Chris

Idle Thumbs 199: Bogost in the Shell

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I'm playing The Order 1886. There's this bit i played last night where you Grapple down the side of an airship, the game gave you the smallest amount of control, first 'move stick to lower yourself', hilariously the next control tip was 'use R to look around', it might as well have said "Use R to admire our work". And admire it I did, looking down upon the beautifully rendered Victorian river Thames. Then i got to 'Press X' to jump when i got to the vertical abseiling bit. All the while thinking how restricted my move set was, i was literally just holding down a button whilst a cut scene played out before me and was acutely aware of it. It was then i realised my palms where sweating?!?!? The visuals were so gorgeously realised that even though i wasn't the least bit mental immersed my body still reacted to the on screen scenario

 

games :)

 

Then i got inside the airship, brief bit of chatter about how we couldn't tell who were rebels and who were just guards doing there job. Shortly after i was creeping up behind a guy, who more than likely wasn't a rebel and even if he was didn't deserve what was coming his way. Press X to gut like fish

 

games :(

 

SPOILERS! i'm only a few hours in so its more like speculations, but i'm always right so you can take this stuff as fact

The very beginning of the game has you walking through an apartment building in which you walk past a couple of small wall hanging mirrors. Mirrors in which give off no reflection of your character, at the time i just assumed as the mirrors were so small and inconsequential that it was a development limitation, that RAD couldn't create real time reflections....

 

3 hours in, searching a hospital ward I come across a burnt corpse with a metal rod through its chest. Galahad quips "poor fellow was burnt to a crisp", but i'm more interested in the metal rod protruding from its chest. BLATANT VAMPIRE

 

There's your story twist. i started thinking one of my close comrades must be a vampire and is working against the order..... wait a sec, i'm drinking black liquid from a vial to restore my health, i have a dubious life span, i'm in a war against werewolf, i have no fucking reflection!!!! I'm the god damn batman! this game just got interesting

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I'm not done with the episode yet but I'm also going to chime in and say the pinball episode is the only Are You Afraid of the Dark story I remember.  I recall not wanting to go to the mall the next day.  It didn't help that the mall had an arcade with several pinball machines in it.

 

Also as an aside to what Tegan said about Gargoyles and Keith David, Gargoyles is my favorite cartoon of all time but now that I've played Saints Row IV I can't help but hear that version of Keith David instead of Goliath.

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I know it's Banjo Kazooie I'm sorry world.

 

I saw that you had it correct in "games discussed" on the podcast page, so I wasn't going to pile on.

 

 

I have never seen an episode of Are You Afraid Of The Dark. I didn't like scary stuff as a kid. I continue to not like scary stuff as a really big kid.

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I loved Goosebumps, I don't think that love was really harmed too much by the realisation that it barely had anything to do with spooky horror as much as it did twist endings.

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I never realized that Are You Afraid of the Dark? aired in the States. I thought it was a Canada-only thing. Never seen the pinball episode though.

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I haven't finished the podcast either but enjoyed Are You Afraid of the Dark?  And wanted to chime in.  I vaguely recall the pinball episode, does it end with a pinball coming down the escalator or is that just a thing that happens earlier in the episode?  I just know the whole mall setting was interesting for someone who spent way too much time loitering in one throughout high school.

 

Also, there was an episode where I think a kid froze to death and they found his sweater in a log.  The monotone "I'm cold" quote is burned into my brain from that thing.  And the pool episode.

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I haven't finished the podcast either but enjoyed Are You Afraid of the Dark?  And wanted to chime in.  I vaguely recall the pinball episode, does it end with a pinball coming down the escalator or is that just a thing that happens earlier in the episode?  I just know the whole mall setting was interesting for someone who spent way too much time loitering in one throughout high school.

 

If I remember correctly, it both begins and ends that way.  The ending of the episode was a downer because despite "winning" the game, the kid was still trapped because it started all over again with no method of escape.

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Apparently someone built a Besiege device that is basically a lattice strapped to a propeller. When it starts, the propeller lifts up, starts the lattice spinning in the air, which then releases bombs which carpet-bomb the area. The rotation makes the bombs spread out.

 

Apparently that'll beat nearly every mission.

 

Hopefully they fix that.

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That Gex backstory is fuckin’ bananas. Just to help the unfamiliar feel the full Gex flavor, I’d like to point out that the game was originally on the 3DO before it was ported anywhere else (alongside a few other Crystal Dynamics joints), and that the sarcastic, hip mascot reptile was voiced by comic Dana Gould.


 


hGor3xD.jpg


 


This is what the CD-ROM format wrought.


