Jake

Idle Thumbs 196: Ode on a Grecian Hat Sale

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Idle Thumbs 197 196:

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Ode on a Grecian Hat Sale

It was the 90s, and there was time. There was a quiet space left in between, room to decide for yourself what was what. But then Mario had to go and open his big fat mouth. Now he never shuts up.

Things Discussed: Super Mario 3D World, Super Smash Bros Melee, Apex 2015, Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, Greece, Klax (GameBoy Color)

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Not all the way through, so apologies if you mention this but Super Mario World has that one or a couple little text boxes before you can go to the first stage. No spoken words, but I'd say it's about the equivalent of the letter Peach sends at the start of 64.

 

EDIT:

 

welcome.png

 

Ok, I guess that's less of a cut-scene because it's more like some kind of narrator talking to the kid playing the game.

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Tim being insistent on tank controls is an odd thing to me. Not because I think they're terrible, I have yet to play any Grim Fandango version, but just because it's a pretty unanimous complaint I've heard and yet he stands by his original choice. Everything I've heard, seen and felt in general production says that it's incredibly hard to evaluate your work when you've been deep inside the project for its entire construction but you're explicitly making it for people who have the opposite experience, only seeing the surface at least at first. So it seems like a lot of people who make stuff are highly receptive to criticism and try to resolve people's issues.

That all just makes it so weird that Tim has not budged on his position, I wonder if that's a conscious decision to not be easily swayed or is it just his instinctual response.

Also I was thinking about how it'd be great to have a game that's just a normal game but full of achievements that are theoretically possible but ludicrous to expect to achieve any of them. But then I realised it would be a lightning rod for the worst behaviour from people who care about achievements, both for them harassing you, criticising your broken achievements system and for people destroying their lives endlessly searching for each achievement trigger.

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Also I was thinking about how it'd be great to have a game that's just a normal game but full of achievements that are theoretically possible but ludicrous to expect to achieve any of them. But then I realised it would be a lightning rod for the worst behaviour from people who care about achievements, both for them harassing you, criticising your broken achievements system and for people destroying their lives endlessly searching for each achievement trigger.

 

The Stanley Parable did this, pretty much. The key is to add an achievement that is explicitly unachievable.

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Tim being insistent on tank controls is an odd thing to me. Not because I think they're terrible, I have yet to play any Grim Fandango version, but just because it's a pretty unanimous complaint I've heard and yet he stands by his original choice. Everything I've heard, seen and felt in general production says that it's incredibly hard to evaluate your work when you've been deep inside the project for its entire construction but you're explicitly making it for people who have the opposite experience, only seeing the surface at least at first. So it seems like a lot of people who make stuff are highly receptive to criticism and try to resolve people's issues.

That all just makes it so weird that Tim has not budged on his position, I wonder if that's a conscious decision to not be easily swayed or is it just his instinctual response.

 

Actually, I think Tim does acknowledge the tank controls as a mistake in one of the Making of Grim Fandango Remastered videos. He says something to the effect like how it's an example of having a good argument for the wrong decision.

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The Stanley Parable's unachievable achievement is a specific wink from a game about game nonsense. If they had achievements like that in some unassuming game it would be way more effective in a weird way.

EDIT: Also I guess that means I was wrong about Tim but right that all creators are beholden to the judgement of their audience forever.

I have clearly not seen said video, what does he mean about it being the wrong choice but with a good argument for it?

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Valve hasn't completely gotten rid of free item drops in Dota 2, but they've made them so rare that they might as well have. When they introduced the change back in October (getting rid of the leveling system rewards and reducing the random drop rate) they pitched it to the community as a positive because they'd be rewarding entire item sets instead of individual items, but the net result has been that you'll go dozens if not hundreds of matches without seeing any of the 10 players receive an item drop. The only exception seems to be compendium points for folks who have spent $9.99 for one of those on the store.

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Your talk of valve reminded me of two interviews from a few years ago.

 

Here is an interview with Yanais talking about working at valve, how they decide on what to do and decide on who to hire.

 

Here is an article talking about this interview with a  former emplolyee of Vavle who was fired giving her thoughts on the company and how while it has no formal hierarchy there is a strong informal one.

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The Stanley Parable's unachievable achievement is a specific wink from a game about game nonsense. If they had achievements like that in some unassuming game it would be way more effective in a weird way.

Universe Sandbox has one on Steam where you need to accrue a full year of playtime. And one where you have to start the game 10000 times.

 

https://steamcommunity.com/stats/UniverseSandbox/achievements/

 

(Those 0.6% are almost certainly cheaters using the achievement unlocking tool.)

