T w e n t y S i d e d
E3 is cancelled this year, but we’re coming up on the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase 2022, which should at least give us the stuff that Microsoft has to show this year. Sadly, the show begins next Sunday, which is too late for us to discuss it on the next podcast.
I’m not sure how I’m going to cover it. I’m not even sure if there’s going to be anything I’m eager to talk about. We’ll see.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast383
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes:
00:00 An Hour-long video on Plain Text
Link (YouTube) |
Like I said, this video is surprisingly interesting. And it managed to be educational, even for an old-timer like me. And the presenter has the same accent and emphatic delivery as the late Total Biscuit.
04:48 Invisible Inc.
Paul has some thoughts on this 2016 game.
06:39 Dropped V Rising
Warning that my angry tirade here is basically a preview of something I’ll post in the next couple of weeks.
18:00 Real-time Browser-based Ray Tracing:
Try it. It’s fun!
19:43 Surviving Mars
This game is here to say that if we work hard, if we work together, and if we use our resources wisely, then someday humanity will have what it takes to put a complete loser on Mars.
I think the takeaway here is that when we do eventually go to Mars, I shouldn’t be in charge.
31:12 Mailbag: Kids, Heartstrings, and Video Games
Hi Diecasters,
I think we’re all familiar with the ways threats to children can be used to jump-start pathos in fiction – and the ways it can be mis-used, as with the brute force or over-the-top usage in Prey 2006 and the infamous Sum Kidd of Mass Effect 3. Shamus, I thought one of your effective criticisms of the latter case was that the kid was conjured up out of nowhere, as an obvious cypher, without buildup, characterization, etc.
My question: What do you think of the famous/infamous Dead Island reveal trailer as it keys into this topic? It was (and remains) very well-received for its artistic and non-dialogic story – but, similarly, introduces a kid with no other characterization than as a fatal victim. Do you think that the Dead Island trailer is just a more slick application of the same brute force effort at pathos, or that it might operate on a different scale because it’s a trailer, and trailers are by definition low on characterization?
Thanks,
David F. Ellrod, Sr.
38:12 Mailbag: Perfectionism in a Coder
Dear Diecasters,
While listening to old episodes I heard Shamus self-identify as a perfectionist. How does this trait square with being a programmer? Is Paul a perfectionist too?
Within scanning distance of perfectly,
Chris P.
43:47 Mailbag: Racing Games
Dear Diecast,
I’m not much of what you might call a ‘racing/driving gamer’, but there are a few I’ve played and really enjoyed and I’d like to branch out in the genre some more. (Recently, I’ve gotten into “Distance” and that’s largely been fun.)
So I was wondering if there are any racing or driving games that you really liked, what you liked and/or disliked about them (and the genre), and if there are any on Steam that you’d recommend.
Kind regards,
Andrew
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Why The Christmas Shopping Season is Worse Every Year
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The Loot Lottery
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I love Surviving Mars…
As my I’m Too Sick To Fully Focus game.
Like, this sounds like damning with faint praise, but I find it genuinely perfect for that. It’s just~ automated and straightforward enough that even with my brain on fumes, I can focus on the next few objectives. And still have just~ enough wrinkles and challenges that I actually feel like I’m doing something that keeps the grey jello a’ wiggling.
It’s a solid 7-10 game otherwise with some solid ingredients like the esthetics and Terra-forming, but in that one context, I’ve never quite found another game like or as good as it. Whenever I get a flue or really bad cold, I tend to gravitate towards Surviving Mars, and log a couple more hours in it.
Just to point out, since Shamus said there’s no terraforming, the Green Mars DLC adds that as an option. It’s generally pretty fun, and I recommend it—it feels suitably lengthy without being interminable*, and it’s really fun to watch the map slowly start to turn green, first with lichen and algae, then grass, bushes, and finally trees. Eventually the sky turns blue as the atmosphere thickens, liquid rain begins to fall, unfrozen lakes can exist on the surface, and, finally, you can lower the domes and let people breathe the free air on Mars…
…then if you’re like me the first time, you simultaneously stupidly trigger some event that causes a three-sol dust storm that wipes out all your solar-reliant power, and your ~1000-strong colony drops in population by like a half. Ah, fun times.
