Better Brush Up On Your Hacking Skills for Quadrilateral Cowboy

I'm curious how this will go. It seems like a mix of both Blendo's narrative experiments (30 Flights and Gravity Bone) and Blendo's gameplay experiments (Flotilla and Atom Zombie Smasher)

I'm excited

Cool, this looks a bit more involved than Thirty Flights of Loving. Gotta keep making use of that Quake II engine.

I've been looking forward to this game ever since it was announced last month or so. I feel like these words from Blendo sum everything up perfectly:

"When you have a top-of-the-line hacking deck armed with a 56.6k modem and a staggering 256k RAM, it means just one thing: you answer only to the highest bidder."

I don't get it.

Let's just hope it is longer than 15 minutes.

The hell?

I'm into it...

But, the hell?

This looks potentially awesome.

Telnet madness!

Remote access!

Alright, I'm more in.

(I'm 23, dos passed me by a little bit, this could be a fun way to learn.)

I will never understand why these games get the praise they do, it's always just seemed like a bunch of nonsense and indie styled obfuscation of information. But it probably has lot to do with me just never understanding the appeal behind trying to tell a story without words: Good job, you didn't say anything, you're so clever, here let me pat your back.

Seen that Flotilla was pretty great and I loved the shit out of Atom Zombie Smasher... colour me interested for this one :)

@Neonie said:

I will never understand why these games get the praise they do, it's always just seemed like a bunch of nonsense and indie styled obfuscation of information. But it probably has lot to do with me just never understanding the appeal behind trying to tell a story without words: Good job, you didn't say anything, you're so clever, here let me pat your back.

Color me fucking surprised that a dude with an anime avatar on an internet forum would be spiteful of any creative media that doesn't hamfist dialogue into your brain.

if this is in the same world as Atom Zombie Smasher and Thirty Flights of Loving, I'm even more in.

Hopefully this is a real game and not just another scam like the last "game".

Came here to preach the gospel of Thirty Flights of Loving was a bowl of bullshit but this looks kinda okay.

jason();

@nohthink said:

First?

Ha, no achievement for you!

@ColumnBreaker said:

@Neonie said:

I will never understand why these games get the praise they do, it's always just seemed like a bunch of nonsense and indie styled obfuscation of information. But it probably has lot to do with me just never understanding the appeal behind trying to tell a story without words: Good job, you didn't say anything, you're so clever, here let me pat your back.

Color me fucking surprised that a dude with an anime avatar on an internet forum would be spiteful of any creative media that doesn't hamfist dialogue into your brain.

That's a little bit mean but oh my god you are saying exactly what I was thinking.

@NekuCTR said:

@bvilleneuve said:

This game is completely for me. Don't even need more polished graphics or anything. This is a video game that I want to play so much.

We can only hope that there's a decent modding community around it. This kind of game is usually tragically short.

I'd rather have a short, polished collection of Blendo puzzles than inflate the length of a game for the sake of inflating it. I'm not condemning modding communities, but they very rarely add anything of consequence to my experience of a game. The few exceptions are things like the KotOR II fan completion project, where they are completing content that was already put in the game by the original developer.

Also I think I just approach games in a different way than a lot of the Giant Bomb community. See: the legions of people calling Thirty Flights of Loving a scam. That game was exactly as long as it needed to be, and it was fucking incredible.

Yep ... I cant wait for this!

@bvilleneuve said:

@ColumnBreaker said:

@Neonie said:

I will never understand why these games get the praise they do, it's always just seemed like a bunch of nonsense and indie styled obfuscation of information. But it probably has lot to do with me just never understanding the appeal behind trying to tell a story without words: Good job, you didn't say anything, you're so clever, here let me pat your back.

Color me fucking surprised that a dude with an anime avatar on an internet forum would be spiteful of any creative media that doesn't hamfist dialogue into your brain.

That's a little bit mean but oh my god you are saying exactly what I was thinking.

Going with Avatars is a bad way to judge. I guarantee I'm into anime just as much as this guy is (if not more so) and I'm a huge Blendo fan. Please don't pigeonhole so hard in the future. <3

Hm. It certainly looks like more of a game than Thirty Flights of Loving (and perhaps Gravity Bone, which I simply found confusing to navigate) but it has yet to show the visual splendor of those best moments of Thirty Flights as well.

I have a friend who really dug Thirty Flights of Loving. I'll be asking him what he thinks on this one.

@ColumnBreaker said:

@Neonie said:

I will never understand why these games get the praise they do, it's always just seemed like a bunch of nonsense and indie styled obfuscation of information. But it probably has lot to do with me just never understanding the appeal behind trying to tell a story without words: Good job, you didn't say anything, you're so clever, here let me pat your back.

Color me fucking surprised that a dude with an anime avatar on an internet forum would be spiteful of any creative media that doesn't hamfist dialogue into your brain.

BURN.

Looks cool, but, man, maybe don't use telnet for everything. That's just begging for trouble...

