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Realism is Overrated | Windbreaker Podcast
6.3k Plays2 months ago
On this week’s episode of Windbreaker, Yahtzee, Marty, and JM8 chat about realism in games, and whether or not that goal is overrated.
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Transcript
Introduction to Worlds of Aria and Podcast Hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
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00:00:54
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Wedbreaker podcast. I'm Yasi Krosjean. Sorry, took a moment to remember there. Marcy's there. And freshly back from the States and back in grimy old London town or wherever he lives is Jay.
00:01:11
Speaker
back in the the green old Hills of Devon. God. Oh yeah. Right before we were live, you started slapping yourself in the face, Yahtzee, which I found really funny. Like that you psych yourself up before a podcast. how do you and Well, you don't. I mean, you got a i go by something let nice yeah it's great to get the energy going.
00:01:29
Speaker
yeah ah The best tip I got for getting ready for like doing like a live chat is to warm up your face muscles. Either you slap yourself or one thing that's good to do is you put your hand over your mouth and you sort of hum in a way that makes the entire front of your face vibrate. That feels weird though. ah that Is that intentional for it to feel strange? 30 seconds before I have on any stream, I eat a big corn dog. And that's what gives me the fuel to get through the stream. During stream I eat a big corn dog. I just have to do it secretively. yeah and that as well secret je yeah
00:02:01
Speaker
I have a small corny dog named Toffee. Great dogs. I'm back with Ludo. I miss Ludo. She's
The Pitfalls of Realism in Video Game Graphics
00:02:09
Speaker
back. oh all the popps the anywhere and great no we yes we actually we did have a topic and The topic is simply realism is overrated, which I think all of us have weighed in on this topic at various points and various different videos. The pursuit of 100% realistic graphics is, ah in my view, detrimental to ah video games and the AAA industry in particular.
00:02:37
Speaker
ye yeah it's the it's the It's the thing that drives the constant push for new consoles which drives more and more games into the dustbin of history because you can no longer run the bloody things. And of course, there's the point that nothing ages faster than 100% realistic graphics. So really, you're just chasing a train that will always move on.
00:02:57
Speaker
Upping development costs it's it makes I did a video on it on games are getting so pretty It's ruined my job in the sense. It makes even level designers Jobs infinitely harder the the more we push for that realism ah Yeah, it it does a lot of bad and I don't think a lot of Players even respond too much of it yet because when did that stop that kind of it used to all be about oh Well, the ps3 can perform better than the Xbox 360 on like that was the argument in those bullshit console walls When did that kind of shift stop?
00:03:27
Speaker
When did we start getting into gameplay again? Feels to me relatively recent. at least the general It stopped when Xbox decided they were going to stop ah doing the console war thing and basically just make glorified gaming PCs, leaving only Sony by itself continuing the ah console conflict alone while Nintendo went off doing its own thing.
00:03:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's funny because this um you know the last week or two, we had ah the news of the PlayStation 5 Pro, which is going to be $700 this fall. And they showcased via a live stream that was streamed at like, or a video that was like 1080p. And it's like, try to spot the graphical differences between 2020's Last of Us Part 2 on these two pieces of hardware. And sort of the tepid response to that.
00:04:18
Speaker
And then also, just, it feels like every big AAA failure of the last couple years, you look at it and you're like, this took eight years. A thing like Concord, a thing like Suicide Squad, and obviously those were for for different reasons and life services, it's a whole bag of worms. Well, there's always going to be diminishing returns, because as I said, ah the stop ah being it stops looking good after a while if aid is really poorly. I think Concord is a really good example of a game that has definitely put its foot in it by going for 100% realism in graphics. Yeah. because And it's like a huge part bill because my next script that I'm handing to you, Marty, after this, that I finished is on Concord. And there's a section on the graphical fidelity and the fact that they went from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5.
00:05:10
Speaker
mainly for a graphical leap, right? And I'm not sure at what point in development that happened, but that is a huge issue. And like you see the reveal of, say, Unreal Engine 5, and they did that massive tech demo with that but woman in the desert. And it was beautiful, right? But yeah the audiences still do respond to that. Like, oh my god, Unreal Engine 5 can produce this crazy these crazy videos, like visuals and particles and stuff. And I think your right yards, like Concord was pushing for that.
00:05:38
Speaker
and trying to get that angle where, in a hero shooter, that's not what sells or anything, right? Yeah, yeah. I was watching a video this morning of a professional designer comparing the character design of Overwatch to the character design from Concorde. It was like, look at these Overwatch characters. They're larger than life, they're beautiful, they're exaggerated exactly the way they need to be, the colouring is expertly set up, or everything leads you to what you're supposed to be looking at. I don't know what the Concorde cast, which, you know, Part of it's the realism and part of it's the character design is just awful. The colours, the class, everyone's covered in meaningless detail. But part of it is that they've also went for the realistic look, which really doesn't jibe with the sort of hyper-real outfits all the characters were given.
00:06:26
Speaker
And I want to, I want to be clear that this, at least for me, this is not a condemnation of games that strive for visual realism. Uh, we have the last one was part two in the thumbnail. It's a game I love and it's a game that I replayed, uh, earlier this year, a couple months ago, maybe. And I was still like, Oh, I think it sucks.