*The one exception is the “plants” parameter, which is both the first one (of four) you will likely start, and the one that you will be sitting there waiting to end long after you’ve filled the other three parameters (like, two or three times as long), because after a certain point you can no longer affect it by actions on the map, only via rare orbital actions (sending rockets to launch seeds across the planet) which take forever to respawn. If you get the DLC I highly recommend getting a mod that makes the respawn time for these actions drop to basically zero; even with it, plants will probably still be the last parameter you finish, but at least it won’t be hundreds of sols later than the others.
I really like it as well for that kind of gameplay. There’s some times I just want to veg out and have fun with a game. And it’s a very good game for that, and I generally would recommend it. It’s also really good with the terraforming DLC. Would recommend. Don’t go into it expecting a ton though. The game is very much designed around the idea of build up a colony, get it going, and then restart to do things differently with different bonuses and locations. It is not a game where you build up the same map forever and ever like you might see with something like Factorio.
Reminder that there’s also the Summer Game Fest presentation on the 9th (followed by all the little presentations) which is going to have a lot of the third parties showing up, since most of them aren’t doing their own thing. Then there’s all the other presentations by smaller groups or publishers that will be a sensory overload of pixel art indies and rogue-likes.
And, naturally, Devolver Digital is also on the 9th, which at least promises entertainment itself.
I’m gonna work on writing up some stuff again this year, though it’s hard to structure it as easily. Sony’s State of Play has me wanting to write about Capcom stuff, but they could have news coming in the Summer Game Fest or Xbox and Bethesda showcases. And what’s Nintendo doing? Normally their Direct follows Microsoft, but they’ve made no announcements. And will Hollow Knight: Silksong ever be seen again?
But yeah, I love this season regardless of how much noise it ends up being, so I’m all here for it and its discourse.
Re: Children in Peril or Being Killed
I’m like you, Shamus, in that I cannot do it in most circumstances. I will not go back to Fate:Zero because of one scene in the entire anime where a kid gets killed, and because Japanese voice acting is what it is, you get to really hear their suffering for a few seconds before they finally bite it. It’s also really psychologically messed up, too. Granted, it turns out a bunch of kids were actually killed later on, but those children are already dead so… I dunno, it hits different. But, it’s the sort of thing that can really keep me from going back.
But then there are instances like Jaws or the original Assault on Precinct 13. In the former, the way the kid is swaying around in the ocean and hardly emoting themselves helps maintain the artificiality of the experience. It gets the job done narratively but doesn’t hit as hard emotionally. In the latter case, the girl is such a bad actress that, well, it’s that artificiality again. I guess the key for me is in the believability. In that case, however, the same goes for death in general. Some depictions of death are so brutal, realistic, or disturbing that I just can’t go back (see: a dude getting eaten alive in Outlander, an otherwise fun alien-and-viking romp that I will never watch again because of one single moment).
In terms of the Dead Island trailer, I think the shortness of that one helps make it watchable, as well as the greater tragedy experienced. It’s not just about the death of the child, as you guys note. It’s the father trying to save the child and then the child literally and figuratively turning on her parents, and how this loving family was brought down by this infection. So it’s not really just about the kid, whereas in Mass Effect 3 it really is just a cheap tool. “Here’s a child with no relation to Shepard that happens to die and now haunts him forever”. That feels as artificial as the acting of the girl in Assault on Precinct 13. And while the depiction of the kid getting eaten in Jaws looks fake as all get out, at least his death serves a purpose to the narrative: to not only inform the audience that no one is safe, but to also punish our protagonist for being right (he takes the blame for the beach being open, a decision he was pushed into by politicians) and gets the hunt for the shark rolling. It feels like a natural course of events.
I’m trying to think of any other moment of child death or danger in a game that actually worked well, and I feel like somewhere there’s a JRPG that handled it somehow. I just can’t recall.
…aw man, I should totally know this and I don’t.
I’m going to mention Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass (because of course I am); an 8-year-old Jimmy explores an imaginary world of his own making, while the Pulsating Mass corrupts it and turns it into nightmares.
Octopath Traveler has a questline where a medic saves a murderer who goes on to kidnap a child at knifepoint.
