Jake

Idle Thumbs 196: Ode on a Grecian Hat Sale

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I was just joking... :sad:

Jokes aren't allowed! This is a serious matter. Very very very serious.

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I feel like they haven't been successful enough given the supposed talent there. It's like feelthedarkness said back on page one - it's odd how little they've managed to put out in the last decade, and how much of it is refining other people's ideas instead of creating their own. They bought Team Fortress, they bought CounterStrike, they bought Portal, they bought Left 4 Dead, they bought DOTA... they're like a publisher that just doesn't outsource, one that has the money to just buy out competitors instead of trying to out-compete them.

They bought Team Fortress and made it into Team Fortress 2, a completely different kind of game!

They bought Counter-Strike and made it into the longest-lasting, most popular competitive FPS!

 

They bought Narbacular Drop's team and created Portal, incl. original story and character GladOS, arguably the biggest reason Portal is as successful as it is. (Without the video game memes cake is a lie bullshit, I don't think there'd have been a Portal 2.) And then they made Portal 2!

 

They bought Left 4 Dead, and then made it different, and then made Left 4 Dead 2, and are now making Left 4 Dead 3 (according to various leaks)!

 

They bought DotA and made Dota 2!

 

They made Half-Life!

 

Out of those, you could argue (in a way that I'd be willing to listen) that they really didn't do much with CS, Dota, and maybe even L4D. I'd argue that the meta-game stuff they've developed for the first two is a ton of work and shouldn't be ignored just because they didn't create the original games. And I'd argue that for L4D they did a lot a lot of work to change and enhance the original Turtle Rock game. If you read back about the development, you'll see that it changed a lot over time from what Turtle Rock originally had planned.

 

But Portal and TF2 are completely different games from the properties/teams they bought/hired, the first because of presentation, and the second because of... basically all of it.

 

And you forgot Day of Defeat which is the best how dare you. ):

 

...

 

Okay all that out of the way, they also made fuckin' Ricochet which is the secret best game of all time.

 

...

 

Okay okay all THAT out of the way, I don't actually disagree with the disappointment and/or resigned acceptance of Valve's seemingly lackluster amount of original output. We do know they're working on Source 2, and they're definitely definitely porting Dota 2 to Source 2 (which will bring with it a hopefully finished official custom map feature), and they're probably definitely working on a L4D3, and they still do SOME stuff for TF2 (although I'm led to believe the team on that is like three people total), aaaaaaaaaand well that's all I got. But I think that's a significant amount of work at this specific point in time. It's just not necessarily work that is immediately appreciable.

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it's odd how little they've managed to put out in the last decade, and how much of it is refining other people's ideas instead of creating their own. 

 

In many ways the company you are describing in this sentence is Blizzard.

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But the collection aspect in Rayman Origins is a major part of the fun. It's score based, not so much OCD based and you can retry sections as many times as you would like.

 

Rayman Legends is even more fun and is just amazing.

 

You can also just not collect the lums and just focus on the cages if you want to complete the game and unlock the final level. Even then you don't need all cages. It's not like the very first Rayman in the 90s where to unlock  the final level it required you to 100% the game up to that point.

 

Also on Valve, I don't get why Steam is so great. I never will. You don't actually own the game, it's just DRM, and it's just a one stop shop for every game to the point where no one will play anything on PC unless it's on Steam. That is not a market for competition or developers to really flourish and that is inherently bad in my opinion. They have sort of become a gatekeeper that makes or breaks what was originally much more of a free market than consoles. It's like loving Walmart for having everything. No one loves Walmart though. it's a gross place. Steam is Walmart though yet it's amazing? They don't even invest in certain games to create variety like maybe the PSN store or Microsoft store (am I wrong about this?) and in some respects, Nintendo.

 

I also hate playing games where you just stare at a gun in FPV forever, so to me all Valve games are inherently boring and sterile in the worst way, so I lack the love there as well.

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But the collection aspect in Rayman Origins is a major part of the fun.

 

Ha ha, of course you like it, you're Mr 100%!

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I just wanted to say that Mickey Mouse has been in a series of short flash cartoons for a year or two, and they've been pretty enjoyable. I have heard some complaints about in-between work on some of the shorts, but I've found them pretty visually interesting.

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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.

 

I wonder if this could be seen as a way to encourage people who are new to the Lucasarts style of adventure game to explore the game more fully? I know from experience that in a game like Grim that exhausting every dialogue, using-everything-on-everything and trying-to-pick-everything-up leads to interesting or funny interactions, but someone who's new to that sort of game might not. 

 

I mean, maybe not, maybe they are just meaningless.

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I actually enjoyed one of the achievements I got in Grim.

 

It was for shaking my Robert Frost balloon at the pigeons. It was pretty funny.

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In many ways the company you are describing in this sentence is Blizzard.

 

Yeah, pretty much. I feel like Blizzard is more open about how they're in the business of genre killers, not innovative gameplay ideas, and what they bring to the table is impeccable polish. They're not doing anything new, they have a house aesthetic that gets old and there's lashings of cliche, but if you're willing to accept that, what you get is a game system that's tuned to perfection. (Diablo 3 aside.)

 

Also Blizzard makes a wider variety of games - if you don't like multiplayer games, most of Valve's output is not for you, while their strengths as a studio (aesthetics and character) are sort of wasted on the games they make.

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I wouldn't say the aesthetics of TF2 are wasted, they're a large part of why it's one of my favourite games. The look and style of TF2 is what drew in me and the friends I talked into playing with me. Frankly I think they're a ton more important than most multiplayer games give them credit for.

