He's also insane in his dismissal of the 360 FC3. That console is ancient and still able to handle all the insane shit in FC3 without exploding.
Good lord that 30 minutes of the last Idle Thumbs where they talk about FC3 and seem to think the entire game is like the tutorial and that Far Cry 2 didn't have strict "stay in this area or the mission fails" parts for it's own tutorial is infuriating.
I dunno, I've put in maybe 10 hours now and a lot of the game is like the tutorial, the story missions in particular. Did FC2 have fail states for leaving an area in the tutorial? I don't remember for sure, but I thought in the FC2 tutorial you start in the hotel, and once you leave the hotel you're supposed to flee the town. You can flee the town any way you want, by just running, by killing the mercs, etc. I don't remember ever hitting a fail state in that tutorial, but I could be wrong.
Not even going to attempt to engage you on the other bullshit but yes, Jeff Gerstmann recently tried to play FC2 even and got to a point in the tutorial where if you go the wrong way you just fall over dead from malaria.
I think you're willfully ignoring the fact that on the whole FC2 does not play like that. The tutorial may have had a fail state (I never encountered it), but on the whole you were free to go anywhere you pleased. Far Cry 2 had flaws but that wasn't one of them.
I listened to Idle Thumbs right after Giant Bombcast. I'm never going to do that again, cos if anything it really stuck out what a gang of pretentious knobs those guys can be. I didn't watch the VGAs. Not likely I ever would. But over on GB you had Jeff and the gang saying that it wasn't too bad, it was certainly better than it's ever been and as good as it will probably get. On Idle Thumbs you had Chris Remo talk about the few seconds of the show he watched as if they were an ungodly torture through which he had to survive if he was going to see his friends. It really made my brain hurt. Idle Thumbs is only about an hour long, but I still listen to it on 2x these days.
At that point it's probably worth giving up on it. I don't dislike Chris at all - I don't think he's particularly pretentious, I actually appreciate the thought that these guys put into a lot of what they're talking about, with the exception of when Shaun *tries* to do this but doesn't actually have a worthwhile point - but I recognise it's a fairly subjective thing to begin with. It's what Idle Thumbs is mostly about though, so if it bothers you that much I don't really get why you're sticking with it. It's certainly missing some of the magic from the original series.
The problem with Idle Thumbs is that it seems that the three of them have all but stopped playing games that anybody else plays and commenced playing only precious indie titles made by their friends. Guess what?! Still never going to play Tennnes.
Yeah, they're all working on the inside of the gaming industry now, and Sean and Jake both just went through massive crunch time. They don't seem to have much time to play games, and when you subtract that aspect of the show it's just them riffing off each other, making silly jokes, and talking about the occasional game (usually some indie title). I'm finding that it has gotten old pretty quickly. I'm now two weeks behind on the podcast. I'm going to stay subscribed, but it's kinda been relegated to something I can use to kill time or have on in the background instead of something I jump to as soon as it's available.
I never said it had that flaw, but it did have tutorial areas where you were on a confined path. FC3 is just as open, the main content in FC2 was assaulting predetermined areas while FC3 has those areas set up as the outposts you attack instead of the little 3 man respawning magical huts that were in FC2.
I don't think the problem with the FC3 tutorial is that you're on a fixed path, it's that it's rigidly scripted within an inch of its life. There is no room for player creativity at all. You must sneak under the hut, throw the rock in exactly this direction, run through the jungle in this direction, kill X in exactly X way. It may as well be a cutscene, really. By contrast, the opening scenes in FC2 at least let you get creative when it came to the opening firefight and the way you approach the first mission, which takes place before the malaria-pill sequence. To the extent that the FC2 tutorial does require you to drive along a certain path to get the pills, that is a flaw in that game and not something that justifies scripting in FC3. At least as I see it.
How is that relevant to the openness of the tutorials? Are you trying to say that FC3 requires a super-scripted tutorial because otherwise people won't understand those mechanics? Even if that's the case, why not allow the player to sneak out if the camp in various different ways after explaining those mechanics? I think the real reason the tutorial is scripted is so the game can hit a few story points that are necessary to move the plot forward. Whether or not that was a wise decision is a matter of taste. E: and to be fair, FC2 also had a fair amount of scripting at first in order to move the plot forward, eg. The drive into town, malaria attack, encounter with Jackal, etc.
I agree. I have no problem with that kind of opening cut scene kind of thing, like the train ride in Half Life. But once the game actually starts I'd like the training wheels off, you know? I'm actually surprised by this rabid defence of scripted tutorials. I thought more people were tired of them.
It's like a 5 minute long tutorial at the most unless you are an idiot and try to do takedowns in a packed pirate camp.