Does Kid from Chrono Cross count? Because that game totally has a Some Kid Died.
A jRPG that handles “a kid’s in danger” well? Maybe
Persona 4, whereNanakois in danger at a certain point and can, if I remember correctly, even wind up dying?I also found the trailer of Dead Island really good, but the sheer difference it had to the game was irritating to me. That’s straight-up false advertising, that is.
(Regarding playing the game: the idiotic systems killed it for me. Shamus mentioned the ‘paying your workbench’ nonsense, but the worst one for me was that my character had a ‘limit break’ style ability…of pulling out a gun.
Yep, she kept a gun in an ankle holster and refused to use it except after she’d been bitten by zombies enough times. Where did the ammunition come from? Her rage and pain? Why didn’t she use it all the time? I literally broke two oars on this zombie boss’s head, and you tell me you’ve been carrying a gun THIS WHOLE TIME?!
What is wrong with you?!)
And since it got brought up – Shamus already covered Dead Island when it came out. It’s a fun read!
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=13210
Thanks for engaging with the question, despite the ugliness of the topic. I have four kids myself, and I similarly find the idea of kids in peril to be very upsetting (maybe having kids of one’s own is a catalyst for that sort of reaction; I seem to recall Control Alt Delete had a comic to that effect a few years back. And yes, it makes sense to me that a trailer kid operates at a different scale than the (lamentably) load-bearing tween of an entire trilogy.
Also, an Adam Sandler take on Schindler’s List sounds insane :P
I know I go against the grain with this, but I actually really love how the trailer for Dead Island turned the suffering and tragedy of what’s basically Corpse #124, Corpse #125 and Corpse #126 into outright heart-rending tragedy.
Like… why would those three be special in-game? You’re survivor didn’t know them. They didn’t even see the zombie attack, or deaths themselves. Why would these two be special, in any way, shape or form, when thousands others suffered and died, or worse than died, all around you?
It’s just… two bodies. In a hotel room. In any other game, that’s a ‘huh, environmental story-telling, neat-o’ moment. At best. Most would not even blink twice, before looting the room.
Like the thousands other corpses you just walk past. Because they don’t matter.
To me, there’s something extremely poignant about that humanization. Doubly so in such a tired genera as the zombie story, where deaths basically often becomes both joke and punchline. A real: ‘a million deaths is statistic’ style chill down my spine.
Like… don’t get me wrong. I get it. The child death is a nuclear option in story telling, because people get such visceral reactions from it, but… Well. In my opinion? The way that Dead Island trailer used it to demonstrate the inhumanity and horror of its setting by telling such a tiny, contained side-story… I think it’s honestly kinda masterful.
Aw. The text lecture was about the underlying encoding of text without talking about some of the obsure aspects, like why Mac has ‘\r’ by itself, like you’d find those really old text files that were 40 column all caps (that one I remember), and the IBM encoding that snuck its way into Zork games.
Racing Games: Project Cars 2 is pretty good semi-sim racer and frequently very cheap indeed on sale. It also has a very competent VR implementation.
On the arcade end it’s hard to beat Burnout 3 and Outrun 2006.
Although I’ve never played it, Trackmania seems like a really fun arcade racing game. The only issue you may have is that it’s a race against the clock – not other cars.
Alan Wake also came off Steam like a decade after release because of music licensing (some of the music was narratively important so they couldn’t just pull a Rockstar and cut it), then a year later it came back, which I find to be the really baffling part. Did they just not realize their music rights were running out until the week before and it took them a year to fix the contracts?
Grain of salt since it’s unconfirmed rumors, but I heard rumblings that one of the c-list stars was trying to milk the licensing deal since Alan Wake become something of a cult-classic with long legs, sales-wise. So the entire music license contract had to be redone, instead of just being renewed… including dragging in the estate of You-Know-Who-If-You’ve-Played-Alan-Wake, since he’d recently died, and thus naturally, wasn’t there to set his own price list.
So what expected to be two bits of paper over coffee, turned into a whole legal circus.
Again, rumors, but… well. Kinda fits how little fuzz was made of the whole thing, once the game actually returned to Steam. Got a really strong vibe that Remedy was just DONE with that legal side of it all by then.