 


A totally irrelevant thing, but Chris was thinking of Body Harvest when Blast Corps first came up. I only bring it up because Edge had a cool making-of article about it a couple of years ago that I’d recommend reading. It was an interesting game that was a direct precursor to GTA III in many ways. I’d link to the online version, but apparently Edge doesn’t have a website anymore.


 


Thanks to the discussion of Darkest Dungeon and the failure spiral that damage and insanity can cause, I’d like to recommend a series of board games to anyone who enjoys that sort of thing. The designer Dan Verssen makes a family of solitaire wargames referred to as the Leader series (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/3268/leader-series), which will scratch that itch in a major way.


 


In Phantom Leader, you coordinate air missions over Vietnam, and a large part of the game is managing the stress levels of your pilots. Coming under fire freaks them out, and this will screw you over time, necessitating R&R to let them cool off, which comes at a huge cost (you lose precious turns that would otherwise be spent flying missions). This is combined with a plummeting number representing the deteriorating political situation (which will plummet faster if you use napalm), and this inevitably leads to your hands being tied in terms of the kinds of missions you may undertake. The pressure builds and builds, and your options become narrower as the game progresses. It’s crazy.


 


Thunderbolt/Apache Leader doesn’t feature politics in the same way, but it does have a somewhat detailed damage model that carries between missions, and taking a plane out to repair it is a big enough deal that you probably will send them back into battle with damage. This ties directly back into the stress system: a pilot will immediately gain stress when getting into a plane that has bullet holes in it. Stress reduces performance, and eventually makes pilots unfit for service.


 


Hornet Leader: Carrier Air Operations has an optional expansion called The Cthulhu Conflict, which adds what you’d expect. When your pilots are flying missions against monsters, they have to deal with insanity, which actually grants them experience (making them more effective), but inexorably progresses to becoming unfit. It’s kind of a take on the mythos lore skill from the Call of Cthulhu RPG (as designed by Sandy Petersen, who also designed a crapton of the maps in Doom and Doom II, and most of episode 4 of Quake).


 


This is what happens when I post right after having a huge cup of coffee on the way to work.


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So when do we get to see Campo Santo's "Gex: Origins"?

 

Also, it bugs the shit out of me that Gex wears human sunglasses whose lenses don't even sit anywhere near his bulbous cartoon lizard eyes.

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Apparently someone built a Besiege device that is basically a lattice strapped to a propeller. When it starts, the propeller lifts up, starts the lattice spinning in the air, which then releases bombs which carpet-bomb the area. The rotation makes the bombs spread out.

 

Apparently that'll beat nearly every mission.

 

Hopefully they fix that.

 

Out of curiosity, why do you feel that's a thing that needs to be fixed?

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Out of curiosity, why do you feel that's a thing that needs to be fixed?

Personally I would like if stuff like this gave them the impetus to make more esoteric missions. The most simple suggestion I immediately think of being maybe one where you have a single target and should avoid damaging anyone or anything else.

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I never realized that Are You Afraid of the Dark? aired in the States. I thought it was a Canada-only thing. Never seen the pinball episode though.

 

I think both that and Goosebumps were produced as a joint between Nickelodeon and YTV, with production being done in Canada. If you're a Toronto native, you will recognize a lot of the shooting locations.

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This episode had a couple of truly adorable fumbled hand-offs. It wouldn't be the idle thumbs if the plug section of the podcast went off without a hitch :)

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Apparently someone built a Besiege device that is basically a lattice strapped to a propeller. When it starts, the propeller lifts up, starts the lattice spinning in the air, which then releases bombs which carpet-bomb the area. The rotation makes the bombs spread out.

 

Apparently that'll beat nearly every mission.

 

Hopefully they fix that.

 

Someone beat all the current missions using just a bomb and the starting block:

 

 

I usually see these things as outliers. They're a good thing to consider when designing to encourage more creativity, but someone's going to figure out the dumbest, fastest way to complete it. Trying to hit or avoid a single target just means that bomb-lattice guy will spend a bit more time to figure out which bombs to leave out of the lattice and when he needs to hit the deploy button to get the rotation right.

 

 

As an avid Goosebumps reader, I will say that they were never all that good. I mainly read them because they were a quick, fun read and sometimes had some interesting ideas. One of my favorites was Say Cheese and Die! It had a spooky camera that produced photos showing the subjects after an accident which would happen soon after. It didn't take long to realize how formulaic the books were. Each chapter ended with some sort of tense cliffhanger that turned out to be nothing at the beginning of the next chapter, and then the book would end with a bigger actual cliffhanger that was sometimes followed up on with a sequel book.

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After two episodes, how has there not been a Besiege - Bespoke joke yet?

there has now.

thank you.

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If you want to hear a nice podcast interview with R.L. Stein, check this out. Bob Stein wanted to be a comedy writer. In the Goosebumps hay day he was writing a new one every month. 

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