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Your Video Game City Kinda Sucks | Windbreaker Podcast
8.2k Plays9 months ago
This week's episode of Windbreaker is all about video game cities - from the most atmospheric, to the completely forgettable.
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Transcript
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00:00:00
Speaker
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Introduction to the Windbreakers Podcast
00:00:58
Speaker
Hello, you gorgeous viewers and listeners of things that are fun to watch and listen to. Welcome to the Windbreakers podcast on Second Wind. I'm Yachty Crozier. I'm joined by Sebastian Ruiz. Yo, I'm going first this time. Let's get it. Yes. And there's Marty Sleever as well. Second's best. I wasn't here last week. I feel like I haven't been here for a while. I'm quite a convo. I do not remember what last week's topic was.
00:01:27
Speaker
Oh, when is the game over?
When is a Game Truly Over?
00:01:29
Speaker
Oh, yes. Man, I wanted to talk about that, because I wanted to plug my game, Starstruck Vagabond. Oh, you could do that now. Like right now. There's no laws, you can talk about whatever you want. All right, I will, because I'm doing weird things with that game in terms of making it over, because there's a story. And when you finish the story, there's an extra, like, objective. And if you complete that objective, it basically resets the entire universe. Oh, that's cool. So you can redo the whole universe, but with no story stuff, it's like a zen mode.
00:01:59
Speaker
But in the depths of that Zen mode, there are also ways you can reset the universe again and reactivate the story mode. So you can play an infinite loop of game. Incredible. If that's what your game is never going to end. That's when your name is over. Friggin never. I dream of people having like special like five times through the game speed runs.
00:02:24
Speaker
I like it. It runs a wiki and porn for your game. Those are your three. Like I've made it. Yeah. Anyway, uh, let me know if I, uh,
Cities in Video Games: Final Fantasy 7 and Suicide Squad
00:02:35
Speaker
volume's all right. I moved my mic a bit closer. Uh, this week on windbreakers, we are talking about cities in video games. What games have really created a sense of place that Marty's always going on about with the cities. All right. Fine. Okay. Normally.
00:02:55
Speaker
And what cities have been less good at it? Sure. Why don't we start with the thumbnail? Yeah, I was about to say this topic was born from something I have been playing that I really enjoyed and something you've been playing that you have not enjoyed. Yes, see if you can guess which is which. So what are the two games we're talking about?
00:03:15
Speaker
I'm gonna be talking about Final Fantasy 7 Remake in a thumbs up, and you're gonna be talking about Suicide Squad, Kill the Justice League. I'm assuming in a thumbs down. Yes, pretty much. And I might as well talk about it here, because God knows I probably won't have room to complain about this specific thing amid all the other things I'm complaining about in my upcoming review of Suicide Squad. But amongst other things, the city of Metropolis in that game really doesn't feel like a city.
Critique of Metropolis in Suicide Squad
00:03:45
Speaker
Because, I mean, you could have the excuse that it's supposed to be in the middle of a war zone and everything's completely fucked up. But everything just feels so noisy in that city, funnily enough, because it's a live service game and basically everywhere you go could be a venue for a shootout. But I find it impossible to differentiate one part of the city from another.
00:04:05
Speaker
beyond a couple of landmarks, but if you said, if you should plonk me anywhere in that game and ask me to sort of triangulate where I am and what direction to go in to get to another specific part of it, I wouldn't have the first fucking clue.
00:04:20
Speaker
And it sucks especially with that because it feels like if you are modeling, if your game is modeling a city after either a real city, which we'll talk about probably some games that have done real cities, or a city that is well known in pop culture and has been represented in various mediums a ton, it feels like it should be easier to create that kind of cohesion because you already have an audience who's coming in with a lot of preconceived notions over what this place is,
00:04:47
Speaker
so it feels like that a lot of your legwork is done and yet they still completely shit the bed with this and it just seems like it might be like directly because of the gameplay loop and design it seems to like you say kind of spit in the face of storytelling uh you know a general live service there was no ending but also like
00:05:07
Speaker
you know, to bring up my sense of place thing, if the whole point of the game is to just keep on grinding and keep on, you know, keep on engaging with these with these systems of mechanics, like you're not thinking about building a sense of place artistically really at all at that point. Well, quite. I mean, we all know the motives of Suicide Squad.
00:05:28
Speaker
It was to be a life service on like just secondary priority. Kill
Game Cities as Playgrounds: Crackdown and Sunset Overdrive
00:05:34
Speaker
itself. Just die. Just immediately dies and doesn't have to exist anymore.
00:05:40
Speaker
Does the city at least work, and again, I don't want to step too much on your upcoming review, but does the city at least work in terms of providing a playground? Because there's certain cities that I think aren't good cities, but are at least interesting playgrounds, like Crackdown, Sunset Overdrive. I don't know anything about those cities, but they're at least an interesting place for me to use the abilities in the game. Like does Metropolis even have that going for it?
00:06:10
Speaker
Well, not really, but I think that's more the fault of the traversal mechanics than the game. Because in Crackdown, yeah, you leap from rooftop to rooftop. It's crazy. But in, well, it depends who you're playing as in Suicide Squad. They've all got different traversal mechanics that are all subtly suck in different ways. I was playing a lot of Captain Boomerang because, you know, props to my fellow spiritual Aussies.
00:06:37
Speaker
Yeah, there you go. And his traversal power is he you just throw a boomerang in a teleport to it and that doesn't really engage with the environment at all. Isn't that great? Yeah, no, it's sense. Suicide Squad at me felt like here's an outline for spots with different elevation. Nothing else. Nothing else. Just like here is
00:06:57
Speaker
abject cover. Here is ambiguous height. It might as well be a great big bowl of lumpy porridge. It's a great big bowl of colorful lumpy porridge and debris. It doesn't even feel like streets. It just feels like stuff. Just boxes, isn't it? You might as well have been paintballing in this. That's one of the things is like, to me, a good city in a game feels like a place that
00:07:26
Speaker
had a sense that it existed before you came and will
The Art of RPG City Design
00:07:30
Speaker
exist after you leave. I mean a lot of the cities in the games, unless the game like primarily takes place in a city like Spider-Man in New York or Grand Theft Auto game, I'm almost thinking of like RPG cities where it feels like I'm passing through and you get to a place and you can immediately get this sense of like history or
00:07:47
Speaker
sort of a vibe based on its architecture and its people and what its bars and restaurants look like. And if they have a thing they're obsessed with, whether it's like a pastime or an activity or a job or something, like you could do a lot of world building that way. A lot of RPG cities, especially in like the 2D era, was basically just here's some houses, here's the inn, here's the weapon shop. No toilets. No, no toilets.
00:08:16
Speaker
None of us poop in this city. Could you find the Eldritch Abomination that's taken our ability to shit? Please, I'm so constipated. But as I said, in the green room...
00:08:27
Speaker
You could make that a much broader thing. Where are all the toilets in any video game environment? Sure, I don't know. I do like that sense of what's a good city and you said this sense of it's been here before me, it'll be here afterwards. But I also do kind of like the ones that have that on top of lending itself to whatever it is I'm doing. Like, that's kind of why I didn't vibe too much with Assassin's Creed 2. While we are in a real place, this is the Colosseum and I was like, OK, I have to get down across the street.
00:08:53
Speaker
And now there it is. Whereas I much prefer Assassin's Creed 1, whereas it also being a bit historical felt like it just played with the environment more. I never have to touch the ground at all. Assassin's Creed 3, by far the worst one because I've gone through those locations and what do you do? You just stay on one linear path going from this branch to that branch down back onto a fence post and then I'm back on the road.
00:09:18
Speaker
Be lived in, sure, but also just sort of lend yourself to what it is that I'm supposed to be here for. To get away from Assassin's Creed, Tony Hawk's American Wasteland. That sense of like, sure, very lived in world bit of history, but also I'm here to grind, baby. I'm here to do some weird things. Why is that bum like pissing on the Hollywood sign? And I'm gonna go grind on him. I like that. I'm gonna grind on him, but yeah.
00:09:44
Speaker
it's you need to there's like a line you need to walk and like anything in games like if you adhere too much to realism things start to fall apart if you try to design a new game city that feels like a real city i feel like things will fall apart and won't be fun so you kind of need to well i think that's an american city thing okay i mean if you design a city based around american city that's just like a grid
00:10:10
Speaker
then sure.
Balancing Realism and Fun in City Design
00:10:12
Speaker
But if you're trying to realistically create a city like London, or I like the cities in Assassin's Creed 2, like some of the classic European ones that have all built up over thousands of years from the original curvy goat tracks and fields, then they're very often not grids, they're sprawls. They're interesting.