00:06:45
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i was still right it floored I was still floored by its visuals, and I think its visuals ah do enhance both the storytelling and enhance the gameplay. Storytelling, obviously, in emotional cutscenes. Gameplay, I do think its ah stealth gameplay has a lot of a lot of mechanics that stem from its
Realism's Role in Narrative and Multiplayer Games
00:07:06
Speaker
pursuit of realism that I think works really well.
00:07:08
Speaker
um I would say a similar thing with Red Dead 2. I think Red Dead 2, that might be the other one. The two last games that I feel like have impressed me most with their quote unquote realism not is Red Dead 2. You know, obviously the shrinking testicles, horse testicles and stuff is kind of, that feels a little silly and it feels a little bit like What are we doing here? like That's the thing all that's all anyone brings up when you talk about redemption to realism. I think since I think we're all broadly in agreement that ah the pursuit of absolute tippy top cutting edge graphics is detrimental. But I guess one of us needs to like
00:07:46
Speaker
create some kind of argument. And so let's let me play devil's advocate a little bit here. Let's talk about what things what good things realism can do. And I think you've hit the nail on the head talking about last was to talk about redemption. The one area in which realism ah is helpful is immersion.
00:08:06
Speaker
The more realistic you can make the game, the more realistic you make the physics, you more releaseistic you you make it feel the more immersed the player can be. Within a window though, right? I think as you were saying, there's always diminishing returns. It ages and then that window for it helping with immersion starts to shift and I think that window starts to shrink over time because a lot of games that were considered super realistic back in the day You can play now and go, oh, like that those physics are really jank or, you know, ah the way they've animated the faces don't kind of like line up to take you out of the experience. But that's just the aging poorly. um I think. Yeah. But when do you want immersion? I'd say you only really care about immersion if you're in a strictly sort of narrative based experience or like atmosphere based experience. If it's if it's like a multiplayer shooter, most people don't give that much of a shit.
00:09:00
Speaker
Yeah, it's, yeah I mean, there were are, reasons like yeah there are like the sweaties who, who love their like realistic and maybe that's less visual realism and more of like, you know, I want my, my bullet in my sniper rifle to have the, to fall the further it goes because that's how guns work or I want to reload my gun can jam if it gets wet or so. I don't know anything about guns. This is very, that feels like dick, that feels more like a dick waving than anything else.
00:09:28
Speaker
but no i am um My ah knowledge of ah realistic military strategy is bigger than your knowledge of realistic military strategy, Penis. I think i think the The Last of Us and Red Dead 2 are really good examples and what kind of got me thinking about this before you mentioned the arts was the idea of I think realism in graphical fidelity or say mechanical expression makes sense in a story that is trying to convey itself seriously and realistically and um trying to bring you into that mindset so that you you don't have to think about um specific things of like, oh, how are they rendering these characters in this cartoony or stylistic way? like
00:10:13
Speaker
The main thing you should be paying attention to in, say, The Last of Us 2 is the story and the emotions of the characters. And I think the
Gameplay Over Graphics: Success Stories
00:10:21
Speaker
realism in a way is creating a more transparent window for you to look through into the went like the writing and stuff like that, if that makes any sense.
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think also it helps. And again, this is also immersion, but um but one of, you know, aside from those two games, I think one of the last games that really wowed me with its quote unquote realism ah was PT and playing that game and getting in that hallway every time you're in that loop, like at the time, 10 years ago, that hallway looked photo realistic to me. i Like it was one of the best looking things I'd ever seen.
00:10:57
Speaker
I suppose that's pretty easy when you only need to render one fucking corridor. and make be game out of it You don't have to make the actual game because you're going to have ah a little divorce with your, with your company. Um, but I think that did really help with the, with the terror of that game of every loop of being like, shit, am I going to round the corner and see, and see scary jittery woman or is there going to be someone up in the balcony or is some, someone talking behind me? That game is certainly one that benefits from realism horror generally, I'd say.
00:11:25
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, it's funny atmosphere, I suppose. That's a yeah, that's a good way to put it. And you don't need realism to make your atmosphere, but realism can be one of the ways of of ah of creating your atmosphere. It's um to me, it it feels like this striving for realism is ultimately about diminishing returns. um There was like a tweet that went around a couple of months ago where it was like, which of these games look the best? And it was like a close up on like the sort of eye face area of main characters. And it was like Aloy and Horizon 2 and
00:12:00
Speaker
out of where I grew up, Ellie, and the last of us or something. And it was like, you could see pores, you could see dimples, you can see eyelashes. And I'm like, I saw that. I'm like, if this is the reason games are taking six to eight years, what if we don't do this? It reminds me of, us so I cook a lot.
00:12:19
Speaker
And there are certain things that I feel like are worth the time and effort of doing homemade and certain things that aren't worth the time and effort. Like I like making homemade pico de gallo salsa, like in good tomatoes, good onions, good cilantro, a little garlic, hot sauce, making my own pico. Tastes great. I tried making homemade hummus once. It was a giant pain in the ass and I think the store one tastes better. So there's like certain things where I'm like, I think putting in the effort for one thing is worth it. I don't think putting the effort for the other thing is worth it.
