Emotive Pixels - All Podcasts

Cities: Skylines is an open-ended city simulator designed in Unity from the ground-up to be moddable and fully support the Steam Workshop with everything from custom structures to camera mods and custom interfaces; from cel-shaded graphics, new rendering engines, and color palette tweaks to R34 Skylines that drive about your cities. Three months after release, the Workshop has 45,000 items and ex-Maxis employees on Patreon earn $700 per building they post. The quantity of content here is on the level of Simtropolis in its prime, and we consider whether the game is all the richer for it, or whether it suffers from a lack of directive - a question that turns out to be larger than simply content.

SimCity was a reboot of the SimCity franchise, a new take on what the 1989-spawned Will Wright classic was all about featuring a new spiffy rendering engine called Glassbox, social play across tiny towns, regional resource management, always-on DRM, and - relatedly - one of the most disastrous launches on record. SimCity 5, as we refer to it despite the existence of Societies, expanded on some of the interesting regional development ideas of 2003's SimCity 4 and its 2005 expansion, SimCity 4: Rush Hour. SC5 established greater goals and obstacles with mining of resources and management of supply chains all the way up through their contributions toward regional superproject goals like arcologies. SimCity was followed up by an expansion of its own, Cities of Tomorrow, which focused on developing cities vertically with modular arcologies connected to each other in the sky, a gameplay element we discuss and a sociological concept of infinite coolness.

Listen to us whinge freely about the two games as we discuss how they compare. Specific points of focus include city plot size, regional and social play, the intrusiveness of mods upon curated experiences, city design philosophies, and nuances of relationships between modding communities and community ambassadors.

Relevant links!

• Bryan Shannon on Patreon: 'burrito consumer and polygon pusher', ex-Maxis employee paying off student debts with buildings
• Reddit: Is there IHT/high-tech industry in Cities?
• Faux Nate methodology: non-rectangular traffic grid inspirations
• Architecture meets ecology: Paolo Soleri's 'arcologies', tracing back to 1899 (wiki)
• RPS' Mirror's Edge color mod screenshot

The format this week is unique as our show is divided and spliced between two evenings, two separate events both hosted by Will: Brian & Geoff vs. Nate & Esteban. You'll get to hear two distinct groups' totally separate and uninformed-to-the-other's opinions and see for yourself just where we all fall down on the matter.

RELEVANT LINKS!
Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics
GDC Vault 2015: Itay Keren's "Scroll Back: The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers"!

* You might not actually find out.

Near-faceless protagonist Ajay Ghale, 26, is following his mother's dying wish to have her ashes spread in the mountainous terrain of her home country Kyrat, and Fashionable Dictator Pagan Min shows up right at the onset of your necrotic visit to run interference on the plan, for your mother is (one of) his lost love(s?). From there, you spread many other people's ashes all over the country as you liberate much of the countryside from the tyrannical dictator's clutches, and you'll do so with flag-totin' Americans and bible-thumping UAC born-agains, with Yogi & Booboo and magical materials that gain you access to hallucinatory Shangri-La, with an arsenal of crazy weapons drip-fed to you from a hybrid mix of Christian-history-inspired figures and egregious quantities of slain wildlife.

Far Cry 4, like 3, has a lot in common with games like Mercenaries and Just Cause 2, and in setting has a few things in common with the later setpieces of Uncharted 2. Unlike that game, the world here is open to you to do with as you please, whether that's exploration-heavy or demolition-soaked. Listen to us this week discuss our approaches, what worked for us (the world), what didn't (the plot), and what chilled us (De Plure). Make sure you try not leaving the table!

Buy Far Cry 4 (PS4) on Amazon and support us!

Both of these games are incredibly twisted and violent gore-soaked 16-bit top-down depictions of Miami across a variety of retro timeframes, tied together by wicked soundscapes and rad driving electronic/nu disco beats. Both games employ unreliable narrators a la a certain movie whose first rule is that it is not to be spoken of; set in a lush vaguely-alternate history where the Russians are every bit as much of a concern as all those Cold War action films would have made you believe, both of these games are clearly inspired by Nicolas Refn's Drive. We delve into both at length and examine just how splendid they are, and whether 2 should really get a '2'.