I still think this demonstrates that many devs/publishers do not concern themselves with maintaining their games in the long run (in case things like call home requirements were not an obvious giveaway already). So far the digital distribution platforms I’m aware of have respected existing sales (i.e: if you bought it you could still download and play it) when a game was being removed from sale but the combination of increasing popularity of subscription services with the shift from “buying a product” to “buying a license” could easily mean certain games basically coming in with a deadline on legitimate availability.
The disinterest in digital retail of old titles from the major players one is SO WEIRD to me. Like… hire two, three guys, and have ’em dig around for old copies of the backlog. One, two legal guys, to make sure you’re actually allowed to still sell DIG GUY 4000, or whatever, despite the mergers and such. You want that extra mile? Have a couple of code monkeys put in Dos-Box.
Surely that would pay for itself over time, AND produce some goodwill with gamers?
Like… that expense isn’t zero. At least some of those games are going to be met with crickets. But the profit from sitting on those IPs and doing zip, is a GUARANTEED zero income.
And it’s not like the studios do this crud with something utterly forgoten like, say, Ambush at Sorinor. A 1993 DOS game whose title I literally got by hitting random game over on Home of the Underdogs. But the studios do this even with the titans of old, like… Silent Hill 2 has a PC version that requires minimal changes to run on modern hardware, but that hasn’t been legally sold in over a decade. Or how Mechwarrior 1-4 are basically just… gone, despite being one of the most fabled and long-running series on PC ever.
Doesn’t make sense to me.
I am very much not a racing gamer, but I have had fun with some karting games (if those count); primarily Crash Team Racing and SuperTuxKart.
My rule is that I only play racing games where you can use a banana as a weapon.
I played Sonic All Stars Racing: Transformed a while back and was shocked by how good it was. The drifting and boosting mechanics feel great and take some skill to master, and the courses have a lot of great spectacle.
Also, its “blue shell” equivalent, the Swarm, manages to be a powerful weapon without feeling really unfair to the person in first place, which is a neat bit of design.
Racing Games I Have Known
A Bulleted List by John
– Night Driver. There’s a car. There may even be a race. I’m not sure.
– Those old arcade machines in which up to four players raced Formula 1 cars–or sometimes monster trucks, whose handling strongly and suspiciously resembled that of Formula 1 cars–around a top-down track. Everybody got their own steering wheel, their own accelerator, and possibly even their own brake pedal. Absolutely, positively the greatest racing game of all time if you are me and I am maybe ten years old. Totally better than Pole Position.
– Road Rash, a motorcycle racing game with punching and stuff. Imagine the motorcycle combat section from LucasArts’ Full Throttle. Road Rash is completely unlike that. You’re looking at the back of your motorcycle rather than the front. Also, the punching, kicking, and bashing with unlikely implements is actually good. Also, you can run face-first into oncoming traffic in hilarious and painful ways.
– Virtua Racing, the 32X version. A pretty good racing game. In 3D! (We’re living in the future!) Arcade-y but just realistic enough to teach me a few actual lessons about real driving. I think about this game sometimes when parking my car in the garage. I am not even kidding.
– Grid. It sits in my Steam library. What is it? How did it get there? How long has it been there? I don’t know. I can’t remember. I know I didn’t buy it. I don’t think I grabbed it in some kind of giveaway. I’ve never even tried to play it because my computer is well below the minimum specs. It’s a total mystery.
Racing Games I Have Known and Loved, by Philadelphus
– LEGO Stunt Rally. Does anyone remember this game? Apparently it released in 2000, but I never got the impression it was a critical hit. It was interesting because it had a top-down perspective, and you only controlled your car’s acceleration and braking, with turning handled automatically. (Once I learned the secret of just braking hard before each turn so that the car takes the turn instead of flying off the track all races became pretty trivial, but it was still a fun game.) All tracks were built on a grid, and the game came with an editor that allowed you to make your own tracks using all the pieces in the game (after you won all the campaign races). It also had power-ups, and 4-person local multiplayer (on a keyboard and mouse!), which led to much enjoyable racing with friends and siblings on custom-designed tracks.
