Conference Call

GWJ Conference Call Episode 98

Warhammer Online, Too Human, Bionic Commando Rearmed, Force Unleashed, Strong Bad's Cool Game, Chrono Trigger, Trying To Do Too Much, Your Emails and more!

Feels like forever since we had a proper show, doesn't it? This week we're all back in our comfy seats and going right into a whole whack of new games. We also talk about games trying to please everyone and failing magnificently.

To contact us, email [email protected]! Send us your thoughts on the show, pressing issues you want to talk about or whatever else is on your mind. You can even send a 30 second audio question or comment (MP3 format please) if you're so inclined.

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Show credits

Music credits: 

Intro/Outro Music - Ian Dorsch, Willowtree Audioworks

"Washaway" Ian Dorsch - 0:40:24
"Carving Away Stone" Ian Dorsch - 0:59:28

Comments

On Braid: this has been mentioned a few times in the catch-all, but if you think you know how to complete a puzzle and just can't make it work, then you probably haven't really solved it. I don't remember any of the puzzles requiring pin-point platforming to collect. If you're stuck, just put it down, walk away, and come back later -- i struggled with at least three or four pieces until I came back to them with fresh eyes, and when I did, it didn't take more than a few minutes to solve them.

"Pixeljunky was second best only to sex, except maybe Rez with the vibrating controller. I won't judge"

Golden!

I think we need a new goodjer drinking game: each time Jade Raymond is mentioned, drink a shot. Every time Bioshock is mentioned, drink another shot. Every time Rob goes off: drink another shot. Last liver standing goes to the next game convention. :p

mateo wrote:

I think we need a new goodjer drinking game: each time Jade Raymond is mentioned, drink a shot. Every time Bioshock is mentioned, drink another shot. Every time Rob goes off: drink another shot. Last liver standing goes to the next game convention. :p

Define Rob going off.

Are we talking about when he gets nitpicky, or is it more like when he gets mad about how something is and then throws out his idea about how it should be, e.g. Live Gold Membership should be free (to pull one from WAY back)?

(I kid because I care)

Do we mention Jade Raymond enough to be a drinking offense? I'm not sure I've ever mentioned her once, not out of any kind of lack of respect, just because I'm not sure we spent much time all over Assassin's Creed (which was fun for the 4-5 hours I played it, but never sucked me in hard).

rabbit wrote:

Do we mention Jade Raymond enough to be a drinking offense? I'm not sure I've ever mentioned her once, not out of any kind of lack of respect, just because I'm not sure we spent much time all over Assassin's Creed (which was fun for the 4-5 hours I played it, but never sucked me in hard).

She was mentioned twice, so I thought it was a funny to put in her name as a drinking condition. Obviously, I was not thinking too deeply about it.

buzzvang wrote:

Define Rob going off.

Are we talking about when he gets nitpicky, or is it more like when he gets mad about how something is and then throws out his idea about how it should be, e.g. Live Gold Membership should be free (to pull one from WAY back)?

(I kid because I care)

I guess that depends on how drunk we want everyone to be.

rabbit wrote:

Do we mention Jade Raymond enough to be a drinking offense?

No, but if we did have a drinking game for every time you mentioned Flight Simulator, a lot of us would be behind David Crosby on the liver donation list.

pneuman wrote:

On Braid: this has been mentioned a few times in the catch-all, but if you think you know how to complete a puzzle and just can't make it work, then you probably haven't really solved it. I don't remember any of the puzzles requiring pin-point platforming to collect. If you're stuck, just put it down, walk away, and come back later -- i struggled with at least three or four pieces until I came back to them with fresh eyes, and when I did, it didn't take more than a few minutes to solve them.

I do remember a few puzzles that involved very carefully jumping on those perm/afro goombas. E Hunnie had to pass the controller to me on a few occasions so that I could take care of the trickier platformy bits.

rabbit wrote:

Do we mention Jade Raymond enough to be a drinking offense? I'm not sure I've ever mentioned her once, not out of any kind of lack of respect, just because I'm not sure we spent much time all over Assassin's Creed (which was fun for the 4-5 hours I played it, but never sucked me in hard).

OoCT? And defile the good names of Ms. Raymond and Mr. Murdoch? No, thank you!

You guys should sing The Twelve Days of Christmas for your 100th episode.

rabbit wrote:

I still don't know what it [Sacrifice] was trying to be.

The answer? Damn fun.

