Jake

Idle Thumbs 196: Ode on a Grecian Hat Sale

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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.

 

Holy shit! That makes the original Mario so much darker. And if that's canon, then what are all the similar bricks in later games? Could the curse not be reversed, the land was freed but those changed stayed changed forever, billions of people locked forever in stone, freed only in death when a plumber bops them with his head? Are the mushroom and fire flower the spirits of the dead you are absorbing?

 

Edited to add: I like how Mario is only (maybe) the hero.  Like, maybe he's just a sociopath that likes murdering brick people, and he accidently rescued the princess.  Dude's mute, so who knows what his motivation is. 

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I have no actual knowledge about this but I wouldn't be surprised if that story were simply made up by some localization employee at Nintendo of America. That seemed pretty standard for instruction manuals at the time.

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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.

 

I am skeptical of Sean's comment about Mario 3D World being difficult to understand from the beginning due to the number of things thrown at the player. There are all kinds of things going on in this screenshot above. The extra item box, a star counter, a coin counter, a points counter, and things are thrown at you real fast throughout. Nintendo does like to ease people into things, and I don't think Mario 3D World is any exception. I have a feeling it was a LOT of people's first Mario game over this Christmas, and I think that perhaps modern gaming sensibility is actually a handicap for understanding current games, since there are so, so many more things an average game expects of its player. I think it has about as many weird things in the first world as, say, Mario 64 did. I donno, I just don't know if I agree with some of the early 'cast discussion. 

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I have no actual knowledge about this but I wouldn't be surprised if that story were simply made up by some localization employee at Nintendo of America. That seemed pretty standard for instruction manuals at the time.

 

Actually, the story in the Japanese manual is pretty similar. Man, Legends of Localization is fucking great.

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

 

Yeah, I hope it's just due to the transition to Source 2.0.

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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.

 

Yes, this was the exact reason for my hesitation in claiming it a TRUE FACT.

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I am skeptical of Sean's comment about Mario 3D World being difficult to understand from the beginning due to the number of things thrown at the player. There are all kinds of things going on in this screenshot above. The extra item box, a star counter, a coin counter, a points counter, and things are thrown at you real fast throughout. Nintendo does like to ease people into things, and I don't think Mario 3D World is any exception. I have a feeling it was a LOT of people's first Mario game over this Christmas, and I think that perhaps modern gaming sensibility is actually a handicap for understanding current games, since there are so, so many more things an average game expects of its player. I think it has about as many weird things in the first world as, say, Mario 64 did. I donno, I just don't know if I agree with some of the early 'cast discussion. 

 

I think there's something of a difference in that when I played those old 2D games when I was younger, I basically didn't even NOTICE all that UI crap. I just ignored all of it, didn't perceive it at all while playing. I think that feels pretty different to things actually existing in the 3D space that you are navigating.

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Wii U technical note: Unlike the controllers, which use Mewtwooth, the Gamepad actually uses a private direct Wi-Fi (Shi-Gi-Fi?) connection to the console. I wish they sold Gamepad repeaters or anntenae. A little more range would be pretty useful.

video games, on 05 Feb 2015 - 13:34, said:

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.

Yeah, I always liked those for co-op games, because you could tell how far your friends were if you saw them playing, and know if you could join in without spoiling anything. I always turn off notifications, though, even though it makes me miss messages and friend requests (and in Steam's case, all the highly useful in-game functionality). It sucks you can't be more granular with that stuff.

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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.

 

I feel a little conservative saying this, but without any pressure, which in our world is basically only market, what incentive do they have to improve? Also, a significant portion of the recent successful work they've done has been market driven/playing to their biggest success. Hats Hats Hats! 

 

Edit: I don't know the general sense, but I don't love the Steam revisions. I liked the idea that we were all seeing the same front page. 

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I don't know the general sense, but I don't love the Steam revisions. I liked the idea that we were all seeing the same front page.

My front page is a huge pile of games I already own in physical form and notifications begging me to review my queue. I ignore it more than I ever did the old front page. It just takes too much effort to cultivate the various systems into presenting you with stuff you actually care about.

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Man yeah, I'm also not crazy about what the Steam front page looks like too. That may unconsciously be affecting my impression of Valve being lost in the weeds at the moment.

 

The only recent thing they've rolled out recently that I think is cool is the streaming feature. It's nice to pop into other people's games and chat for a bit.

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So I haven't loaded DotA 2 since my computer broke during the International last year. I reinstalled it and all, and I looked at patch notes regarding balance changes, but didn't pay attention to any other changes. I had no idea that the item drop system was taken out. That is bizarre. That game continues to grow on the competitive level, but as a product it seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot.

