fi, especially a big fan of the feminists that worked in this wave: Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Alice Sheldon, who wrote as James Tiptree & Octavia Butler. Russian Sci-Fi also took it to different heights: as an actual fight against the Soviet/Russian machine and to explore new territory without all the bullshit that comes with it.

 

If you're interested in new stuff to check out, Danielle and Sean:

The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov

Dhalgren & Babel-17 / Empire Star Samuel R. Delany

Lilith's Brood & Kindred by Octavia Butler

The Female Man & To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction by Joanna Russ

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

The Crystal World by J. G. Ballard

The Left Hand of Darkness & The Dispossessed Ursula K. Le Guin

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree

Hard to Be a God & Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky Brothers 
Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

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I second Danielle's recommendation on Solaris and Stanisław Lem in general. Solaris is a beautiful examination on how people will react when they discover something genuinely new and incomprehensible. The book is also very pessimistic (that is to say, less optimistic than much of science fiction) about people's ability to truly understand foreign concepts. I wish I could re-experience the sense of chill of discovering what the planet was doing to the scientists.

 

A lot of Lem's writing deals with the limits of human knowledge and inability to comprehend. The Invincible, for example, is a first-contact story with micro-bots that are impossible to communicate with and whose "motivation" completely eludes the human crew and the reader. Based on the description at least Fiasco deals with similar issues as well. Lem brings the theme to a brutal extreme in His Master's Voice in which scientists accidentally discover a message from space and top-level scientists from different fields are brought together in a massive operation to "crack the code".

 

Not all Lem's works are like that, though. He has also written whacky shit like The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age.

 

 

PS. There is a hilarious (inasmuch as severe paranoia can be hilarious) connection between Stanisław Lem and one of my other favorite science fiction author Philip K. Dick:

 

Lem singled out only one American SF writer for praise, Philip K. Dick—see the 1986 English-language anthology of his critical essays, Microworlds. Perhaps due to a frame of mind influenced by drug use or mental illness, however, Dick believed that Stanisław Lem was a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion, and wrote a letter to the FBI to that effect. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem#Philip_K._Dick

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I'm definitely on board with Danielle Riendeau & Sean on Sci-fi. I have such a love/hate relationship with it, as in, that it's hard for me to find books that really connect with me; movies not such much, I think that's because I can see people and infer emotions and story from their acting.

 

I like my sci-fi to be in the background that doesn't call too much attention to it or as narrative spice that never overtakes the story or is given an interesting spin. I think this is why I'm a big fan of New Wave Sci-Fi, especially a big fan of the feminists that worked in this wave: Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Alice Sheldon, who wrote as James Tiptree & Octavia Butler. Russian Sci-Fi also took it to different heights: as an actual fight against the Soviet/Russian machine and to explore new territory without all the bullshit that comes with it.

 

If you're interested in new stuff to check out Danielle and Sean check out:

The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov

Dhalgren & Babel-17 / Empire Star Samuel R. Delany

Lilith's Brood & Kindred by Octavia Butler

The Female Man & To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction by Joanna Russ

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

The Crystal World by J. G. Ballard

The Left Hand of Darkness & The Dispossessed Ursula K. Le Guin

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree

Hard to Be a God & Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky Brothers 

Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

 

Strongly ditto Dhalgren. It's pretty great.

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Amazing episode. Nick Breckon at his most Breckonic (I half-expected an epilogue about how he was going to buy his girlfriend a puppy on the way home), discussion of my favourite horror game in a long time (The Last Door), and Don Bluth talk. Kind of weird to hear discussion about All Dogs Go to Heaven being willing to lay heavy ideas on kids, since that film also has some hilarious censorship ("a rayyyyy gunnnn"). It's also pretty tragically fitting that that movie is about death.

 

Don Bluth got fucking weird by the end of his career, by the way. He may not have been involved in the countless Land Before Time sequels, but The Pebble and the Penguin is a phenomenally terrible movie all on its own.

 

 

 

 

Also...

 

So a dude who wrote a culturally beloved horror story also wrote a terrible story about an air-breathing landshark, eh?

 

 

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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.

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Solaris was recently translated directly from Polish to English for the first time: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/15/first-direct-translation-solaris

 

Nice! Looking forward to replacing my ugly-ass Clooney movie tie-in copy with a nice new paperback in...

 

We are both somewhat conservative readers and despite the fact that an ebook will follow in about six months we secretly hope for a paper edition. Currently this is impossible due to legal issues but recognition of the new translation might persuade the publisher to rethink their position. For the time being we are excited about the reception of the 'new' Solaris and its popularity.

 

...Damn.

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