Idle Thumbs 248: The Bear's Black Heart

[Valorian Endymion]

rip birthday bear...

 

....but it droped any loot?

 

Oh, wait, maybe it is like Far Cry 3, with some more birthday bears you might be able to craft a belt or a bigger holster.

 

Jokes aside, once the noise over, the silence that followed was quite amazing.

[Cordeos]

  On 2/5/2016 at 2:23 PM, Valorian Endymion said:

rip birthday bear...

 

....but it droped any loot?

 

Oh, wait, maybe it is like Far Cry 3, with some more birthday bears you might be able to craft a belt or a bigger holster.

 

Jokes aside, once the noise over, the silence that followed was quite amazing.

I really hope they skin the bear and turn it into a wallet!

[SuperBiasedMan]

  On 2/5/2016 at 2:42 PM, Cordeos said:

I really hope they skin the bear and turn it into a wallet!

 

There's a story behind this wallet...

[Bjorn]

I could continue hearing the happy birthday song play for like 2 whole minute after the episode ended.  That really is like the sound of madness. 

[eot]

I'm disappointed that thing broke so easily. They should make a better one that's more like a black box.

[sclpls]

  On 2/5/2016 at 1:55 PM, Apple Cider said:

Nick looks so young compared to how I imagined he looked just hearing his voice every week. 

 

They are all babies to me.

[Bjorn]

  On 2/5/2016 at 5:47 PM, eot said:

I'm disappointed that thing broke so easily. They should make a better one that's more like a black box.

 

I looked it up, it's only $20 to order one, I think if you were going to make it harder to stop, you'd have to charge a lot more.  There is, hilariously, an option to add glitter to the inside of the bear though, so when they rip it open they get glitter everywhere.

[dayeight]

one of the best episodes I've ever heard.

[sevirm]

In this episode it is said that "Myst clones" are what gave Myst a bad name. I'm racking my brain here. What is an example of a "Myst clone"? Are you referring to the sequels?

 

I feel like the reason Myst was popular at the time was how amazing those pre-rendered scenes looked on a CRT monitor and how it would run well as long as you had a reasonably fast CD-Rom drive. Low specs and pretty. The esoteric and sometimes inconveniently arranged puzzles were what gave the game a bad name in my opinion. As a 10 year old kid, its riddles went completely over my head and what drew me in was the atmosphere and imaginative world.

 

Later as an adult I realized that pretty much every solution was in the game somewhere as long as you were willing to read several novels worth of in-game books. I have very mixed feeling about the Myst series. Thank god for "Let's Play" videos so I can be nostalgic and let someone else suffer through the actual game.

[Chris]

  On 2/5/2016 at 6:45 PM, sevirm said:

In this episode it is said that "Myst clones" are what gave Myst a bad name. I'm racking my brain here. What is an example of a "Myst clone"? Are you referring to the sequels?

There was about a decade's worth of abstract puzzley adventure games set in realistically rendered and sometimes surreal worlds that followed Myst and The 7th Guest. (I would say a modern game like The Room is a more streamlined descendant of this.) I honestly can't remember names at this point but the hardcore adventure game community was largely split into camps about which of the two main approaches (Myst-like puzzle-first design or LucasArts/Sierra narrative-first design) were the right way for adventure games to go. It's dumb to think about now because it's one of those now-irrelevant tribal chest-beating arguments that nobody cares about, but it was totally a thing for some reason.

[sevirm]

Bad Mojo maybe?

[dium]

There were a TON of them, but I don't remember ANY of their names. I know that doesn't help.

 

I remember as a child going to Office Max or CompUSA or whatever other boring-ass store that sold Windows software and the "games" section of the software aisle would be at least 50% Myst clones. 

 

EDIT: A quick googling reminds me that Rhem was a name I saw a lot. Also Schizm. Games with those kinds of names.

[Korax]

[sclpls]

A lot of those Myst clones were stuff you'd see in the bargain CD-ROM bin of office supply stores. If you do a search at a site like Home of the Underdog I'm sure you can find a ton if you look around the years 94 and 95.

 

That being said, I do agree with sevirm that I don't think the clones are really what gave Myst a bad reputation. As the level of fidelity in games improved I think a lot of the contrivances of Myst aged poorly. The problem with puzzles in LucasArts style adventure games were that the solutions often didn't make a lot of sense to anyone other than the designers. Myst had a different kind of problem which was that it didn't really make any sense why these puzzles existed in this world at all.

