Jake

Idle Thumbs 203: Goat Impossible

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Idle Thumbs 203:

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Goat Impossible

This week, one of us is a murderer... But who? Is it Chris, who spent the week maximizing the traffic flow in his Cities: Skyline city, a city so perfect no one wanted to live there? Or could the murderer be Danielle, the one who spent the week actually murdering a bunch of people -- fictionally -- in Bloodborne? It was probably Jake, who spent the week without internet, but everyone at the cable company seems alive and well. A case this complicated will take at least six Jessica Fletchers to solve, and for that we have just the thing.

Things Discussed: Bloodborne, Cities: Skylines, Dyscourse, Zafehouse Diaries, Murder, She Wrote: A Game of Strategy and Pursuit

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Chris, is the youtuber you mentioned quill18? I haven't watched the videos for sure, but Rob Zacny mentioned this youtuber that got deep into highway planning & traffic management, and checking the twitter account I believe this person is Canadian, so just taking a stab here...

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FYI, The Name of the Rose takes place in a Benedictine monastery.

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If the Thumbs or anyone else is interested in the idea of cities that grow around their planning failures, check out this awesome series Unfinished London:

 

 

It's cool that through being somewhat faithful to real life systems, Skylines is also incredibly enlightening.

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Wow, Jake still doesn't have internet at home?  I think that's long enough to get a book deal about it if you want!

 

127 Hours (without internet): The Jake Rodkin Story

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Trivia time: Nic Cage's real name is Nicholas Coppola, nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, so his cousin actor would be either actress Sofia Coppola or one of any number of semi-obscure musicians.

 

Nic Cage actually named himself after Marvel Comics' Luke Cage, and then named his son Kal-El because I guess he didn't want his stupid comic book reference to go full circle and just wanted to make a new stupid comic book reference instead.

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I can't seem to find a "toblogs" or "T O Blogs" on Youtube. Hook me up? I'm extremely interested in road designs for Cities, since I can't seem to get them to work like they do in my actual city. Specifically, people on major streets have priority, and turning from a tiny residential street onto a major street you have to wait for an opening. There are no lights for every little residential street, and you can't cross the median to turn left (in most cases). That's accomplished by turning right onto the major street, then making a u-turn at an intersection or median cut-out.

 

In Cities, making my "major streets" into parallel one-way streets almost does the trick, except when traffic backs up, people on the major street will wait for the "intersection" to clear before proceeding. Whereas in real life there is no virtual intersection so you just go. The fact that a tiny street exits onto the major road should be inconsequential to the major road traffic...maybe I should use highways or highway ramps instead? That would look all wrong though.

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I can't seem to find a "toblogs" or "T O Blogs" on Youtube. Hook me up?

 

They were actually saying "

" because kids today with their blogs and vlogs.

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I wish I could afford some of that sweet new shoutout space. It's a really good idea.

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Jake with hair on his head is weird, I barely recognize him.

 

Edit - I can't think of any way to say that without it sounding really mean, I'm sorry Jake you're my secret favorite on the podcast.

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Ad talk: Speaking of 56 hour Audible Audiobooks, I got the complete works of Sherlock Holmes, also for one credit. Turns out I accidentally stayed subscribed after the last time I did a free trial (via thumbs I think) for six months, whoops.

 

This here link that you are looking at its highlighted in link colors and everything is the Traffic Engineer who made the city called Victoria and its really impressive and also informative.

 

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Chris, thank you for the vindication. Just the other night I was telling someone that Bloodborne looked like the 2004 Van Helsing movie and they said they weren't seeing it.

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I feel like IJ would be a rough listen! I wanted to check out the audiobook of Pikety's Capital, but it has a 100 page PDF of graphs, which doesn't work for my commuter listen.

 

This might be a little crass, because it's from an IT Commercial, but over the last 2 years or so I've really come to love audiobooks. I started using Audible because of the IT sponsorship. Stuff I would most highly recommend, both as being nourishing and fun literature, but also good audio performances:

 

Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - David Mitchell

The Flamethrowers: A Novel - Rachel Kushner

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace

The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon

Perdido Street Station - China Mieville

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If the Thumbs or anyone else is interested in the idea of cities that grow around their planning failures, check out this awesome series Unfinished London:

 

Thanks for this! This is really good.

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I feel like IJ would be a rough listen! I wanted to check out the audiobook of Pikety's Capital, but it has a 100 page PDF of graphs, which doesn't work for my commuter listen.

 

This might be a little crass, because it's from an IT Commercial, but over the last 2 years or so I've really come to love audiobooks. I started using Audible because of the IT sponsorship. Stuff I would most highly recommend, both as being nourishing and fun literature, but also good audio performances:

 

Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - David Mitchell

The Flamethrowers: A Novel - Rachel Kushner

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace

The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon

Perdido Street Station - China Mieville

 

If you're interested in Pikety, maybe you should give Balzac's Pere Goriot a shot (it's often translated into English as Old Goriot). I think that was the book that inspired him to do the research into Capital in the 21st Century because Balzac is obsessed with money, and Pikety wanted to check if Balzac's figures were legit or if he was just pulling figures out of his ass (it turns out he wasn't). The villain of the novel gives this incredible speech to the naive protagonist about how the world really works that breaks down how working is a sucker's game and economic inequality perpetuates itself. The novel also has some aspects that will cause readers today to roll their eyes, but the foray into realism is still impressive, and if you make it to the end you are treated to one of the great last sentences.

