By John Walker on August 26th, 2009 at 2:43 pm.
Imagine a world where there was a new Rock, Paper, Shotgun Electronic Wireless Show to listen to. Imagine harder! You made it happen! Jim and John teleported into the RPS under-sea bunker to record an episode of game-based chitter. With your tweets much frivolity occurs, in what is unquestionably the most edited podcast of all time. Plagued by knocks at the door, madmen strimming outside the window, helicopter attacks and an earthquake, a lot of fun is to be found seeing if you can spot the concealed gaps.
Discussed this week are Red Faction’s explosions, Tales of Monkey Island’s confusions, the possibilities for 3D, and favourite game endings. Then there’s crucial matters of which game has the best cartoon animals, the loss of Beyond Good & Evil 2, and Jim’s cold emotionless gaming heart.
Get the mp3 directly from here, subscribe to it by RSS with this, or get it on iTunes from here.
Oh, and we can’t forget Chockablock:
Chockabloke, checking out!
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Well, you really would have to be mad to be “strimming” (strumming?) outside the window of an under-sea bunker.
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Awaiting RPS bloopers reel and Director’s cut.
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d d d downloading. I wonder if my question made it on for the third time – it was definitely the worst of the bunch!
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Talking about the 3D glasses, I don’t have a particularly prominent eye, but I just see two separate pictures, like a red one and a blue one. But they’re still the same image but two separate ones in the same space, I’m not really sure how to describe it.
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I’m trying to imagine a world where I saw this post before I left for work so I could be listening to it. Where is that world?
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Uhm, I’m not saying that it’s not a unique pleasure and privilege to listen to you two jabber on… but what happened to Kieron and Alec? Have you ripped their tender, silky vocal chords out and replaced them with slimy crustaceans? Admit it! Admit all of it now!
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You want me to, you know, deal with Gassalasca, John?
Deal with him. You know.
Kill him.
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About Adventure games not being understood by new people: My little brother (who is 19) had never played an adventure game, but he tried the Monkey Island Episode 1 demo. He got stuck after getting over to the other ship. There is a plant there, that when you click on, Guybrush says “this needs a trimming.” My brother didn’t make the connection that he was supposed to use the sword with the plant. For me that was such an obvious hint, but you have to be in the right mindset to get that.
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Don’t modern 3D glasses rapidly shutter each eye glass so you only see out of one eye at any given moment, but it happens so quickly that the images merge, instead of relying on different coloured images?
Have you tried the modern 3D glasses yet?
I still agree that having to put glasses on still represents a big hurdle for mass-market take up, much in the same way as seemingly obtuse game controllers confuse the normals.
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/nods at Mike
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@Gassalasca:
As a hardline supporter of the Jihn faction, I for one welcome their apparent triumph over their evil urban nemeses.
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@Sagan
I’ve heard about them, they sound much better, but I haven’t had the good fortune to use them. It’s a shame you can’t use a similar idea but using the monitor instead (change the view-point marginally each frame to try and represent two eyes), but I haven’t tried it and somewhat doubt it would work.
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Just listening now, I believe the 60′s film with a cartoon dragon that Jim mentioned is Pete’s Dragon.
Never really liked it as a kid I have to say, but haven’t seen it in years.
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About 3d glasses, the red/green ones are so 15 years ago, aren’t they?
I haven’t tried the shuttered ones, but they’re supposed to work fairly well. I tried polarized ones a few months ago, and was surprised at how well that worked. They use them at a local cinema. The advantage for them is that the glasses are dirt cheap, so they don’t have to collect them after the movie. And it really does look excellent. I think the screen requires some special coating though, so it’s not straightforward to use at home.
A friend just bought a new monitor and everything for NVidia’s 3d thing (I think they use shuttered glasses, and a 120hz monitor), and while I haven’t seen that in action, he says it works really well.
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When I say shuttered I probably mean polarised. I’m sorry. Details are like optional collecting quests, I reckon. The point being it uses each eye individually, so maybe John’s story about the optician and the red lines means the new tech would work.
Or maybe they will make his frontal lobe explode, which would at least provide some entertainment for those watching Avatar with him.
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John Walker is world champion in use of the word ‘bemused’.
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The shuttered ones mean that your eyes see images that are just out of sync which might cause similar problems to the red/green ones – your eyes actually see different images (either different frames, rendered 1/120 second apart, or completely different colors in the red/green case), not just different perspectives on the same image, and the brain has to correlate two slightly unrelated pictures. If you have weird eyes, that might cause the brain to just give up and ignoring one eye.
The polarized ones just show different perspectives of the *same* image (just like you see out in the real world), so I’d imagine that might work better. But just thinking out loud here…
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Jim’s little gasp at the start of the Tomb Raider story echoed how excited we all were, I’m sure :P
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Hah, the Tomb Raider ending sounds *exactly* how I felt about whatshername in FF7. It was a f’ing JRPG! My characters got shot down and hit by meteors and whatnot every single fight, pretty much. But nooo, *that* death was *special*. Aaaargh! And all the drama they tried to create about it… I… just… didn’t…. care…
And yeah, Dreamfall’s ending was amazing… But horribly sad. :(
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I am going to oil John’s chair.
There’s a euphemism.
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Wow. I thought I was the only one who didn’t hate the ending of Dreamfall.
You didn’t mention the ending of HL2:E2. I cried at that. Then I went into shock. And then I watched it again, just to make sure I hadn’t imagined it.
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Re: Eyes.
I used to have a lazy left eye as well, although as a kid was given an eyepatch to wear over the right one to correct the problem. Its still a bit lazy, and also focuses slightly off centre, but its good enough to see 3D cinema stuff. (It is perhaps unsurprising that my left eye is also the one with the strongest prescription. Basically its a bit crap all round.)
