Chris

Idle Thumbs 186: Doctor DNA

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Idle Thumbs 186:

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Doctor DNA

It is time to give thanks. Join us in giving thanks for inexpensive content updates, for the Super Smash Bros. metagame, for mobile free-to-play experiences, for elephant slaughter, for knowing one's own gaming limits, for blockbuster pseudo-reboots, and for Chris and Sean arguing about basically nothing. But most of all, thanks to you, the reader.

Games Discussed: Monument Valley, Far Cry 4, Crossy Road, Never Alone, This War of Mine, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

Trailers Discussed: Jurassic World

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If Danielle's Toad voice and Sean's Yoshi grunt become Idle Thumbs memes, I will be a happier person living a happier life.

 

Also, and I'm already regretting dragging this talk into yet another thread, but is someone able to walk me through why a blonde white guy in a Western suit sitting on a desecrated Buddha and using a person of color as an armrest is worthy of discussion and maybe criticism, but a blonde Asian guy in a Western suit sitting on a desecrated Buddha and using a person of color as an armrest isn't, when both hypothetical images are made by the same mostly-white and Anglophone game studio? Multiple people on the podcast (well, maybe just Danielle and Sean) have said that the "revelation" of Pagan Min as Asian somewhat defused their misgivings about the racist and imperialist imagery of that depiction, and I'd frankly like to experience the same.

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Smash Bros is at its core a combination of fighting games and platforming games. So movement is a huge factor in what makes a Smash game considered good by pros. Melee had a huge plethora of movement tricks that were glitches/exploits in the way the engine was built. A lot of people have heard of wavedashing but that is really just the tip of the iceberg. There are also things like fox-trotting, moon-walking, wave-bouncing, etc. Brawl went in the opposite direction and removed aerial momentum from a dash, and all those other fancy tricks. Instead, they introduced tripping, which was infuriating. Brawl did add some interesting things like the foot-stool jump and buffering (inputting a command within frames of the previous action completing will allow you to perform it at the fastest possible moment). Another thing is that the overall hitlag is reduced, removing the possibility of many combos, which made the game boring to play and watch since it mostly came down to people just taking turns hitting each other. Shielding and dodging on the other hand was massively improved, which led to the game being heavily defensive-oriented, i.e. super boring.

 

Smash 4 3DS and Wii U is clearly a descendant of Brawl, not Melee, but they removed tripping and has a lot more combo potential. Melee will probably never be topped in terms of competitive depth and how exciting it is to watch, but Smash 4 is an excellent companion and moving forward (big tournaments will host both games), more and more things will be discovered and it can only get better from here =)

 

Of course, this game has more characters and more items and cool stages and 8 player and holy shit I can't wait to play that (not out in Australia yet!)

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If Danielle's Toad voice and Sean's Yoshi grunt become Idle Thumbs memes, I will be a happier person living a happier life.

Also, and I'm already regretting dragging this talk into yet another thread, but is someone able to walk me through why a blonde white guy in a Western suit sitting on a desecrated Buddha and using a person of color as an armrest is worthy of discussion and maybe criticism, but a blonde Asian guy in a Western suit sitting on a desecrated Buddha and using a person of color as an armrest isn't, when both hypothetical images are made by the same mostly-white and Anglophone game studio? Multiple people on the podcast (well, maybe just Danielle and Sean) have said that the "revelation" of Pagan Min as Asian somewhat defused their misgivings about the racist and imperialist imagery of that depiction, and I'd frankly like to experience the same.

I'm a little confused by it too. It's taken a mishmash of Asian influences from different cultures, thrown them together, and presented it as a vaguely exotic but difficult to place aesthetic. It's basically the definition of orientalism, but it's forgiven because... the land mass it takes place on doesn't exist in the physical world, geographically or politically? I don't get it.

But also I haven't played the game so who knows!

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I don't think it's "forgiven", but I do think it's a slightly different discussion. There isn't really "forgiven" at least in my case because my overriding opinion at this point is no opinion since I haven't played the game.

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If Danielle's Toad voice and Sean's Yoshi grunt become Idle Thumbs memes, I will be a happier person living a happier life.

