Ep. 268 - Cake Realizer Button

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”#p99147 Tim talked about that game! Did it not make it into the episode?

@“exodus”#p99176 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.

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.

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@“Chopemon”#p99200 wait his nickname is actually ‘cliffy b?’ i thought that was a joke

A mission type sorely missed:

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

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!

I didn‘t mention it on the show but I played the Turbografx version of Loom and couldn’t figure it out and super disliked the music! But I guess that wasn't the good version.

Maybe Tim was being facetious going on about the irony of claims that The Last of Us 2 is “too long” at 25(+) hours in the face of complaints that other much longer games aren‘t long enough, but it seems clear to me that the implicit criticism in complaints about overlength is not that something is too long in and of itself, but that it is incapable of holding the player’s interest for its whole duration. The Last of Us 2 is built around not only the same amount of (interesting) content as the first game, but largely the same content (mechanics, upgrade systems, encounter types), stretched to twice the length, plus the mentioned three-hour intro. Basically I want to challenge the claim that complaints about its length are an error on the player's part to approach it “like a book,” where the first is “like a video game”; they are both the same video game, and the second one really leans into the good faith/presumed emotional investment of the player when it throws a lot more more of the same stuff at them

@“exclamatia”#p99218 Question 2 was so reductive I almost had to quit living, so thanks for bringing me back with this!

Honestly, very humble of Bennett Foddy in the process of answering that question to not mention his role as the executive producer of Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor (just kidding, if Bennett Foddy had been involved, it woulda been good (or at least more funny)).

Man... Bennett Foddy is such a cool guy. It blows my mind sometimes that every once in a while when I listen to a favourite podcast of mine, I get to hear the thoughts of the guy who made that one funny Flash game everyone was super annoying about in my high school computer lab. One of the best kept secrets of videogames these days is that _QWOP_ was, well, it was a joke, but it was so much more authentically conceived and executed upon than anyone could have possibly imagined from playing it (at least, from playing or seeing it in the presence of annoying dudes in your high school computer lab).

@“NoJoTo”#p99216 Cliffy B is as real as it gets

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@“esper”#p99034 Narratively, what is happening to a video game character when they lose a life? (13:10)

I was hoping _Call of Juarez: Gunslinger_ would come up in the answers to this question. It's got a pretty neat framing device where the whole game is being told as a bar story by an (unreliable) old gunslinger recounting his glory days, and you're playing as him in these stories. Whenever you die, either the people in the bar or the narrator says the story's not being told right, and then you're reloaded back to the last checkpoint. This also affects the gameplay sometimes, when details of the level that you're playing will change whenever the narrator's memory fails, so you'll see the geometry get kinda wiped out and reframed on the fly.

It's an unexpectedly ambitious approach to storytelling that elevates it above the otherwise meh series.

@“NoJoTo”#p99216 no kidding, he tried to rebrand to “Dude Huge” at some point

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@“gsk”#p99304 NoJoTo no kidding, he tried to rebrand to “Dude Huge” at some point

ngl don't know why that didn't catch on, that rules

@“fivedollardare”#p99299 This reminded me that Bastion does this, too. The conceit ends up being a key part of the story.

@“Gaagaagiins”#p99305 probably because it was part of a broader attempt to reshape his image as some sort of geek-bro daywalker, which people suffered for maybe five seconds

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@“gsk”#p99314 probably because it was part of a broader attempt to reshape his image as some sort of geek-bro daywalker, which people suffered for maybe five seconds

removed from all context though, Dude Huge is so funny

cliffy b was inspired to write his memoir after tasting a dorito dipped in bawls