Idle Thumbs 304: The Game Shack

[Chris]

Idle Thumbs 304:

The Game Shack
It's a week of ambition, both realized and failed. All three hosts continue their journeys through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but Nick Breckon goes the extra mile by slogging through the entirety of the oft-maligned Trespasser: The Lost World. There, he discovers moments of brilliance years ahead of their time, and also a lot of broken dinosaur animations.

Discussed: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Trespasser: The Lost World - Jurassic Park

 

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[Gormongous]

Chris, you are 100% right about the Hammond narration. It slew me as an eleven-year-old and it hasn't lost any of its power since.

 

The reason that Minnie Driver's character responds to Hammond sometimes is that the quotes are from Hammond's autobiography, which had been published recently and which Driver's character was reading prior to the plane crash... or something like that.

[simonster]

I'm sorry, but I think the ability to remember things from our own life came before books introduced non-linear storytelling.

...actually.

[Cordeos]

Have the hosts played much Just Cause 2 or 3? Those games really encourage you to go wherever you want. The way the player moves through those worlds with the parachute, grappling hook and wing suit is so perfect.

[Jake]

  On 3/25/2017 at 10:07 AM, simonster said:

I'm sorry, but I think the ability to remember things from our own life came before books introduced non-linear storytelling.

...actually.

That's a super reductive take on our discussion, haha. Sorry if we seen this dumb to you. 

 

  On 3/25/2017 at 1:54 PM, Cordeos said:

Have the hosts played much Just Cause 2 or 3? Those games really encourage you to go wherever you want. The way the player moves through those worlds with the parachute, grappling hook and wing suit is so perfect.

Chris talked a bunch about Just Cause 3 in 2016 I think. 

[CaptainFish]

Did Jake say "he's Dot Gobblin' " as in the present participle  "Dot Gobbling" or did he posit that the cover character of "Dot Gobbler" is a "Dot Goblin"?
 

[Chris]

  On 3/25/2017 at 1:54 PM, Cordeos said:

Have the hosts played much Just Cause 2 or 3? Those games really encourage you to go wherever you want. The way the player moves through those worlds with the parachute, grappling hook and wing suit is so perfect.

Yeah I love those games a lot and have talked about all three of them in Thumbs. They're a bit different though in that (increasingly across the series) you have SO much control over your traversal that you're basically a superhero: it's almost like how you traverse the world in an extreme sports game but on a massive scale. Still fantastic, but a bit too low stakes to be an appropriate comparison to BOTW.

[Cordeos]

  On 3/25/2017 at 3:58 PM, Chris said:

Yeah I love those games a lot and have talked about all three of them in Thumbs. They're a bit different though in that (increasingly across the series) you have SO much control over your traversal that you're basically a superhero: it's almost like how you traverse the world in an extreme sports game but on a massive scale. Still fantastic, but a bit too low stakes to be an appropriate comparison to BOTW.

Yeah totally, just what sprung to mind when you talked about a game encouraging you to go everywhere. I wish more games cared about how fun traversal of the world was. Part of why I don't play GTA is I never found driving in that game compelling. I think a lot of games don't consider making your primary activity/locomotion method interesting to be enough of a priority.

[Patrick R]

Jake (on some podcast): Remember when people thought we were gonna do a Jurassic Park podcast? Crazy.

[vimes]

anybody has a clip to the mentionned hammond narration?

Also, I suspect you guys know this already, but Trespasser was helmed by Renaissance Man - and personal hero - Seamus Blackley who did amazing things in his life and recount them in this great discussion with Warren Spector.

 

[Henke]

The Gaaaaame shack is a little ol' place where

we can get togetheeeeerrrr

 

GAME SHACK, BABY (game shack ba-hey-beeeee)

 

I haven't listened to the episode yet.

[cooljammer00]

Ooh, tons of bleeping in this episode for some reason

 

I assume whatever it was has been excised from the stream recording? 

[Chris]

  On 3/27/2017 at 7:35 AM, cooljammer00 said:

Ooh, tons of bleeping in this episode for some reason

 

I assume whatever it was has been excised from the stream recording? 

 

No, it's still in there. It's really just incomprehensible garbage but I thought it would be funny to play it up into a seemingly bigger deal by going overboard with the censoring and music because that's the kind of thing that amuses me!

[SecretAsianMan]

Nick telling Chris and Jake about a section of the Zelda map that's a big maze reminded me of Chris trying to explain Link's Awakening to his dad.  "So the objective here is to navigate this maze"

[Urthman]

  On 3/27/2017 at 7:38 AM, Chris said:

 

No, it's still in there. It's really just incomprehensible garbage but I thought it would be funny to play it up into a seemingly bigger deal by going overboard with the censoring and music because that's the kind of thing that amuses me!

 

You're definitely not the only one amused, although it was even funnier when you used it to "tune out" of the bit where you got off into old-manning about being annoyed by the BotW download.

[marginalgloss]

Very much enjoyed the Trespasser chat. Life being what it is I don't think I'll have the time to watch the streams of this stuff but I do appreciate the concise, illuminating summary. I can remember playing the demo of Trespasser back in the day and being totally fascinated/bewildered. I don't think I ever got further than picking up items and flinging them about in the initial areas, though when Nick mentioned that the game has no UI, I so dearly wanted him to mention that the player can check their health by looking down at the heart-shaping tattoo inked conveniently above the character's cleavage. 

 

Also, I wanted to mention that the things that now seem admirable in Trespasser - the way in which the systems-driven mechanics govern everything, even to the extent of stopping player progress - reminded me instantly of The Last Guardian, which works in very much the same way. Trico is considerably more sophisticated than those raptors; but TLG is very much a game which is unafraid to interfere with or even stop player progress if its systems don't quite align perfectly. A lot of the time this means deferring player enjoyment, which is perhaps why the game has had a fairly mixed critical reception. But where I think The Last Guardian excels is the way in which those systematic fail states contribute to the meaning and flow of the game; put simply, when everything comes together not because it had to but because it could, it feels so much sweeter.

 

If anyone is interested I wrote more about this at length here (contains major spoilers from a point indicated). Sam Greer at Kotaku reached much the same conclusions here (with fewer spoilers). It is a really great game.