 

Another problem Myst suffered from was that the story was really bad. That meant that the only really attractive quality to Myst for a lot of people was the environment itself. But as game development techniques improved that environment felt empty and comparatively shallow. I think this is the basis for the eventual backlash against Myst, fairly or unfairly.

 

That Myst is now being reappraised more positively is in part I think to general 90's nostalgia where a lot of things we appraised poorly immediately following the 90's are being reevaluated. Her Story is an example of a reappraisal of FMV technology, and I suppose the Witness is a reappraisal of an empty beautiful island full of puzzles.

[Bjorn]

I just noticed in my pod player that the genre of this episode is "Teddy Bear".

[DocRandal]

In case of Daddy Long Leg erections lasting longer than 99 million years, please see a doctor.

 

Also Chris, never surrender. Never ever, ever surrender.

[Uber]

I was inspired to make a little something by the end of this episode.

 

Idle Thumbs Presents: Curb Your Enthusiasm

[dium]

  On 2/5/2016 at 8:47 PM, sclpls said:

Another problem Myst suffered from was that the story was really bad.

 

The people in my life who were (and are still) really into Myst like it for the story and world building much more than the graphics or puzzles. You aren't the first person I've heard to call the Myst story "really bad" so I'm not gonna argue with you, but let it be known that the opposite opinion is also popular.

 

That said, I tend to wonder if people conflate Myst's story (which is pretty threadbare and elemental) with Myst's hammy amateur acting. I find the FMV stuff to be endearing, but that's about the most nostalgia-tinted and charitable thing someone can say about it.

[Argobot]

  On 2/5/2016 at 10:08 PM, Uber said:

I was inspired to make a little something by the end of this episode.

Idle Thumbs Presents: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Very good job

[jeremywc]

  On 2/5/2016 at 6:45 PM, sevirm said:

In this episode it is said that "Myst clones" are what gave Myst a bad name. I'm racking my brain here. What is an example of a "Myst clone"? Are you referring to the sequels?

 

I think Lighthouse is probably the most egregious example I can think of.

 

  On 2/5/2016 at 8:47 PM, sclpls said:

Another problem Myst suffered from was that the story was really bad. That meant that the only really attractive quality to Myst for a lot of people was the environment itself. But as game development techniques improved that environment felt empty and comparatively shallow. I think this is the basis for the eventual backlash against Myst, fairly or unfairly.

 

I agree that Myst itself didn't do a great job of presenting the world and the justification for weird setting. I stopped and started it a few times and couldn't completely figure out what was going on. Once I read some of the companion books they put out, the game made a lot more sense to me. I think the team had imagined up a lot more to their world than what made it into the game. Maybe they had resource limits at the time that made it harder for them to present that up front? Ideally, a player shouldn't need to read a companion novel to get the full effect, but I think the market was a lot more forgiving of those kind of omissions in those days. Probably a lot of factors that led into it, but it clearly didn't hamstring their initial success.

[thespyisaspy]

"I can't put it in the trash because that's where our landlord... is"

 

I lost it.

[Nappi]

Fantastic ending!

[Vasari]

Oh my god, Chris

[Buns]

  On 2/4/2016 at 2:02 PM, dium said:

Love The Witness and The Witness talk, but loving even more how Myst is now part of video conversations again (and NOT in that infuriating dismissive "wasn't that shit horrible?" way that is STILL the default mode of discussing Myst, unfortunately).

Myst was cool, is all I'm saying.

As someone who grew up in a post-Myst world and didn't even know of the games existence until about 2 years ago when I started to indulge in the discussion of games and broadening my horizons the only conversations I hear of the game are mainly the impact it left behind.

 

On a side note I still do not know what the game looks or plays like(Haven't bothered to look it up). So my second hand opinion of the game is a positive one just from everything I hear.

 

I think its cool in general that people like me can learn so much about the legacy of games from yesteryear because older folk are now in a position to discuss these games with a much different lenses. I also love the fact that these old games still surprise me in the same way modern tiles do. I recently came across Hexen and SimAnt today and I felt so happy to be uncovering these odd gems for the first time. This is an experience that happens to me a lot when I listen to most podcasts on here.

[Bucket_of_Lizards]

That ending is some of the best Video game podcasting of our time, the weeks of buildup, the big plot twist, people were stabbed in the back, bears were sawed in the front, thank you for that Chris & Nick.