 

Also, and I'm already regretting dragging this talk into yet another thread, but is someone able to walk me through why a blonde white guy in a Western suit sitting on a desecrated Buddha and using a person of color as an armrest is worthy of discussion and maybe criticism, but a blonde Asian guy in a Western suit sitting on a desecrated Buddha and using a person of color as an armrest isn't, when both hypothetical images are made by the same mostly-white and Anglophone game studio? Multiple people on the podcast (well, maybe just Danielle and Sean) have said that the "revelation" of Pagan Min as Asian somewhat defused their misgivings about the racist and imperialist imagery of that depiction, and I'd frankly like to experience the same.

 

My secret wish: to become a Nintendo voice actor...

 

Ok! Here's my explanation, and again, this is only based on having played a couple of hours of Far Cry 4. My initial mistake - and I admit, this was my mistake - was that the cover represented a white dude basically shitting all over both a culture (the desecrated Buddha statue) and a living people (the guy kneeling before him). If he reads as a white guy, then the whole "crazy but also sort of cool!" bad guy schtick that Ubi has been using for the last two games is full-on disgusting. It reeks of white imperialism, but worse, of appealing to some base instinct that celebrate the things that allowed that imperialism to grow (the desire to conquer, etc.)

 

If he reads as a person of color, the context is slightly different. He's not all of a sudden a totally cool, nice guy, but it no longer reads (to me) as a racially charged statement. I look at the current cover art and say "look at that smug asshole!" instead of "Jesus Christ, that's gross!"

 

Again, I think Ubi is trying to sell their chief antagonists as crazy, cool, fascinating, dangerous dudes. There's an appeal to them (or, at least, Ubi *wants* the audience to find them appealing, on some level). Ubi wants us to at least think they're cool and badass.

 

This is all completely subjective, obviously, and other folks are free to read other things into it. Pagan Min is a pretty horrible person. Is he a stylish, more-interesting-than-usual horrible person? Yeah. 

 

I hope to have more substantive thoughts on this when I actually finish the game, but I wanted to clarify my thoughts here, since folks wanted to continue the discussion!

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My secret wish: to become a Nintendo voice actor...

 

Ok! Here's my explanation, and again, this is only based on having played a couple of hours of Far Cry 4. My initial mistake - and I admit, this was my mistake - was that the cover represented a white dude basically shitting all over both a culture (the desecrated Buddha statue) and a living people (the guy kneeling before him). If he reads as a white guy, then the whole "crazy but also sort of cool!" bad guy schtick that Ubi has been using for the last two games is full-on disgusting. It reeks of white imperialism, but worse, of appealing to some base instinct that celebrate the things that allowed that imperialism to grow (the desire to conquer, etc.)

 

If he reads as a person of color, the context is slightly different. He's not all of a sudden a totally cool, nice guy, but it no longer reads (to me) as a racially charged statement. I look at the current cover art and say "look at that smug asshole!" instead of "Jesus Christ, that's gross!"

 

Again, I think Ubi is trying to sell their chief antagonists as crazy, cool, fascinating, dangerous dudes. There's an appeal to them (or, at least, Ubi *wants* the audience to find them appealing, on some level). Ubi wants us to at least think they're cool and badass.

 

This is all completely subjective, obviously, and other folks are free to read other things into it. Pagan Min is a pretty horrible person. Is he a stylish, more-interesting-than-usual horrible person? Yeah. 

 

I hope to have more substantive thoughts on this when I actually finish the game, but I wanted to clarify my thoughts here, since folks wanted to continue the discussion!

 

Okay, those are great thoughts and I appreciate you sharing them. I guess I'm still stuck in the same place in which I started, regardless of Pagan Min's race, because it's still a mostly-white and Anglophone game studio choosing to depict their villain this way. In a worst-case scenario, it resembles #GamerGate inventing Vivian James to say #NotAllMen for them, except I don't think Ubisoft's creative decisions have remotely the same level of toxic and self-serving intent, beyond the desire to sell this badass and exotic experience to as many people as possible. It's just a little unfortunate that they had to decide on an Asian antagonist under such circumstances.

 

Like Chris points out, my reaction is based entirely on marketing materials and the previews I've seen (although it's disconcertingly easy in this day and age to view a substantial portion of a game's plot before it has even been released), so I'm looking forward to a more authoritative perspective from someone who's digested the entire game with these thoughts in her head. Maybe I'll even duck into the stream next time!

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Ok! Here's my explanation, and again, this is only based on having played a couple of hours of Far Cry 4. My initial mistake - and I admit, this was my mistake - was that the cover represented a white dude basically shitting all over both a culture (the desecrated Buddha statue) and a living people (the guy kneeling before him). If he reads as a white guy, then the whole "crazy but also sort of cool!" bad guy schtick that Ubi has been using for the last two games is full-on disgusting. It reeks of white imperialism, but worse, of appealing to some base instinct that celebrate the things that allowed that imperialism to grow (the desire to conquer, etc.)