Sure, but it's just not very fun, goes for some pretty eye-rolling plot points that it doesn't even begin to earn, gives a bad first impression of the game, and is unfortunately not the only example of a highly-scripted story mission. Does it ruin the game? No. Is it good game design? Emphatically not, in my opinion. I definitely felt left down after playing it, anyway, and I can see why the Idle Thumbs guys wouldn't have liked it much either. E: out of curiousity, what did you think of the tutorial?
I haven't thrown a rock since the tutorial. It's kind of a funny idea, what if word got out that there was some guy on the island who was throwing distraction rocks and murdering loads of people. You'd think it would escalate with some kind of anti-rock technology. Like padded huts. It's genius really. On this same note, Sean's complaint about the tutorial was dumb, the tutorial was unimpressive, but not because he couldn't strangle a guard in a room full of bandits. From a design standpoint I'd prefer that the game let him make that mistake - but in context it was fine and he should find more interesting things to whine about.
I listened to the podcast on my way home tonight, and I pretty much agree. I think having a guard kill you for trying to man-handle him is a pretty fair result. It's a bit weird story-wise, I guess, given that but no big deal. The other points they make are pretty valid; I was happily surprised that someone else was annoyed by the radio tower camera swoop. I may be an annoying nerd about this stuff, but at least I'm not alone!
Because the guards in FC3 patrol enough to eventually see a dead body. That's one of the best things about the game, you can snipe from afar but unless you plan your shots quickly carefully someone will notice and sound the alarm. Also in that instance Jason isn't all tattoo powered up yet and is just scared shitless, he wouldn't go stabbing someone that his brother didn't tell him to first.
They do in the real game, but not in the tutorial. You can leave your game on for a long time and I don't think they ever discover the guard your brother kills at the start. Totally agree that the guards ringing the alarm is a cool mechanic. I guess I agree with the other part too, although my point was that you'd think , but maybe not. Certainly if I were Jason's brother, that's what I would do. That's what I do in FC3 all of the time! That being said, it didn't bother me at the time.
No guarantees that guy wouldn't somehow cry out or whatever, he was distracted enough to get by so why take the chance? In that situation another guard could have popped out of any entrance that they hadn't just come out of and seen a body. Anyway it's pointless since out of the 11 story missions I've done only one of them required stealth without killing again.
I've got to agree with those that have commented on Idle Thumbs. I used to absolutely love that show, but lately they seem to have crawled even farther up their own asses. The show used to be funny. I remember laughing so hard I was crying sometimes when I would listen to it. Now it's rarely even amusing. Worse, it's like every single topic has to be beaten to death with boring and painstaking analysis, no matter how mundane the subject matter is. I'm sure Remo would take exception to that phraseology given that he's become some kind of video game vegan, apparently refusing to spill blood in a game unless absolutely necessary. Which is fine, but does it have to come up in every episode and with an odd note of moral superiority? Okay, that might be reading too much into it. I guess the bottom line is that the show is really fucking boring now.
I'm pretty certain that they've specifically mentioned doing GOTY podcasts again this year (of course I don't have anything to point to to back that up...).
I guess the conversations have to happen whether or not they podcast them, so they might as well do it in the studio.
FYI, they just confirmed on this week's podcast that there would be GotY discussion podcasts next week. Cool cool. I always like those.
No, no, think more Abed from Community. Perhaps I should have written "Cool Cool. Cool cool cool." But that would be a little too precious.
They're different, though they still have the personalities of the cast on display which is what I like about all their podcasts. They're raw in the sense that it's unrehearsed debate and discussion about the merits of the games for game of the year across a variety of categories. It's essentially a recording of their meeting to hash out those awards. Things can (and undoubtedly will) get bogged down from time to time, though, and chances are you'll get annoyed with someone (*couch*Brad*cough*) for refusing to concede a point out of pure stubbornness and spite.
Think I'm well and truly done with listening to Idle Thumbs. First 30 minutes of them just orgasming over a simulation of a newspaper vendor and then they get ready to shit all over Far Cry 3 and start comparing it to the newspaper game. I've always been on the line whether they were too far up their asses to talk about something like videogames but man I never thought after they came back that the days when they'd just repeat their stupid self-made memes over and over were the good ole days.
How are they "too far up their asses to talk about video games?" Most of the episode is bitching about Far Cry 3, which is a AAA, just released video game. They didn't like it, they explain why, and they compare it to the other game they recently played. I pretty much agreed with all of their criticisms, and I made most of the same points in the FC3 thread. I mean, it seems like you complain when they talk about weird indie games, and when they talk about AAA games you complain too. So I don't know what you are looking for in a video game podcast. I'm also surprised because I thought this was one of the better recent Idle Thumbs, I was interested in both games and they had cogent things to say about both.
