Idle Thumbs 182: I Am Suspicious of Myself

[Ben X]

I think a cinematic Batman removing his mask to reveal his make-up could be pretty cool if it was just a horizontal stripe across his face that obviously took two seconds to smear across. It would look like a ninja (turtles) eye bandana or, if the hair was ruffled sufficiently by the mask removal, an Adam Ant aesthetic.

 

Something Danielle said about Alien Isolation made me think that the systems could work well as a (much shorter) Jason Voorhees game. That would be sweet.

 

Actually, I've always thought that a smart way for film companies to knock out direct game adaptations of their movies (as opposed to franchise games like Isolation) relatively quickly and easily and yet end up with a good game rather than crappy shovelware would be to identify an already existing good game that matches your IP and commission its devs to, essentially, mod it into an adaptation of your movie. An easy commission for the dev company which they can use to fund more original games, and a short dev time and a guaranteed good (if unoriginal) game for the film company. I'm sure there are plenty of reasons why this is ill-conceived, though.

[Mike Danger]

In re: the Batmakeup discussion, Arrow actually had the first few seasons with Oliver Queen/(Green) Arrow using a stripe of makeup and a hood in lieu of an actual mask.

 

They ended up giving him the mask later when he became more of a superhero character.

 

If you're into superhero crap, definitely check it (and sibling show The Flash) out. It falls into a lot of the same pitfalls that other CW shows do, but it also has moments where it's a pretty spectacular show. The AV Club had it on their "shows of the year" last year.

[Jambe]

I'm liking the fivers.

 

I didn't like Alien Isolation even apart from the dumb minigames and shitty time-wasting encounters.

 

I prepped to be scared with appropriate ambiance. The alien quickly became comical. Its routines were so transparent and its animation (outside of cuts) became so goofy after extended examination that I just cooed and chuckled at it like I did at a relative's friendly but amusingly-lanky young Irish Wolfhound. Instead of Frank I eventually dubbed the alien Saul Malone (from Saul of the Mole Men) because whac-a-mole had been called to my mind a few times.

 

If they'd have cut 80% of the door traversals and crafting and ten hours of sneaking/ambling (at least) I probably would have been invested in and thus impressed by the ending. I, too, was of various minds about it, but had the game been shorter it would have at least taken longer for my current ambivalence to set in. Alas, I felt my time was being wasted and was resentful by midway through so the ending seemed flat.

 

My overall experience of the game was like so: imagine yourself mindlessly squishing silly putty. A drab person appears and grabs a pinch of it while strenuously affecting an unconvincingly-menacing smirk. They draw out the putty slowly and excruciatingly into a long strand. The now-stringy strand breaks and falls onto the carpet and gets countless cat hairs in it. Finally, they stare at you like that was exactly what they intended to do. Why did you do that to my silly putty, Creative Assembly?

 

I'm not sure about that analogy. Regardless, I think CA's enthusiasm for Alien and their obvious skill at evoking mood via place should have been in service of a tight five-hour experience. I'd prefer clipping around the levels geeking out at the details and looking at its static art assets to actually playing the game or interacting with its agents. The alien needed to be visible much less frequently and there should've been far fewer interactable agents (there could've been orders of magnitude more agents in the game, but they'd need to be more distant, more set-dressingy, less interactive, because I didn't really buy any of them therefore they appeared as somewhat-artless props repeatedly breaking suspension of disbelief).

 

I feel bad being so negative about it because their care is evident in the set design and their animation chops were good enough that if they heavily pared the game's closely-interacting agents they could've been made far more convincing.

 

I think it was noted but it bears repeating: it's impressive that CA so effectively nailed ambiance and sense of place in an FP game which is new territory for them. I gather they took on some ex-Crytek folks who'd be familiar with the perspective (and good on them for that) but still, it's nice to see an established group stretch out like that.

 

Also: god damn I would enjoy watching ya'll play some Payday 2.

 

Also also: I don't communicate much but I've been listening forever and the podcast is still really great. The genuine interplay between hosts means you could bs about weather and similar inanities and it'd still be listenable. Thanks for the great shooooooooooooooooooow~~

[SecretAsianMan]

I really agree with Sean's comment about how the systems of a game can make it more like an experience you'd expect but make the individual moments worse.  The biggest example I can think of in Payday 2 is the bank that Sean described trying to rob.  If you do manage to successfully take over the bank without any alarms going off, it then becomes a rather monotonous wait while you let the drill open up the vault.  If you do it correctly, the mission enters a no-fail state (short of everyone killing themselves) and there's nothing to do but wait for the drill.  Even once you're in the vault, if you want to open the deposit boxes its even more boring because you have to stand still waiting for a timer to finish as your guy picks the lock (unless someone can equip a saw, which is really only interesting for them).  Of course the game systems have to work that way otherwise all the tension and frantic chaos of the loud parts would be much less interesting.  It's strange that when things go horribly wrong it's very exciting and fast paced but when things go completely right it's very tedious and boring.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Listening to the Payday 2 talk put me on an arc from remembering that it was a game I saw that didn't sound interesting, to getting really hyped and then hearing it required investment and nearly €30, so at least for now Sean's storytelling was enough for me.

