Ep. 185 - Newman On The Toilet, with Kazuma Hashimoto

billy

RE: removing lives from games, I disagree! Sometimes!

I played through Crash Bandicoot 4 recently, which gives you the option to play in ‘Retro’ mode (finite lives that need to be replenished) or ‘Modern’ mode (unlimited lives, lots of checkpoints). I started in modern mode and the game felt lightweight and disposable. There was essentially no way to lose - play a level enough times and you can memorise / fluke / brute-force your way through. The difficult levels were frustrating rather than challenging.

I then started again in retro mode and the added peril of potentially having to start again if you mess up makes it a completely different game. You take fewer risks, and the ones you do take feel like a bigger achievement. It also makes returning to a level for collectables / time trials actually worth something more than cosmetics and skins, as you’ll inevitably pick up some lives along the way to use in the harder levels.

Worked well for Mario Odyssey though.

goonbag

billy Therein lies the rub - lives are only good when the game is designed around them.

And I forgot to say how much I enjoyed the episode and guest, too! Kazuma’s insights were great, I am not familiar with RE for example and never considered that there are political themes lurking in there.

milo

billy

Completely agree with you here! A lot of times if a game doesn’t “punish” me for losing, I’ll get bored quickly. No risk, no reward, yknow? There are many ways to keep a player motivated to not lose, but the risk of having to start the segment again is a good enough one for me. Maybe balanced with a fair checkpoint or continue system, where when you lose a life you start at a checkpoint, but lost them all and you have to do the level over.

Definitely a relic of the olden days, but it can be pulled off in today’s game development spectrum, IMHO.

yeso

seconding the guest praise and I know I’m a dang broken record but kazuma should play pathologic 2 if he hasn’t already (if I may make a suggestion re said political themes)

Gaagaagiins

yeso seconding the guest praise and I know I’m a dang broken record but kazuma should play pathologic 2 if he hasn’t already (if I may make a suggestion re said political themes)

^YEAH

connierad

re: games you can’t play anymore;

I was thinking of MAG on the PS3, an online FPS shooter that boasted 256-player matches. Unplayable now since the servers shut down. Also the Satellaview games on SNES.

@exodus it may please you to find out that the platformer+hacking gamejam game that was supposed to expire actually had its players actively work against making it unplayable for others. Not sure what the state of it is now but it lasted much longer than expected. Vice covered it: https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbmmq/players-were-meant-to-make-cruel-world-unplayable-now-theyre-saving-it

tombo

esper love the hangoutable video version. maybe it could have similarly insert-credited little gameplay loops (as in looping short videos of gameplay footage, not as in rewarding game design). i think it’s very pleasant as it is though, if it just showed every game they talk about it would be annoying because when not looking at the screen i would be wondering if i missed something. anyway, good job!

good guest this week too!

esper

tombo i thought about getting gameplay in there, but it’s a big question of “intellectual property” since i’d have to pull from some streamer or another to get my hands on the footage unless there’s a big archive of free use gameplay footage I don’t know about. i’ll look into it more!

gouis hmm!! i just opened Apple Podcasts and it downloaded and played ok, but I did have some problems last night due to originally typo-ing the MP3’s url at first (fixed that problem pretty quick, though). try closing and reopening the app? thanks for letting me know about the issue, I’ll keep looking into it

gouis

Anyone else having issues downloading/listening to the pod? I keep getting errors on Apple podcasts.

gouis

esper Closed and re-opend the app, deleted the episode, marked as unplayed, and then was unable to re-download. Could just be me but just wanted to let you know.

tombo

esper i mean… there is a big question of “intellectual property” with streaming in the first place. has any streamer/video creator ever successfully sued somebody over the use of just gameplay footage? i think it’s virtually impossible that someone would be able to recognise it, they knew or had a way to contact the original creator, that the creator would care, and that they would insist on it being taken down and/or had the grounds to pursue legal action.

in any case, youtube has a Creative Commons filter, some people upload their videos directly with that license to make it clear they are free to be reused and manipulated. it’s easy enough to find popular games, some of the more obscure ones that come up on the show, probably not.