00:12:47
Speaker
Especially when a lot of the games you're talking about that have the characters with the ultra-realistic eyes and ultra-realistic ability to express emotions, spend 90% of the time with that character facing away from the camera. As you stare at their butts. I mean, it's... Yeah, but I think ah a comparison of all of those characters' asses in a line on Twitter would have been read very differently. Still, it would have gotten some clicks. and That's very true. That's very true. I think a lot of it comes down to...
00:13:16
Speaker
marketing. I think a lot of players ah the and general consumers are starting to shift and say that they don't necessarily care about graphics. But um it's one of the things I said years ago in my episode on why is AAA UI getting worse? It's because The UI of the game does not sell copies. The the art and the design of the the game yeah um artistically sells copies on a face value and having your game made in Unreal Engine 5 and using ray tracing and you know particle systems and lighting and stuff like that.
00:13:49
Speaker
is what's going to sell you on it in a trailer along with glimpses of what the gameplay is like. um Which is one of the reasons I'm also sad that the era of the demo has gone and is kind of coming back now, thanks to like Steam ne Next First and stuff like that. Because being able to get to play something is is way more um important, but unfortunately visuals sell and people are going to start. If they, if the devs could put in a million dollars into making their game feasibly look twice as good, that is going to sell a lot more copies than putting that money towards, you know, sound design and UI and gameplay systems and stuff like that, which is a shame, but it, you know, it's true.
00:14:32
Speaker
I think I once referred to the the pursuit of realistic graphics as sort of gaming's Cold War in that no nobody agrees that ah the the realistic graphics, the cutting edge graphics are ah helping the game experience that ah that ah is make good games or even like necessarily sell good games. But everyone's sort of racing towards it anyway in case someone else races towards it faster. And we end up in situations like with For Spoken and more recently um I'd say Star Wars Outlaw suffers from this as well, where if a game that wants to occupy the AAA space is anything less than 100% realistic, ah then everyone calls it out.
00:15:15
Speaker
yeah just blame know for talk shit about it you know They'll take like a single screenshot and even the most beautiful human on the planet at the right moment, you take a picture of them and they don't look weird. And that's what they do. It's like, look at the facial look at this face. And it's like, well, it's it like when when that becomes the like tentpole of this games, this game's fucking sunk because of this single screenshot I took. um It's a sort of a it's not a microcosmic argument against the sheer amount of excess effort that goes into the game. I think there's validity in doing that because it's sort of expressing the fact that look at all the work they put into this and this was the result.
00:16:00
Speaker
I think, I think that, that, I think that argument is making a good point, even even though it seems a little. tallow and It depends how you see how you frame it, right? Cause we, we've been doing it. We've been talking a lot about graphl graphical graphical fidelity, but we've also spoke a little bit about mechanical and how specific mechanics work. And I saw a comparison on Twitter. I can't remember the exact comparison, but it was like, Oh, in extra play game, you can't swim.
00:16:27
Speaker
But in this game from 10 years ago, you can. And someone's response was like, you can't swim in Dark Souls. You can't swim in Elden Ring. Like yeah all of your favorite games you can't swim in because it doesn't make sense to be able to swim. But somebody was trying to weaponize the fact you couldn't do this. You know, this one thing is meaning the game is shit.
00:16:46
Speaker
And people will always try and, you know, grab these things to try and hurt the things they don't like. um well also so You know, it sucks in most games, uh, swimming. Yeah. Most games do swimming badly. like Yeah. Of course, the pursuit of, um, super advanced realistic graphics goes hand in hand with the pursuit of broadest possible gameplay experience. The, yeah the world where you can do anything.
00:17:08
Speaker
which has led us to the the rise of the Jiminy Cockthroat. Too many game mechanics, not focusing on anything. AAA gameplay model.
Challenges in Realistic Depictions in Games
00:17:19
Speaker
Yeah. And it's, I don't know, it's funny because if you look at like what the biggest, I think the last like biggest AAA game that took over everyone's lives felt like Elden Ring.
00:17:31
Speaker
and Elden Ring in no way shape or form what I say is realistic. In fact, I feel like FromSoft, the reason they're so prolific in terms of being able to release games at a steady pace is because they keep building on the same thing they have. Like there are animations that have existed in those games for 15 years that haven't changed, you know, opening a double set of doors or people use that. I remember when Elden Ring was coming out, people were comparing a lot of the animations in Elden Ring are one for one copies from
00:18:04
Speaker
ah weapon animations from Dark Souls 3 and um they utilized a few of the enemy animations and stuff like that. And people were trying to weaponize that as Elden Ring is shit and is a rehash and stuff like that. And it's like you said, they didn't waste development time remaking those things and put that time and money into other aspects, like expanding the open world or making a couple more bosses or something like that. And for me, fucking do it, right? Like the general consumer is never going to notice those things.