Also the Digital Breckon saga was an amazing reminder of how we miss having him on the show.

 

On the note of sci-fi being overly human centric, it's a recurring disappointment for me. A recent egregious one was when I played Out There on Android. It's a strange game, compared to FTL sometimes but I think the links are tenuous. You're a sole human, way out in space having just woken from statis. The entire game has you piloting a ship that's roaming from galaxy to galaxy, attempting to survive and heading towards a destination to the bottom right of the map. On the way you regularly encounter aliens, and you'll go onto their planet and talk to all these different species. As you play the game again and again, you slowly learn the words of their language and can understand them. And they're just constantly either asking for resources to trade, asking if you're a friend or foe or they   think you're a god and offer you a special resource. There is no other interaction whatsoever with these aliens, apart from some quite unsatisfying endings. And for something that presented as philosophical and thoughtful, it was a hugely simplistic model of how to interact with... anything. Let alone a plethora of alien races.

[youngfrey]

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).

[Ben X]

In re: the Batmakeup discussion, Arrow actually had the first few seasons with Oliver Queen/(Green) Arrow using a stripe of makeup and a hood in lieu of an actual mask.

 

They ended up giving him the mask later when he became more of a superhero character.

 

If you're into superhero crap, definitely check it (and sibling show The Flash) out. It falls into a lot of the same pitfalls that other CW shows do, but it also has moments where it's a pretty spectacular show. The AV Club had it on their "shows of the year" last year.

 

I really enjoyed the first few eps (and now you come to mention it, I was stoked to see my make-up stripe idea happening!) but it quickly got dull and clunky, I thought. Had to give up on it.

[Smart Jason]

Listening to the Payday 2 talk put me on an arc from remembering that it was a game I saw that didn't sound interesting, to getting really hyped and then hearing it required investment and nearly €30, so at least for now Sean's storytelling was enough for me.

 

For what it's worth, Payday 2 is a Steam Sale Staple. You'll find the base game for $7.50 or even less during the big seasonal events and its DLC regularly plummets so low that I've been able to afford most of it just as a byproduct of the trading card market.

[TinKelp]

Have you guys changed something with how you make the mp3 files? 179, 181 and 182 don't have any metadata and when I convert them into an m4a file for my Nintendo DSi (Yes, really. It's the only portable player I have.) 179 and 182 stutters every few seconds. The stuttering issue only shows up on my DSi. On my PC both the mp3 and my converted m4a files work fine.

[SuperBiasedMan]

For what it's worth, Payday 2 is a Steam Sale Staple. You'll find the base game for $7.50 or even less during the big seasonal events and its DLC regularly plummets so low that I've been able to afford most of it just as a byproduct of the trading card market.

 

I have to correct my initial post "requires time investment" and then say that it is more the time investment. I can't really commit to multiplayer sessions with other people at the moment, and playing alone requires more effort to figure out systems and is also not as fun a prospect for a game so heavily predicated on planning.

[JonCole]

Multiplayer is a huge time investment indeed. Between Destiny and now coming back to Payday 2, I feel like I really don't have a lot of time for single-player stuff and find myself burning whole evenings on MP. Between arranging a group and doing a raid in Destiny, I can lose 4 hours no sweat.

[Gormongous]

Of course the game systems have to work that way otherwise all the tension and frantic chaos of the loud parts would be much less interesting.  It's strange that when things go horribly wrong it's very exciting and fast paced but when things go completely right it's very tedious and boring.

 

This was actually the design issue that cut short my time with Monaco, which I got very close to hundred-percenting before the mini-expansion doubled the number of achievements. There's a small amount of pleasure to be derived from executing a plan perfectly, but when so much air is built into the interactions to make them tense during combat, stealth suddenly has a lot of unavoidable tedium that's hard to see as the reward for a job well done. I've only played two, but I suspect all multiplayer stealth/heist games struggle with incentivizing stealth while still keeping combat interesting, although push comes to shove, I'd rather the fail state be enjoyable, so that's why I'm playing Payday 2.