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Valve is weird. They have this veneer of infallibility, like they are the beating heart of PC Gaming, but personally it seems kind of negative value. I've loved a lot of their games, but it's odd how little actually gets out, and how much of the last decade's output is a refining of other ideas.

 

The flat structure sounds nice and fanciful, but given what we know about how much of the tech industry works, and Jeri's displeasure, I imagine it can be rough for some people. Also, is the lack of typical job structure the reason nobody has taken up the mantle of community manager? 

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Sean,

 

I'm not a big "OMG SPOILERS" person, but I think that's the one. One day I will finish your game. I really like it. (I started playing it together with a girlfriend, and I broke up before we finished the game. For some reason though, that's still "our" game save.) You didn't spoil it for me (neither in the sense of "gave away" or ruined), it just feels like that's one that shouldn't be spoiled.

 

If Valve is doing weird stuff with the Dota economy, now's the right time to try Legal Legends. This is possibly a joke?

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I'm pretty sure you can't turn off Steam achievement notifications without disabling the entire Steam overlay. It really bugs me, I've looked for that option a ton of times. Maybe they've added it since I last checked but I doubt it.

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I think Civilization 5 has the worst achievements of any game I own. Its essentially beat the game as every faction, on every map, on every difficulty level and beat all the historic scenarios. There a few achievements that are not like this, but the vast majority (Civ 5 has 287 achievements) are really lame completion achievements.

 

Crusader Kings II on the other had mostly has my favorite kind of achievements, goofy ones and really hard ones that have an effect on your play style.

Have three anti-popes in one game

have a child with the inbred trait

have seven courtiers with the dwarf trait (dwarf fortress),

as a woman, have three different husbands killed

Rule the Empire of Britannia as a Hindu Buddhist or Jain character

 

These are all hard to do and make fun goals to reach for. I guess I like achievements that are more like challenge levels.

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Not all the way through, so apologies if you mention this but Super Mario World has that one or a couple little text boxes before you can go to the first stage. No spoken words, but I'd say it's about the equivalent of the letter Peach sends at the start of 64.

 

EDIT:

 

welcome.png

 

Ok, I guess that's less of a cut-scene because it's more like some kind of narrator talking to the kid playing the game.

In addition to the letter from Peach, 64 has the intro with lakitu as the camera and a few other story-scene-setting things, but I think you're right that it was a slow ramp up over time. Mario 1 had "our princess is in another castle," then Mario 3 had occasional letters from Peach (including gifting you a P wing for instance) as well a the throne room scenes with the kings before each Koopa Kid encounter. Mario World had that introductory text as well as little vignettes before each castle (probably on par with Mario 3), then the opening story of Yoshi's Island, then Mario 64 introduced actual cutscenes in addition to the notes from Peach. Then Mario Sunshine had a full on prerendered cutscene about Mario's vacation being ruined (and the GBA versions of the old NES and SNES games were retrofitted to have intro cinematics as well).

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On the topic of unachieveable achievements (if you are interested in Hate Plus, the sequel to Analogue: A Hate Story, I would not recommend clicking this list. It has a fairly big spoiler as one of the achievement titles, which is part of the joke, but you can at least be warned.): http://steamcommunity.com/stats/HatePlus/achievements

Hate plus written by Christine Love (who is amazing) has an achievement that is literally impossible. 

People have deconstructed the code trying to find a way to get it & have just failed.  I think it's a really interesting way to pull a prank on your community. If you think about it for a little while after reading the title, and have a knowledge of Final Fantasy, you'll realize 'of course it's impossible.' She will also give you an achievement if you bake a cake in real life and send a picture of it to her.

I highly recommend playing both Analogue & Hate Plus. They're often on steam sales for super cheap (but are totally worth paying full price) & I think a really good use of storytelling in games.

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The background story for Super Mario Bros. was in the manual, like all games of that era.

 

super_mario_bros_instruction_manual_stor

 

What's really crazy about the story (which I didn't realize until I found that image) is that the citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom were turned into bricks and stones.  Those blocks you're busting to get coins and flowers?  THEY'RE PEOPLE.

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Wasn't it once posited that the reason for the "Congrats on beating chapter 4" type of achievement was a way of getting a metric on what percentage of player made it that far in the game. Was that ever proven or disproved?

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Wasn't it once posited that the reason for the "Congrats on beating chapter 4" type of achievement was a way of getting a metric on what percentage of player made it that far in the game. Was that ever proven or disproved?

 

I always liked these achievements because it was an easy way to see how far my friends had progressed in games we were both playing. I hate the notifications for them though.

