T w e n t y S i d e d
Come and hang out with the Spoiler Warning all-stars as we play Monaco. Multiplayer! The stream is right here, which will follow Josh’s P.O.V. You can also watch the game from Randy’s perspective.
EDIT: Well, Steam died and so the game ended. A shame. Also, since we were all playing the game we didn’t get to interact much with the viewers, which made it kind of an odd hangout. Ah well.
Monaco is really fun. I can’t wait to try it in single player and find out what we were supposed to be doing and how the game really works.
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Object-Oriented Debate
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
I am testing out the twitch.tv services tonight, so if you don’t want to deal with livestream’s madness, check out the Randy’s Perspective
The replay is up at http://www.twitch.tv/rasonj/b/395667933
I’ve only been watching for about two minutes.
It’s going…amazingly well.*
*(By which I mean it’s not going well at all.)
Oh! Idea!
Ocean’s Twenty (Sided)
Sure is 2 in the morning right about now!
Literally just about to sleep when I make that fatal mistake, checking this website. Its at times like this one must choose between responsible sleep or hanging out with Twenty Sided. I guess it’ll be recorded. D:
Shamus dug a hole in the Steam client. He just won’t admit it.
That was a hilarious stream. I loved the comment stream.
Shamus: Master of Stealth
Shamus: SILENT ASSASSIN
Shamus: BIG BOSS
So in conclusion, Monaco is the best game ever.
Okay, time for my real comment.
Monaco is in many ways akin to a 2D cooperative Thief. So I want you to imagine if someone who never played Thief before booted the game up on livestream, charged through the level uncontrollably, and got stabbed to death by the guards. And then all the people in the chat said, “This game doesn’t look very good, it seems so confusing, I don’t get what’s happening, this is dumb,” etc.
This may help you understand why by the end of the night my teeth had been ground into a fine powder.
I apologize if I was being irritating during the session. I don’t hold anything against Spoiler Warning and co., of course — succeeding wasn’t their goal, after all — but it was a very frustrating experience for me, partially because I’d been spending the past two days learning all the fine details of Monaco’s incredibly well-designed game mechanics and was then subjected to Josh and his chimpanzee squad failing spectacularly, and partially because I’ve only gotten to play single player and 2-player coop so far and was really eager to get to play 4 player with the gang at some point. (If I didn’t make that painfully obvious enough.)
I know that the guy who shouts at the rest of the team for playing ineffectively is generally maligned, but understand that most of the time I was explaining how the game works and is supposed to be played because people both in the Vent server and in the chat log were often asking questions like, “Who’s doing what? What’s going on? What are we/they trying to do again? Why? Where?” I was answering those.
Monaco is really not that difficult of a game to learn if you’re not watching it in a low-res stream, guys, I promise. I’m no grognard, and I was able to wrap my head around it pretty easily. It helps if you play the first mission or two by yourself to get the basics down.
No! I was working late and forgot to check if it started.
Damn, I wanted to participate, but timezones and lack of sleep screwed me. Maybe next time.
I forgot! But if there wasn’t much audience interaction, I guess I can just watch the vid.
it was kinda like watching the three stooges find their long lost fourth brother and decide to go on a crime spree. Hilariously bad.
I don’t know if it is the four player clusterfarg or what but the game looks too busy visually.
I think the problem is that the overhead camera is too far zoomed out and it moves around. One of these features would be good, but both makes it hard to focus on your character.
Of all the Monaco game videos I’ve seen, I’ve not had a clue of what’s going on in any single one of them. For my perception abilities, this game might jsut as well vomit coloured rainbow chunks at me. … Which it kinda does.
You can follow your character’s distinct color, which, again, is not hard to do when you’re not watching from a low-res stream.
This is the first one of your hangouts I’ve not especially enjoyed. I guess it was the fact that everyone was just running around incompetently, and I’m sure this isn’t what the game is supposed to be like, but nevertheless this really didn’t endear me to the game at all, and it’s the first time I’ve got bored and stopped watching a hangout before. Watching people completely disregard how the game should be played just wasn’t entertaining. Still looking forward to the next one though.