00:18:33
Speaker
So just reuse it, just do it. That's why it's got to that. high i reinvent the wheel Like if it just works, but put your time and effort towards something else, make cool monsters, even though they also reuse monster slots. Yeah. I think that's been my realism video way back when it all would really impress me was if they managed to 100% realistically depict water in a video game, like So not just that yeah it's got realistic ripples on it and that it realistically refracts light as you look through it. But if you could, I literally scoop out some of it with a cup and put it in a different vessel and just keep doing that until there's no water left in the ocean. Your PlayStation 5 would blow up. like Not a PlayStation 5 Pro though. $700. It would blow up. You just see it at 60 FPS while it blows up. Well, here's a question for you two. What's your favorite in-game water? I've got mine.
00:19:28
Speaker
I was really impressed by Sea of Thieves's water. That's mine. I fucking love the Sea of Thieves water shader, it's so amazing. Now you mentioned it, yeah. It looks it looks ah incredibly good.
00:19:39
Speaker
They were great looking, and it did a little bit, obviously it was much more like binary, but it did the, oh no, the hull's taken in, hull? Is that what a ship is called? Whatever. Yeah. It's taken in water and you got to scoop it out. And it wasn't like realistic scooping, but the mere fact that you had to think about that, I thought was... um but That realistic scoop. but That realistic scoop where it all all takes three scoops and we're good. The longest time they couldn't even like have a player like realistically traverse from being over the water to under it.
00:20:06
Speaker
Like you go ah like you from the first person perspective, the water would go up, up, up, up, up, and then it would just go, bam, just jump to the top of your view because they couldn't have the water level like transition up through your view.
00:20:18
Speaker
ah have good water of animations and stuff right when um you think about the fact that the the shader of the water surface is moving so turbulent Lee right if yeah if it was actually mirrored exactly um it would it would look incredibly jank right you need that transition I agree with you though it doesn't feel weird but there's a lot of things we do in games for a technical limitation uh that we have to do or it will feel even worse like it will just look worse um and now they've just become you know it's things that we do in every game it's funny to try to get out
00:20:52
Speaker
games, there are a lot of games, some of the games that have the most impressive individual realistic element are the games that are not realistic by and large. Like when you said water in the past robot, I'm going to bring up Astro Bot. To get there, when you talk about water, Mario Sunshine has incredible water. And that's like the core thing of the game, but that is not yeah a realistic game by any measure, but how it thought about water and used water throughout the game ah felt realistic in a way that games at the time didn't feel. Astrobot, the same thing. like For all of these games that are are taking eight years to develop and striving for photo realism, in Astrobot, when you pull a pull a cord and 200 acorns fall on you and you can run around the acorns and spin and the acorns go flying and you can feel them on the controller,
00:21:42
Speaker
Like, I was grinning like an idiot because I was like, that's cool. I have not seen anything like that in a game. And that game is, again, not realistic whatsoever, but it really, it sort of scratched that same itch in my brain. kind of It's it particles the game. It is particles. But I think part of that is a lot of games that attempt to be realistic are attempting to be realistic in the same sense that, so I'm going to speak about this from a sound designer's perspective.
00:22:08
Speaker
ah sound sound is meant to go unnoticed. You are meant to, you're meant to see a, say a beach ball bouncing on the ground and hear the sound it makes and think to yourself, nothing, because that is the sound that beach ball makes. You're not meant to go, that is a good sound effect. Right. um And I feel like It's different with graphical fidelity. A lot of the games that are attempting to be realistic in the sense of the like last of us and and stuff like that are doing it in a way where they're trying to emulate real life. So you don't notice that it is a pretty game, right? You're just meant to take it in and soak it in like sound.
Interactive Environments vs. Graphical Realism
00:22:43
Speaker
But with Astro Bot,
00:22:45
Speaker
they are dropping those acons on you so you can visually see that you're getting to interact with so many physics items and revel in it and notice it and feel good rather than say those pretty games which are just meant to fly under the radar and be like this is just this looks nice and looks real and I think games that lean into it and go look at what we're doing like isn't this a good use of the technology a good use of um you know the the power of your machine That's more entertaining to, to the general audience rather than, Oh, the horses balls shrink or, you know, this, uh, the main character has a load of pause, right? but You're never going to really notice that until someone points out. You know, you've made me think of is, um, the character animation in the old free radical games on the PS2 time splinters, second sight games like that. Cause these games, uh, had like pretty typically, uh, low grade graphics for the era.