– Star Wars: Episode I: Racer. Yes, the podracing game. I actually enjoyed it as a kid, and even when I played it again a few years ago after discovering it was available on Steam and worked via Proton. The opponents aren’t anything to write home about, making it really more like PvE than Pv-imaginary-P, but it’s still fun to push your luck with the boosting mechanic.
Best thing in Episode I: Racer was entering the cheat that let you use two controllers to independently control your pod and try to race that way. Then hand one to a friend and *suffer* through a race
I had the PC version (and no controller) so I haven’t experienced it, but that does sound pretty crazy! Like QWOP, but with hovering jet engines instead of limbs.
Maybe this, truly, is podracing.
I’m a big fan of Burnout, particularly Burnout 3 on the PS2 – it was a racing game where you got boost from driving dangerously (e.g. driving in the wrong lane, near-misses on oncoming traffic), and especially by crashing your opponents, which would fill up the boost gauge fully. It’s not like Mario-Kart where you have weapons, instead you bash into them and try to check them into walls and oncoming traffic.
What’s clever about this is it’s sort of a natural rubber-banding: crashing enemies completely refills your boost, so you can quickly rush up the ranks even if you’ve fallen behind… but once you’re in-front you no longer have enemies to crash, so your boosting becomes more limited. And AI trying to rubber-band past you is another opportunity for you to try to crash them and fill up your boost again.
It also had a non-racing mode kind of “puzzle mode” where you drove into traffic and scored from how big of a crash you could make. It ended up being an interesting mix of strategy and execution.
The open-world version, Burnout Paradise is more popular (and a lot more available having been released on Steam/Switch/etc) and its fun too, but I actually like the non-open-world version better.
I’m kind of surprised that, for Burnout Paradise’s massive success, there wasn’t ever a sequel. Weird for the series to essentially die on its most popular game.
—
It does seem like racing, as a whole, is kind of a niche genre nowadays with the PS2 era as the heyday, I remember the PS2 being filled with racing and vehicular combat games that I can’t even remember the name of. Did some research and turned up Rumble Racing which I remember being pretty fun. (IIRC, it had a lot of “do tricks to fill your boost gauge”)
Not a car racing game, but the SSX snowboard racing games were a lot of fun, too.
The studio got shifted over to Need for Speed which was flailing around and about to die at the time. I guess Need for Speed as a series had better sales?
I don’t know if the move ended up being profitable for EA (I mostly assume it was as they never got shifted back to Burnout), but from a consumer perspective mark it up as another anti-EA example. They’re two different series and played differently. NFS cars moving in the weird blocky physics of Burnout felt wrong, and I don’t think they’ve ever made a NFS game that captured the pure fun of Burnout.
I looked it up and found two-point-five signs that EA know what they’re doing and one they don’t.
1) Need for Speed games sell much better than Burnout games. Paradise sold 1 million at launch, Need for Speed: Burnout (aka Hot Pursuit) sold 5 million
2) As with Anthem EA execs playtesting prototypes seem to know what makes games fun. Apparently Criterion were making a much more standard NFS game and the EA exec asked them to shake it up and give it more Burnout spice. I can’t imagine Hot Pursuit succeeding without that.
2.5) It was actually the Burnout staff who asked to work on Need for Speed. They didn’t think EA would allow it, but EA were happy for them to take a shot.
-1) All the moving around of staff etc. eventually drove the founders of Criterion to quit and start a new indie studio. The team behind the Burnout games is effectively dead now. Half still make NFS games, some do tech support for Frostbite, and the rest left.
Need for speed 3: Hot Pursuit was a lot of fun back in the day. It still is actually. Because the AI does *not* rubberband. Also the tracks are quite beautiful. There is a modern edition patch out tgere that makes it playable on newer machines. Me and my brothers loved to play it together on the LAN. There were a lot of community made cars available including the Mexican version of the Volkswagen Beatle (Sedan Vocho). It was quite slow, so we took that to race in hot pursuit made and try to make sure we all finished the race (you were arrested/game over if you got ticketed too many times). This was quite hard, and a very fun challenge.
Need for speed 5 has a very fun single player mode where you are a test driver for porsche and need to complete a series of challenges. Quite fun. And the tracks look good.
Lego Racers is fun too. A sort of Lego Mario Kart. You can build your own car with lego bricks, so that is a nice touch.