00:10:35
Speaker
I talked about in the past how how much I liked Ghost Warrior Tokyo. I think you mentioned earlier. Oh, yes. Where's some of that kind of thing? Are there any real cities, real cities and games that you think have done it well? Does that go using an actual city like a real city? Like, oh, great. It was in San Andreas. Feels great. Oh, yeah. Based on a city with actual architecture and engineers that designed a good flow. Yeah.
00:11:03
Speaker
Yeah, but those aren't based on real cities. I mean, those are based on real cities, but it's not like, you know, Watch Dogs 2 is San Francisco, Watch Dogs 3 is London, goes around Tokyo is Tokyo and trying to like represent, you know, Driver San Francisco, that kind of thing. Like, are there examples of those or even maybe some of the Assassin's Creed ones where their historical cities have, you've been like, oh man, this really, this really kind of nailed that city.
00:11:25
Speaker
in one way or another. Oh yeah, the colonies in Assassin's Creed 3. I've been there. They're as vacant as they look, absolutely. Which is a problem there. I've never been to Victoria in England. I don't know if Syndicate holds up.
00:11:41
Speaker
Well, it's not a specific town, but I always think Swery's two games, Deadly Premonition and The Good Life, both did a really good job of creating the atmosphere of the kind of town it was set in.
00:11:56
Speaker
And I think Swery, like, apparently did exhaustive research. He went to, like, actual real-life locations and did a lot of research. And Deadly Premonition set in a sort of, like, small middle-of-nowhere American city. And it very authentically feels like one because it's very unwalkable. You gotta drive everywhere. There's, like, huge, like, fields in between every, like, significant location. Same is the true of the good life. It really feels like a rural English village. The houses look really authentic.
00:12:26
Speaker
There's way too much space between the shit you actually have to care about. I mean, the games kinda suck for all that, but he does a very good job at authentically creating the feels of these places.
00:12:37
Speaker
That was a funny thing with Atomic Heart. People were saying it's like, well, you've got old structures and these new things. And a lot of people apparently native to the area were like, no, that's pretty accurate. Where we've just built on top of cities with history in them. Yeah, yeah. But you can almost tell as well when it's sort of devoid of it, because I think Redfall was based in Massachusetts. That's no Massachusetts I've ever been to. That looks like
00:13:02
Speaker
You know those those carpets that had like roads and stuff on them for children. That's exactly what this feels like. Yeah, it's funny. Speaking of Massachusetts, the Last of Us TV show at one point a title card comes up and it says 10 miles outside Boston. They're just in the middle of the mountains. Why did you even use that title card? Like just put another number, say you're like hundreds of miles outside the DiCaprio thing, you know, Boston.
00:13:30
Speaker
That feels like a joke. Like that one bit in Austin Powers 2 where there's a car chasing what is obviously like Southern California. Yeah. And there's a sign on the road saying English countryside. Yeah. Yeah.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, but that's good enough. An audience will see that and be like, yeah, that's fine. That checks up. You mentioned, it's interesting, the sweary thing about how sweary kind of nailed the feel of either rural America or small town England. It feels like sometimes you almost need an outsider's perspective on a thing to
00:14:05
Speaker
you lean importance or like present that thing from a different point
Celebrating Earthbound's Americana
00:14:10
Speaker
of view. And when you mentioned how a lot of like 2D RPGs, the towns felt like very sort of just utilitarian. One example against that I would say is earthbound.
00:14:20
Speaker
I think Earthbound, in its Japanese-centric depiction of classic Americana, was able to include all those small details, be it the evolution of the towns being from a little small town to a suburb to the big metropolitan area to the beach resort.
00:14:39
Speaker
And then just including little things that add flavor like libraries and fast food joints and museums and things like that. And it feels like there's a through line there into where we get to now, which is another one of the games that made me think of this, which is the Like a Dragon Yakuza series.
00:14:57
Speaker
and their depiction of whether it be a Japanese city or whether it be Honolulu and how it really nails by zooming the camera and it nails the density of those places. It includes all those little details that normally other games would gloss over but add a real sense of place there.
00:15:19
Speaker
Someone told me, I asked during Amy's stream with that, I was like, is this real? Is this a real place? Obviously, Tokyo's real, but did they do a faithful depiction? Someone said, who's been there for 30 years, apparently, yeah, it's really, really close. Yeah, and I've seen some things about Honolulu. I've never been to Hawaii, but Gene Park, the journalist who used to live there, said they nailed literally some of these stores. He's like, these are all places I've been to. This place is one of the most accurate depictions of a place I've ever played.
00:15:47
Speaker
With AI coming through, I'd make a game with Google Maps. Just there you go. Generate me a city block based on that. Bam. Well, there are games you can play with Google Maps like Geoguesser. Yeah. That's that one kid who's very good at it. Sometimes I like to go to places I used to live in Google Maps and just walk around on Street View for a while and see how everything's changed. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be like, oh, they tore down that thing or, oh, look, they put up the chip shop over there.
00:16:15
Speaker
Yeah, I like that. That sense of was there before you end after. Not mine though, they never update it. It's still stuck in 2005. Maybe the town itself is actually still stuck in 2005. Maybe they drive through every year and they're like, yeah, we just don't have to update it. Well, so then we've got the good balance of the tourism as well.
00:16:36
Speaker
What are just the heinous ones, aside from Suicide Squad, just in the history of gaming? You know, we'll just go to Standout Cities, did it really well in a game, did it really terribly.
00:16:49
Speaker
So the one we talked about earlier, the one that stood out to me as did it really well was Midgar in Final Fantasy 7, both in Final Fantasy 7 original, which you spend a few hours in before you go out into the greater world, and Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which was able to take the entirety of the game and put it in Midgar and really gives you
00:17:10
Speaker
a taste of the city that has a physical delineation between the haves and the have-nots. The haves on the upper crust of the city and the have-nots in the lower part of the city. Just walking through them, you get a sense for how these people live. There's a sense of energy. There is that sense of if I wasn't here, life would still be going on and people would still have their roadside stalls and their food carts near public transportation and they would have this bar that everyone goes to.
00:17:40
Speaker
and they would have these are like the slums and the homes and the cats running around and there's children playing and a little makeshift school and it's all the kinds of things that just I feel like what makes a good city isn't any one single thing but it is all those little details feeding in and kind of working together to really like put you in a place. I'm just gonna keep saying.
Memorable vs Bland Cities in Games
00:18:04
Speaker
I think the bad cities in games are the ones that you just can't remember when you're called upon to ask to think of a bad city in a game. Is that bad or bland? Here's one, um... Agents of Mayhem. What do you remember about the city in Agents of Mayhem? It was kind of purple. A little? Maybe? It was kind of purple. I'm thinking the color purple. Not the color purple like the color purple. Oh no. The color purple.
00:18:29
Speaker
Just when I think back to it, it all sort of feels like the same wherever you were. It was like modern buildings and wide streets. I feel like we've especially hit that with the rise of open world games when you think of
00:18:46
Speaker
Dying Light 2, which came out like two years ago or something, I don't remember a thing about that city. I could not tell you what country that city was supposed to be in. I remember they tried to do a kind of like a Yojimbo Sanjuro thing where you play sides against each other, but I do not remember anything about the infrastructure of that city. And I liked the running around the city, and then I liked being able to get like the glider or whatever it was or the parachute. But what was going on in the place was
00:19:14
Speaker
Just completely meaningless to me and it just feels like a lot of those open world games kind of blend together in that just become a mush.
00:19:24
Speaker
Who was it? On the Discord, someone had put up a video of someone else where they said, lies of P, mildest take, right? Is that just the sense of space? Because you got this hotel and it's in the middle of like to the west of the slums immediately, to the right behind us, where the rich people are, to the rights of a church. And then over on that side, everything's burning down. And yeah, it's like all happening at the exact same time, blending together. I was like, oh, yeah, I never really noticed that. Maybe that's why I felt like I didn't belong here so much.
00:19:55
Speaker
One city I wanted to shout out was GTA IV as well, because I played that a few times, but I always got the sense that wherever you were in that city, you had a vague idea of where you were on the map, just from looking around, and you knew what direction to head in to get to wherever you wanted to be.
00:20:12
Speaker
I love it. You'd be in the, you'd be in like the, um, the Eastern European quarter where you start, where everything's a bit like run down. There's all like a lot of local owned businesses. Oh yeah. And if you're there, you could just have to head north to get to the, uh, sort of, um, housing projects. And if you're anywhere, they just need to go west across the, across the bay or across the river to get to the built up business district.
00:20:39
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the – I think that's one of those examples of you can take artistic liberties and if you would try to recreate that one-to-one, it would be a slog to get through the boroughs of Manhattan unless you were swinging like in Spider-Man and even that has to take a ton of liberties.
