Diecast – Twenty Sided

Congrats to Paul, who is now a father. Again. I’m at the age where I’m nostalgic about those hectic early years of child-rearing. Heather and I are unquestionably done having kids, but once in a while we stop and smile at someone else’s toddler and say to each other, “Man, it would be great to be able to do that one more time.”

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Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast369

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:00 Uh oh

The good news: It’s not COVID.

The bad news: I’ve caught something.

Yuck. Hopefully this passes soon. I have videogames I need to complain about, and I can’t complain about those if I’m busy complaining about my health.

03:30 Risk of Rain 2

In some games, you find yourself groping around for the one proscribed and predetermined way to win. In RoR2, it feels like you’re trying to see how many different ways you can beat the game.

“Wow. I played as an engineer and stacked bonuses to boost my turrets and it worked really well. Now let me see what happens if I use the all-melee class and go for things to boost my mobility to insane speeds.”

A lot of people praise the soundtrack from Chris Christodoulou, and for good reason. It really is amazing. However, after an hour of play it can be… bit much? Imagine listening to an entire album of guitar solos. That’s what it’s like. After a while I feel like the dim-witted Emperor Joseph II in the movie Amadeus, complaining that the genius composer is playing “too many notes”.

Reflecting on this a little more, I’ll bet this has to do with how I’m playing the game. Instead of spending 6-8 minutes on each stage, I’m playing with modifiers where it makes sense to hang around for 25 minutes or so. The end of a stage is when the music resets, calms down, and switches to a fresh track. So the real problem is that I’m spending too much time on a stage and the music is trying to maintain “maximum epic” for long periods of time.

Like I said: Great soundtrack. It’s just a bit much when you play like this.

06:58 Dyson Sphere Project Update

Okay, so Paul’s base puts out a Terrawatt of power. I wanted to know the scale of a terrawatt in the real world. Is that a single city? A country? A continent?

We tried to work it out, but after half a minute I realized we’d just nerd sniped ourselves. So we got back to doing the show instead of doing the math.

15:53 Mailbag: Genre Tensions

Dear Diecast,

In Shamus’s Mass Effect retrospective, he mentions how the series always had a tension between its elements of Trek-y sci-fi (quest for knowledge) and elements of Lovecraftian horror (quest toward doom), and would inevitably have to commit to one over the other.

So, I was wondering if there are any other examples you might know of where there is any similar stark blend of genres/story types or tension between big genre conventions, in video games or other mediums? And what are your thoughts on how to handle such complex storytelling? Do you think this kind of setup unavoidably makes promises that cannot be kept, or does it just require really sophisticated writing to account for such a risk/issue?

Kind regards,
Andrew

26:59 Mailbag: Steam Workshop Integration

Dear Diecast,
I’ve been playing a game called Escape Simulator. The base game is a great virtual escape room simulator. The amazing part comes from the steam workshop integration. There are tons of AMAZING user-created maps that are just as good, and often better, then the base game. As a player, this is amazing, I get tons of content for a low price point. How do you think this will play out for the developer? When they release new content, will people buy it when it has to compete against free maps?

Thanks,
Rob Lundeen

29:17:04 Mailbag: Archiving and Preserving Gaming

Deeeeeaaaaar DIEcast,

Previously on the podcast, Shamus has mentioned his wish that videogame publishers would release their source code for commercial games once they were done selling. However, he also acknowledged that – even if this were attainable – the result would be “the release of an enormous code base that nobody can compile”.

What are your thoughts on archiving and preserving gaming?

Do you worry about the extent to which many games are tied to an arcane infrastructure of hardware and software that impede the likelihood that such games will still be playable in the distant future?

If so, do you believe that the videogame industry ought to have more of a moral imperative in simplifying or archiving this infrastructure in the interests of preservation?

Where do you think most of this responsibility would sit?

• The videogame developers and publishers?
• The extraneous software: makers of the drivers, operating systems, or online stores/services?
• Or the extraneous hardware: Graphics cards and consoles?

Yours historically,

Nick

40:55 Mailbag: Spiderman Movies

Deeeeeeeaaaaaar DIEcast,

In an earlier podcast Shamus mentioned that he felt like Avengers Endgame was an appropriate jumping-off point from the MCU. However, since then I have heard him mention snippets about the recent MCU television shows (Wandavision, etc). Does that mean that you have fallen off the wagon, and are back on the… bandwagon?

Over several weeks in the leadup to watching “Spiderman: No Way Home”, my friend and I re-watched every Spiderman movie since the very first Sam Raimi one. This came to 8 movies in total (including Venom 1 and 2) with an apparent total runtime of 21 hours and 1 minute.

So was it worth it? I would have to say… yes!

No Way Home had many little nods and winks, even just the reprisal of simple musical cues from the earlier movies, that wouldn’t have landed anywhere near as well for me otherwise. It was rewarding, if not least of which because it finally gave me the push to see some of the movies I had previously missed (into the Spiderverse being a personal standout). I was a teenager when the very first movie hit cinemas, and it was nice to see some genuine love for the previous continuities and their narrative conclusions.

From one long-time Spiderman fan to another, has Shamus seen Far From Home or No Way Home yet? If so, what did you think of them? Any thoughts on the various Spidermovies?

Spider-sensing your reply,

Nick

45:38 Mailbag: The Anacrusis (2x)

Hey Diecasters!

In case you haven’t noticed, “The Anacrusis” dropped recently in early access (in short: L4D but in 70ies Sci Fi). My first session left me sweating: a few random players and I barely, and I mean barely, managed to beat the first episode, almost, but not quite wiping at the finale (and a handfull of times during other crescendo moments). It left me so exhausted that I had to take a break after the one and a quarter hour it took to finish.

Later, I stumbled upon this blog entry: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1120480/view/5679596996296063978 by Chet Faliszek. Looks like that intensity is by design, and boy oh boy does it seem to hit the mark.

Now for my question, in case that blog entry isn’t enough for a discussion: Why has noone done something like that for a single player RPG? Imagine Oblivion tailoring it’s difficulty and gameplay to the way you actually specced yopur character and how you played rather than with the broken enemy levelling it has.

Kind regards,
Norbert “ColeusRattus” Lickl

Sorry to disturb a second time, dear Casters of Die!

Not having had time to play for a week or two, I noticed that the Anacrusis is pretty much dead in the water, despite being oretty good. Marketing has been next to nonexistant. With the success of Deep Rock Galactic, another 4player coop horde shooter, one would assume that there’d be a market for games like The Anacrusis. Any Idea how and why it is invisible to the gaming community?

Kind regards,
Norbert “ColeusRattus” Lickl

And here is the video I talked about on the show. The difference really is stark when you compare the two games (Back 4 Blood and Left 4 Dead) side-by-side.

Link (YouTube)

Some of the shortcomings – like the lack of mo-capped death animations, lack of facial animation, and lack of musical score – can be attributed to lack of budget. But other things are inexplicable. Survivors don’t cast shadows in flashlight beams? Furniture and clutter are static and can’t be moved by explosions? As I understand it, these things should be completely turnkey in Unreal Engine 4.

As for the Anacrusis, the footage I’ve seen makes it look like a more serious version of the same problem: A game that compares poorly with its predecessor, because the original was made by Valve in their heyday.