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The drop system isn't gone. You still get drops. They're just much rarer now, and they're whole sets instead of individual items.

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The drop system isn't gone. You still get drops. They're just much rarer now, and they're whole sets instead of individual items.

Eh? Maybe I misheard Sean then.

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I think Sean was just simplifying things rather than getting into minutiae of how it works since the rest of the cast doesn't play DOTA. 

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They're like suuuuuper rare now. I've yet to get one since the change (though I've played considerably since then).

 

They're also no longer tied to the battle level system, which is where I think most people got their item drops.

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I have no actual knowledge about this but I wouldn't be surprised if that story were simply made up by some localization employee at Nintendo of America. That seemed pretty standard for instruction manuals at the time.

 

C'mon, it's SOOOOO much better if this is the truth. It will always be the truth now, in my heart.

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Haha okay I got to the past where Sean talks about Dota item drops. Sorry Sean you're wrong! Heh.

Items do still drop, they're full sets now, and they're much much rarer. The battle level stuff is now definitely useless. The main reason the steam market has dropped, a far as I can tell, is that chest items are not marketable for uhhh I'm not sure about the exact amount of time, but it's at least a month. So the only way to get those items First Oh Man I'm So Cool First is to open chests. Which, yes, don't drop anymore. But you can open as many as you want now without buying keys

 

(none of this is important information, but it maybe does sort of defend valve's strategy a bit - i think the idea is that they'll make more money off of chests and also make those items a little more specila since people can't just buy the one they want off the market for cheaper than the chest)

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I have no actual knowledge about this but I wouldn't be surprised if that story were simply made up by some localization employee at Nintendo of America. That seemed pretty standard for instruction manuals at the time.

I thought so too but they republished this story in the manual for Super Mario Bros. Deluxe on Game Boy Color.

 

Not sure why they did that as all of that stuff seems to have been abandoned.

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I imagine when your continuity and world-building is as convoluted and ridiculous as Mario's, what you chose to keep and throw out can get pretty arbitrary.

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Haha okay I got to the past where Sean talks about Dota item drops. Sorry Sean you're wrong! Heh.

Items do still drop, they're full sets now, and they're much much rarer. The battle level stuff is now definitely useless. The main reason the steam market has dropped, a far as I can tell, is that chest items are not marketable for uhhh I'm not sure about the exact amount of time, but it's at least a month. So the only way to get those items First Oh Man I'm So Cool First is to open chests. Which, yes, don't drop anymore. But you can open as many as you want now without buying keys

 

(none of this is important information, but it maybe does sort of defend valve's strategy a bit - i think the idea is that they'll make more money off of chests and also make those items a little more specila since people can't just buy the one they want off the market for cheaper than the chest)

 

Chests not dropping any more doesn't really matter that much, they changed it so you just buy chests off the store instead of keys for chests. The chests were worth 3 cents on the marketplace so it was just a hassle if you wanted to burn money on keys. That was changed a long while ago anyway, you guys got an email from the hat baron about it then.

 

The 3 month delay on selling items from chests is really weird. A clockwerk set that came out 3 months ago was 2-3 euros before February 1st is 4 cents for each of the 5 pieces now.

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Is the delay on sales meant to be a strike against people who are trying to make a living on digital goods sales?

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I couldn't agree more with Jake/Sean about achievements popping up over narrative games (or however it was phrased). I actually emailed Gaben once to complain about it when Steam kept on destroying my Half Life 2 immersion. It's become easier to turn that all off now, but it's still not that obvious how to do.

 

I don't understand the whole achievement/trophy chasing thing - it rarely if ever translates to free games or anything like that, right? I was playing Portal 2 co-op recently, and my mate insisted we spend 15 frustrating, dull minutes trying to get the achievement for jumping through all four portals in one go. Eventually he had to go find a youtube video and follow that. Mindlessly following external prompts for zero reward - it's like a rat in a maze without any cheese at the end.

 

It's like with people trying to 100% games (ie collect all the things) - I've noticed people here criticising games before for that aspect not being fun - it's because the developers haven't designed the game around that; they just slap some stuff in because it's on the "things people want" list, whether it's good design or not. Similarly, the achievements in Grim Fandango Remastered, to pick a recent example, are completely meaningless because they're things that are either inevitable or very likely to in every playthrough.

 

Of course, some games do try to integrate it into their design properly, but this can taint the main thrust of the game design. Rayman Origins, for example, is a beautifully presented, flowing platformer. But so much time, level design and screen space is given over to the collecting aspect of it that it really drags down the overall experience. So many rules and collectible variants and exchange rates and unskippable tottings-up and locked character rooms. 

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