00:20:56
Speaker
By condensing it, I feel like you make a much more entertaining city. I think they did a similar thing with the Vice City, honestly, back on the PS2. I remember that as one of the first open worlds that really impressed me. It just felt like, oh my God, there's so many distinct areas, and there's the mansions, and there's the slums, and there's the beach, and that famous stretch in Miami along the beach with the bright lights and everything. You go back to it and it's tiny. You can fly across it in two or three minutes.
00:21:26
Speaker
impressive nonetheless. I don't know. I'd say stand out city for me. Bully, you plot me back in there. It's like a little vague, but if you plot me back down in the Bully city, I was like, all right, I know exactly how to get from here to there to there. Great landmarks. Great. That's also set in fictitious New England, right next to Redfall, apparently. That actually feels like, yeah, we're right by the coast. That's where you put the carnival. It almost
00:21:50
Speaker
gives a sense if I feel like if someone from
Spatial Design in GTA IV
00:21:52
Speaker
Massachusetts played bully and never having played it before they would go yeah this seems about right where this rundown part would be where the tracks would be where the sums are and it's almost like this unspoken innate sense of of direction that we have depending on where you're from right it's just like
00:22:10
Speaker
it just subconsciously dings something in you. If I had a game that was based somewhere near where I grew up because it is like historical colonial America, I do get this sense of like, oh, the blacksmith would be right around over here because the river and that's like, oh, interesting.
00:22:28
Speaker
Do they hire people? Do they hire people for that? A small English industrial town and I can't think of any game setting anything that's remotely the equivalent of a small English industrial town. Yeah, yeah.
00:22:44
Speaker
No. Skyrim doesn't feel like that, no. It's funny, a game I love that I think has pretty lackluster towns by and large is Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, which Zelda has been kind of hit or miss when it comes to its towns in the past. I think Clock Town in Majora's Mask is one of my favorite examples of a town because that's one of those things that we haven't talked about yet, but a place with a schedule.
00:23:10
Speaker
A place where it feels like, you know, when we talked about it feels like people are living here and they would be doing this without you. Like they literally do that in that game. You know, they have a set schedule throughout the day and they'll be working at the inn from nine to five and then they'll be going to romantic rendezvous afterwards and the postman comes through at this time, that kind of thing. Which I thought was really impressive and again, lends a real sense of authenticity.
00:23:36
Speaker
Whereas in the modern Zelda games, those places, I don't know, the fish people live in that weird-ass kingdom, but you don't get a sense of what the hell this place is, same thing with the Gorons, same thing with the Rideau. They're cool looking, but they don't feel functional whatsoever. The one city island in Wind Waker was really good for that. Yeah, that one was great. That kind of had that
00:24:02
Speaker
RPGs do a good job of a lot of them. You start off in a small town and then you go off on your big adventure afterwards and Wind Waker on, I think, Onset Island or wherever that was called, where you start off, has that great sense of a small community and
Atmospheric Cityscapes in Thief
00:24:16
Speaker
then you venture out into the larger world and games like Chrono Trigger have that and just pretty much any RPG under the sun.
00:24:25
Speaker
Well, if you want to get away from open world games, an example of like a great city with a great sense of place for me is the city in Thief. Thief, The Dark Project and Thief 2. There's a real like sense of place created on that place of like a huge urban sprawl.
00:24:43
Speaker
Every now and again, you get a mission that would take place in like a sort of pseudo open world, like borough of the city. And you get a real sense for how incredibly lost you could get. Does every mission take place in the same city? I've never played Thief 2. Like, are they all set in the same place? Yeah, it's called The City.
00:25:02
Speaker
titular the city. Some of them are you're like, um, down on the ground or one later on, you're like, there's a very good level in thief to where, uh, you have to navigate across a sequence of rooftops.
00:25:17
Speaker
And one of the things Thief 2 is good at is creating a sense for the culture and how life is in the city, like, just in the background as you play. Like, there's Bits in Thief 2, because the whole plot of that game is about this, like, industrial cult taking over the city, and sort of killing all the plant life, and you keep overhearing conversations, people saying, yeah, all my plants are dying, it's weird, isn't it?
00:25:40
Speaker
And they built that really hideous statue over in the east side of the city, which you then go and get to see later on in the mission. And partly it was the fact that you didn't see or get to explore all of the city that gave it its sort of mythic feel to it. And that's why thief three kind of fucked things up. Because they tried to make it open world.
00:26:07
Speaker
You show your hand at that point and... Yeah. Yeah. And then it had lost all the mystique because you could go everywhere and it wasn't that interesting. The environments had to be a lot smaller because it was like they had to increase the graphical fidelity. I don't know why you're showing Thief 4, Eric. That game sucks.
00:26:27
Speaker
Oh no, Eric, how could you? What's your favourite one? I'm talking about Thief 1 and 2, and Thief 3, Dead in Shadows. It was one of the early post-Doom 3 high-def games where the environments were suddenly much more detailed and interestingly lit, but much smaller and less detailed. Yeah, it's... I think sometimes it can be easier to
00:26:57
Speaker
of the
00:27:16
Speaker
You can kind of feel the urban sprawl of tokyo and then there's a small things like when you fast travel what first you don't get the fast travel you have to take the train and so it establishes the space line. Oh it takes a while to get to places and you have to go into the train station the train stations confusing you find the right train and then you have to take it to where you're going and those small things.
00:27:37
Speaker
kind of stitching together what Shibuya feels like compared to Shinjuku, compared to Harajuku. It again creates this web in the city that even though you're ostensibly fast traveling between little focal points, in your mind you are kind of living the character, having to hop on the train to go all the way to kind of the golden guy stretch of bars at night and everything, which I think is really cool.
00:28:04
Speaker
Yes, yes, you're a big weeb, we know. Oh, you like Persona as well. He's been to Tokyo. Who do you want from him? Yes, well, Persona 3. My Persona 3 review is coming out this week, incidentally. Oh, there you go. Yeah. I think, to me though, a city that lends itself to mastery, which is a hard thing to describe in a video games, but it is like the place that you grew up in, right? The place where here's the restaurant only locals know,
00:28:31
Speaker
Here's the shortcut that if you've driven around here like for a few years you've known lends itself to say um like crazy taxi road rage of CS Simpson's hit and run where after a little bit of time you're like oh wait I need to get to this other section on the other side of town but I know there's a quick little gap through this alley that's that's sort of like it provides itself those I guess a gamified secrets gamified mastery points away it's just each door
00:28:59
Speaker
gives you this stronger sense of navigation. That's the word. I want, not just my own sense of like, okay, here's the map and whatnot, but like, I know where the secret alley lands itself to thief, like you said. Well, because he is a thief, he does know the under workings of the town. He can get around in ways that other people can't. And when you first find them, even though he knows they're there, you're like, oh, snap, I'm actually the thief. It's me and Garrett, not just him.
00:29:25
Speaker
And that is like, I mean, not the thieving part, but like that is a realistic thing you get when you've lived in a city long enough. Like you start to know the shortcuts and the ins and outs. And like when I lived in San Francisco, I knew, like I walked all the time everywhere in that city. And I knew, oh, if I want to get to this other neighborhood, if I go two blocks out of my way, I'll save myself a pain in the ass hill to climb.
00:29:52
Speaker
and like whereas if you're just following the straight line or google maps and be like shit i gotta walk up this really steep hill but i'm like nah nah nah i know if i go two blocks out of my way i can cut this hill in half and and have it spread out over two blocks and it'll be it'll be fine um which again that's like
00:30:07
Speaker
you almost get that sense of navigation and mastery of living in a city. And if a video game city is able to do that as well, it's pretty impressive. Yeah. Are there many games that can achieve that feel? Because by the very nature, you don't live in a video game city for years before you start playing it. Sure, sure. Yeah. What do you... Our lord and savior is from software. Do you think they're good at designing cities? Do you think your garden was...
FromSoftware's Iconic City Designs
00:30:36
Speaker
Your Yarnums, your Anor Londo's, like, do you think those are, quote unquote, good, well-designed video game cities? Yarnum is cool. I can't imagine what Yarnum is like when it's not just dripping with werewolves. Yeah, I don't know if, like, they would function as actual cities to live in. I think they function very well as video game cities. Yeah. But while simultaneously creating a sense of nonsensicalness that a real life city can have.
00:31:03
Speaker
Like, why does the Yharnam twist around and reconnect in all sorts of weird places? That's the kind of thing a real city might do. Yeah, yeah.
00:31:15
Speaker
I mean, I think Dark Souls 1 had a really good sense of space and logic of like, yeah, let's put the prison over there. Could the graveyard down there and then build on top of all these ruins and whatnot? Well, of course, early on in the game, you don't have fast travel, so they have to design the game around reconnecting with places. And I think it does it really well. And I think the level design goes downhill later in the game when you do unlock fast travel.