[SecretAsianMan]

This was actually the design issue that cut short my time with Monaco, which I got very close to hundred-percenting before the mini-expansion doubled the number of achievements. There's a small amount of pleasure to be derived from executing a plan perfectly, but when so much air is built into the interactions to make them tense during combat, stealth suddenly has a lot of unavoidable tedium that's hard to see as the reward for a job well done. I've only played two, but I suspect all multiplayer stealth/heist games struggle with incentivizing stealth while still keeping combat interesting, although push comes to shove, I'd rather the fail state be enjoyable, so that's why I'm playing Payday 2.

 

Yeah, the design of both Payday and Monaco seem to favor things going wrong.  In order for a plan to work, pretty much everything has to go right or you have to get some very lucky breaks.  With so many systems and mechanics at work, it's incredibly easy for one thing to go wrong and ruin everything.  What both of those games do right is keep people from instantly rage quitting by making failure fun.  The in-game universe encourages the characters to be stealthy but the gameplay encourages the opposite.  It makes for an interesting experience.

[steinersteiner]

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.

 

Holy smokes that looks amazing. What is the name of that manga? And did you notice the weird ghost face on the kitty's back in the first panel?

 

That manga reminds me of The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu. It's about an elementary school that gets teleported to a post-apocolyptic wasteland, and things go off the rails pretty much immediately. Actually, it would be a good premise for a creepy resource management game, now that I think of it.

[tegan]

Holy smokes that looks amazing. What is the name of that manga? And did you notice the weird ghost face on the kitty's back in the first panel?

 

That manga reminds me of The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu. It's about an elementary school that gets teleported to a post-apocolyptic wasteland, and things go off the rails pretty much immediately. Actually, it would be a good premise for a creepy resource management game, now that I think of it.

 

It's Itou Junji No Neko Nikki: Yon and Mu. Ito's well aware of the creepy face...

 

 

...because it's based on his real cat.

 

 

 

 

 

Also, I've only read a little of The Drifting Classroom, but really liked it. I've mentioned some of Kazuo Umezu's other work (like the fantastic Cat Eyed Boy) in other threads. Nothing could ever possibly top the incredible head trip film version of The Drifting Classroom, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi of Hausu fame and inexplicably featuring Troy Donahue.

 

[Apelsin]

I really enjoyed the first few eps (and now you come to mention it, I was stoked to see my make-up stripe idea happening!) but it quickly got dull and clunky, I thought. Had to give up on it.

 

First season is so-so I've heard. Actually skipped it entirely and just started watching the second season instead.

It's not the pinnacle of television, but I like it.

[feelthedarkness]

When you guys were talking about sci-fi world building games, and their world building, I wanted to mention one of my personal great games: Ascendancy. http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/221/Ascendancy.html

 

Part Master of Orion, Part Civ

 

The Alien races are all quite unique, entirely non-humanoid, like a less cheeky Star Control. They add a great deal of variety to how you play, such as sentient igneous rocks that can easily inhabit volcanic worlds where other species can't land. 

[Reyturner]

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

[Urthman]

Oh man, Nick's The Sims 3 story is so great.  It's extra entertaining for those of us who know and love Nick, and the Greek chorus of the other Thumbs repeatedly asking, "Why didn't you just babywall him/her?" is hilarious, but even without that context, it's a pretty fascinating story about playing video games.  It's right up there with some of the better stories from Tom Francis or Rock Paper Shotgun.

 

It's too bad Nick went into game development, because he could've been a great games journalist. 

[osmosisch]

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.

I seem to recall Brian Reynolds saying that he did a lot of the reading when he was on 3MA:

http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/2011/09/15/three-moves-ahead-episode-134-the-alpha-centauri-show/

That was a good 'cast.

e: I've started noticing Chris' bad boy 50s finger-snapping recently, it's cracking me up picturing him getting ready to throw down with the Sharks.

[CollegeBaby]

Solaris is still worth reading if you have seen the films. The Soderbergh film is non-essential anyway, and the Tarkovsky one is fine but in my opinion takes a different interpretation from the book. It shifts the core theme away from the incomprehensible nature of alien intelligence/consciousness and the limits of human knowledge in favour of the less interesting relationship drama between the male and female leads.

 

I read it in highschool almost a decade ago but got the new English translation from Audible this year. I don't know much Polish so don't know for sure how faithful it is, but it is more coherent here. Listening to it in audio form also makes the "Kelvin reads a book" chapters easier to swallow the jargon.