I went through 3/5 characters in that game. Only problem is that the last level is always the same and I didn't want to play it that third time so that's when I retired.

Just one comment: I don't think Jon Blow's the "art games rule, screw everything else!" kinda guy. If you listen to his Podtoid interview, he's a very realistic guy who just wants people to explore all kinds of games - artsy or not.

LobsterMobster wrote:

You guys should sing The Twelve Days of Christmas for your 100th episode. :D

I think the occasion definitely calls for some singing, yes. Games You Can Play Right Now: The Musical?

Good episode, but yeah, Excelsior does mean something.

I posted what is essentially s novella, in the Too Human thread, detailing some fo the things I didn't learn until I'd been playing for more than 20-25 hours. Anyone who's playing the game and is dying a lot or frustrated or bored, might want to check the posts for some tips.

"The longest script Silicon Knights has ever done," bit I agree with. I suspect that between all three games it'll be a long script, but the first game just has poor pacing and exposition in story mode, and the Aesir town feels like it didn't have everything they'd wanted to. If I hadn't played co-op for 20 or so hours before beating anything but the first mission in campaign, I would have been way more bored, but since I had already beaten all the levels and wanted to know why I was doing things like backtracking with "no explanation", and I enjoyed it. If you can manage to solo through level 2, the story starts to get good.

And yeah, i totally agree about using the thumbstick instead of the XYAB buttons. My thumb is sooooo tired of all the shmups and dynasty warriors and button-mashing games..

Check out Varney's Escapist piece on Blow.

I'd just like to throw in with Rabbit's lot on the whole games-as-art thing. It always smacks of an inferiority complex when people insist on calling games Art with a capital A-- as if our hobby is not legitimate unless some skinny dude in a beret and a black turtleneck proclaims it deep.

Can't something be skilled or well crafted without having to throw the A word around? It just devalues the term.

If someone makes a game and intends for it to be art, why are you holding it against him? I've seen dogs tied to a wall and left to starve get called art, I've seen excrement called good art, and good art called pornography just as often as being called pretentious.

If someone is good at what they do, produces something really good and feels that it's art, then it's not pretentiousness for them to be confident in themselves or their creation. It's skill and experience combined into self-confidence.

Alien Love Gardener wrote:

Games You Can Play Right Now: The Musical?

How many times can you mention World of Warcraft or Flight Simulator in one musical?

coyo7e wrote:

If someone makes a game and intends for it to be art, why are you holding it against him? I've seen dogs tied to a wall and left to starve get called art, I've seen excrement called good art, and good art called pornography just as often as being called pretentious.

If someone is good at what they do, produces something really good and feels that it's art, then it's not pretentiousness for them to be confident in themselves or their creation. It's skill and experience combined into self-confidence.

This gets to the heart of the problem for me, which I really don't want to get into to any great extent here. If art = whatever the creator of it says it is, then the term has no meaning.

Maybe it's not supposed to. Heck, I don't know. I'm an engineer for crying out loud. I design circuit boards for a living. I work hard, and I think I do a good job-- some of my designs even work. Does that make what I do Art? I can't imagine why it would. That's craft, not art.

My wife has a BFA in sculpture from Mass Art. She's had her own gallery showings, and even sold some of her work. These days she makes crochet stuffed animals for our daughter. She doesn't call those art, though she probably could, because she doesn't believe that everything creative has to be Art as the term is modernly understood (or, in my case, not understood). Again, that's craft.

There's a difference between Art and craft. Good craft is when you're really talented at making something, and it comes out exactly how you wanted it. Art is something more transcendent (good G-d, did I just type that? Sheesh!). A kind of baring of the soul. Maybe Blow has bourn his soul to us in Braid, and the little dude jumping around and rewinding reflects some deep internal struggle within him or his relationship to the world. Or maybe he just made a really cool, visually interesting game.

Why does it have to be anything more than the latter?

Thought I'd mention that we're discussing similar stuff over in the Braid thread.

Pun.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:
coyo7e wrote:

If someone makes a game and intends for it to be art, why are you holding it against him? I've seen dogs tied to a wall and left to starve get called art, I've seen excrement called good art, and good art called pornography just as often as being called pretentious.

If someone is good at what they do, produces something really good and feels that it's art, then it's not pretentiousness for them to be confident in themselves or their creation. It's skill and experience combined into self-confidence.

This gets to the heart of the problem for me, which I really don't want to get into to any great extent here. If art = whatever the creator of it says it is, then the term has no meaning.

Ding! We have a winner.