00:31:39
Speaker
and the rest of the games in general. I don't know. I feel like some of the cities, so to speak, later on weren't all that good. Elden Ring, once you get to the city side of things, I'm like, oh, Christ, I gotta go up routes to get into rooftops and go down this hole. Oh, God, where am I?
00:31:57
Speaker
Yeah. I did like- Lane Dale, sure. Lane Dale. Another L, Laernia of the lakes. The city outside of Hogwarts felt like it was a place that had just sunk into a lake, into a swamp. It just became a swamp city. I was like, okay, I can sense that hundreds or thousands of years ago, this was bustling and now this place is musty as hell.
00:32:22
Speaker
lived in lived in having been lived in nice place if you will i also look something like pt even you can really tell the house in pt has been lived in because there's just like a random worktop covered in random pills and shit and yeah yeah just bits of paper yeah yeah that's what clutter yeah that's what all the surfaces in my plows look like
00:32:46
Speaker
Yeah, one of, uh, I think it's in The Last of Us part one when you're wandering around Joel's house at the beginning before shit hits the fan. If you go into one of the bedrooms, there's just laundry on the floor. Like it was like, how fucking, I'm just going to throw this on here cause I'm tired cause I've been working all day. And like, that's one of those just very small details that I'm like, Oh, this is great. Cause most video game bedrooms you walk in and are just like, here's a nightstand. There was a picture of my father and I have a poster of a sport team and that is it.
00:33:13
Speaker
That is my bedroom, where most people are messy as hell. Yeah, some proper grime. Disco Elysium. That definitely felt like, I'm not from here, and I got knocked out, and I might have caused some trouble. And I don't have any memory of any of this.
00:33:29
Speaker
Good textures, good layering on that one. Very good. Yeah, yeah. I like that too. It's interesting because Nexfest is pretty much done. There were a lot of demos tagged as exploration going for the tiny city and sort of like the stray thing that they were going. Yeah, yeah. Literally, Tiny Terry's turbo trip is a little dude in a small town and he's trying to get to the moon with a taxi.
00:33:52
Speaker
Great little dude. That game got on my radar when Elise wrote about it for the video we put up last week. But man, love myself a little dude in a big world.
00:33:59
Speaker
Right? Yeah. There's just this a lot of, I'm throwing you in. You have no memories. You're not from here. And figure your way out by traversing, by talking to the locals, by just having a gander, which I think is, that's my favorite thing. I think that's where video games shine because in a book, books can only tell you, you know, what they want you to know. Movies, they can only hold the shot for as long as possible. A video game can live in infinite.
00:34:23
Speaker
Just like, here's all the detail, and I'm not going to give it to you. You can have as much or as little as you want through your own exploration. Ooh. Ooh. I mean, I guess we don't want this discussion just to turn into randomly naming games. I just remembered one. I just remembered one. Gravity Rush. Gravity Rush. Yeah, that's a great city. That felt like I was a person with superpowers exploring a city from a Jean-Pierre Genet film. Yeah.
00:34:52
Speaker
It was great. Like City of Lost Children. Oh. Yeah, it doesn't feel anything like a quote unquote real city, but is is a beautiful, like you said, a good a good amalgam of feeling like a playground while also feels like an actual place.
00:35:09
Speaker
Yes, that was good. Was Rapture a good city? Was that a well-designed you think? One from a game perspective and two from like in the- Certainly unique. I mean- Yeah. Certainly, if you would drop to like a random part of it, you'd instantly know where you were. Yeah, I would say it feels more like a theme park, right? Which is kind of the point where it feels like fucked up Disneyland. Well, guys like Infinite setting even more so, yeah. Yeah, that's fucked up Universal Studios.
00:35:37
Speaker
Cause that's the whole thing. They're grand architects, but almost like, I would not live here. Yeah. Yeah. That being said, um, they do have good bars and what I think, uh, uh, a video game city can, uh, is only as good as its finest bar. If you have a good bar in a game, I'm like, you sold me on Grim Fandango. Great bars. You open up one of those great bars, good bars.
00:36:00
Speaker
Hm. George Massey has Milk Bar, good bar. Time to bar. Yeah, Washock's Three had some good pubs. That's what we call them in England. I don't know if you guys knew that. I like how in earthbound Nintendo chickened out of calling them bars in the English dub. They're all replaced with cafes. Cafes, and you're supposed to go in there and get real fucked up on Moonshine and over to see the other world.
00:36:23
Speaker
Whoa, I'm feeling really woozy from all this coffee I've been drinking. Whoa, I should cut down. Yeah. And then they're like, oh, you're too young. We can't serve you coffee. I'm like, this isn't what this is about. Yeah, divide to be earthbound. I'll take it. Shall we go to super chats? There's a lot of them. Yeah. Yeah. And folks are mentioning a lot of cities that I'm going to want to chat about. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you to everyone who's getting your super chats in. Tell us about your cities.
00:36:51
Speaker
Real cities, fake cities, it doesn't matter. Don't dox yourself, yeah. Don't dox yourself, yeah. Video game cities, there you go. Mother's maiden name. Okay. First, we have one from Eloise, who gives two British pounds and says, why not make a Mog World game? Because that will kind of kill the joke, Eloise. It was a book taking the piss out of video games. If it were a video game... Take the piss out of books. It would only work, would it? No one reads. No one reads.
00:37:21
Speaker
Chaoscrest is five years the list. Sorry, were you saying something? Oh no, there was a member one, but I'll do it after Chaoscrest. Okay. And he says, here is five for pulling me away from live Senate coverage. I don't want to watch that. It'll just depress you. It won't depress you. Oh, how old are you? Who's watching the Senate? I only have C-SPAN. I need it. Hic Warrior. Been a member for two months. Thank you so much, Warrior of the Hics. It's been two months now. Oh, how time flies. Agreed.
00:37:51
Speaker
I know. Oh, my God. It's February already. We've only been doing this since November. Yeah. Who wants to be my Valentine's? Any takers? Two days? Oh, yeah. I heard you asked us on Firelink if we have Valentine's plans for the Firelink show on Wednesday. Yeah, we're going to do the main topic on Wednesday is going to be does Kirby fuck Colin in an expos day?
00:38:16
Speaker
He does he does big sucking, but I don't know if he does any cool fucking so we'll figure that out on Wednesday
00:38:22
Speaker
You know how you bring someone off by just cutting a grapefruit in half and just sort of mouthing their bellend? Mm-hmm. Surely, yes. Of course. I just wanted to put that image in your head. Moving on. Yes. I love grapefruit. Making the garden gives two euros and says, audio only, folks, you're missing Eric's visual goofs. I'm a host and I'm missing Eric's goofs. Because I have it in the corner and I just start seeing stuff happening. And I'm like, I can't watch it. I'll watch it afterwards. I'll get the cliff notes of the goofs.
00:38:52
Speaker
I look at Kirby. Oh, the whole titty, he said. The whole titty! Kirby! Imagine Dedede. I don't know how many Dededes are one of those penguins. Does he have like multiple, like, does he have like eight nipples? How do penguins work? What? Are penguins mammals now? Penguins don't lactate. No, he's not a penguin. What's the name? What's, what's, what's King Dedede? He's a penguin.
00:39:18
Speaker
Is he a penguin? Yes. He's a bird. He's very much a bird, I think. I don't have an amiibo of him, so I can't do, like, an amiibo. Oh, no. You can't check the anime. I don't think there would be nipples on an amiibo. Oh, for how much he pays, they should. Oh, my God. That is a very big... I'm playing face value now. Oh, you're playing a different game. Yeah. It's fine.
00:39:39
Speaker
A coffee koala gives £4.99, says Toffee for Chief Marketing Officer. Hope the coffee and hat, Eric Editing Magic, get a few more well-deserved Patreon subs for you all. Good point, Coffee Koala. Everyone should subscribe to the Patreon. Because we're now paying ourselves, and it turns out there's just a lot of people who make money. Turns out I'm pretty high maintenance.
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah, him and his Ferrari rockers. Yeah, we all have our things. Nick needs to fix his sliding door. Yeah, his wall door. His wall door? Have you ever heard the term wall door? Is it door wall door? The salad door. No, he said wall door because we kept making the wall door, like wall door for Astoria goofs. He said, I'm excited to get paid this week because I need to fix my wall door. And all of us were like, what?
00:40:29
Speaker
And then he showed it to us and he's like, it's a door that's in a wall. And Jack and I were like, they're all, all doors are in walls. It was nuts. Genuinely nuts. It turns out it was Southern Michigan slang, which makes sense because that's where he's from.