00:23:38
Speaker
But they put a lot of effort into the facial animation, to the character animation, to their gestures. And those characters come across incredibly alive, if not realistic. And you can really get a sense um of the characterization from them. And so it makes you wonder,
00:23:59
Speaker
why was all the evidence of looking 100% realistic? If you could, if you just, if you just, if when those games illustrate that, if you just do just enough, uh, then you can pull it off. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it doesn't take you out, right? No, no, it's, it looks really good. You look at the character and you go, I like this character and I'm, and I understand how they are feeling. And I'm having fun, right? This is fun. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny too. I feel like there were so many, um,
00:24:29
Speaker
you throughout every generation, there were like moments and lines of demarcation where I was like, Oh, this is the first time I've seen something look like the first time I saw Donkey Kong country. And I was like, Oh, look, this character looks 3d, even though it's not a super Nintendo or like, even like games that used, uh,
00:24:46
Speaker
is it rotoscoped? Like what did like Prince of Persia use? That's rotoscoped. Yeah, use rotoscope movement or the day night cycle in Ocarina time or people's schedules in Majora's Mask or even like Shenmue being like going to this arcade and you could play an old arcade game. And I was like, wow, these little things are like really impressive or shooting the but what like in Metal Gear Solid 2 where you can like shoot a container of liquid and the liquid comes out of it like really really impressive small things that I just don't feel like we get at the same tick anymore even though I'm sure Rise and Forbidden West is doing a million things under the hood that are crazy impressive but maybe it's just like a sensory overload and I'm just not
00:25:31
Speaker
appreciating any of it. It's like the difference between having like one little dessert. That's incredible. And then being like, here's infinite dessert forever. And it losing its luster. It's the sound design thing, right? It's once thing million things forbidden ah for horizon, forbidden West. I don't know what the fucking games. called um so Like you said, a million things happening under the hood, but they're all being done in service to emulate realistic interactions with the world, right? So there could be systems that make the foliage ah move and wither in realistic ways, but because that's how it should work, your brain doesn't compute it as something as being impressive. That's just how it should work. It should be making that sound, right? You're not meant to notice it, but, um, like we, we spoke about, I think it was last, last week on one breaker or the week before where we were talking about
00:26:20
Speaker
I spoke about the mud in Red Dead 2 or like you spoke about the sand in Wukong and stuff like that. um those things are super impressive because they are immediately noticeable as things that ah haven't really been done in a lot of games because they're so hard to process. Yeah. Yeah. We're just not seeing enough of them, right? Because they're they're just too good. That's a problem. They're just too good nowadays. yeah They're going unnoticed. Yeah. Also, we talk about the fatty Yahtzee's camera froze while his eyes were closed. So it looked like he was asleep. He is not asleep. His camera is frozen and he's
00:26:55
Speaker
it's currently on discord Is very funny that is extremely funny that it not amazing. Yeah, that's that's that's that's that's really fucking good um Yeah, I just don't Like I don't I feel like there was an error there wasn't are you back? Yes, I'm back. Okay. It was funny your camera froze while your eye while you were blinking and your eyes was closed were closed and everyone in chat assumed you went this you just went to sleep and No, my computer's internet just mysteriously stopped working, but I rebooted and now it is fine. We can see your camera. We need to see your camera. We'd like to see your big beautiful face. I'd like to see you with your eyes open, honestly.
00:27:37
Speaker
Yes. No, it's it's funny is ah we again, we were talking about like small, small moat. Your camera's weird at a weird angle now to one of the real, quote unquote, realistic moments from this year that impressed me was in Animal Well, which is a game that's like 50 megabytes big. But like, Just the way ah like little lights and lanterns will sway when you hit them or even when you throw your frisbee and it gets caught in some of those kind of like the the dangly weeds or the seaweed. And I was like, man, that's like really impressive. It's like a game that is not realistic whatsoever, handling an interaction in a realistic way that surprised me that I really liked. So I guess you can get a little moment of realism in non-realistic games.
00:28:25
Speaker
Well, when if absolutely everything is realistic. The details tend to get lost, as we've noted. yeah I mean, the whole history of video games has been the pursuit of getting to the point where we're at now where where everything can be so detailed. And now we're we're in an era where the more noticeable games are the ones that focus on one or two little things and just focus on doing them as well as possible.
00:28:47
Speaker
Rather than just trying to do the all across smorgasbord approach. I mean, the, the games that have really caught people's attention lately has all been shit like, uh,
00:28:58
Speaker
and theested on latertro indie games like Celeste or neon white would just focus on one like platforming mechanic and do it really well. Astro bot, which is a very old school platformer. Once you get past the, uh, the, uh, particle physics that it's so fond of. I mean, i I mean, they could literally step out of the middle of the week era right down to the shitty controller gimmicks. Hey, sometimes you have to blow on your controller to make the little pinwheels move and to create an interaction.
00:29:27
Speaker
I think that was my one bridge too far is having to blow on the controller. I was surprised to find that I could go into the options and shut off the fucking controller motion controls, but it wouldn't let me shut off the fucking blowing in the mic controls. It wouldn't let you go in and turn off blowing in the options.
00:29:41
Speaker
right hear the blow Again, it felt like something that come up, come out of the Nintendo way, terrible option controls, options and all. I feel, um, I feel really sorry for like systems designers and and people who make engines and stuff because, uh, I haven't played last of us too yet, but, um, am I right in saying they do some interesting stuff with rope? Like rope goes real good. Rope physics. Yeah. Is it used?
00:30:12
Speaker
No, that's using like two or three puzzles. Oh, it's really impressive yeah in those two or three puzzles i seen it and its Incredibly impressive. Um, but part of me If I was on that team and I know they have a lot of money to be throwing around, but if it's only used in a couple of puzzles and I know how difficult it would have been to actually make those things and get them working. I wish somebody would have just said, just remove the rope puzzles, like do something else because this is going to cost millions of dollars to make this thing that only a few, like a handful of people are going to appreciate. It's worth not doing it.
