Chris

Idle Thumbs 199: Bogost in the Shell

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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.

 

That is awesome.

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A totally irrelevant thing, but Chris was thinking of Body Harvest when Blast Corps first came up.

Correct.

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So glad Gex was mentioned in an episode. A while back I remember discussion around "video game-ass video games," and Gex is definitely the one that stands out from my childhood as a great example. It fits right alongside other zany platformers of the era like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro (which have great lore themselves).

 

Needless to say, I know what just made its way into my weekend:

 

GxWNIOu.jpg

 

 

A great sequel, complete with surprise twisty cliffhanger of an ending:

 

Since his retirement from the public eye in 1996 after having been swamped with celebrity publicity following Rez's defeat in the first game, Gex has resigned himself to a life of solitude. For two years Gex started his day watching Kung-Fu Theater (Supermarket Sweep in the European release), eventually the days, then weeks started to feel like a telethon/chat show.

One day, Gex was watching his TV when it suddenly went blank. The screen then began to flash a familiar face, over and over again; the face was that of Rez. The next thing Gex knows, two government agents show up at his side, requesting Gex's help; Rez has again risen to power in the Media Dimension and the agents believed that Gex was crazy enough to go back in after him. Gex denies, saying he's already saved the universe once. One of the agents then hits Gex in the head using a wrecking bar, knocking him unconscious.

When Gex wakes up, he realizes he is in an interrogation room. The two agents ask him what he knows about Rez, Gex tells them everything. Once again they ask for his help, one of the agents reaches under the table, pulls out a briefcase and slides it over to Gex. Gex opens it and sees that it is full of cash, a negotiation to cover his expenses. Just when Gex thinks it couldn't get any better, the other agent tosses him a secret agent suit and Gex agrees to help them. The two agents give him a map, and say they want Rez to "disappear", instructing him to hide the body between Jimmy Hoffa's and Spuds MacKenzie's.

As Gex leaves the building, a beautiful female agent walks up to him, and introduces herself as "Agent Xtra", she wishes him good luck and leaves. Gex then leaves to the Media Dimension.

Once Gex is in the Media Dimension, he navigates through several channels. Cartoon (Toon TV); horror (Scream TV); sci-fi (The Rocket Channel); futuristic (Circuit Central); Kung-Fu (Kung-Fu Theater); Pre-history (The Pre-History Channel); Rezopolis; and Channel Z. Once Gex navigates through Rezopolis and Channel Z, he fights the overlord again. By dropping a large TV on top of him, Gex defeats Rez. Rez once again transforms into a ball of energy, and is then trapped in the exact TV Gex dropped on him.

Rez tells Gex that he is his father, and Gex asks how that could be possible. Rez says that he did not always look like he does now, claiming he fell into a scrap heap while trying to get free cable. Regardless, Gex picks up the remote and is about to turn off the TV when Rez begs him not to, saying he will do anything. Gex then shuts off the TV and makes a snide remark: "Okay then, 'Dad'. Hows about we forget all this and go play catch in the yard?". It is not known whether Rez truly is Gex's father, possibly meaning a retcon, or whether this was merely a reference to Star Wars.

Gex is last seen in a hotel room with (in a cameo appearance) Nikki, from the Pandemonium video games (as she appeared in Pandemonium 2).

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

 

I feel like, in a game about finding creative solutions to problems, if all your levels can be beaten by the same technique then you're not giving people varied enough goals. Scribblenauts had the same problem.

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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.

 

I recall that and Welcome to Horrorland being my favorites, although I didn't keep up with the series too much past that (apparently I'm not the only one who dug Horrorland because according to that wiki it had several different adaptations and a whole spinoff series based on it). But yeah, the fact that every single chapter ended in a cliffhanger and that cliffhanger was almost never paid off with anything genuinely scary or important was a bit of a turnoff, and a lot of the premises seemed more goofy than frightening. But hey, it was aimed at grade school kids. Also, huh, apparently Ryan Gosling was in the TV version of Say Cheese and Die!

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I feel like, in a game about finding creative solutions to problems, if all your levels can be beaten by the same technique then you're not giving people varied enough goals. Scribblenauts had the same problem.

 

Scribblenauts and Crayon Physics Deluxe were fun toys I enjoyed playing with, but ultimately I prefer games that have their goals better integrated rather than constantly having to come up with my own goals. To be fair to Besiege though, it's early and things like that will given them the opportunity to put more variety and challenge into it.

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I was ordering a round in a pub a while back and it came to six quid. Another barman piped up "sorry, we don't take fish!" It transpired he was doing a crap "six squid" joke (which presumably he does every single time someone says "six quid"). He disparaged me and my barman for not understanding, to which I was able, thanks to having read the Sam And Max comics a million times, to respond that I only didn't get it because squid are cephalopods. That shut him up. I went in six months later, and presumably he didn't recognise me because he did the joke again at one point but updated with the correct classification.

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I have no memory of the AYAotD's pinball episode but I sure as hell will never eat any green soups after the fucking fear soup episode. Does anyone else remember that one? Restaurant uses a room in the back to extract some sort of pure essence of people's fear and then puts it into the soup so to ensure that everyone is like, addicted to how good it tastes? 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0514409/

 

It contained a very young Neve Campbell as well. 

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I have no memory of the AYAotD's pinball episode but I sure as hell will never eat any green soups after the fucking fear soup episode. Does anyone else remember that one? Restaurant uses a room in the back to extract some sort of pure essence of people's fear and then puts it into the soup so to ensure that everyone is like, addicted to how good it tastes? 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0514409/

 

It contained a very young Neve Campbell as well. 

 

Now that you mention it, I think I have seen that one.  It sounds familiar at any rate.

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Isn't the Captain Toad thing a lot like *jump on the axe* -> "your princess is in another castle" 8 times or how many ever it is?

Edit: With a little bit of Bubble  Bobble thrown in.

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Well... I figured how to make something very simple and silly with the combination of Ghost in the Shell and Ian Bogost. If you haven't seen/remember

(cyborg nudity warning), this will make even less sense.



The Bogost talk used in that
.
Craving for more Bogost? Check out

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In fairness to Jake and Chris, "Nuts and Bolts" sounds like the kind of cheesy innuendo that would be a Ratchet and Clank subtitle.

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Ghost in the Shell (2017)

A cyborg academic (Scarlett Johansson as Major Motoko Kusanagi as Ian Bogost) breaks into AAA game developers offices and gives rogue talks about the expressive power of video games.

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Bit late on this, but did anyone else find it weird that they referenced this interview twice but never mentioned the writer, John Walker? Just felt really dismissive of a person who, generally, has a good reputation in the industry. If they really wanted to know what Walker's intentions were, couldn't they just ask him?

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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.

 

This made me giggle and now I cannot unsee those poorly placed glasses, dammit.

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The sunglasses are Oakleys, too. How do they fit?

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I never get caught up on stuff like that in cartoons. Or things like a cartoon character's goggles blinking in place of their eyes.

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John Walker's always struck me as the guy you tolerate at RPS because their editorial direction in general is really solid even if one of their writers is full of himself. Sort of like Ben Kuchera at Polygon, who appears to be better than he was at Penny Arcade Report but still not exactly great.

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LOL

I wasn't gonna say it. Glad someone did!

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