00:40:47
Speaker
Mmm, that's yeah, that's fucking localized You think that but yeah, so I could say Lewis that's the only place to get gooey butter cake and it's just them Yeah, well, it's all the way butter cake. I bet he's made that before King teacher Lee It's like being in the one part of America where they still say Hope to mean every single soda. What? Oh, oh, yeah. Okay. Oh
00:41:11
Speaker
Anyway, Dr. Theo gives $5 and says exploring source engine cities feels strangely lonely, like they feel like unintentional horror games. Well, that's where the liminal spaces genres come through, like backgrounds of like, Oh, weird that it's empty. We haven't talked about cities, spooky cities. What kind of city? Silent Hill is you like Silent Hill, you like those games.
00:41:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's like the Deadly Premonition setting. It's like a small resort town in the Midwest. Yeah. What do you, speaking of Source Engine, City 17, is that the name of it in Half-Life 2?
00:41:51
Speaker
Yes. What do you think of City 17? Do you think that's a good video game city? I think it is a good video game city. I think it's very well realized the sort of mixture of the old Eastern European architecture and the combine evil alien tech is surprisingly effective for giving a sense of lived inness.
00:42:12
Speaker
Yeah. And it does a good job of, you know, you walk into an apartment building and you can't go in any of the rooms and it's not just like, well, the door's locked or you can't interact with it. Like they have all those things, like the government came and barred up every apartment. And so there's just like a small touch like that. And you're like, Oh, okay. Story-wise, it makes sense why I can't just rummage through all these places. Hmm. I mean, the old war games, you should have some pretty cool like cities that you were
00:42:38
Speaker
running through that they were bombarded. I mean, Black Ops had a sick scene in Havana where I was like, is this really little Cuba? All right. Oh, well, real Cuba. This is what it's like. Real Cuba. Big Cuba. Yeah. Great framing and whatnot. Just show me the hot spots like in those disaster movies where it's like, boom, we hit the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, Lena Tower Pizza. Yeah.
00:42:59
Speaker
I also liked Ravenholm because that does a different thing, but I like hyping up a place before you get to it. Yeah. Yeah, we don't go there anymore. And you're like, oh, I definitely want to go to this place. Like I want to see what's going on here. That's right. Yeah. Robonobthasnob gives 11.99 euros and says Iwoudai in persona three is the best depiction of Coventry with people getting depressed every day.
00:43:24
Speaker
They do get very depressed. Coventry is a very depressed middle of nowhere English city. Oh, I thought Coventry. I thought that was like the like being a nun. That's a convent. In the Arkham games, there's a district of Gotham City called Coventry, which makes me laugh. Coventry is like the closest city to where I grew up. Coventry. Interesting. That's a good city. Batman City.
00:43:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's what makes the Suicide Squad Metropolis all the sadder, is that this is a studio that made a fucking banger of a city, an Arkham City.
00:44:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, they I mean, I wonder if there's some weaponized incompetence at work on Rocksteady's part. Oh, no, we fucked up making a live service game. Guess you can't make us make any of these anymore. Guess we'll have to go back to the actually in a good single player games with integrity now. But the sad thing to do that now, the scary thing is now they'll just just got the studio. Like not that's not that that's necessarily going to happen in Suicide Squad, but
00:44:32
Speaker
for Rocksteady, but that just seems like we see those stories every day. And so you can't have a failure to make a point if you have a failure that just might be your last game. Yeah, also the amount of time it takes to make games these days. Quite a long way to go to make a point. It takes seven years of your life to prove a point. Yeah.
00:44:52
Speaker
PoxD gives $5. Says, I'm still waiting for the game city that doesn't just feel like a checklist of need fulfillment. Ammo store here, armourer there, quest giver here. Oh, those are MMOs, ain't they? They're like, hey, I need you to talk to the baker that's standing right next to me. Yeah. You know, one city we didn't mention that I noticed the chat was sort of foaming at the mouth for us to bring up was the city from Cyberpunk.
00:45:13
Speaker
Night City. Oh yeah, yeah. There's a whole lot of extraneous bullshit in that game. CD Projekt Red is kind of decent with the Mercedes. You know, The Witcher had a pretty good old town city. I wonder why they marked restaurants on the map. Why there's so many different restaurants you can go to with Cyberpunk, because there's literally no gameplay benefit to eating food. But there are so many restaurants that offer different dining experiences.
00:45:39
Speaker
You don't even get small things like in Yakuza where it's like, oh, if you sit down with your party, they bond with them or you can heal yourself. It's just... Yeah. It's just there. If you feel like role-playing as a restaurant critic, you can. No, I'm going to.
00:45:56
Speaker
Goldratt gives five euros and then his message was retracted. Maybe he was being an asshole. No, he's got a message coming up. I think he just... No. Retracted means they took it back, deleted it, we got it. I didn't know that. That's a fun fact.
00:46:11
Speaker
Pink gives $5 and says, Yahtzee, can you say, oh, here we go. Que sin gue a su madre el America? That was pretty good. America being a Mexican football team. Yeah, yeah, America. What is that?
00:46:26
Speaker
Oh, it's just soccer stuff. What's it mean, though? Oh, it literally means fuck your mom. But we say it for everything. It's just like, fuck off with them. That's just we don't like that team. It's one of Mexico's soccer teams. It's the New Mexico City one. There you go. Well, that's worth remembering. Well, we got we got Chivas or something. A Chivas fan. Moving on. Achievments?
00:46:53
Speaker
Like Xbox achievements? Yeah, those. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Galdon Yetich gives $2. There's Shadows of Doubt nailed the simulation approach. Yeah, not a big city, but it kind of blows a mind that literally every apartment in every building in that game you can go into. Yeah, you just don't know what you're going to find. Explore people's stuff. Felt very like what Robert Rodriguez since city. I feel like he has something to do with that. Hmm.
00:47:23
Speaker
Alex Armstrong gives $5 and says, laugh if you must! But I think the next Sonic game should have a sandbox city with missions like Spider-Man, considering Frontier's open world was decent. I like the city in Sonic Adventure 1. I think about that city a lot. I'm not joining you on this one, Alex Armstrong, because I think what makes Sonic Frontier's work is that it's set in wide open spaces, where you can just run free like a big old black beauty horse.
00:47:48
Speaker
Yeah. So the city has an awful lot of stuff that will get in the way if you're trying to go very fast from place to place. That sounds awful. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Cause people like the sif, the San Francisco facsimile and song convention too, but that is a sound, etc. I was trying to find you. Yeah. That's a beautiful song. I put it in every direction except until I found you. You were hard to find.
00:48:22
Speaker
Goldrack gives 10 euros and says, Clock Town and Pathologic 2's town feel more alive than any other place in games, and MM Remake should give the other hubs the same treatment. Majora's Mask. Yeah, the Majora's Mask hub, that's probably my favorite. Clock Town's probably my favorite city in any Zelda game. Pathologic, again, is one of those games. For us, you should play Pathologic.
00:48:46
Speaker
God knows Yahtzee's not going to and God knows I'm not going to. I gave it a go. Wait, what is this? Oh, it's like, it's like a capital G game where it's like, I think you got to do like poopies and stuff in it. And like, I think, yeah, it's going to be like, Oh, you got too much poopies. So you got to find a place to go. Oh God. It's one of those games. Yeah. Some people seem to like it. Yeah.
00:49:10
Speaker
Erm, witchesism gives ten dollars and says fantasy RPGs usually have bad cities, IMO. They never feel big enough or lived in. Every building has a specific purpose. Shop, quest, guild. Novigrad from Witcher 3 is the exception I think of. I see. Yeah.
00:49:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think cities feeling like that early on were just a tactical limitation. Like I don't think you were supposed to go to like a major city in an early RPG and assume the kingdom is only three buildings tall. I think it was supposed to be like a representation of what the larger city was. Yeah, you're supposed to infer
00:49:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, which, again, like, the Midgar of Final Fantasy VII proper is probably only a couple dozen screens. But you're supposed to infer it's a much bigger thing, and then when you see Final Fantasy VII Remake, you're like, oh, yeah, that is a much bigger thing, so, you know. So spend your disbelief on that. Jackson Jewel gives $5, says, only city I ever memorized was Saints Row 2, and even near the minimap. I guess Skyrim's Town 2, but they're like four buildings each.
00:50:16
Speaker
Well, you must have played a lot of Saints Row 2 then, Jackson Jewel. As well, you should, because it's good. Did it take place in the same city as Saints Row 1? I'll take place in the same city. The first two are set in the same city, I think, although the city in Saints Row 2 has been built up a lot. Saints Row 3 is a new city. Saints Row 4 is set in a virtual reality recreation of the city from Saints Row 3, because they couldn't be asked to design a new one. And then, Gant out of Hell, I think, does the same thing.
00:50:48
Speaker
Yeah, fun facts. But anyway, SVS Go 2000 gives five euros, says who could forget the Starfield cities? There's expansive megalopolises that could house a grand total of 500 people if they live in bunk beds. Oh, this. Burn, etc. Yeah. I felt like, what was it, Outer Worlds? Wilds? Worlds.