By the way, this looks fantastic. I love the VCR filter and the whole Wes Anderson vibe. Stark shading and primary colors, looks great!

@Neonie said:

I will never understand why these games get the praise they do, it's always just seemed like a bunch of nonsense and indie styled obfuscation of information. But it probably has lot to do with me just never understanding the appeal behind trying to tell a story without words: Good job, you didn't say anything, you're so clever, here let me pat your back.

Mind if I take a crack at it?

The reason nonverbal narratives get so much credit in games is because they're narrative stories that don't rely so much on the techniques of traditional film to tell their stories. In a world where we want to cry out that "GAMES ARE ART!," it gets more difficult when the only part that's artful about Uncharted 2 is the part where they take the controls away and make it a literal movie. Nonverbal narratives tend not to have cutscenes, which make them less cinematic and more individually video games.

If the player can pull a story out of Fez or Journey, that's significantly more meaningful for the state of "games as art" than pulling a narrative out of Red Dead Redemption or MGS4, which deliver their narratives through (mostly) cinematic means. Those are perhaps bad examples because Red Dead also delivers a lot of its narrative through world exploration and MGS4 is especially creative with its setpieces, but in comparison to Fez or Journey, they're basically movies. I'd argue that Journey is also basically a movie due to the extremely polished design that makes every Journey nearly identical, but for the sake of this argument...Journey a nonverbal narrative that moves along exclusively as you play it and whose mechanics fill in pieces of the emotional narrative.

Now...

Now. Thirty Flights of Loving and Gravity Bone are another story. They are far more akin to art films and general modern art than they are any kind of game. Their main method of emotional efficacy is editing techniques, disorientation through jump cuts, and surreal moments of special effects. Their main method of narrative is pantomimed versions of filmic moments. And I largely agree that, in the case of Thirty Flights, there's little done there that couldn't be done in a student film (beyond needing a better special effects budget.) And said student film would not be as impressive as it would be if it were part of a larger, more filmic narrative; Thirty Flights is specifically aiming for the kinds of movies the Coen Brothers make, with a bit more Tarantino in the aesthetic. If this were the climactic scene to Jackie Brown, it'd be totally okay that the characters weren't talking because we'd already be attached to them. It would basically be "normal."

I like Thirty Flights, but I found in it no revelations. It instead reminded me of the power of using techniques that disorient the viewer; lots of jump cuts to different moments accentuate chaos, loads of unison movement conveys alienation, etc. And it uses those effectively while managing to have a couple moments of visual beauty.

The reason this is interesting is because it has more gameplay, which (hopefully) increases player involvement beyond just walking through the story. But, obviously, if you haven't read to the end of this, you're not really interested in this kind of analysis, which means you should almost definitely stay away from Quad Cowboy. But, if you did read through it, hopefully I've successfully conveyed some of what can make a nonverbal story kind of interesting, especially in games.

@bvilleneuve said:

@NekuCTR said:

@bvilleneuve said:

This game is completely for me. Don't even need more polished graphics or anything. This is a video game that I want to play so much.

We can only hope that there's a decent modding community around it. This kind of game is usually tragically short.

I'd rather have a short, polished collection of Blendo puzzles than inflate the length of a game for the sake of inflating it. I'm not condemning modding communities, but they very rarely add anything of consequence to my experience of a game. The few exceptions are things like the KotOR II fan completion project, where they are completing content that was already put in the game by the original developer.

Also I think I just approach games in a different way than a lot of the Giant Bomb community. See: the legions of people calling Thirty Flights of Loving a scam. That game was exactly as long as it needed to be, and it was fucking incredible.

I totally agree, games like Thirty Flights of Loving and The Walking Dead can be as short, as long as they conveys their stories effectively. This game, however, looks interesting based on the mechanics, The games story may be amazing, and it's length may be perfect for it's narrative, but I still want to mess around with the cool stuff the developer put together, and have that stuff configured in neat inventive ways that may not conform with game's world.

Really cool looking game. However, I don't see telnet commands being used to hack anything. It's still cool that it teaches people unix commands.

Cyberpunk cowboy's are way into Telnet.

@Wes899: Typical Anime fan, talking about pigeons' holes. Psh

@tyler1285: My love of pigeons is unrelated to my love of anime. 2D pigeons though, that just gets me all worked up.

@Little_Socrates: I did read it all, and you know thinking about it, i don't really have a problem with it in a game like Journey or Minecraft (if you would even consider that part of this, I'm not sure). Something about 30 Flights of Loving though I felt was just incredibly over obnoxious. Maybe it was specifically the use of jump cuts and it's attempt at completely disorienting the player. I just felt something about it was trying far to hard to be something it just should not have tried to be.

Does anyone know id this takes place in the gravity bone/ 30 flights of loving universe?

Will people stop with the Thirty Flights… is a scam nonsense? 'Cause that's really obnoxious. Thanks.