00:30:50
Speaker
My thought with that was always, ah Sony has an unfortunately named internal team called ICE, I-C-E, and I don't know what ICE stands for, but it is it's all about like sharing technology between their internal studios. It's always my thought with a thing like that was like, oh, they're going to share the rope tech with everyone else, and then we're going to get sick ass ropes in all these first party games. I haven't really seen any cool ropes in any other games, so I don't know i don't know what's going on there. why um Yeah, I think IC stands for internal combustion engine. Anyway, I remember the first time I saw a rope in a video game, I think it was Half-Life Opposing Force, and it was incredibly jank. They were saying oh we did that had a whole section of the tutorial saying, hey, you can climb it and you can swing on it. And it's incredibly jank, but it's here.
00:31:34
Speaker
I was like, yay, we are living in the future. I want a game to focus on it. Do you remember when we all played a chain together and some of their interactions would require you to get stuck on like some things had physics attachments so yeah we could get like stuck on them if we didn't communicate and some things didn't. I would have preferred that game infinitely more if it was jank.
00:31:56
Speaker
But every single object had chain interactions and we had to think about all of that, right? I guess instead of realism, it's consistency. Consistency is king for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Like a 2d tethering game. Like, um, what's the one with the two penguins? Uh, bread and Fred, bread and Fred. Yeah. Oh, why is that in my brain? do I don't know. Um, yeah, I don't like,
00:32:24
Speaker
When I look at the games on the, on the, on the rise, even like for the rest of the year, like the ones I'm excited for are like the new Zelda game and metaphor refantazio. And like, there's, it's not really the like pushing, you know, pushing the boundaries of, of visuals. This is going to be the thing that's going to you to spend $700. And I don't know what the next like thing like that is, like maybe grand theft auto, but grand theft auto even usually isn't at least Grand Theft Auto 5, which I guess was over a decade ago, um wasn't like photo-realistic. It was just, look how much we can do here. It's scale. It's not fidelity. Yeah. The next thing that's going to excite you, Marty, is going to be another game like Animal Well that does one thing really well.
00:33:07
Speaker
That's exciting now, because we've seen the things that go all out and all we get out of it is games standing up in a bush with their trousers down, wiggling their testicles back and forth and charging us extra money for additional testicle physics. I thought that was the horse. And I was like, is the horse wearing pants and in a bush showing us his little testes? That's why most people didn't know you had to take the pants down. I was talking metaphorically.
00:33:33
Speaker
Oh, of the arts is famous metaphor a metaphor. Refan testicles. Yes. Refan testicle metaphor right there. The game that's going to get me is going to be rope the game. I'm i'm looking forward to that. ah pretty because again You can just play cut the rope. That's got pretty good rope physics.
00:33:52
Speaker
I want to be able to loop the rope around things and pull and tug. You go shit like Where's My Water had really impressive water physics. I know because it it was 2D and it it did do one thing. What I want is some kind of 3D particulate water system as like what Where's My Water has so you can put it in a 3D game.
00:34:13
Speaker
I feel like that's going to be, that's going to be real difficult. I mean, I'm sure the square cube law is in play here, meaning that it's going to be like a million times more graphically intensive. What's the point of all these fancy graphics cards? If weve we've talked about the square cube law. No. Me? Yeah. We didn't win right ago. We talked about how doubling something in size like... Oh, yeah. It was going from 2D to 3D in design. yeah yeah I didn't realize that was what it was called.
00:34:40
Speaker
Uh, great. Shall we go to super chats? There's a lot to get through. Yeah, we got some good ones and there's, there's a couple of points I specifically didn't mention because I saw the super jets come in and I wanted to jump off those. Uh, Alex Armstrong gives $2 and says immersion's good when it adds example, silent Hill fog. That's a good example to bring up because of course the sign Hill fog is a beautiful example of games working within limitations.
00:35:07
Speaker
ah the whole reason why Silent Hill had fog because they couldn't render very much of the game environment on the PlayStation 1 or indeed the PlayStation 2 with the kind of graphical fidelity Silent Hill 2 had. So they had to like reduce the visibility to like six feet but then they added like fog effects and it was one of the most atmospheric games of all time. yeah take Now the fact is fact is games are getting stale in the realistic sector because we don't have enough limitations anymore.
00:35:38
Speaker
Yeah. It's funny to go back to the the games that still look good from that. Like I think pre-rendered backgrounds still look really good because of, because they were limitations. And it was like, here's the pre-rendered backgrounds of the resi two police station or, you know, reasonable remake, like some of the most gorgeous not preendderend movies, right? Like it's, there's a charm to having a limitation and having to create, think creatively. And some of the best, I can't think of any examples right now, but I'd love to, this would be like a really good, um, semi-ramble topic. Yeah. It's sort of like,
00:36:07
Speaker
limitations in games, um find some good examples of like, There's lots of things in games where those mechanics and those interactions only exist because of either a limitation or an accident while making it. yeah And then that spun into it being like a core gameplay mechanic or one of your favorite things about the game like Silent Hill 2. That's one of the things I have very low ah expectations for the Silent Hill 2 remake because so much of what makes Silent Hill 2 good was unintentional and was a consequence of the process of designing it and having to cut corners.
Design Constraints and Their Impact on Game Atmosphere
00:36:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's beautiful.