00:51:08
Speaker
I feel like they're both in space. They're both in space. Outer Worlds was the Black Isle one. The Obsidian one. I had pretty decent cities to it and whatnot. But honestly, I liked the first area a lot more. I wasn't much of a city, but that felt like a little lived in, I don't know, like a gold mining town.
00:51:34
Speaker
Come on Outer Wilds or Outer Worlds? We're talking worlds. Because the opening of Outer Wilds also feels like a little lived in. They do the same thing, don't they? Damn. Yeah. Just let me wander. Just let me wander. The Piss Bandit gives $5 and says, here's something that might be heretical, but I prefer to Steel Port over Steel Water in the Saints Row games. Okay, I think Steel Water is the city from the first two and Steel Port is the one from the three. I googled Steel Port and it took me to a city in South Africa or a brand of knives.
00:52:03
Speaker
Uh, first one. Uh, the knives. Mm. Alex Armstrong gives $5. It says spec ops the lines Dubai. It felt like you were traveling all over the place, fucking things up even worse. Also sucks the games delisted everywhere now. Yeah. Yeah. War games do that pretty well. Little cities. Yeah. That's creepy to me. Horror games, I've never been scared by like the city in a horror game, but in shooters, like so many vantage points. I don't want it.
00:52:32
Speaker
Yeah, and that's another, I just streamed through the entirety of the game the other week, and that's another game that does a good thing like Midgar where it's juxtaposes the haves and the have-nots, which is obviously something in Dubai proper and in honestly most major cities, but sort of juxtaposing the complete garish opulence of the people with money compared to the absolute squalor of the people without money. Mm-hmm.
00:53:00
Speaker
I love it. What are you doing with coffee? Coffee's going wild. Coffee's so upset that they delisted Spec Ops line, which to be fair is just because there's so much licensed music in that game. Every time I got to one of those points, I was like, oh yeah, the license is probably one up for all these. And they were like, we're not going to, we're not going to pay for this. He's so mad. He's going to take it out on this yellow duck. Make your own music industry. This yellow duck is you. That is clearly a chicken.
00:53:31
Speaker
Okay fine. Well there you go. Yeah it's got a little chicken head thing going on. I'll just hold it here for him to come get.
00:53:49
Speaker
Stuart Green gives £2 and says, Paper Mario, Thousand Year Door, Rogue Port, best city ever. Yeah, I liked how it wasn't just, you know, some toads who live in houses complaining about Princess Peach being kidnapped again. The city in Paper Mario 2 really feels like it has a history. Disabled too though as well.
00:54:09
Speaker
I just like that there's a fucking gallows in the middle of the town square. It's pretty fucking dark for Mario, but then you think about it and say, wait, how many Mario species would actually be affected by a gallows? How many of them actually have necks? Could you kill a goomba with a gallows? Do you think a goomba is the after result of a gallow? Like a goomba had a body and then got its head lopped off and is now just a little goomba walking around? Well, gallows don't top heads off.
00:54:39
Speaker
No. They strangle you. Oh, I thought it was a guillotine in the middle of town. No, is it gallows? No, it's gallows. Oh, my mistake. What if it's a two and one? Would you say a gallows or a guillotine is darker? I think a gallows is a darker thing. A dull guillotine is the darkest. If it takes more than one hump, it is the darkest, I think.
00:55:04
Speaker
Peter Riley gives $5. Speaking of Thief, I've been playing The Black Parade, which is a fan-made mod that released recently. It also does the City Mission as well. Yeah, people keep banging on about that. I've got too many other games to play, I'm afraid. You hate Thief 4 and you play that Portal fan mod, you just open it up.
00:55:21
Speaker
Yeah, you also love my chemical romance and they love the Black Parade. When I was a young boy, my father took me into the city. How did I not point to you? I seem to recall it was to see a marching band. And he said, son, when you grow up, will you be the savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned? And I was like, what the fuck are you on about, dad? I'm just trying to watch this fucking band. It's a crazy thing for a dad to say to someone.
00:55:48
Speaker
Right? I hadn't been to God Knight, Joe. My dad, have you been on the moonshine again? Oh no. He's speaking about the moonside in Earth Mode. Neurass25 gives 10 runs and says, Metraplex heeds the call of the last Prime. That Transformers thing. I don't know what he's on about. If I don't understand something, I assume it's about one of your books.
00:56:15
Speaker
And then it's the British or the British. Yeah. This is, uh, I imagine that's where all the transformers lives and apartments. Yeah. It's like friends, but for it is, it is transformers. I knew it. Yeah. Last prime. Yeah.
00:56:34
Speaker
Anyway, Pundabaya gives two pounds and says, what about City 17 in Half Life 2? Well, we've been over that. Pretend we talked about it earlier just because of your donation, and we really appreciate it. What a grand point. Thanks for your money, retrospectively. Alex Armstrong gives $2. It says, not a city, but thoughts on Wind Waker's Big Ocean. I actually quite liked exploring the Big Ocean in Wind Waker. It certainly achieved giving you a sense of epic journeyness.
00:57:03
Speaker
Especially when the music... Especially when the music kicks in. Et cetera. It's also cool to know... That was actually a good rendition of the OPC song. No, it wasn't, you fucking creep. I like the idea of knowing that, ooh, a couple hundred feet below me is an entire kingdom. That's exciting.
00:57:43
Speaker
Sure, but I mean, that is the peak of a utilitarian society. Go ahead and do the whole like, there's the baker, there's the blacksmith. If it's a game like Stardew, you're going to be in that place for the entire game anyway, like basically just three areas.
00:57:50
Speaker
A Fuegan member for two months in Tip Jar, thank you very much.
00:57:58
Speaker
How do you feel about games where you make your own cities? Either cities, city skylines, yeah, or even like an Animal Crossing where you're making a little village, or even like mini games in other games where you, it's like, this place is a piece of shit and you need to fix it up. I always like that. I like an RPG where like this place is a piece of shit, have at it, and then you make a little society out of it and you feel like you put your thumb, your thumbprint on it.
00:58:23
Speaker
It's not really my bag. I feel like if you're gonna ask me to be creative, I'd ask you to pay me for it. It's my job.
00:58:33
Speaker
Problem is I get to, not hackery, but I get to meta. So it's just like, okay, if I can just lock you all in a room with a toilet, that's all you need. That's all I'm going to do. I don't care if it's in real life. That's just not how it works. Amazon warehouses, maybe, but yeah, no, I can't get too into it. There was that, what, Man of Lords is coming through. It has a setting to where you can walk through the city that you've made. Like, well, like.
00:58:56
Speaker
Kinda helps, but... Yes, and a super cool simcopter had the ability that you could import the city you designed in, like, SimCity 2000 or SimCity 3000, or one of those. And then you could just fly around it in your little chopper. Putting our fires and stuff. I'm just not a logistics man. Anyway, Henrietta Vermillion gives $2 as his thoughts on Sunset City from Sunset Overdrive. Well, I don't remember much about it, so it can't have been very good.
00:59:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's my, like I was saying earlier, it's a great playground. Nothing about the city is memorable, but maybe it being a great playground is all that matters. You know, I don't think you need to, like I was saying earlier, like, oh, I want a sense of history, you know, I want to know what people are doing. I don't think it's fine. If your game's about goop monsters, maybe it just matters that they drank a bunch of fucking energy drinks and turned into goop monsters. Now let me bounce off the hood of your car and kill things on power lines. Yeah, let me grind on something. Just let me grind.
00:59:56
Speaker
Not that way, though. Oh, don't let me grind that way. In the good way. Yeah, good grinding. Good grinding. Jackson Jewel gives two dollars and says, Yachty, encourage me to work out today, please. Do some press ups, you fat git. Every press up you don't do is one your arch nemesis could have over you. Didn't you have a gaming workout regimen of like you do X amount of somethings during
01:00:23
Speaker
load screen every time you die or didn't you say that? You were playing a game like that? I used to, yeah. When I used to play more like multiplayer focused games, but problem is I got good at the game. So I just got, I got good and fat and my wrist hurts. So I stopped. Chaos Chris gives $2 and says, I am 33. Well done. Happy birthday. You made it. Happy birthday. They call it a sunny Pippin birthday.
01:00:51
Speaker
Godless Heathen gives $2 and says, when's the next Let's Drown Out with Gabe Morton? Never. Piss off. And then SBSGo 2000 gives 10 euros and says, video game cities should be spatially compressed and mostly inaccessible. Once they become too big and you can go anywhere, they just become annoying maze-like obstacles and you just tune out most of it.
01:01:09
Speaker
Agreed. I'm okay with that though, if it's like, if you wander through these cities you can go through the drawers and odds are you don't find anything. You know, I'm kind of okay with that. Shadows of Doubt does that. Yes, you can go into every apartment but odds are they're not all killers and they're not all doing anything special. There's nothing particularly relevant there. Yeah.