 

If he reads as a person of color, the context is slightly different. He's not all of a sudden a totally cool, nice guy, but it no longer reads (to me) as a racially charged statement. I look at the current cover art and say "look at that smug asshole!" instead of "Jesus Christ, that's gross!"

 

It still reads as basically gross to me because of orientalism, though. He does look like a light-skinned Nepalese person (since from everything I've heard it takes place in basically a kind of Nepal surrogate), but he dresses like someone from a Hong Kong movie. From the mannerisms I saw in some gameplay demo from somewhere early, he acted very flamboyantly -- something that could be telegraphing an interpretation of the Korean male as inspired in the West by the popularity of PSY but could also just be typical LGBT-associated-traits-as-villainous/undesirable grossness. There was some weird India-ish spiritualism involved, along with some Sherpa stand-in thing, and a military force like you'd find on Kashmiri borders. Basically, from what little I've seen of the game -- both from the main villain himself and the setting in general -- it's like they just took different things from around Asia and threw in what seemed cool to them, ignoring where it came from to service some aesthetic they wanted to put into a made-up place that's "over there somewhere." That's basically the definition of orientalism, and orientalism is a problem.

 

I haven't played Far Cry 4 and I probably won't, but the whole vibe it gives off just feels incredibly gross. I don't know much about it though so I could very well be interpreting a small amount of information in the worst way possible, but after playing Far Cry 3 and seeing how just fucking terrible every single representation in that was, I really don't feel like they deserve the benefit of the doubt. They essentialized cultures in the game that came before this, so I'm just assuming that they're doing the same thing here.

 

Also, since it just popped into my head and I don't feel like working into what's already up there: Fighting elephants and other "exotic wildlife" has been basically essentialized and used to Other back to god damn Alexander the Great.

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0SsJ7dp.gif

 

 

 

Super pleased that Danielle is still talking about Pokémon. I want a Poké Today podcast.

 

(you can do it on Mondays and call it Poké Monday)

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This is really relevant to the discussion, but is Ubi Montreal mostly Anglophone? Montreal is a pretty Anglophone city, sure, but I'd be interested to know what you're basing that assumption on, Gormongous. Like I said, not really relevant, so whatever.

 

Somewhat relatedly, I'm from Toronto but I can pronounce oeuvre. I know Chris probably meant "people who don't speak French" rather than "people who aren't in France," but I thought that was funny. Lots of people who aren't from France speak French. Colonization, dontcha know.

 

Also, Jake, the Wavebird actually has sixteen channels, not twelve, which never struck me as weird until you brought it up. Thinking about it, my guess is that it's because the Gamecube had LAN support, meaning they had to support that many Wavebirds in the same room, if not hooked up to the same console.

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Jake pitching a jokey movie idea and realizing by the end of it that he was pitching Demolition Man is a good example of why Idle Thumbs is my favorite podcast. No worries, Demolition Man is actually a really good movie.

 

This is really relevant to the discussion, but is Ubi Montreal mostly Anglophone? Montreal is a pretty Anglophone city, sure, but I'd be interested to know what you're basing that assumption on, Gormongous. Like I said, not really relevant, so whatever.

 

It's impressionistic, from scanning names in the game's credits, so I might be full of shit for all I know. I just should have used "Western," but I had so many Ws in that sentence already...

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Mario Kart Double Dash supported sixteen-player karting by networking eight Gamecubes together on a LAN.

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It's impressionistic, from scanning names in the game's credits, so I might be full of shit for all I know. I just should have used "Western," but I had so many Ws in that sentence already...

 

Ah, okay. From a similarly quick scan, a majority of those names read as Quebecois to me.  Actually, it's worth interrogating the "white" comment as well, since Montreal's got a sizeable immigrant population too. This is to say, that given that this game was made by what looks like at least 100 people, it's probably not that relevant to comment on the ethnicity, language or other background (for the purposes of this discussion, at least) and instead emphasize that Far Cry 4 is the product of a Western company, firmly rooted in those structures. I imagine that a similarly large game made from a similarly large studio withe a similar focus on making profits would have similar problems, even if it weren't staffed by white dudes. In fact, I think you can find similar depiction problems in Square Enix's games.

