Bombin' the A.M. With Scoops and Wolf: 10/18/2013

Opie and Anthony talked about you guys.

SCOOOPS

@nekroskop: Really? What did they say?

POKEYMANS

I also fell in that hole and tried it. Same feelings as Alex, it's... fine. But ehhh why would I want to collect them all, I have 6 dudes already, they seem fine? I don't know, it's probably not for me.

Yes. holy shit yes. omg yes. yes yes yes.

Edit: Oh shit no. the video won't work. no no no. omg no!

video messing up for me too.

Huh? Really? Am I missing an in joke?

Yay Michigan!

With Rayman Legends, I felt the $40 price tag it carried on the PC was pretty dead-on for what I wanted to pay for the game. I was surprised they didn't start with that on all platforms, but then again, I feel like a lot of publishers still gun for the $60 price tag on games that don't warrant it.

"Good lord."

Damn right it's a great state!!!

Setting your goals super high and going out and posting that a game didn't hit the sales that were expected is a really good way to justify cutting developers short on bonuses. You can claim anything you want when you make it looks like your long and mid term goals are not being met. There may be some negatives for setting unreasonable goals and eventually saying that you did not meet them and I would like to hear what those are. Cause I can sure think of many positives (for the corporate side) for setting them too high.

Heh, Alex was so proud of that "awoo" at the end there. His face was brilliant, I bet he was thinking "nailed it" haha

@mbdoeden said:

I think that is a Jocktober reference, because there podcast name sounds like a cliche radio show name.

That's what I figured he was getting at. I'm just wondering if they actually referenced Bombin in the A.M.

Stoked for the Ted talk!

I think when it comes to game reviews, reviewers angry at the process should stop feeling like their audience needs to accept reviews that aren't helpful to them, and get more comfortable with the idea that what they want to write isn't always a review.

Why insist on putting a hard, quantifiable score on your reactions to a game if you don't want to assess the game in terms of hard, quantifiable attributes? There's no reason to do so! Other than to keep stirring up this same old argument, out of some insecurity that games aren't treated enough like movies or whatever in the way they're reviewed.

They're different things! It's okay that they're treated differently.

http://www.tedxumdearborn.com/

Patrick's picture is on the About page! Cool I'm looking forward to it. It'd better end up on this site in some capacity.

Dumb question: if the PS4's main push is for games as the focus, does the pushing-back of next-gen games to the spring give Microsoft any boost over the holidays and console launches? Will the Xbox One's more "overall" focus on living room entertainment get a better hearing if fewer big games are out along with these new consoles?

(Also, dumb double-question...)

Alex's feelings on Pokemon are kind of how Harry Potter stuff shakes out for me.

Ha! A New Yorker and a Californian talking about the mid-west as if it were a 3rd world country.

I played and finished Minerva's Den recently, thought it was one of the most blatantly over-rated over-hyped biggest let downs I've ever played. Man the way people talk about it like its some masterpiece of gaming, it really really isn't. Even just playing it in a basic sense of gameplay was annoying for half the dlc due to being forced to start with all the worst powers and guns.

Bioshock 2 was crap, and the Bureau was a joke it was so bland and awful looking. Whoever was in charge of 2K Marin had no idea at all what they were doing.

I'm somewhat happy that these launch-day games are getting delayed so that I don't feel quite so compelled to buy a new console. Though in all honesty, I'm most excited for Super Motherload. I suppose it'd be profoundly dumb to buy a PS4 solely to play a goddamn update of a free Flash game, but I'm still heck-of tempted!

But yeah, it'll probably be a while till I buy one.

Thanks for making time to do this, especially Patrick in this case. Awesome show.

Isn't that a line in a radio song in Sleeping Dogs?

@chrystolis said:

Agreed. Plus you basically get Rayman Origins for free, which is kind of ridiculous. I "only" got about 400 lums and think the rest will be too frustrating to get, but I still got a ton of value out of that game.

@mormonwarrior said:

That's a damn handsome picture of Patrick. He should go back to the clean shaven baby-faced look.

Great podcast as usual, keep it up! :)

Pathetic jaded dudes :(

sad

Good luck on your TED talk thing Scoops.

Tevis Thompson sounds like the most butthurt and angry kid in the world.

@patrickklepek What do you think of American Horror Story? I personally think it's pretty good with its campy horror but hit and miss with the series plots.

Didn't hear that Driveclub had officially been delayed too. Man, with that and Watch_Dogs both out of the launch lineup, there goes my 2 biggest reasons to buy a PS4 right away.

Watchdogs and Drive Club being delayed doesn't really bother me. I am still picking up Need For Speed, Killzone, Call of Duty, Battlefield 4, and Assassins Creed 4. I understand that only one of those are exclusive but I still want the system at launch and there will be downloadable titles for me to play and by the end of the year I will have Knack too. As far as I am concerned I have better games to play at launch than I did in comparison to the systems at launch last generation and the generation before.

I think some people, like game reviewers, tend to have different perspectives than others. I don't know anyone in my group of friends or this area in some gaming groups I am in that are disappointed in the launch lineup. Better third party games and just one or two exclusives that are going to be good than playing total shit...which was basically what the last generation launch was and I hear people (even on Giant Bomb) talk a lot of positive mess about the 360 launch.