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I just wanted to say that Mickey Mouse has been in a series of short flash cartoons for a year or two, and they've been pretty enjoyable. I have heard some complaints about in-between work on some of the shorts, but I've found them pretty visually interesting.

 

I wanted to bring this up too. Mickey was also in a really inventive theatrical 3D short called Get A Horse that played before Frozen in some theaters.

 

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1euywx_mickey-mouse-get-a-horse-2013_shortfilms

 

(play it in fullscreen, there's a reason it looks so weird at first)

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I can understand why people dislike achievements, and I definitely would like there to be a user-end global setting to turn off notifications for people who don't care about them/find their immersion being ruined by them. But personally I love them most of the time, and although I think the interesting achievements are the ones that encourage experimentation with the game or finding some cool off the beaten path element of it, I absolutely do want the achievements that just track game progress. I don't see it as a metric for the developers to see how many people have managed what (as has been noted, this would be easy enough to implement in some behind the scenes fashion). I see it as a way to have a history of -my- progress in a game, and compare it to friends and the internet at large. It's like how Steam tracks how many hours you've spent playing a game, except that's just time with the executable running, whereas the achievements tell you what parts of the game you've experienced. This is information I enjoy having available to me. It's not particularly meaningful in the larger scheme of things, but it's a memory aid and interesting data about my personal play tendencies (and those of my friends, for that matter).  I think I'm against having a cross-game metascore the way it's been done on consoles (although it took me a while to come to this side of the argument), but just having those data points attached to a game the way Steam does? yes please. I think the more interesting (and potentially worthy of pursuit) metric is how rare your achievements are. Steam's profile showcase shows off your rarest achievements and I think that's pretty cool.

 

I do hate achievements that are either completely meaningless (oh look, you've killed X number of thousands of this basic respawning enemy type in our game. Woo.) or actively push you to play in ways that break the game experience, though. For the latter, particularly ones that are multiplayer-based. If you put achievements into your multiplayer game that reward poor play or ignoring the actual game objectives, that's not just bad for achievement hunters, that's bad for everyone playing. (For example, World of Warcraft has a holiday meta achievement that rewards an awesome flying mount. I want this thing badly, but some of the sub achievements are really unfun and the ones that force you into PvP a) put me in a game mode I hate and b ) are about doing things other than pursuing the actual objectives of the scenario, thus fucking over the people that actually want to be there.)

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The only time I had an issue with achievements in terms of taking me out of the moment was in the PC version of Bioshock 2. It was the only GFWL game I had played at the time and those achievements were so intrusive and obnoxious looking to me. The gross metallic design of the blades really clashes with pretty much any game. I believe one tied to the NPC choices you have to make was the one that made me turn notifications off. I think about it every once in a while on steam, but I think the colour scheme is less annoying in general. At this point the only achievements I detest across the board are the social media ones. Otherwise I just engage in them to the degree I want to spend more time in a game system.

 

I was playing Heroine's Quest recently since it popped up on my Steam. I dunno if that means it just came to Steam or was just recommended cause I played a few adventure games recently. Anyway I noticed the score system of those Sierra style adventures and text adventures are pretty similar to achievements. I'm sure it's been known, but it just struck me.

 

I wanted to bring this up too. Mickey was also in a really inventive theatrical 3D short called Get A Horse that played before Frozen in some theaters.

 

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1euywx_mickey-mouse-get-a-horse-2013_shortfilms

 

(play it in fullscreen, there's a reason it looks so weird at first)

 

Cool stuff! I really loved the flipbook time-manipulation, thanks for linking that!

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I just wanted to say that Mickey Mouse has been in a series of short flash cartoons for a year or two, and they've been pretty enjoyable. I have heard some complaints about in-between work on some of the shorts, but I've found them pretty visually interesting.

 

? Yeah, they're great, I watched them all when Tegan mentioned them a while back. Get A Horse is great too, although that dailymotion site is a nightmare - so many drop-down, pop-up, pre-roll and embedded audio-playing ads to fight through to actually see the video!

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I've always wanted to make like a style guide for achievements, just kind of explaining the different kinds of criteria that tend to work and not, what they'll mean to players, when to set the timing, that sort of thing.

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I picked up my copy of the Grim Fandango Remaster (finished last night!) through GOG, and can report that there are no achievements in that version. So if this is an important issue for you, there's some useful information for you.

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GOG doesn't do achievements at all, right? I'm guessing achievement-hounds will know that!

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GOG doesn't do achievements at all.

 

Although it's possible they might come GOG Galaxy's release. Whenever/whatever that is.

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Hmm yeah good point, there isn't any network you're hooking up to that would track achievements, but that could change in the future perhaps...

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I like the way Nintendo does achievements on Miiverse: you just post something, maybe a screenshot, then you just tag it with "Achievement" (or it might have been "accomplishment", I don't remember exactly). You decide what your achievements are. If you thought getting a good score or a fast time on a game was cool, or if you found a neat hidden section of a game that was hard to reach, just post it, tag it, wait for people to Yeah! it and comment. 

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Man I guess I'm well in the minority because I hated that Mickey Mouse 3d cartoon. I thought the whole thing was mean-spirited and not very clever and the 3d characters looked incredibly generic and ugly compared to their black and white 2d counterparts. Plus the entire thing felt like a goodbye to 2d animation in general, which doesn't sit well at all when the 2d animation in it is so much more interesting and full of life. Ugh.

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