 

To clarify: I'm not saying that the background of the people who made the game isn't important, just that the relative importance is difficult to assess with such a large team and so it's probably better to look at the company as a whole.

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It still reads as basically gross to me because of orientalism, though. 

 

I think you're right about a lot of this. Sorry, I should've clarified that I don't think there's nothing gross about Pagan Min/Far Cry 4's representation issues, more that I found the cover art somewhat less gross than it would've read to me if Min were a white dude.

 

Levels of grossness! I should make a chart or something...

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Mangela Lansbury: Thanks for that post! That's pretty much exactly my thoughts as well. Also Danielle, yeah! Now it reads as "typical" casual appropriation instead of outright racism. Great! Baby steps, game industry.

Regarding fighting games and balance patches, while I'm not a fighting game player, I have learned some about competitive games like that. You guys (especially Sean) thought that the main changes in the meta come from balance patches, which is probably true for modern games like LOMAs and RTSs. But historically, the big developments in arcade fighting games came from the discovery of new techniques. eRonin mentioned wavedashing in Smash, which is exactly the kind of thing that people figured out in Street Fighter. Every few months or years, somebody would work out a technique that allowed them to completely dominate a tournament, at which point everyone in the community would hear about it and try to learn it. (Typically such discoveries were kept secret until a tournament so as to keep the advantage.)

Usually these things were not really intended by the designers and would lead to big shifts in which characters were strong, or even competitively viable at all. Sometimes more minor techniques would just shift how a couple characters were played or specific matchups. Or sometimes all it would take is someone focusing on a particular character and getting incredibly skilled with them for the meta to shift as more people try to follow suit. Winning or placing well in a couple tournaments with a certain character or technique would do it. These were the main sources of metagame changes before patching became a thing. Anyone who currently plays Street Fighter (or any competitive game) could give a ton of specific examples, but that's the concept.

Nowadays all of that still happens, but designers can react very quickly to bugs and unintended problems with their design, and also add new things to shift the meta more or less where they like it. In the bad old days, getting a game somewhere near competitively interesting through pre-release testing alone required some luck, since you could be sure players would do their damnedest to break your game in all kinds of boring ways. A competitive game with several characters somewhere near balanced was the best you could hope for pretty much.

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I'm definitely not a competitive player with fighting games, i can't offer a super informed and technical perspective, but I'll just throw in that sweeping balance updates have absolutely been a fixture of the fighting game scene for quite a few years now. It more or less started around Street Fighter 4, though that has still mostly contextualized its updates as discrete new releases of the game, but in amongst new characters and other changes, the existing characters are always seeing myriad changes. (Tweaking the damage/startup/recovery/hitbox on a single move can have mind-boggling and branching repercussions that alter how combos work and how a character overall plays.)

Players of fighting games keeping up with changes made to their preferred characters is very much like a Dota 2 player keeping up with any changes issued to the characters they play. (I'll still argue that Dota is secretly a fighting game.)

I think fighting game crowds tend to be somewhat resistant to rapid fire iteration on a game though, because there are so many examples of a fighting game's meta continuing to evolve over a long period of time. (In the podcast, it's asserted as potentially a unique aspect of Melee, but even the much older Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo is known to still have an evolving meta.)

In these games that are defined by matchups, where you can come at a problem from so, so many different angles, there is just so much room for continued discovery years after the developer has ceased its involvement with the game. With examples of metas growing purely on their own because the basis for them is such a complex sandbox of possible interactions, there is sometimes the sentiment that a developer shouldn't issue balance changes to a game, that players are perhaps just "sleeping" on a character and not investing enough effort into figuring out what can make them effective. (Or are not investing enough effort into understanding how to counter a dominant character.)

Also, i don't know how the idea of Smash 4 microtransactions was discussed without making mention of Amiibos.

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Opening Scene of Jurassic World

 

Chris Pratt is stalking through the jungle, he sees a rustling in the brushes ahead of him and moves closer, the scene feels very reminiscent of Robert Muldoon's demise in the the original film.

 

You are scared

 

Chris Pratt's eyes narrow, is that a tail in the distances?... then a raptor bursts from the jungle next to him. "Clever girl" Chris exclaims before the raptor pounces

 

You shut your eyes to shield yourself from the mutilation that is no doubt unfolding on the screen before you , "not again" you utter to yourself... but then you hear... laughing!? you look back at the screen

 

The raptor is licking Chris Pratt's face as they roll around together on the jungle floor. More raptors burst out of the jungle and join in the frivolities. Chris Pratt beams from ear to ear.