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On the topic of unachieveable achievements (if you are interested in Hate Plus, the sequel to Analogue: A Hate Story, I would not recommend clicking this list. It has a fairly big spoiler as one of the achievement titles, which is part of the joke, but you can at least be warned.): http://steamcommunity.com/stats/HatePlus/achievements

Hate plus written by Christine Love (who is amazing) has an achievement that is literally impossible. 

People have deconstructed the code trying to find a way to get it & have just failed.  I think it's a really interesting way to pull a prank on your community. If you think about it for a little while after reading the title, and have a knowledge of Final Fantasy, you'll realize 'of course it's impossible.' She will also give you an achievement if you bake a cake in real life and send a picture of it to her.

I highly recommend playing both Analogue & Hate Plus. They're often on steam sales for super cheap (but are totally worth paying full price) & I think a really good use of storytelling in games.

 

I am one of the 5.8% who baked a cake. I wonder if that percentage is actually accurate or if people found a way to cheese it.

 

Also Analogue: A Hate Story is excellent. Hate Plus was OK. Maybe I played them too close to each other.

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Rich Geldreich is a former Valve employee, and he wrote a blogpost recently that was super critical of open office designs for large companies that was also implicitly critical of Valve's organizational structure.

 

http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-cabal-rooms-suck.html

 

While we all can only speculate on what's going on with Valve, it definitely appears to be the case that they are incredibly successful company now because Steam operates as a rent collection system, and that means they don't have to address the kinds of inefficiencies in their organization that a company that lacks a money hose would have to handle at various points in time if they wanted to keep their doors open.

 

I do hope that the feeling that a lot of cool Valve stuff has stalled out is just a temporary bottleneck.

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In addition to the letter from Peach, 64 has the intro with lakitu as the camera and a few other story-scene-setting things, but I think you're right that it was a slow ramp up over time. Mario 1 had "our princess is in another castle," then Mario 3 had occasional letters from Peach (including gifting you a P wing for instance) as well a the throne room scenes with the kings before each Koopa Kid encounter. Mario World had that introductory text as well as little vignettes before each castle (probably on par with Mario 3), then the opening story of Yoshi's Island, then Mario 64 introduced actual cutscenes in addition to the notes from Peach. Then Mario Sunshine had a full on prerendered cutscene about Mario's vacation being ruined (and the GBA versions of the old NES and SNES games were retrofitted to have intro cinematics as well).

I think Mario Land 2 and 3 (starring Wario) need to be taken into account as well, also along with Wario Land Virtual Boy and Yoshi's Island. All of these predate Mario 64 and were very much story laden for platformers at the time with length of cinematics and characterization. I feel like if anything Mario 64 is lighter on story than Mario Land 3 and Yoshi's Island in terms of what's going on, it just tends to have a lot of slow ass skycam pan and zoom shots 'cause you know, 3D cameras. I guess I think of the 2D "cinema" feel dependent on how many backgrounds and sprites were generated just for the sake of cutscenes and not actual game time.

 

Also besides cutscene heavy third party games Mario RPG, Hotel Mario, and Mario Is Missing, there was Wario Woods for both SNES and NES with many dialogue screens before the battles.

 

Is the 197 crossed out for the episode number some kind of reference to the Twin Peaks cast?

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I am one of the 5.8% who baked a cake. I wonder if that percentage is actually accurate or if people found a way to cheese it.

 

Also Analogue: A Hate Story is excellent. Hate Plus was OK. Maybe I played them too close to each other.

 

I baked a cake, too! I love Love's games and recommend them to anyone, even people who are leery of visual novels, because they're grounded so well in their theme.

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I am one of the 5.8% who baked a cake. I wonder if that percentage is actually accurate or if people found a way to cheese it.

 

Also Analogue: A Hate Story is excellent. Hate Plus was OK. Maybe I played them too close to each other.

 

I know how to cheese the cake achievement.

 

recipe-image-legacy-id--484543_12.jpg

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Wasn't it once posited that the reason for the "Congrats on beating chapter 4" type of achievement was a way of getting a metric on what percentage of player made it that far in the game. Was that ever proven or disproved?

 

I don't have any ability to prove or disprove any developer's motives for doing something, but that kind of metric is definitely easy enough to track without hooking into a player-facing system. It is arguably easier to piggyback on Valve's (or whoever's) existing API, and I guess on consoles developers are probably more limited in their ability to send data back to servers they control, so maybe that is the reason. But if acquiring player metrics were my main goal, unrelated to player-facing notifications, I think I would just implement a basic metrics-gathering system in the background.

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