Release dates: 2012-10-23 / 2015-03-10 (2)
Developer: Dennaton Games (Jonatan Söderström & Dennis Wedin)
Country: Sweden
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Genres: action, shooter: top-down

Relevant linkage:
Hotline Miami soundtrack on Steam ($9.99)
Devolver's Hotline Miami OST on SoundCloud
Caustic Soda podcast: Heroin (pt1&2)
R.I.P. Giant Bomb's Ryan Davis
DBOYD - Sunset For A Lonely Heart - theme! <3 chipmusic.org

From this crazy game there has spawned mobile ports to iOS & Android, two manga adaptations, full-on novels (yes, the written word), a TV anime running for a season so far (imbibed by our hosts alongside the game) and highly eligible for a second, a proper sequel titled DanganRonpa 2: Goodbye Despair, and a spinoff creatively entitled Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls - not only that, there's a set of pretty cool Monokuma merch for which Brian has already clicked the big "BUY NOW" button because, to Will's mild chagrin, everyone loves this demonic bear.

A roundtable is held regarding [anime] adaptations - this specific one and the idea in general, with discussions about backstory and relevance of season 1; the game's soundtrack is discussed with a woeful lack of mention of composer Masafumi Takada's masterwork soundtrack of GodHand (Editor's note: rage) but with an abundance of approval on the theme's use of English. In our critique of the finer points of this game's plot, we draw reference to a most unexpected game we recently podcasted upon; we admire the titling of the Family-Oriented Serial Killer and the demise of many of Will's first date - er, character - choices, to the surprise of nobody and the sadness of all, in addition to his strange formulaic calculations of death rates over the episodes.

DANCE, BABY, DANCE!
Cast: Will, Esteban, Brian <3
DanganRonpa: Japanese, lit. 'bullet refutation'

We ponder the influence of Ready At Dawn's legacy of mobile development and handling others' IPs (in the case of the God of War franchise) and how that pans into this game's strengths and weaknesses, we reflect on who this game would be good for (spoiler: it's one of our cast who didn't show up), and we draw some parallels between a certain French game that has lots of emotions; we reflect upon the gender roles in the game's female characters, and in so doing we either get something completely inappropriate or guess accurately at something hidden and slightly odd. All in all it's a pretty straightforward discussion this week:

The Order: 1886 is a one-knight stand, a fine mark in the emerging genre of perfect triple-A Redbox rentals.

Beginning with our opinions of the armed forces, we tackle tough issues this week with a very interesting discussion about the narrative masterpiece of 2012 that is Jager's Spec Ops: The Line. We have a social worker of advanced wisdom and a psychologist (both of advanced credentials) weighing in on a few key points in our discussion this week, supporting our exploration of PTSD and the reliability of dear protagonist Walker.

What's the trigger? What happened in Kabul, and just how much of this game is a flashback? Is Conrad even real? How do you blend in, getting two trained soldiers not to question you as you subvert your only authority? Should games stress us out? Are we literally descending into hell? Is survival a moral choice for our protagonist? It's unbelievable that a game that starts like any other drab shooter generates these kinds of questions by its shocking end. Also, turns out the P90 exists outside of Stargate. Who knew? Not one of us, apparently.

It should be noted that we almost successfully avoid making Darude references. Go team!

RELEVANT LINKS!
Extra Credits - Spec Ops: The Line
Vsauce - Why Do We Play Games?
Vertigo Comics - Pride of Baghdad (it's real!)

“When 9/11 happened, it was clear that war was inevitable. They'd been preparing for it all along. A generation of young American pilots would use my interfaces to hunt and kill Afghani people and Iraqi people, too. This would be my fault. I felt so sorry for those Arab people and their families, and I knew the American pilots would suffer, too. Maybe not right away. At the time those young boys were carrying out their missions, it would all feel unreal and exciting and fun, because that's how we designed it to feel. But later on, maybe days or months or even years later, the reality of what they'd done would start to rise up to the surface, and they would be twisted up with pain and anger and take it out on themselves and their families. That also would be my fault.”
– Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

Sunset Overdrive is an over-the-top third person action/adventure platformer & shooter that revels in breaking the fourth wall. It enjoys lampooning LARPers and any other stereotype you can conjure up even peripherally related to gaming, and shattering your expectations of what Insomniac can produce as a studio, especially in the wake of their overwhelmingly morbid Resistance series.

We hit upon the concepts of interface frustration, hitting the first 80%, traversal issues and delights, uncooperative co-op, and the pros and cons of a game even bothering to pretend to take itself seriously. Does a game have to top the charts in one category to truly be recommend-able?

Uncharted is a third-person shooter with a distinctly Indiana Jones-like style. In this podcast, we lob all sorts of critiques at the 7-year and one-generation old game. We speak a lot about what levels we play games on (especially Will), and we delve extensively into voice acting: what exactly makes Uncharted? is it Heavy Rain? is it Bastion? is it Ravenholm? (We don't go to Ravenholm.)

Special bonus points go to the astute listeners who can spot the hidden reference to a superindie underground Sony-exclusive title in this episode. Feel good about yourself if you find it, you sherpa you. ;)