The power of the Dead Island trailer is that by telling the story backwards, it’s recontextualizing what you know. You start with a dead child, and get glimpses of her running from the zombies, and presumably tear up a bit and say “well, that sure sucks”. But then the scene starts moving backward, and we see the innocent child is, in fact, eating a full-grown man in front of his family, and you’re forced to re-evaluate; the girl went through the window as a monster, and the look of innocence in death was a lie. And we keep going backward, and find out the man charged out his door to save the girl, not accepting it was too late to do so, and we get a shot of him jubilantly grabbing her hand as he saves her. But that’s played in reverse, so we the audience see them pulled apart in their happiness. And then final confirmation that yes, the girl is his daughter, and we’ve got peak emotional investment; a perfect tragedy, masterfully told*.
So the Dead Island trailer is definitely on a different level; the kid isn’t just a kid, she’s the catalyst for three separate beats on an emotional rollercoaster.
—
I don’t find child deaths super upsetting, but I find most of them crass and hackish. It’s one of those lines where there’s no longer a proper comeuppance available, and a happy ending is off the table, so why bother watching to the ending. It’s got to have a special reason why it needs to be a kid for it to not feel like the writer’s trying to play a piano with a mallet.
Here, the girl being a child serves a purpose; the more innocent she looks, the less we expect the blindside of her eating a full-grown man. We’re expected to stop taking her innocence at face value, and look more intently into what’s going on.
—
*(Although I can totally nitpick this. Why was she so far away from the door, anyway? That’s grossly irresponsible of her parents to leave her unattended. And do those rooms just have fireaxes sitting around in the closets? Where did he get that from, and why?)
Kinda sounds like you’re building Mars Eisley. Is a bartender essential personnel? What about somebody who’s got the death sentence on 12 systems?
Mars Eisley, isn’t that from The Novelty Desire? Clearly a rip-off of A New Hope’s Mos Eisley.
Shamus, so good to hear your voice and body gaining back their oomph.
Based on the notions you make in the Diecast, I have a theory of what could be causing your perfectionism to trigger in. In the examples you have provided, there were instances of decisions that have entailed long-term, persistent consequences, like, the placement of new installations on a base. The mere-, persistent, physical presence of these buildings in the world is of key importance, in my opinion, in the context of triggering your perfection-urge. In a base-management game, all installations are to remain on the site for an indefinite amount of time, – in an ideal scenario – so, their hyper-optimized placement facilitates a more dense, more compact base with less distance to cover between its places of operation. Not surprisingly, when you realize that this chain of consequences is something that you will have to deal with during the development of the base, your perfectionism triggers in instinctively, as its very machination in your mind makes you think for the long-term consequences of your decisions.
On the other hand, a rail-shooter FPS is usually designed in a way as to let the player make a series of mistakes, and are often relatively tolerant of a certain degree of mismanagement of resources, too, so, your perfectionism-urge remains dormant in these instances, knowing in your DNA that this isn’t the type of game that will deliver long-term-, persistent consequences, so what is the point of mimicking as if the game would do that?
On the – I suppose – third hand, a game which strategically limits your resources, like Prey 2017, might very will trigger your perfectionism-urge, as it is definitely not irrelevant in Prey 2017 whether you neutralize a lethal threat via an elegant method that is easy on your resources-, or, by a “method” that relies on brute-spending your precious resources.
In summary, it seems to me that the perfection-urge triggers in instances when there are decisions to be made that have persistent consequences, and no perfection-urge will emerge if the game in question is not capable/or not interested in offering decision spaces with persistent consequences.
A perfectionism urge might actually show up in older shooters, where getting into a bad fight and having low health for a while is a concern. I know those have given me a few “well, I won, but I really got hurt there, so I’m going to reload” responses over the years.
Indeed, good point! Older shooters definitely had these reload-inducing urges. Fortunately, some modern games do recognize the importance/relevance of this very tension. Doom Eternal immediately comes to mind: while you have to defeat an exact amount of monsters per encounter without a pause to the encounter, Doom Eternal astutely transmutes your invested effort into a self-perceived resource that you do not want to lose, as it would be emotionally taxing to start the whole 25+ minutes fight over. And funnily enough: the longer the fight, the higher is the stake of surviving it, and the more emotionally taxing it is indeed.
