Idle Thumbs 247: The Clone Progenitors

[Chris]

Idle Thumbs 247:

The Clone Progenitors

Welcome, cadet. Your mission: go back in time, and kill baby Hitler. To assist you in this perilous but vital task, you will be outfitted with an array of dice, two decks of standard playing cards, a two-stroke go-kart engine, one swarm of bees, and a Carl's Jr. Western Bacon Cheeseburger. Good luck. Never give up. Never surrender. Oh, and if you see Winston Churchill, give him this teddy bear for me.

Discussed: The Witness, Return of the Obra Dinn, Tharsis, Churchill Solitaire, Sage Solitaire, Bridge, Reality on the Norm

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[zerofiftyone]

I really enjoyed the discussion of Tharsis. When Chris described it as a game about mitigating randomness through smart planning and prioritisation, it occurred to me that XCOM (the 2012 version) is really similar in this regard (especially when played on the highest difficulty). XCOM is another game where the success of your individual actions is determined by chance, but in the lower difficulties, consequences for bad strategy are pretty forgiving, and the player can pretty much brute force their way to success. However on the highest difficulty, the cards are stacked against the player pretty harshly in a way that reminds me of Tharsis. The only way to succeed is by being prepared for the worst outcome at all times, and having a plan in place for when it arises. It really becomes a game about managing risk and mitigating the effects or random chance.

 

Funnily enough, it also has sort of a board game feel to it, even though that's not at all suggested in the game's presentation. It's possible that it feels that way to me because apparently the design for XCOM was prototyped by using actual board game prototypes. 

[Spenny]

Mirrors Edge apparently used a fully animated person as well, so third person kind of works.

 

[Jake]

Yeah first person games that use a fully animated person often "kind of" work in third person but without some correction it ends up looking kind of like a waking nightmare when cheated animations play in full view of the camera.

[J.C.]

That arm flapping makes it hard to take the running animation seriously.

[DMorsing]

The real interesting part is when they play out the cutscenes in 3rd person

 

AGDQ did a demonstration after the mirror's edge speed run (begins at 56:27 if the time on youtube link doesn't work) 

[Gormongous]

That was a really excellent revisiting of the conversation about copyright, derivative works, and "ownership," guys. It felt like you touched a lot of different perspectives, a few of which I hadn't considered fully. Thanks!

[OBAMA_TookMy_VCR]

I love playing Tharsis. My brother and I play it all the time. The most fun I had was trying to make it to Mars without eating anyone. We figured out how to make it to Mars pretty much every game

[frythefly]

Which Trump clone are we talking about? Truump or Truuump?

 

Re Gaming history: I came across this video of Peter Cushing painting miniatures and setting up a war game according to the rules in H.G. Wells' Little Wars "A Game for Boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl [ ] who likes boys' games and books":

 

[Flay]

Hoo boy, hearing my email kind of makes it sound a bit like I'm shitting on Toby Fox for not letting people sell derivative works. That's totally not the case, his choice is perfectly reasonable and well within his rights, but it's a topic that I think is worth discussing.

 

That said your discussion about copyright was really interesting, so thanks!

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Also RE: the Big Dog discussion

 

[Korax]

FEAR had a first-person body model and a full-body shadow, plus ghosts and bullet time, so I'm pretty sure that means FEAR is better than The Witness.

 

And TCBY hasn't meant "This Can't be Yogurt" for about 30 years now, old man (Jake).

[jeremywc]

The talk of Doom and Myst brought up one of my earliest experiences with PC games. When I was in Jr. High, our school purchased a brand new PC with a modem and dial-up service and put it in the library. We had a period where you could sign up to go into the library and take turns using the PC and getting on the Internet. This usually led to about 5-10 boys huddled around the PC a few times a week.