01:01:30
Speaker
So it makes it all the more special when you do find, like, a dead body. I mean, you could go out of your way to create a database of every single person in the city's fingerprints. But, uh... That would probably be very dull. Camjaininja gives two dollars. It says, Happy 99th Day of Jissantmas, guys. Still going.
01:01:55
Speaker
Yeah, I wouldn't hold that much hope on. Is tomorrow gonna be 100? Yeah, I think so. I don't think they're going to do that zero punctuation revival with a new voice performer at the center of it. I mean, they might. Call me. I'm free. I'll do it. I'll just like everything.
01:02:20
Speaker
Be really positive. You won't know it's me. I'll go into a pseudonym, except I just keep talking about how much I appreciate a sense of place. Yes. You'll talk about how much you like games and talk very slowly. Yes. In a very foreign accent, not of this world. Yeah. Talk about my wife a lot. My wife. Nice. That was Borat. Henrietta Vermillion, welcome to the Green Gang.
01:02:42
Speaker
And then Alex Armstrong gives $5 and says, got just cause two, just cause. But it has the same problem GTA 5 had. Two huge city, boring, restrictive missions, and the hookshot gets boring after a while. Well, have you considered doing other things then? Have you considered hijacking planes and flying them into buildings?
01:03:02
Speaker
Jesus. Drive carefully and help the elderly. Yeah, the real challenge it just caused is just to drive like a sober, like a reminding citizen.
01:03:16
Speaker
Vojtech gives $20 and says, completely agree a city needs to have stuff to explore, Witcher 3, Skyrim, etc. But when it's just a big space with nothing there, Hogwarts Legacy, anything Ubisoft makes, it's just a slog. It's a bloody score. You ever been to a college campus? Nothing extreme. I've often said the good sandbox feels like the thing you want to explore. The bad sandbox just creates a commute between missions.
01:03:43
Speaker
Yeah. That's just flyover states. Ooh. Yeah. I don't think all Ubisoft games are like that. I do. I like the cities in Watch Dogs. Watch Dogs 1, 2, 3. I like their depictions of Chicago, San Francisco, and London respectively. I take it as a sort of like, these games are very linear, but if you do want to just, you know, go off the beaten track for a bit, go for it. Don't make that the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah.
01:04:07
Speaker
Uh, Drive By Commenter gives $5. It says, I do wonder what FF8's Estar would be like as an open world city with a transport system. You might be alone there, Drive By Commenter. I also wonder that. And I want to know what my Balamb Garden is like when my school stands up and walks away. Because that has a school that can stand up and can just walk across the continent. Sorry, I know literally nothing about Final Fantasy VIII except that the sword is also a gun. I was about to say, do you know that the sword's a gun?
01:04:38
Speaker
It rules. God. It rules. Doesn't make a sense, but it's fucking cool. There's actually a lot of historical precedent to guns that are also swords. Really? How come we're having that? This was a thing for a while. Yeah, bayonets. The whole concept of a bayonet is turning your gun into a sword. It's just the element of surprise. You try to stab a man and then bang. Whoa. Yeah. Ballistic knives. Brought a knife gun to a gunfight. Yeah.
01:05:09
Speaker
Alex Armstrong gives $5 and says, I did like Far Cry 5's Hope County. It felt like an actual place interesting people lived in and wanted to protect. Even talking to them unlocked stuff too. I thought so too. I liked Far Cry 5 a lot when I look back on it. I liked Far Cry 5. This might be blasphemy, but that might be my favorite modern Far Cry game.
01:05:31
Speaker
Far Cry 5 felt to me like a game that wanted to be the last in its respective series. And did it do that? Yes, it ends with a nuke. It also had a sense of this is the series coming home. Yeah. And then it kept going. And then it kept going because the people wanted their fat money checks. As opposed to their fat baked bean checks and all the other kinds of checks that exist.
01:06:01
Speaker
Neeras25 gives 25 rons and says, don't know if this is on your radar, but hashtag blood, B-L-U-D, looks to be a Zelda-like set in a neat little town. I'd never heard of that. What do you want? I've never heard of it either. I played it. It's alright. Not crazy. As far as Zelda-likes go, there's another one called King's Grave, which instantly had me way more curious because the king is
01:06:29
Speaker
revived and he's like oh what's going on where am I and he travels out a little bit and they're like oh my lord is that you it's been 50 years so you're just trying to figure out like oh why did I come back and trying to fix the place up. If I was a king and I came to life and realized I was in a place called King's grave my first thought would be is this literally the last interesting thing that happened here? Me being buried here.
01:06:51
Speaker
The game's called Kingsgrave. You come back, you're on the throne, apparently. I imagine you've just got murdered. You've been dead for 50 years? Yeah, that's the whole point of it. You've been resurrected and you have to figure it out. Some reason I'm thinking of that Bill Hicks routine where he said, I see all you Christians wearing crosses around your necks. You think when Jesus comes back, he's ever going to want to see a cross again?
01:07:19
Speaker
Robonop the Snob gives €23.99 and says, I like when a city has plenty of little corners and dead ends. It feels real rather than utilitarian like most games. The aforementioned Ghostwire Tokyo and The Darkness are perfect examples. Oh, The Darkness, that's a good one.
01:07:37
Speaker
You can watch a whole movie in the darkness. You can watch Oliver in the darkness. I know. Yeah, what was it called? Showed it to Marty, Fragmented City. That's another one, like Little Town Adventure. Cults come through and you're trying to figure out what the hell is going on. They don't really tell you much of anything. Another one, The Last Explorer. You're on a tiny island. All you have is a camera. Yeah. It's just big boom. Yeah. It's for a hike, a little gator game.
01:08:01
Speaker
A fox named Sean gives $5 and says, about Suicide Squad, I believe that game was built on the corpse of a Superman game that Warner Brothers rejected since it's in Metropolis. A lot of people thought that, but Jason Shryers debunked that and said that it's not true. Well, I have a question for you. Do you think people would like a Superman game? Yes. Because it seems to me- I don't think you'd find character to play as. I do not think so. Break everything. Well, there's that and there's the, I think,
01:08:30
Speaker
I might actually do a semi-amplimatic about this, because it's something I've been thinking about since playing suicide squad, but are we living in an age that is just too cynical for superheroes in the traditional sense? No. Everything superhero related lately has been like Superman's evil now, or, you know, subverting or deconstructing it like the boys. It looks like the Streamdad. What? I was in flow, you bastard. I was in flow, he says. We were flowing! Alright, let's resume offline.
01:09:02
Speaker
God, it feels kind of lonely, doesn't it? What do you mean? This is Windbreaker After Dark. I could take my pants off now, finally. Anyway, Eitorabari goes like a 500 arses and says, what about cities and city builder games? Can they eventually achieve a sense of place even if you build them yourself and you watch them from above? The towns in Knights and Merchants felt very real to me watching inhabitants actually live there. Not the way I do them.
01:09:25
Speaker
Not the way I make cities. They play cocks. How can you be immersed in a city if you're hovering like 50 meters above it, looking down? Will you be immersed in something you built? Like, do you get immersed in the worlds you create, like your books or your games? Not in the same way. I mean, I have to be immersed in that. I have to know what all the characters are going to do next.
Immersive Experiences in Manor Lords
01:09:48
Speaker
Yeah, I don't feel like I'm losing myself in a fictional place that has a lack of mind of its own. It just feels like, yeah, I know what this is all about. I think that's why, like, Manor Lords is getting so popular because it has that mode where you essentially incarnate and can walk through. Maybe it was the clothes I was wearing, I felt like Santa.
01:10:09
Speaker
I just saw a big red cape, big red hat. I'm like, I am your god. I've come to say things to you.
Realism in City-Building Games
01:10:16
Speaker
What about, like, civilization? Does that give a sense of, like, a thriving city? No, because so many of those feel, I mean, like, SimCity more so, at least, because it's an actual city. But, like, civilization, again, feels like a very, like, a rough approximation of something, right? I don't know. I also don't play enough of those games for it to, like,
01:10:39
Speaker
really impact me one way or the other. Yeah. I mean, I just got that problem of like, if I draw something, I was like, oh, that thing's hideous. I see all the flaws. So yeah, I don't get lost into it.
Tragedy and Humor: A Controversial Discussion
01:10:59
Speaker
I guess I'd say the gallows because they've got hole corpses. Tiny baby coffins. All in the line. For sale, baby shoes never worn. Think about that. I just came up with that on the spot. Going out of business. I mean, it's, it's tragic, but, uh, if a person is- Whatever you're about to say about that, baby, we don't- First, it's quite a while.