DanTheBrad

Any game where your love interest is a satalite deserves better than a 2

nolimitsquesting

The video version of this episode is a great way to relax! There’s a sort of meditative aspect to it that adds to the atmosphere of the podcast, I like it!

Kazuma was a great guest, he really helped me rethink the Resident Evil series and want to play Final Fantasy XII!

I was laughing hard at the Newman (or rather, Wayne Knight) on the toilet bit and the discussion of the Nintendo calculator app.

When it comes to reasons I’ve stopped playing a game, I stopped playing Shenmue 3 because it completely shattered the illusion of Shenmue for me. This is one of the problems of loving a game as teenager and being disappointed that the reality of the game didn’t live up to my projection of ‘Shenmue’ as I grew up. The good news is, now that I’m older I can experience the old joy of Shenmue whenever I walk around my house, go outside or study!

xhekros

Nice episode. I enjoyed Kazuma being a guest and I loved his insights on Final Fantasy XII, since I didn’t realize about the colonization theme (maybe because I was in my late teens-early 20s when I played it), but yeah, the ensemble cast is really strong and mature and I would have loved the game to be more political, but I always left the game nearly the end because I felt Vayne as the weakest link of the game. As for the episode, I also abandoned the Persona 5 ship nearly at the end when I would have wished to do it sooner, and one of the reason was precisely because of the cast. I don’t mind a series being anime-tropey, but I care about characters that are badly used or that don’t seem to be well meshed together, and this to me felt like one of the cases.
Also, I don’t know if Jaffe has though about it, but a nice and funny question (specially if taken as a joke) would be which is (if it’s not done) which is “The Birth of a Nation” of video games.

Jaffe

xhekros I have considered this, but decided that it would not be funny!

Gaagaagiins

esper p.s. this week’s lightning round is a real fun game to play on your own, I need to think of my own ranking scale

10 - Factorio or Bloodborne
9 - Monster Hunter World: Iceborne
8 - Final Fantasy X
7 - Journey
6 - Death Stranding
5 - Final Fantasy IX
4 - Ratchet and Clank (2016)
3 - Diablo III
2 - DOOM: Eternal
1 - Persona 5

xhekros which is “The Birth of a Nation” of video games.

I am going to allow myself to ignore what I think the worst aspect to think about is wrt Birth of a Nation. As horrendous as its content matter is, what really makes this film an awful thing to think about is that it was extremely commercially successful and is a landmark film in technical achievement as well as filmmaking as an art.

Let’s instead remind ourselves that the creation of Birth of a Nation was not just controversial in hindsight but controversial at the time of its creation. It’s not like we invented antiracism in the late 20th century.

And so, while I didn’t set out to answer this question with my calibration ranking, I posit that this is the definitive answer to what the Birth of a Nation of videogames is, and unequivocally a goose egg outta ten:

Custer’s Revenge

esper

tombo the Creative Commons filter!! I forgot about that and use it frequently in projects. good catch, I’ll use that in the next one for sure!!

exodus

tombo even if it were uploaded under a friendly license like that we’d have to/want to contact the person who made it and get permission which is a whole situation each week. The only solution I could see would be to identify a series of folks from whom we’d get permission to use everything they have uploaded, which might work.

But either way I sort of feel like the unrelated footage is quite insert credit-y in the older sense of the site’s vibe so I’m not totally sure it’d benefit us to change - though it’d help us get into the old algorithms better I reckon.

shane

If some people are seeing the episode on apple podcasts being displayed at 1 second that’s just because it hasn’t loaded the meta data for the episode. once you press play it should figure out it’s 1 hour, 12 minutes. This meta data issue is related to the way the RSS feed is created and should be some fixed sometime in the future.

billy

Jaffe also the answer is basically just the last ten years.

yeso

it’s bioshock infinite

billy

or wario land

hellojed

Was the game Brandon couldn’t think of the name of Everyday The Same Dream? I played that and I think I had a similar reaction.

exodus

hellojed it’s this one, Actual Sunlight:

completely insufferable. I got so mad playing it. I feel bad when I dislike someone’s creative work but I just could not stand this.

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