Idle Thumbs 264: A Very Pretty Pipe Dream

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This week we're throwing away our traditional hyper-competitive leaderboard and focusing on hand-selected stats that show us what we've accomplished.  Chris plays Overwatch and discovers that, after years away there's still a Blizzard for him.  Nick goes to Disneyland, comes home and finds a new release of Planet Coaster. " This means something," he says, burying his theme park under mountains of dirt.  Alone, late at night, Jake builds the Nublar. 

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Also if you're in this forum but for some reason haven't checked out Wizard Jam, you should!  You can go play a bunch of the games on the official Wizard Jam website, and also dive into their development, and look at lots of screenshots and behind the scenes posts in the Wizard Jam dev forum

Also I mentioned the super striking In Search Of Paradise trailer on the cast so here's that:

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I hope Imbroglio comes to PC sometime soon (the time between iOS and Steam releases of 868-HACK was almost 1.5 years).  The way Chris described it feeling more like an action game than 868-HACK, sounded really appealing to me.  I had to check what imbroglio meant:

- confused mass- an intricate or complicated situation (as in a drama or novel)- an acutely painful or embarrassing misunderstanding- a violently confused or bitterly complicated altercation : embroilment- scandal 3a <survived the political imbroglio>

...what a good name for a video game! 

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I was going to come into this thread and say "Sorry, I'm that guy who tells people what role to pick in Overwatch".  But I just joined a game with two Pharahs, two Widowmakers and ZERO tanks.  So I'm not sorry!  Pick a useful role!  >: (

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Looking forward to the stream!  Also I suggest you download the latest build before streaming it.  I just uploaded a new one with improved car textures and better camera control when using the mouse. ( gamepad is still the recommended control method tho) Heck, probably a good idea to check for updates on all the jam games before the stream, I know a lot of people are still working on them and putting out new versions. 

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I was going to come into this thread and say "Sorry, I'm that guy who tells people what role to pick in Overwatch".  But I just joined a game with two Pharahs, two Widowmakers and ZERO tanks.  So I'm not sorry!  Pick a useful role!  >: (

The most terrifying team I've seen was 6 lucios.  They slaughtered us. 

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Looking forward to the stream!  Also I suggest you download the latest build before streaming it.  I just uploaded a new one with improved car textures and better camera control when using the mouse. ( gamepad is still the recommended control method tho) Heck, probably a good idea to check for updates on all the jam games before the stream, I know a lot of people are still working on them and putting out new versions. 

We're going to do a good amount of prep for the stream, including downloading the latest versions of everything, running them once to make sure the inputs work on our PC, etc.  I would like it to be a very smooth presentation of wizardjam's output. 

If I get my shit together I want to also showcase WizardJam 2015 and Winter Wizard Jam too, but I can't promise that yet. 

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I hope Imbroglio comes to PC sometime soon (the time between iOS and Steam releases of 868-HACK was almost 1.5 years).  The way Chris described it feeling more like an action game than 868-HACK, sounded really appealing to me.  I had to check what imbroglio meant:

While I'd hate to dissuade you from picking up Imbroglio, I think Chris' description of it as more of an action game was a bit of an idiosyncratic impression on his part.  After all, it's still a turn-based puzzle-y roguelike where you swipe into enemies to eliminate them.  In my mind the biggest difference between Imbroglio and 868-HACK is that in 868-HACK your power-ups and abilities are randomized, whereas in Imbroglio you select them in advance.  I think that gives the game a bit of a tower defense feel to it, and I believe Michael Brough has compared that aspect of the game to deck building card games which makes a lot of sense to me as well. 

Another comparison that comes to mind is the drafting phase of DOTA where you are selecting a composition of heroes that have different power curves throughout the course of the game.  The weapons work much the same way as heroes where you can have a "greedy" draft that is very weak early on but becomes extremely powerful later in the game.  And there are easy-to-execute drafts vs. complicated but potentially powerful drafts if executed correctly.  The interesting thing with copying other people's boards is that sometimes you don't know how to use a particular configuration, but also sometimes you copy a board and it is really successful but you're not entirely sure why.  You also sometimes become obsessed with powerful combos, and sometimes you come up with some really good board, and become obsessed with the idea that if you make some slight adjustment it will be super powerful (but the risk is maybe that tweak actually just turns it to shit). 

Anyway, I say go for it and check it out since it's only like $3 or $4 or something!  I think the game's wonderful. 

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Chris has repeatedly said that there are 15 characters in Overwatch, but there are actually 21.  Also he didn't mention the best part of the Overwatch end-game card screen: you can commend people on either team!  Commending does nothing except make people feel good, and if a single person gets 5 commendations, it starts glowing and a voice yells out, "EPIC!"  soooo get on those commendations you guys. 

