Media Crossover Expert Topher “Docfuture” Florence sits with the panel to cover fetchy texture and Bare Nuckle. Ash Parrish shares thoughts on the Halo TV series in “Master Chief Does the Covenant.” Hosted by Alex Jaffe, with Tim Rogers, Brandon Sheffield and Topher Florence. “Master Chief Does the Convenant” by Ash Parrish. Edited by Esper Quinn, original music by Kurt Feldman.
Questions this week:
Can video games do anything interesting with the multiverse trend? (07:21)
What are your predictions for Kingdom Hearts 4? (14:01)
Why do games give you equipment and features later that would have made it more fun from the start? (19:30)
Design a game based on the winter biathalon of cross country skiing and rifle shooting that doesn’t take place in an athletic competition. (25:34)
How would you design a convention experience for Mario Party games? (31:05)
Dirtbag Kiko B asks: What’s an example of a fetch quest you sincerely enjoyed? (42:09)
What are the greatest challenges in video game animation today? (48:14)
What distinctions would you make between the numbers 1 through 4 on a 10-point game rating scale? (53:47)
What is the CW’S Riverdale of video games? (01:05:45)
That Vitamin water zero cross up happened to me like 2 weeks ago. Liquid death was $5-6 the first I saw it, that is the only issue I have with it.
The XII example is the posterchild for me. I ranted about the Tales games doing this in the last ep’s thread too.
With both these games you can see by merely playing or reading the skill charts what they expect you to build towards. The player has nothing to be surprised by with the progression of the license board, but the acquired equippables get locked behind grinding and blind spending off points. For the Tales, I feel like a cancellable move integral to make a 3D action game feel good, that fluidity is important to show the player is in control and inspire them to try things. There is just an emptiness to a lot of the strings that lead to the player not learning anything about the systems until the real stuff gets introduced 8hrs in.
JOKER FOLLOW-UP: Batman has killed Joker in many different stories, but he’s never shot him with a gun! Tim Drake did shoot Joker in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, but usually when Batman has to do it, he snaps his neck (The Dark Knight Returns, JLA: The Nail, The Batman Who Laughs, and heavily implied in The Killling Joke).
shocked SHOCKED to learn that brandon hasn't seen the exorcist before! one of my favs for sure.
(in all honesty i'm not really one of those "how have you never seen x" guys. people get to stuff at their own pace in their own order. i hope you enjoy the exorcist though!)
@rootfifthoctave the more popular something is within a niche genre the less likely I am to have engaged with it, because I usually assume it’s the bad version of a thing I like! This was good though.
@exodus i think the exorcist sort of earns its infamy (that it got through being banned and censored and stuff) but i could also see how someone could just think it’s old hat and not up to the standard of other more modern/weird stuff.
i only saw the godfather relatively recently, kind of braced for it to become victim to its own hype. turns out it’s pretty great!
jaffe dropped both “Ranger IX” and “Barry Levingrandson” to absolutely zero response and I have no idea how. we’re lucky to have him. we’re lucky to all be alive at the same time as him.
also, ash’s Master Beef makes this pound for pound one of the best episodes for puns ever.
@esper well the levingrandson was a call back so I think we were just ready for that one. the other I didn’t hear (a lot of what jaffe says in the heat of things is half swallowed by discord)
Nice episode! I was surprised by the fact that you ended up having basically the same conversation that emerged here on the forums on last episode’s thread.
I guess multiverses can be theoretically good, but they are artifacts so prone to be driven by money-chasing, fan service or any combination of both that it’s very hard for them to succeed. I have a read a couple of comics that dealt with that idea in interesting ways such as Flex Mentallo, and that Spiderverse movie was really fun and refreshing, but it’s so hard for these projects to fall into the hands of people who actually want to do stuff with them that it’s generally hard to be interested.
By the way Jaffe’s information on the amount of children Bobby Kottick has seems to be wrong, I found out the real answer.
(hehe)
Aaaaand since you already clicked in this spoiler and ended up here, here’s something kind of disturbing related to both Call of Duty and the mandatory pets trope that you guys were talking about.
JOKER CORRECTION: I forgot about Countdown, a multiverse-hopping series from 2007. Jason Todd travels to Earth-51, an alternate universe where Batman did in fact shoot The Joker after A Death in the Family.
It‘s fun hearing everyone’s predictions about the new Kingdom Hearts involving more recently acquired Disney IPs like Marvel or Star Wars but personally I hope it's entirely set within the world of Pollyanna
All the talk this week of progression helped me articulate why I stopped playing Mordor: Shadow of War. I was in hour 12 or something like that and the game just kept introducing new systems. I‘ve noticed a lot of modern AAA games do this, but a real blow to Mordor was that these systems were more or less integral to the rest of the game. I had to keep my eye on things and invest time and resources into, idk, defending my strongholds or whatever. If I didn’t, I either couldn‘t progress, or progress became hampered in some way. I’d been having fun boppin' around and killing orcs and stuff, but man I became disinterested fast.
This episode gave me many deep belly laughs, which was nice. Thanks for another great ep!