I found it really helpful to put the player in a separate browser window, expanded to a larger size. I was able to follow the action a lot easier then.
I would say that in future, if a game with a similar color scheme was played a guide to who is who in a banner or sidebar somewhere would’ve been helpful at first. Eventually I could match the cries of despair with the avatars being killed, but still…
Well, I was watching it fullscreen, but it’s still a fair point. I think not really being clear on who was doing what when may have been an issue, eventually it just turned into a load of shouting and some footage of a coloruful blur, neither of which seemed to have much to do with each other.
Don’t let this discourage the crew from their next hangout, I’ll be there and looking forward to it.
Yeah, I hope next time they do a game that is easier to watch. I eventually was just watching the chat and listening to the video. I might go and watch some recordings, because I just couldn’t tell what was happening except that Shamus made lots of holes in things.
Having played the Monaco 4-player with friends recently, this actually does represent the Monaco multiplayer experience pretty well. You could play with SWAT 4 levels of care and experience, but playing it like this is amazingly great fun. Playing it with my friends I laughed harder than I have in a long time.
HOWEVER, I will agree that it didn’t translate well into the Hangout format. Watching doesn’t make a great case for the game as everything just seems random and confusing. The only reason I kept watching was to talk in the chat, even though, as Shamus said, he couldn’t interact with the chat at all.
The sight of everyone else running around and Shamus on the other side of the map calmly digging through walls, never got old. It was almost zen
I’m disappointed that the game map didn’t update which walls were broken though, that was a little lame. Is it any good single-player? It looked like a multiplayer focused game but if it isn’t I’d totally be interested in checking it out
The common opinion seems to be that “Monaco has very good single-player, but the multiplayer is where it SHINES”
The confusion and lack of coordination got to Shamus so he decided to play Minecraft instead?
Watched the hangout for two hours, went to bed (by then it was 3 in the morning where I live), and woke up to this Penny Arcade-comic.
That’s almost creepily accurate (except it normally ended up with a mole coloured corpse :P)
AHAHAHAHAA. Yeah. Now I’m imagining Shamus actually saying that.
Caught about half an hour live in the morning on the laptop while getting ready for work, and it didn’t really do anything for me. But in the evening I decided to veg out and have pizza for dinner while watching this wrought large on the TV and was hooked. Once I had matched the colours to the various players (didn’t realise at first that colours were hardcoded for each class – actually, does it change if you take duplicates?) it wasn’t overly taxing to keep up.
Now to watch the alternate perspective….
Here’s the visual change I would make to Monaco if I could:
Once you’ve actually seen something, when the lights go off or you leave instead of reverting to the blueprint it would change to the fog of war with colours (but slightly darkened) and the proper shapes. Not registering people of course, unless someone is lookout.
Thoroughly enjoying the twitch feed, please keep it for future hangouts. My system likes it better than livestream, so I can actually watch for once.
Also, Shamus, there can be only one Josh!
Thanks for the great diversion while I’m dealing with food poisoning, it’s much more entertaining than the TNG marathon I was doing.
Considering what mad fun this was, and how much intentionally or not Shamus was trolling the other players, think what MAAAADNESSS Magica would be. They would spend half the time drenched while casting lightning.
It was a good stream (watched it later, because today was a workday), but I don’t see myself playing Monaco. I don’t know why, but it has absolutely no appeal for me. Oh well, back to launching rockets in KSP. I’ve got a space station to assemble. Now, if the next stream was that game…
Well I came in a bit late, but I had a wonderful time watching the crew bull through a very lovely china shop and heckling with the audience.
And no, JPH, I don’t hold the crew’s neophyte performance against what appears to be a very cunning game with incredible music.
Now if only that ‘being revived’ sound didn’t make me want to run screaming out of the room…
I really do not understand what that sound is supposed to be or why they ever thought it would be a good fit.
That was a fun stream. Mostly due to Shamus revealing himself to be a mole troll and the chat. But maybe a slightly more deciferable game next time?
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/04/26
the entire play through in comic form