I still think Minerva's Den is a little overrated by some people even though it is still good on its own. A masterpiece is it not.

Reviews are trusted less due to many factors, and his misaimed spray-and-pray rant didn't touch on many. The zerg mentality of fanboys when (nay, ESPECIALLY when) their fave series' latest entry is critisized well in a review, corporate shenanigans via exclusives, herd mentality of less wise game reviewers damning passe genres or methodology and putting nouveau genres and methodology on pedestals, a damningly anti-intellectual bent to mechanics, priotities to criteria such as "feel" and quality-of-life changes over balance and ingenuity turning the former into clumsy emotional groping and gamer bribery with the latter becoming things not even noticed, much less comprehended.

It's a bad scene all around. For most hardcore gamers, large and medium site reviews are merely a source of ridicule and outrage or the score is justification to preconcieved notions. To everyone else, they become reviews that double as virtual PR the pub didn't have to pay for.

They're taking the hubris and stupidity of Namco's yesteryear and saving their bacon by throwing their own studios under a bus via turning it into a strategy. Business ethics!

I don't really get what is the issue with Tevis Thomsons' tone, I was expecting it to be a lot more agressive, high browed or long winded, but I found it actually rather straight forward, neutral and direct. No insults, not too many snarky comments... maybe I'm reading it from another mindset, or maybe he has a nicer voice in my imagination, who knows.
I do give you that it gets a bit too political for its own good, after all, as Alex said, subjectivity goes both ways, and straight white middle class male gamer, also have a valid view, whether he appreciates it or not.

I find the issue is very clear though. I mean I was looking at the onslaught of reviews for GTA5 just waiting for the week after when all the reviewers would actually start speaking honestly about the game. Not because a game has spectacular amounts of content must it be a 10.

The odd thing is that more than what he says, I find that sometimes critics DO identify the weaknesses beyond the spectacle, but seem too dazzled ( or compelled ) to be objective. We all know the narrative in GTA5 is weak ( some say that the game isn't about the narrative, but if it isn't, why is it there?), and we all felt oddly constrained and carried around in a wild pointless goose chase in Bioshock. So, is it that the blinding spectacle of the complete games pushes us to overlook the glaring flaws?

Obviously in a technical level they are excellent games, but you would assume that nowadays, we are far beyond evaluating technical proficiency.

I suppose we should care less about numeric scores, and pay more attention to written reviews and more meaningful observations, but it's impossible to deny the ease and absoluteness that a clean number provides.

"[The Stanley Parable demo] deconstructs the existential crisis of building a demo, and is actually amazingly nakedly honest about how stressful an experience it is to make a 'vertical slice' of your game"

Seriously, Patrick, just stop. I mean everything I say constructively. Don't get me wrong, you're an alright dude. Really, I like hearing what you have to say most of the time. But the above passage is the area where I think you could improve the most.

I know you want to sound really intellectual, but you're not Tom Bissell (yet?), or whoever it is you're aspiring to be. Right now, you're still very much a newsman. I don't think you've demonstrated you have the highfalutin academic mindset, nor the vocabulary, of a Tom Bissell or Leigh Alexander or whoever. Don't just use big words you don't fully understand, because it has the opposite of the intended effect. Smart people think what you're saying is nonsense, and less smart people probably just aren't particularly enticed when you describe something as an "existential crisis". Everybody loses. Use language you're more comfortable with, or make sure you understand terms properly before you use them.

I don't think any developer would describe the "existential crisis of building a demo", because the term "existential crisis" in no way applies to that situation. I don't know what you think that term means, but evidently you settled on using it as your default way to describe the demo, and I wince every time I hear you say it (I've noticed a Worth Playing, and 2 Bombin' the AM where you've said it). If you want you could say "personal crisis" or "internal crisis" or something, if you're really convinced the demo is about the designer expressing some crisis they go through when they make a demo, but I think you're too in love with that idea to see that the demo isn't really doing that in the first place.

Also, I don't think the demo is "amazingly nakedly honest" about stress, like, at all? At best, it alludes to it very indirectly, since the narrator is not a mouthpiece for the designer, and the events the narrator stresses over aren't really analogous to actual stresses a game dev would encounter (i.e. the demo being replaced by the 8 game, the demo having a big anticlimax of an ending, then the narrator having to improvise a crappy game where you put a mug into a bin; these aren't really the stresses a game designer goes through, as they are all humourous gags that break the 4th wall and treat the demo like some sort of live show/tour, when instead a demo is more of a prototype mechanism, and if it breaks, you can't just go with it because it isn't improv or something, it's a piece of software).

Sure, the demo acknowledges the aims of a standard demo and the fact that it's all in service of the player deciding "would I like to buy the full game?", and it has that amusing "must do" list posted on the wall with all the rote guidelines that most of the industry obeys when making a demo. But really most of the Stanley Parable demo is just subverting the expectations of what you'd expect from a demo, by repeatedly acting like "trust me, the demo is going to start any minute now", when really all this buildup to the demo starting is the demo itself, which is the source of most of the humour. Like the main game, the demo is about a narrative subverting expectations and going in weird directions.

I know you've taken a liking to recent "empathy games", but I think you're doing a disservice to the Stanley Parable by acting like its demo is deeply personal when it is nothing of the sort.

@patrickklepek