Quite a relevant method of “resource management”, if one thinks about it. Its drawback is that you will be able to come up with the optimal method to handle any given encounter, but oh well, this drawback of regressing into dry methodology, necessarily gives way to the fervent satiation of an unavoidable perfection-urge during the very same process. Gotta love the hobby.
Paul, you might be interested in checking out mods for Invisible, Inc.. I picked it up on launch and wasn’t initially too interested, then came back to it last year only to discover it’d had mod support (and Steam Workshop) added in the interim. I’ve now done heists with Carmen Sandiego and the goose from Untitled Goose Game in my party, and it’s pretty hilarious. There are also some not-quite-so-immersion-breaking alternate agents with some creative abilities, various new items and programs for Incognita, and some nice QoL mods.
Dylan Beattie is awesome. He also made several songs about code.
Songs like “We’re gonna build a framework” on the tune of “we didn’t light the fire” and “bug in the javascript” on the tune of piano man.
Highly recommended. Published on his youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/DylanBeattie .
Yeah, Surviving Mars has a great concept when you’re doing all the work to set up a self-sustaining colony, but once the colonists actually land things start to get a bit goofy. Even aside from the weirdness of the time compression or the part where you can recruit geriatric alcoholics, the real big problem is that it’s built around the assumption that a dome is going to be a little self-contained city and that’s clearly not true. Until you get to the late game, domes just aren’t big enough to have all the buildings you need to keep your colonists happy, so you end up doing a bunch of weird things to shuttle colonists and resources around. It’s really easy to get silly situations like “all the children live in a different dome from their parents because there’s no room for a school in the main dome.”
Silly situations? That’s the meta—you make a dome where only children are allowed to live and put schools/nurseries/playgrounds/school spire etc. in there (plus a grocery store for food, with adult workers living in another dome and commuting in). Once they hit adulthood they’re no longer allowed to live in the dome and move out to become a
productivemember of society. But yeah, apparently the game launched in an even crazier state (I got it only when Green Mars came out), with NO INTER-DOME WALKWAY CONNECTORS, where every dome was expected to literally be self-sufficient. Nowadays you can link multiple domes together so it’s not as bad (you can for instance have a “hub dome” devoted to recreation/food/etc. with multiple “habitation domes” connecting to it), but yeesh…no idea how it made it to launch in that state.So you found your paradisic child-only Little Lamplight dome, and when your colonists outgrow it, they’re banished to brave the unforgiving Martian wastes to Big Town dome, where they must toil their days away. Got it..
Much like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.
Surviving Mars has come up free on Epic Games a couple of times, and the Steam version has been in several Humble Bundles. Keep an eye out and you’ll grab it free or cheap.
Re: “Free Water” billboards — Wall Drug, probably. The signs are kind of a thing.
I’m pretty sure the reason you can recruit alcoholic teenagers in Surviving Mars is because the trait system is built for later in the game where the colonists are born and raised there, rather than recruited, and they just didn’t build in any exceptions for early game.
Either that, or Mars is basically space Australia.
I see why it would be quite a complicated addition, but starting off with superheroes and then having to deal with negative traits developing (or children with negative traits) sounds like it would be both thematic and a good gameplay complexity ramp.
About American Truck Simulator:
At launch ATS only included the states of California and Nevada, a later patch added Arizona for free. The initial version of California was underwhelming in terms of scale and they’ve since patched it to make it larger. They’re also currently in the middle of redoing the entire state to expand certain cities, add new ones and revamp the entire state to match the level of quality that states they’ve added via DLC have attained. Which brings me to the second point, ATS doesn’t cover all of the US /yet/. They’ll get there eventually, but right now American Truck Sim is more like Western US Truck Sim as the states added by DLC are: New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Idaho, Colorado and Wyoming, with Texas and Montana currently in development. Personally as a fan of the game (I’m often listening to this very podcast while playing) the content that has been done so far is plenty to work with!
I remember playing the Blur demo and eagerly buying it on Xbox 360 only to be disappointed… though I can’t remember why.
I hope that if you get the chance to play it that it lives up to your expectations. Maybe see if you can grab an old copy for your Playstation?