00:36:41
Speaker
i'm of I'm one of those people who thinks that the voice acting being slightly off and they're slightly out of sync ah really adds to the sort of atmosphere of surreality.
00:36:54
Speaker
And even like the, I mean, that's like a whole separate debate of like survival horror does our quote unquote bad controls, uh, good. Like do they help, uh, you know, the, the, the sort of the fear and the tension. And that's what the original resi in silent Hill was sort of like your, you feel like a silent Hill, especially you're kind of like a bumbling fool. yeah It's like, you're not used to this. Whereas in resi, it's like, well, you're, you're a special ops. So you should probably.
00:37:18
Speaker
be able to kill these things, but yeah, yeah helps him. The worst thing Silent Hill Homecoming did was give you a dodge roll. Yeah. Why am I fucking dodge rolling in Silent Hill? Yeah. Who the fuck am I? Sonic the Hedgehog. Oh, don't get me started, mate. Anyway, Dale Mallows gives $2 and says, real eyes, real eyes, real lies.
00:37:47
Speaker
Say that 10 times fast. Heard people, heard people, heard people, heard people. Think about it. Dr. Theo, you saw a dollar and says, realism does not equal realistic. It isn't realistic that a single fire arrow melts at a huge ice block in Breath of the Wild, but you apply realism logic to solve that puzzle. Yeah. Those are, those are little things that, you know, by no means does Breath of the Wild look realistic, but the fact that your fire can burn through a field of grass and like have actual, uh, an impact on encounters and the environment and puzzles and stuff, uh, tickles that realism center of your brain. Yeah. It's, it's real immersion, I suppose, yeah more emotion than realism in that it's the qualities of the immersive sim in that you have multiple tools in your arsenal and you can find the route that works for you. Yeah. Yeah. I guess immersion, that immersive sims, that's another genre that has those, um,
00:38:41
Speaker
kind of dips into realism without being entirely, you know, realistic top to bottom.
00:38:48
Speaker
like if you can think it You can do it. Yeah. Kingdaid42 gives $5 and says, Jacob Geller had a good video, the best looking game ever a couple of weeks back discussing this topic. Yes, I saw that. His point was that Hellblade 2 is the best looking game he's ever played and he doesn't really like it. And he was sort of interrogating their reaction. Yeah.
00:39:09
Speaker
Also Jacob go is great. I want you to watch his videos. Yeah. Come on the podcast. I'm time. Jacob Geller. The pod you fuck. If you just keep saying friend of the pod, they're ultimately a friend of the kind of the Kojima from the pod. Well, I don't think any of us know him personally. That's how we've gotten all our previous guests on. But if he sees a compilation of us saying friend of the pod 50 times, one person who doesn't need to abide by the make your games less realistic rule is Kojima. He could do whatever he wants.
00:39:37
Speaker
Yeah, I, at this point would just have a sort of sense of, um, sort of fascinated car crash, fascination, sort of, um, vibes, but like, yeah, I really want to see what he comes up with now. of his thing Like his, his whole is storytelling and, you know, ah conveying that narrative is what, what impresses most people about his games and that that surrealness, not necessarily that Oh look snake snakes balls are shrinking.
00:40:08
Speaker
or that's because He makes games that he makes games that feel like ah they are auto driven. They come from one person's insane mind. I mean, I think like the, the, the act of walking in death stranding, like it was the most realistic walking i've ever playing the game. I've never had to carry that much shit. I don't like carrying anything, but if I did, I imagine it'd be like what Sam has to go through. And we've all had to get ah shopping out of the car in as few trips as possible. exactly yeah that drop We all instinctively have our own strategies for that. Like tuck the, tuck the case of beer under the arm, hold the lightest bag in the same hand.
00:40:47
Speaker
ah Going from car to the house is a Stranding type experience. Yes. The original Strand game is bringing in all your groceries. A few trips possible. but
00:40:57
Speaker
ah Dale Mallows gives to us and says, what's the best game with realistic graphics? Sorry, until two. Next question. Realistic for the time games that were shooting for realism ah up to the standard of the time they were made.
00:41:14
Speaker
Red Dead Redemption two, I think. Last was part two. You got to your grease. No, I don't. Oh, sorry. Stop putting your disgusting vinegary words in my mouth. um mistake you Oh, do you not like fish and chips with a little vinegar? Yeah. I was going to say, you don't like pickles, dude. ah Don't drink vinegar by itself. I drink pickle juice by itself. Like a little, like a little fucking goblin in the kitchen. um no Absolutely.
00:41:44
Speaker
ah Dr. Theo goes sideways and says, her, do you like to read the law of the original killers and dead by daylight? What's your favorite original killer? Mine's the unknown. I guess mine's the nurse, Dr. Theo. Cause it makes me think of Silent Hill 2 again. I was, I was going through this with, with just the other day, like going through some of the killers.
00:42:04
Speaker
And they're all called like, they've got so many like crazy licensed characters that even ones that I thought, wow, I'm impressed you've got these. Um, but they're all called like the something and they've renamed them yeah to fit that convention. And it like it looks like they don't have the rights, you know, but the at head school the executioner and yeah.
