Ep. 268 - Cake Realizer Button

穴

I’ve heard a ton of references to the Steel Battalion controller through all my life, but hadn’t ever looked at a picture of it until now, and I gotta say I definitely was oversold on the size of that controller by all the game talkers of the world. I imagined it being like 4 times as big.

Gaagaagiins

穴

Gaagaagiins exactly! this is kinda what i was picturing and what it should be like tbh

Samograj

One cool tribute is in Left 4 Dead, you get an achievement for killing 53,595 zombies and it’s called “Zombie Genocidest” while Dead Rising had a achievement “Zombie Genocider” for killing 53,594 zombies.
That joke was even present in later titles of these series each adding one required kill.

exodus

Samograj Hmm yeah, I forgot about the achievement tribute “genre.” that was happening for a while there, with achievements being references to specific things. Maybe that still goes on today? I’ve turned off all achievement notifications and with the new xbox interface I don’t even know how to find them anymore!

JJSignal

exodus I’m still doing it. When I have to make achievements, I just name them after or reference things I like. Our upcoming game’s achievements are just names of albums and songs that relate to the chapter. I hate achievements, but if I were an Achievement Liker, I’d want something that’s more than just “1000 Kills.” and I like seeing glimpses of things a team likes or references in their game. It makes it feel like something more than a task I had to do to make my gamer points go up or whatever.

esper

穴 two racing wheels is genuinely inspired thinking. get bennett back on the line,

exodus

JJSignal I try to make them a little fun but I’ll admit it’s more of an afterthought for me still.

undarlegt

In Cold Blood was an adventure game on the original Playstation where you were playing through the main character’s interrogation so if you died he would correct himself, saying something like “No, that’s not how it happened”. It became sort of silly if you were stuck on a part and repeatedly died in similar ways. It would seem like the main character just repeated ways in which he had died to the interrogator.

Gaagaagiins

undarlegt It would seem like the main character just repeated ways in which he had died to the interrogator.

Objection, your honour, the prosecution’s cross examination of my client is unacceptably aggressive, there must be some consideration for my client’s unique memory mnemonic where they make up a gruesome way they died when they forget minor circumstantial details such as whether they did a crime or not

gsk

Doesn’t the first Ubisoft Prince of Persia do pretty much exactly what Tim describes in terms of game-overs, ie the game being framed as a story being told by the prince after the fact, with him saying “no, that’s not how it went” whenever the player dies?

RE: games paying tribute to other games, Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell had a few back-and-forths, culminating in Sam Fisher’s brief moment of existential crisis in Splinter Cell Blacklist when he learns the other guy “retired” and he’s the only guy still out there sneakin’.

exodus

gsk Tim talked about that game! Did it not make it into the episode?

deepspacefine

I think the Deep Space 9 documentary is made for fans with the younger-brother chip on their shoulder about the show. There’s not a lot of explicit ds9 hate (these days at least) but between the fawning love that gets thrown at The Next Generation and a lot of people being like “i just couldn’t get into ds9,” some of us have developed a bit of a complex. The fake plot they developed was pretty bad, but the documentary is worth watching just to hear Terry Farrell tell her story of getting forced out by not-cool-guy rick berman.

And for video game homages – surprised that tokimeki memorial didn’t come up. Seems like there are a few cool ones there.

wickedcestus

The Good Life does the “Well I definitely shouldn’t do that!” style of resetting when you die during missions and I found it pretty annoying!

gsk

exodus He did talk about the series (mostly the 2008 reboot) and mentioned that he replayed all of them somewhat recently, but he brought up that narrator idea as if it’s something some game ought to do, and not something Sands of Time essentially already did back in 2002 or whenever. Listening back, I guess it’s more that he specifically wants the player-character to verbally reconsider their fatal action in the moment, rather than it being framed as them recounting their actions after the fact.

Chopemon

With reference to the Fortnite section and did Cliffy B design Fortnite: Mrs. Chopemon got me Cliffy B’s autobiography as a joke gift for Christmas and on the cover it says design consultant on Fortnite. It also doesn’t mention LawBreakers. This sounds to me like he once looked at a pitch doc, decided he didn’t want to be part of it but still wanted to put it on the cover of his book.

NoJoTo

Chopemon wait his nickname is actually ‘cliffy b?’ i thought that was a joke

Chopemon

NoJoTo Cliffy B is as real as it gets

gsk

NoJoTo no kidding, he tried to rebrand to “Dude Huge” at some point

exclamatia

A mission type sorely missed:

DavidNoo

exclamatia Question 2 was so reductive I almost had to quit living, so thanks for bringing me back with this!

esper

WARNING: there IS dogpatch footage in the youtube version of the show this week

Mnemogenic

I’ve never played Loom before, but hearing Frank describe the Correct Loom in so much detail made me really want to try it. I got the EGA version, set up that MT-32 emulation, and played through the whole thing in one sitting. What a great game!