[karobit]

The Don Bluth discussion at the end reminded me of an Onion AV Club comment I read years ago that I loved so much I had to save it on my livejournal. It was a long time ago, okay?

--

From the comments of The Onion A/V Club's review of the DVD release of The Secret of NIMH. ( http://www.avclub.com/review/the-secret-of-nimh-7719 )

Don Bluth hates the world

by Emily Dickinson

Bluth's worlds are dominated by darkness and chaos. Desperate self-sacrifice is the standard heroic action. The visuals tend to be dark and cluttered. The voices often seem like people passing through on their way to something else - this is not an insult, the voice acting could be fairly called Altmanesque.

I think the Bluth film I would consider to be the apotheosis of his art is Land Before Time. The world is falling apart for no reason, there is no villain, the children have no support, no relief, and no reasonable hope. The Great Valley sounds completely ludicrous, and I don't think it's a stretch to read the ending as being same happy ending as The Little Matchstick Girl.

Special mention must be made of Rock-a-Doodle, in which a rooster is Elvis and Jesus, and the Devil hates the American family farm.

I wouldn't want to meet Don Bluth, or at least, not if I were the only one in the room with him. It's that combination of grim spirituality and inability to resist the comic stylings of Dom Deluise and Charles Nelson Reilly. We can thank the dark gods that Bluth was never able to afford Robin Williams...

12:26 AM Fri July 6, 2007

--

TLDR: please Bluthcast

[texashogride]

The alien needed to be visible much less frequently and there should've been far fewer interactable agents (there could've been orders of magnitude more agents in the game, but they'd need to be more distant, more set-dressingy, less interactive, because I didn't really buy any of them therefore they appeared as somewhat-artless props repeatedly breaking suspension of disbelief).

 

I feel bad being so negative about it because their care is evident in the set design and their animation chops were good enough that if they heavily pared the game's closely-interacting agents they could've been made far more convincing.

 

As someone who experienced Alien Isolation purely from Danielle's stream, I definitely agree with the sentiment that the alien showed up way too much to be truly scary, although the constant swearing from Danielle seemed to indicate that at least she was scared by the experience... I thought the genius of Alien the film was the distinct lack of screen time the alien has, ala Jaws, but when your game is 25 hours long (give or take 90 minutes) the alien screen time is by necessity longer too. I wonder if we'll ever see a director's cut to rectify this? Probably not.

 

I wasn't sure about your analogy either. Putty covered in cat hair only brought to mind putty covered in cat hair and I can't get that image out of my head now, so thanks I guess?

[SecretAsianMan]

I wasn't sure about your analogy either. Putty covered in cat hair only brought to mind putty covered in cat hair and I can't get that image out of my head now, so thanks I guess?

 

Putty on the cat hair makes a mustache.

[Granny Dragon]

Okay, on Koko:

 

The research on Koko is very poorly documented, there are hardly any serious scientific publications on her, and Patterson refuses to collaborate with other researchers from the field. So almost all data available are the videos. Based on the videos there is no evidence that Koko understands anything beyond the very basic. While she knows some signs, there is no evidence for meaningful communications about death or similar topics. In the science community Patterson and Koko are considered a bad joke.

 

So why do we see meaningful interaction? There are two important phenomena: one is often referred to as "clever Hans effect": Koko picks up cues from others and has learned which types of reactions result in greater attention, increased affection or other rewards. The other is that Patterson wants to see meaning in what Koko does, and humans are excellent when it comes to finding meaning even if it's not there, or not there to a greater degree. In the case of Patterson this bias goes so far that unexpected or uninterpretable behaviour is always interpreted as humour: Koko is being silly again! Needless to say Koko is extremely silly according to this interpretation. Let me link to and comment on my two favorite bits of interaction with Koko:

 

Here, Koko watches TV. Patterson is engaged in a conversation with her. Note that before Koko truns away from the TV, you can hear someone else enter the room. Patterson interprets Koko's behaviour as her finding a particular scene (which involves some dialogue about courage) hard to watch because it is sad.

 

In this one, Koko picks a method for adoption. Actually I will not comment on this further. It's so bad.

 

The real shame is that gorillas are intelligent animals and there is much to learn about them and from them. This includes Koko. Unfortunately we won't learn anything of real scientific value thanks to Patterson secluding her. It's probably too late now since Koko is pretty old. I can understand the attention Koko gets on the web, but the videos propagate a very wrong idea about gorilla cognition.

 

This is no criticism of the piece that Sean read on the show, which indeed raises some great points and is written very well.