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Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

 

Finally got around to purchasing Wolf Hall in paperback after having the seed planted in my brain by many of Chris' compliments.  Haven't started reading yet but is it worth simply going the audio route?  I've got a long flight coming up in a few weeks so I'm hoping I'll have ample time for either method.

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Whoops posted this in the wrong thread.

 

I now want to play whatever someone's interpretation of the board game Cigar Chomping ExecutiveTM would be.

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Finally got around to purchasing Wolf Hall in paperback after having the seed planted in my brain by many of Chris' compliments.  Haven't started reading yet but is it worth simply going the audio route?  I've got a long flight coming up in a few weeks so I'm hoping I'll have ample time for either method.

 

I think they're both excellent as novels and performances. I didn't read the paper versions, so I couldn't say for comparison, but some people have expressed trouble keeping all the characters straight. There are probably 20 players, and it seems like half of them are named George or Thomas, but when they're all uniquely voiced I didn't having a problem keeping them straight. 

 

Also, thanks Paul, Le Pere Goriot is an audible option, and pretty well reviewed! I'll peep that. 

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The lady has a personal obsession with civil engineering, road construction and traffic stuff (she seriously missed her calling in life by not going into engineering back when she was in school).  You guys had her drooling talking about Cities: Skylines. 

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There's a lot of "did you know it's actually made in Unity?" games coming out lately, see Pillars of Eternity which is out today.

 

Regarding kids cooping games by splitting controls, I thought everyone had done that? I remember my way of introducing other kids to games was by letting them to handle shooting and the use key in Doom and Duke 3D.

 

Also I'm pretty sure the subdued nature of the Souls games is very intentional, it's present in every aspect of the games as Chris said and I always felt like I can see the designers went out of their way to achieve that. There is an interesting interview with Miyazaki and other people that worked on Dark Souls in the Dark Souls Design Works book which touches on this subject. I especially like this part:

 

Waragai: I remember when I was drawing the Undead Dragon, I submitted a design draft that depicted a dragon swarming with maggots and other gross things. Miyazaki handed it back to me saying, “This isn’t dignified. Don’t rely on the gross factor to portray an undead dragon. Can’t you instead try to convey the deep sorrow of a magnificent beast doomed to a slow and possibly endless descent into ruin?”

 

You can find the translated interview here:

http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/7force/blog/dark-souls-design-works-translation-creating-the-w/97235/

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I think the aesthetic is still driven by the design, just in a more straightforwardly pragmatic way:

1: I want something like a new Souls game

2: Except I don't want shields or magic, nothing the player can use to make the combat easier and less scary

3: So what I want instead are powerful but slow weapons like guns the player can use tactically

4: But they can't be like modern guns, because then the player would rely on them exclusively, so they have to be pretty primitive

So then you end up with a kind of victorian setting just because that's what makes sense with those gameplay constraints. Now, maybe that could have been executed a bit better, but the big steps to get there all make sense.

 

 

Man I want to play Bloodborne :(

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It took a bit of digging, but I tracked down the interview where Miyazaki specifically explains why the storytelling in the Souls games is so vague and clouded:

 

Does the sparseness of dialogue add extra pressure to the localisation effort, since each line has to carry more weight in conveying story and gameplay direction?
HM One of the goals of the Demon’s Souls concept was to tell more with less, and so the sparse dialogue becomes very important. We did our best with the localisation. I’m not confident that I’ve perfected this method of storytelling. There are probably things that weren’t clear enough, or could’ve been done more effectively. When I was young and reading fantasy novels – and this is at an age where I could only understand maybe half of what I was reading – there was an allure to not knowing entirely what was going on. So I had this idea that perhaps there would be some way to create that kind of feeling in a game. My method of storytelling comes from that inspiration, from the shadowy parts of a story or a legend that you can’t make out.

 

I remember alot of people talking about the same things when Dark Souls first came out that were talked about on the podcast. Lots of people wondered how much of it was actually intentional and how much just unintentionally turned out to be so engaging. If you look into interviews with the developers (Especially Miyazaki himself) it's clear that they are all ridiculously smart, creative people who knew exactly what they were doing. There are a few great interviews out there online, and if you're a fan I recommend buying Dark Souls Design Works from amazon. It contains a huge interview with all of the design leads for the game, and hearing them talk candidly about such an inscrutable game is really fascinating. They even joke about how easy the last boss ended up being.

 

This part was floating around a while ago on twitter/imgur and it's my absolute favourite quote:

 

Otsuka: Is there anything else in particular you tried to avoid?


Miyazaki: You may not believe me, but I always tried to maintain a certain level of refinement and elegance in all the designs. I often told the artists muddy or messy is definitely *not good*. I think this carries through the entire game, of course if you asked me to describe what this "elegance" is… well I think you just have to look at the designs and judge for yourself, but it really is one of the most important factors in everything I oversee.

 

Waragai: I remember you said that to me when I was working on the zombie dragon. Originally it was covered with maggots, but you told me that I needed instead, to try and capture the sadness of this great creature as it marches towards extinction.

 

Miyazaki: As I said before, everything has it's particular shade or tone, blight town for example is the rawest, most disgusting area in the game, but looking at the area as a whole, I wanted it to feel both bitterly cold and possess a deep sadness, and that's the atmosphere I tried to build on. You could say I have a habit of working in this way, and I think you can really see that in Dark Souls' art direction.

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