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re: PS3 costs, it doesn’t excuse the price jacking, but don’t forget that UK prices have VAT added, whereas the equivalent tax is added at the till in the States, so that makes a (small, 8-ish percent) difference.
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I think that if Kieron dies in mysterious circumstances you should kick off a huge manhunt for the killer then give him the job.
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Bit in the middle of BG&E when Jade returns to the lighthouse and is consoling the dog (memory is sketchy — some kind of pet at least) about being unable to help the kids: tears. The only time in my gaming life.
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I didn’t like the ending of Dreamfall. I though the scene was beautiful, but it simply didn’t work as an ending. I am trapped somewhere and the bad guys win. What the heck of an ending is that?
And it came too suddenly. Sure, it felt like I was close to the end, but to something different. And It felt so random that it should end like that.
And it just felt like they were setting up for a sequel. If that was to be the end, they should have explained more. What happened after the bad guys won? How does the world change after they release their product? Is April really dead? All of these questions should have been answered in a proper ending. Unless that ending is really just a setup for a sequel.
So yeah: Liked the scene, didn’t like the ending.
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@Sagan
But, sometimes the bad guys do win…
Really must play through again sometime.
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I have a lazy left eye too, and the vision in it is really poor. Attempts to correct it as a child failed, and whilst I’m currently seeking surgery to ameliorate it I know it’ll never get to the stage where I have true binocular vision.
This means I too will never be able to use 3D technology, and it concerns me that technology is being developed with seemingly no concession to people with disabilities.
I think the fact that not only do John and Jim face this issue, but so far two people including me in this comments thread do too. It’s grossly unscientific but it hardly seems to be a very minor group of people as was suggested in the podcast. Given that lots and lots of people have vision difficulties in some way or another I’d say it was actually a fairly significant problem for the 3D industry not to look for ways to make their technology more accessible.
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I think the problem with the Dreamfall ending wasn’t so much that it was bad, but that it was clearly setting up for more. An ending doesn’t have to be entirely conclusive to be successful (in fact, you could argue that a story never should be completely conclusive as in life a story never just ends and are actions will always have repercussions,) but Dreamfall felt as if it ended in the middle of a story and it was obvious that a new game was meant to follow and that there was more that the developers wanted to say.
As for 3D, I’ve not experienced any 3D games, but films it comes across as a complete gimmick. Mark Kermode says it perfectly when he says that the intention of 3D is to draw you in but it only serves to push you out of whatever you are watching. People constantly pointing out at you and things flying at you from the screen only end up reminding you you are watching a film. The attention put into making the 3D effects inevitably end up taking away from the important elements of the film (characters, story, narrative, etc.) and it ends up just being an amusement park ride. Still, I’m holding out final judgement until I see James Cameron’s Avatar. He is a master at using technology to its best effect, so if anyone can pull it off then he probably will.
It may work better for games, but again I imagine it would just be a gimmick.
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I’d argue that things like characters and story are only in Hollywood films to draw you into the amusement park ride of the sfx.
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If you commandeer some of the vehicles in Red Faction, some of the drivers cheer you on in French, Spanish and I believe Chinese. So Mars isn’t *just* American.
Clearly you lot haven’t played enough of the game to provide informed snark. Consider your Red Faction snark rights revoked.
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@Vandelay
That’s true. And I hope that some day the big guys at Funcom will let Tørnquist revisit the world. But I wasn’t left with the feeling of frustration that most people seem to have been. I’ve just watched about an hour of Dreamfall on YouTube, for a refresher… Man, I don’t remember noticing it at the time, but that man could use a script editor… It ties up the main thread of this story chapter fairly conclusively. And we did, after all, know from the beginning that Zoe was going to end up in a coma.
Beyond Good & Evil also quite clearly sets up for a sequel – and not just in the infection on Pey’j hand. We suddenly find out at the end that Jade is more than we might have thought. Had been really looking forward to exploring that universe a bit more. :-(
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For favourite cartoon animal, how about Jimmy(?) the skateboarding chipmunk from Peggle?
And I was surprised no-one mentioned Portal when talking about great game endings.
I was screaming these answers at my MP3 player as I listened. Well, I wasn’t as I was on the tube, but you know what I mean.
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Marcin: I’m close to the end of RF and haven’t heard any language other than
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I’ll back Marcin up, I’ve heard other accents in the game too specifically when car jacking/commandeering.
I’m playing it on the 360 though…
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I feel that KOTOR 2′s non-ending is a better conclusion than it seems at first, but I’m sure Dominic White could actually explain why that is.
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KOTOR II wasn’t quite the game to make me cry, I don’t think. Maybe I’m misremembering, but it tugged at my emotional heartstrings in a different way. It was more like…hm…
More like knowing a character is going to betray you from the instant you meet her, because it’s abundantly clear, and then learning from her anyway. Or the feeling of loss that underpins every locale and storyline. Interesting feelings, not really sob-worthy.
I, too, lament the loss of Alec and Kieron.
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Do you have a link to this magic technology that’s supposedly just around the corner that will give us 3d monitors without the glasses? ‘Cause I can’t imagine how that could possibly work.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF-PMN3aK8g
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Thanks, Jim. Hard to see exactly what it is without seeing it in person. He compares it to 3D postcards, which look awful, so I’m guessing there must be more to it.
Also looks like it’s a long way from being something you could use to play games – the content needs to be created specifically for the monitor, unlike those NVIDIA goggles that work with existing games (if you have a 120 Hz monitor). Those things are pretty amazing.
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