 

Poking around the web using Netscape and WebCrawler quickly lost it's luster, so mostly we just ended up taking turns playing shareware demos, especially Doom. I don't think any of us had a lot of exposure to PC gaming up to that point. I remember an argument one day where someone said they had gotten a new "3D" game like Doom but it was called Myst. He said the graphics and music were way better than Doom's. Everyone was skeptical. Then he was asked what kind of guns Myst had. The answer (none) led to a lot of blank stares. By the time he finished explaining the concept to us, everyone had written off Myst as the worst idea for a game. The next time we met up someone had loaded the shareware demo of Dark Forces and we moved on.

[eot]

I used to play bridge in high school. One teacher at our school was an accomplished player, former European champion among several other titles, and managed to convice the principal to let him teach a bridge class. I suppose his skill was a little bit wasted on us, but by the end of it we could actually play kind of properly. Having an exam that quizzes you on what the right card to play is in a given situation is pretty different (and quite tricky actually). It's something I've been wanting to pick up again, but unless you join a club it can be hard to find people to play with.

[Ewan]

Even since watching The Sound of Music on New Year's Day I sing the words Idle Thumbs to the tune of Edelweiss when a new episode pops up...so that's a thing.

[Dewar]

  On 1/29/2016 at 1:24 AM, Korax said:

FEAR had a first-person body model and a full-body shadow, plus ghosts and bullet time, so I'm pretty sure that means FEAR is better than The Witness.

 

And TCBY hasn't meant "This Can't be Yogurt" for about 30 years now, old man (Jake).

 

It's been The Country's Best Yogurt for as long as I can remember, though I'm not surprised that it's meant different things at different times.

[jennegatron]

It will forever be this can't be yogurt in my heart.

 

(I prefer to approach it less from a I can't believe it's not butter route and more, 'eww, what is this? it can't be yogurt.')

[Lork]

I haven't listened to this episode yet and this probably isn't related to it at all but I feel that it's vitally important for Chris to know that Duke Nukem's voice was inspired by "The Full Throttle Guy".

 

 

[Badfinger]

I didn't know TCBY stood for anything other than The Country's Best Yogurt! We also had a frozen yogurt shop called "I Can't Believe It's Yogurt" near us when I was growing up. Apparently the yogurt cabal thought everyone was completely incredulous that yogurt could be frozen and then consumed.

[Jov]

Just finished listening, and with regards to the Robot News section, it didn't sound like it fully sunk in: the DARPA contract with Boston Dynamics has ended entirely. Big dog was too loud, and attempts at quieter versions were too weak to be useful. So, sorry, no nuclear dog or electric dogs are on the way.

 

On the bright side,

, and this recently blew me away (skip to 50 secs):

 

[Chris]

  On 1/29/2016 at 10:36 PM, Lork said:

I haven't listened to this episode yet and this probably isn't related to it at all but I feel that it's vitally important for Chris to know that Duke Nukem's voice was inspired by "The Full Throttle Guy".

Whoa!

[namman siggins]

  On 1/29/2016 at 11:45 PM, Jov said:

On the bright side,

, and this recently blew me away (skip to 50 secs):

This is the most adorable thing in the world

[Calvarok]

Halo's third person animations are still a little floaty-feet-ish, but I think they've always been pretty good and gotten better over the course of the series.

 

Also the bridge section was interesting to listen to, even though I didn't understand most of what was said and the music only added to the sense of having entered into someone else's dream world

[Patrick R]

I was surprised to hear that Jake didn't have a PC capable of running The Witness, since my three year old off-the-shelf laptop more than meets the minimum system requirements. Is it that you actually can't play The Witness or that you want to play that game with all the graphics set to max?

[Jake]

  On 1/30/2016 at 5:58 AM, Patrick R said:

I was surprised to hear that Jake didn't have a PC capable of running The Witness, since my three year old off-the-shelf laptop more than meets the minimum system requirements. Is it that you actually can't play The Witness or that you want to play that game with all the graphics set to max?

I bet my PC could run it but I kind of want to wait until I can play on something that runs it really really well.

[melmer]

I just noticed today that Spotify has added podcasts to the iphone app. There was pretty thin pickings in the "tech and gaming" category, you guys could clean up!

Looks like you can upload your whole backcatelogue, and probably get paid a bit for listens... That's how Spotify works right?