Art (capital A) really is a meaningless term, something that people who don't study art wouldn't necessarily know.

Anything, even a circuit board, that someone sees to contain meaning can be seen as art. It isn't necessarily the creator who needs to attribute this meaning, even one person seeing the work and perceiving meaning creates the artwork.

But then even http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot]meaninglessness[/url] can be artistic.

The fact that the games as art debate exists means that games are art, maybe not always good art.

wordsmythe wrote:

Thought I'd mention that we're discussing similar stuff over in the Braid thread.

Pun.

I've been avoiding that thread till the PC release, but now I'm curious.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

I've been avoiding that thread till the PC release, but now I'm curious.

I read through the whole thread. Be forewarned that there are a whole lot of spoilers, but a lot of them seem contradictory. There seems to be a whole lot of disagreement over what's actually happening in the game from a narrative perspective.

I remember reading an essay about the modern state of literary fiction that had a line in it that I think is pertinent;

At the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say that she had had to puzzle over many of the latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was "That, my dear, is called reading." Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing. Great prose isn't always easy, but it's always lucid; no one of Oprah's intelligence ever had to wonder what Joseph Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence.

There are some pretty smart folks on these forums. If they can't play the game and know what's going on (or at least come to some agreement about what's going on), I can't help but wonder if the fault lies with the creator.

But what do I know? I still haven't figured out why anybody would subject themselves to a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:
MrDeVil909 wrote:

I've been avoiding that thread till the PC release, but now I'm curious.

I read through the whole thread. Be forewarned that there are a whole lot of spoilers, but a lot of them seem contradictory. There seems to be a whole lot of disagreement over what's actually happening in the game from a narrative perspective.

I remember reading an essay about the modern state of literary fiction that had a line in it that I think is pertinent;

At the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say that she had had to puzzle over many of the latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was "That, my dear, is called reading." Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing. Great prose isn't always easy, but it's always lucid; no one of Oprah's intelligence ever had to wonder what Joseph Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence.

There are some pretty smart folks on these forums. If they can't play the game and know what's going on (or at least come to some agreement about what's going on), I can't help but wonder if the fault lies with the creator.

But what do I know? I still haven't figured out why anybody would subject themselves to a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Then I will persist in avoiding the thread, I don't want to spoil Braid. In fact I feel like I know too much already.

That essay looks very interesting, I've skimed it and will come back to it this evening, but it seems to be becoming increasingly common that creativity is becoming more about the creators cleverness than the enjoyment of the viewer/reader/player.

In many ways I feel that games as they are now are a fairly pure art form, because they have to reach the player to be successful.

What's "RvR"?

Realm vs. Realm. It's basically a huge multiplayer battle between factions in the game. Similar to WoW's Horde Vs. Alliance, except the battles are larger and more structured.

I throw a dart into the pile of subjective art balloons.

All the art definitions so far have been subjective in one way or another - we have the democratic, the solipsistic, the authoritarian.

I prefer Aristotle's, and by extension Rand's, definitions:

Art is a selective recreation of reality, things as they might be and ought to be.

Much of what is called Art these days is more anti-art than art, an attempt to erase Art as an objective concept to be replaced with, "whatever we say it is."

Hans

hidannik wrote:

I prefer Aristotle's, and by extension Rand's, definitions:

Art is a selective recreation of reality, things as they might be and ought to be.

Much of what is called Art these days is more anti-art than art, an attempt to erase Art as an objective concept to be replaced with, "whatever we say it is."

Hans

I'll be honest, that still sounds like a pretty subjective definition to me.

And it seems to be strictly limited to representational work. While I don't consider most modern garbage art to be art myself, I do see space for non-representational work in the creative space.

And it would seem to me that as soon as you open that door, then you open the door to "whatever we say it is."

Explain these Pubic Quests to me.

Certis, is this the Jamaica game you were talking about? It's available for under $40.

If Google fails you there are always options. :p

MrDeVil909 wrote:

Certis, is this the Jamaica game you were talking about? It's available for under $40.

If Google fails you there are always options. :p

wordsmythe wrote:

Here are some Jamaica links.

Stand at attention to accept your Filthy Skimmer badge!

wordsmythe wrote:
MrDeVil909 wrote:

Certis, is this the Jamaica game you were talking about? It's available for under $40.

If Google fails you there are always options. :p

wordsmythe wrote:

Here are some Jamaica links.

Stand at attention to accept your Filthy Skimmer badge!

About time! :p