 

Screen fades to black

 

JURASSIC WORLD

 

After the events of the first three films, and by events a mean 'people being ripped limb from limb by velociraptors'. The scientists this time round decided that If they were to breed raptors again they would make sure that they wouldn't attack humans in the way they have before, so, they genetically melded them with dog DNA. Yes, Man's arch-nemosis is now man's best friend. The main villain of the previous films is now the hero! Its Jurassic park after all, the raptor had to be the star of the show.

 

 

y7bwfkk72k55c9odsddy.jpg = 158719946_101.jpg

 

 

By the end of this film you will have weeped at the death of Chris Pratt's favourite raptor, who sacrificed itself to save its master.

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By the way, "American Mario" is Mario's NES Open oufit.

 

5XLvrqF.jpg

 

Luigi has the same outfit in green/white/blue.

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Considering Capcom's new version releases of Street Fighter II, with a bunch of new moves in Hyper Fighting/Turbo, reversals and combos in Super, and throw techs in Super Turbo and the changes in the multiple releases of Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter 3, changing meta in a somewhat recognizable game is an old trend. If even feels more like what we think of as an update now when you consider that a lot of these games were still played in arcade where switching to a new game just meant showing up and putting your change into a new machine.

 

Sean and Chris' argument was pretty interesting, especially in light of a thread I was reading over at neogaf recently about the racial diversity of the Smash cast. What was presented* as a simple observation of a lack of minorities and suggestion that Doc Louis would make a good addition to smash as a somewhat prominent black Nintendo character was met with a lot of gross responses.That thread showed me a mindset that frivolity and cartoonishness and default whiteness go together through some logic that I can't really follow, and that suggestions otherwise are perceived as attacks on that core playfulness. So I agree with Chris' notion that having a somewhat mindless, fantastical, cartoonish or silly game does not mean that a white protagonist is a better fit than any other. I also see where Sean is coming from on his point, but I think that he would generally prefer a more thoughtful game in which all the design choices are deliberate and reasoned.

 

Regarding Far Cry 4, I'm glad Danielle brought up the animals constantly attacking aspect. I saw the Giant Bomb quick look and the way roving bands of foxes attack you to their death and birds swoop in and trigger extreme in-your-face attack mini-cutscenes just made the whole thing seem like one of the latter-day Cabela's games where every single animal in the world is constantly trying to kill you. It actually put me off from the game quite a bit to be honest, the combination of high-fidelity animals from an animation and model standpoint with suicidally aggressive behaviour bums me out. I don't really see why it couldn't take a page out of MGS3 or even Shadow of the Colossus where the creatures act in a believable manner and doing what you have to do to win/survive means being the aggressor.

 

 

*It wasn't presented very well, to be fair, but I still think the responses were unreasonable.

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Danielle, when you do the "hup hup hup hup" noise, what is that imitating? It's a wonderful noise, and on the previous episode you say it's a Yoshi noise, but I don't know where it's from. 

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When Jake said there was one thing that could make this movie good, I guessed he was going to say what I now think is an amazing idea:

 

A one-armed crazy survivialist Ray Arnold shows up, having been abandoned 20 years ago and survived on Isla Nublar ever since

 

I assume Jurassic World is still on Isla Nublar (probably due to that piece of artwork they released a while back with the raptor on the old wrecked jeep), though that might be wrong.

 

 

Tiny, silly nitpick at the episode description: Jurassic World is not a reboot, pseudo or otherwise! It's a sequel! Why is everyone so eager to call things reboots these days?!

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Isn't it a reboot when it's about bringing back a franchise that was previously popular but is not currently running?

 

Not a reboot like a computer where it restarts, a reboot like you're kicking an engine that died down to get it going again so you can go further.

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I love how John Hammond excitedly says something that sounds like "oh! Mr. DNE!" 

 

Also, I love how John Hammond plans on either being there for every tour himself (presumably this is easy for him, since he is present at all of the lab dinosaur births), or at least staffing someone named John for the tours. "Hello John. Oh, Hello John." 

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Isn't it a reboot when it's about bringing back a franchise that was previously popular but is not currently running?

Not a reboot like a computer where it restarts, a reboot like you're kicking an engine that died down to get it going again so you can go further.

It's a reboot if you wipe a franchise's previous continuity.

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