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Chris has repeatedly said that there are 15 characters in Overwatch, but there are actually 21.  Also he didn't mention the best part of the Overwatch end-game card screen: you can commend people on either team!  Commending does nothing except make people feel good, and if a single person gets 5 commendations, it starts glowing and a voice yells out, "EPIC!"  soooo get on those commendations you guys. 

Unless commendations are something separate from the voting, I think Chris spoke at length about them. 

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Chris has repeatedly said that there are 15 characters in Overwatch, but there are actually 21.  Also he didn't mention the best part of the Overwatch end-game card screen: you can commend people on either team!  Commending does nothing except make people feel good, and if a single person gets 5 commendations, it starts glowing and a voice yells out, "EPIC!"  soooo get on those commendations you guys. 

Yeah I was just saying a number that sort of gestured at the general range of characters there is since I didn't ever count.  Sorry! 

(Although I did explicitly say that you vote for those commendations across both teams.) 

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Chris mentioning that pressing tab during the match does not show the standard ranked list for each team was the thing that made me finally buy Overwatch.  I like occasional multiplayer FPS but usually feel like I'm not good enough to play them, so I really appreciate when a game does not actively highlight how shit I am at the game.  I only played one match yesterday, got 11 kills, and have now idea if that is good or bad (probably not too good), but it doesn't matter because I had fun and felt like I was contributing to the team effort.  So, yay!  Go team!  And so on. 

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It was weird when Chris sort of shit on the very concept of trying to use voice chat.  Overwatch is fun enough when everyone just kinda pieces together what they should be doing and what roles they should take, but it can be a lot more fun when people actually communicate.  That's kind of the point of the game.  In fact, the result of no one communicating is really frustrating situations where no one seems able to make a single competent decision to help their team out. 

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It was weird when Chris sort of shit on the very concept of trying to use voice chat.  Overwatch is fun enough when everyone just kinda pieces together what they should be doing and what roles they should take, but it can be a lot more fun when people actually communicate.  That's kind of the point of the game.  In fact, the result of no one communicating is really frustrating situations where no one seems able to make a single competent decision to help their team out. 

I'm not shitting on the concept of it, just conveying my own discomfort with it in a public setting.  I'm totally into it with friends.  Hearing random people in voice chat puts me on edge.  It's not really a broader opinion, it's just something that's true for me. 

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I'm probably more tolerant of it than Chris, but I totally empathize with the anxiety he gets from voice chat, it puts me on edge too, and the multiplayer games I play tend to have communities that largely favor text communication.  I don't think I would have stuck with DOTA if voice chat was the default way people communicated, and I'm never too far away from muting someone's voice if they're talking too much, have a shitty mic, or just an annoying voice even if they aren't particularly obnoxious (and lets face it, plenty of people are). 

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There was an era of console gaming (halo 2/3 were a huge part of this) where everyone had their voice chat enabled, and when you played with someone who didn't have it you got annoyed that they wouldn't be able to communicate.  People were still shitty on chat then but the idea that you had to communicate to play well was more important than someone occasionally being a dick.  I really miss that time!  There was an innocence to just putting on your headset and getting it done.  Nowadays I never use voice chat unless it's a premade group, because the good people that you'd actually want to talk to aren't wearing their headsets either. 

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Chris mentioning that pressing tab during the match does not show the standard ranked list for each team was the thing that made me finally buy Overwatch.  I like occasional multiplayer FPS but usually feel like I'm not good enough to play them, so I really appreciate when a game does not actively highlight how shit I am at the game.  I only played one match yesterday, got 11 kills, and have now idea if that is good or bad (probably not too good), but it doesn't matter because I had fun and felt like I was contributing to the team effort.  So, yay!  Go team!  And so on. 

As someone who pretty much always assumes that my team losing is my fault, I miss having at least some sort of comparison with the rest of my team just so I don't feel lousy all the time. 

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I'm just catching up with the 'casts, and I've been assured by the Slack Thumbs that the pronunciation of .wad has not been discussed here.  Chris wasn't sure whether to pronounce it to rhyme with "rad" or with "pod".  I'm pretty sure I read an anecdote about Romero coming up with this extension name: he asked Carmack what you would call something that contained a bunch of (map) lumps, to which the answer was "a wad".  So it should be pronounced as the word is, i.e. to rhyme with "pod".  Apparently the Doom Bible says that it stands for "Where's All the Data?",  but I think this is probably a backronym (and even if it's not, I still think it should be pronounced as the word, as this fits nicely with the Lucasarts habit of naming things after bodily fluids - SCUMM etc).