01:11:24
Speaker
And, like, has some, like, prospects in life dying is arguably more tragic than just a blank slate of a baby getting killed, I'd say. I realise when I have a video over it, I've just been shaking my head the last, like, ten seconds. The sound of Marty wagging his finger. Look, I am, of us all, I'm the person who's most invested in not killing babies. He's got a point. Do you have a point? Yeah.
01:11:46
Speaker
I mean, I've sort of gone off dead baby jokes just because when someone brings it up, I think of my baby. This is so funny when there's a live baby. No, I wouldn't like my baby to die. That's a horrible thing to have to think about. Yeah.
01:12:01
Speaker
But even I would say that like a 30 year old dying is probably worse than a baby dying. What's the saddest age of someone dying? Cause at a certain point, if they've lived long enough, you're like, well, they have, they live the next life. 120. Um, yeah, probably around 20. Just before they've, just before they've reached their physical peak and had time to enjoy themselves at their physical peak. It's like a 99. Like, Oh, you almost made it. Just one year off. And you can commit crimes.
01:12:31
Speaker
Jumbly Wobbly gives 2,500 CRCs and says Shadow Moses, GW, Selena Yask, South America, Afghanistan, Angola Zaire, Silent Hills, fired. That was just all the kajima cities. You did it. What the hell? One, two, three. What's fired from? I believe him being fired. Oh, okay. I think that was like his Konami career.
Adventure is Nigh: Listener Praises
01:13:02
Speaker
Eitora Bari comes back with another 500 arses and says, also, I really loved the newest episode of Adventure is Nigh. Seeing Egelir breaking down was hilarious and the scene with Mortimer and the Needle was really suspenseful. Can't wait to see how you bullshit your way out of Papalatavia this time. Papalatavia! You've got to keep tuning in and watching to find out. Only two more episodes.
01:13:25
Speaker
Wesley Thomas gives five Canadian dollars and says, speaking of Yahtzee's books, we'll leave the galaxy, reveal who's really Jacques McKeown, or will we still have to guess? Yes it will, Wesley Thomas. This whole time no one's known who he is. The last ever book
MMO Cities: Immersive or Routine?
01:13:39
Speaker
in the Jacques McKeown trilogy. I will not be writing anymore. It was always intended to be a trilogy and no more. Is that his pen name?
01:13:48
Speaker
Yes, Jack McKeown is sort of a mysterious character who the main character impersonates through the course of the trilogy. Ah, okay. But we never know who precisely they are. Interesting. Galdon Yetich gives two dollars and says MMO cities can be memorable, even over-familiar. Well, I never quite figured out how to get around in fucking Undercity all the time I was playing World of Warcraft.
01:14:15
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not, I would like to ask, I wonder what Jay thinks about because he's put a shit ton of time into like WoW and Guild Wars and stuff. Like if he feels like those cities are, feel like actual cities or if it's more of like, this has just become my part-time job.
Utility in Metroidvania Design
01:14:29
Speaker
This is work, okay. This is just work, this is just an albinos.
01:14:34
Speaker
Alex Armstrong gives side orders and says, Stretching here, but thoughts on Metroidvania locations like Symphony of the Night's Dracula's Castle and Yum Yum Bumlic, Poacher's Underground World. That's one of my questions. We'll get back into map design, aren't we? City... City... I think Metroidvania is, as I've said before, by their very nature, have to be utilitarian. Yeah. It's hard to have that sense of a place that exists outside of the game.
01:15:03
Speaker
Yeah, Dracula's castle doesn't feel like a place he lives. Like, the only place he would hang out in his throne room and maybe that library? There's all these fucking wolves! I mean, yes, what the fuck else just goes on in that castle? Same thing with even like Hollow Knight. Where do you go if you just want to have a sandwich? Wake up in the middle of the night in Dracula's castle and want a sandwich. Where does he go?
01:15:25
Speaker
You gotta bust the right wall, you gotta find a wall, you gotta crack it open and maybe like a turkey leg comes out of it. Fridge is in the upside down. Yeah. Yeah. Even Hollow Knight, which is, you know, based in the city or whatever of Hollow, be it the sewers, be it the city, be it the jungle, it's all platforming and all feels about the same. How can a castle with no toilets have such extraordinary sewers? When you said, although there is one implied toilet in Symphony of the Night,
01:15:49
Speaker
And it's when you go to the library and you meet the librarian that you buy shit from, you can also hit him from underneath. There's like a little tunnel and if you like high jump above it, you can like hit him from underneath and it looks like he's just shitting on his chair and the shit goes down into the room below head. That doesn't even outflow into the sewers though. No, it's just a room below. It's just the room under him. It'd be like just shitting in your basement.
01:16:12
Speaker
Also, when you said Hollow Knight is based on, I thought you were going to say a real city. I was like, there is no way Hollow Knight is based on Lisbon. I was like, what?
Changing Perceptions of Weight
01:16:34
Speaker
That's stuck in his own bathtub man. And he was a great gamer. That's why he's 325 pounds because he used to work out every time he lost and then he wasn't no scrub. Yeah. Favorite president. It's funny how back in the day 325 pounds was like freak show OBS. Yeah. And now it's like 30% of Americans are there. Yeah.
01:16:55
Speaker
Thanks a lot. I don't know. I will celebrate William Henry Harrison. There you go. He died in 40 days. Yes, we remember that episode of The Simpsons, don't we? Yes, we don't have video anymore. I was just giving a thumbs up. I did. Race Car Lock gives $5.
Detail vs Value in Open-World Games
01:17:16
Speaker
It says, at what point do open world details go from adding some kind of value to the world to horse plop plop syndrome?
01:17:22
Speaker
Ah, too much detail. Oh, yeah, I see this thing with the Red Dead. It's like, who took the time to make this so detailed? Yes, when you get bored and stop caring. Yeah. Yeah, I think you can only have so many and not so much a fake out, but if there's no payoff to the actual exploration, eventually it will glaze over. Like Atomic Heart, they'd have these moments where it's like, hey, branch off and explore. And I was like, no, there's this dickhole here. There's just drawers to wave my hand at. And no, thank you. Yeah. Yeah.
01:17:52
Speaker
Good. Elise Tanner gives $4.99 and says, I feel like Lego games have really immersive cities. The cities in Skywalker Saga impressed me. If I say so. Star Wars.
Immersive Qualities of Lego Cities
01:18:05
Speaker
Yeah. Skywalker Saga. That was, uh, yeah, I guess that might just, part of it might be like, Oh, you did a good, you did a good Star Wars city. I like a city where you just break everything. Yeah.
01:18:20
Speaker
Well, that was all the super chats I had. That was all I had as well, before the incident. We're broke. Before the terror. The night terror. Okay, well, thanks for whoever's still listening to this. Thanks for listening to Windbreaker podcast. Sorry about all that.
Technical Issues and Capitalism Jokes
01:18:39
Speaker
You know who I blame? Bill Gates. Eric. I blame Reagan. I don't blame Eric. His internet went out. We don't have control over that. Okay, fine.
01:18:49
Speaker
I blame capitalism. I blame capitalism as well. Every damn thing. Yeah. Are we getting some usual sign offs? Yeah, are we plugging? Say what you're working on, you might as well. Okay, well, Persona 3 review this week. Suicide Squad review next week. I think Artsy Tries will be on a couple of indie games I like. We'll be playing Ultros and this MMO puzzler thing that I quite like.
01:19:17
Speaker
Oh wait, did you already play Island of Insight? Islands of Insight, yeah. Did you play it yet? Did you give it a try? Yeah, I've been playing it. I've been holding out for some anagram puzzles, but it's okay so far. Yeah, it's just like, I don't know, a big world of nothing but puzzles you do at the coffee table. Yeah, beautiful. That's what I like. Although I just unlocked like the gliding wings and they kind of suck.
01:19:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. That'll probably be good for like the parkour puzzles or something. I don't know. You need to grab a hook. What? Yeah. Frost what do you have going on? Just get a cold take, a little design video there. I'm talking about numbers, the numbers in the video games, you know, when to do them, when they're not, or, you know, just give them the option to turn them off if you're going to have all those numbers. And I think that should be it for me.
01:20:12
Speaker
What you got, Marty? Oh, just working out a bunch of bullshit. I know. The biggest thing I can't talk about yet, but you'll be able to see the fruit of that labor in a few weeks. Yeah, other than that, just thank you all so much for tuning in. Apologies for the technical difficulties, and we appreciate you, especially the listeners who get to hear this, because so often we're focused on the viewers, and now we're talking right in your ear holes. Yeah, especially for you. Yeah.
01:20:42
Speaker
Okay, I guess that's it from us then. There's Toffee again. What's the sound of one Toffee walking behind your head? Clop, clop, clop, clop, clop, clop. Big old shit kickers Toffee. Bye everyone!
01:21:12
Speaker
you