00:42:25
Speaker
It doesn't even call him. or the What's his, what's pyramid heads actual name in style two? Well, he's got, he's got a couple. He's got a few names. Uh, the game refers to him as pyramid head, the red pyramid thing, red pyramid. That's what I was. Various. of all led they They do. The game does call him pyramid head at the end. Yeah. After you defeat them in the final boss fight, if you examine their bodies, James says pyramid head isn't moving anymore. Like a little child who misses his toy.
00:42:54
Speaker
hu My God. yeah
00:43:00
Speaker
ah Yeah. Dead by daylight. Weird game. Just licenses everything that returns its phone calls. I have a, I have a video, an entire video planned on my, my irrational beef with that game. But, um, we'll see. when play like have they played the cast Have you played the casting of Frank Stone?
00:43:22
Speaker
No, I haven't even heard single player game. That's like the choose your own adventure kind of. Yeah, it's by it's by supermassive the until dawn and dark pictures anthology guys, but it ties, but it's a dead by daylight. It's set in the dead by daylight universe and it sort of sets up the situation in dead by daylight. That sounds fun because all of the issues I have with dead dead by daylight are all just like mechanical and interaction based things. So actually getting to explore having multiple horror icons in a more Point and click not point and click but she's your an adventure kind of style thing so it doesn't take to any of the established it by daylight characters. Oh the the the og ones like big man and ah creepy woman and um yeah it has it's it introduces its own ah killer character who i assume is going to be added to the base game at some point.
00:44:11
Speaker
but it doesn't reference Pyramid Head or any of the non-original characters. yeah horror Horror immediately starts to lose its luster when lore gets involved. When more, when you got Michael lore, how are we supposed to do that? yeah Well, part of the attraction of horror is the unknown, I suppose. As I complained about this when I was talking about Amnesia Rebirth, because there's the whole section of that game where you go to the dark universe, open quotes, and it sort of takes the lid off the the mystery of the horror that's existed in that series up to that point.
00:44:46
Speaker
Anyway, let's not get bogged down on this question. There's lots to go through. The bad thing gives five New Zealand dollars and says crisis was peak realism hype. There's a reason the can it run crisis meme still exists. Red Dead Redemption 2 might be the only other that had as much of an impact. I am ooh.
00:45:04
Speaker
Mm hmm. I was not a PC gamer at the time. I'm still not. But was crisis like did you play crisis when it came out? Either of you. And was it that like, oh, shit. um Yes, I reviewed it when it came out. And I remember being impressed by it, ah specifically the bit where you first go into the alien ship and you see all these weird blue crystal formations. And I remember thinking, my golly, gee, this is in some impressive graphics tech. So going back to it, it would probably not look as good as it did at the time.
00:45:32
Speaker
Like you said, striving for photo realism. Yeah. doesn't age well usually A lot of it as well as people would again, just like with the console or bullshit, just use it as a weapon of just like, can your PC run crisis? That was the the benchmark. Like your PC isn't good enough unless it can run crisis. Talk about wave waving. Yes. Yeah.
00:45:53
Speaker
It was all just out you know like i like to the meme or like, I mean, I guess or was it wasn't true. Like, was it like actually used as like a baseline for yeah you building because it was very difficult to run because it was really, really stunning. Um, and yeah, we'll see if they're doing a crisis five. Right. four Oh, what are we up to now? It's what you count as a full game.
00:46:18
Speaker
I remember. crisis I played the third one. I just don't know if there was a fourth. We're up to crisis three in numbered sequels, but there have been a couple of spinoffs, I think. Oh yeah. Crisis jim Jimmy Fallon's nightmare. Um, yeah. Like the first game had a spinoff with like the British dude called crisis. Something or other. names called and Warhead crisis warhead. It was called crisis war form there was warhead. cuto yeah full So hopefully I don't know. Is four going to come out and be another graphical shitfest where people are like, probably no you're not a real PC gamer in unless you can run Crysis 4. You know, this is why this is partly why I think Half-Life 3 hasn't happened because Half-Life 1 and 2 were both sort of quantum leaps for PC gaming technology and I just don't think Valve would do a Half-Life 3 unless it could also be a similar quantum leap and I'm not sure such a thing is possible at this point.
Evolving Realism in Gaming: From Crisis to Today
00:47:13
Speaker
hu Yeah. And I mean, I guess VR was the closest thing there, but it's such a small audience. it's um Yeah, it was too nichey in the end. Yeah. Anyway, uh, Fox D gives $5 and says even among realism lovers, sometimes realism is annoying. s SCS tightened up the left turn rules in the ATS 1.51 and the bug report forum lit up for a week. Now who knows what the fuck this person's talking about. but
00:47:44
Speaker
I don't know what SCS is. I need to go look at that. Who, who, who did that one again? as as ah Fox D said that s SCS tightened up the left turn rules in ATS 1.5, one chat, please. Left turn rules. So a driving game. Is that what that is? SCS sports, sports car, so please chat, please.
00:48:08
Speaker
Please, our family, they need to eat truck simulator. So I'm just at a truck simulator. Oh, American truck simulator. That's what it is. Right. ATS is the developer resume. If we as a society are going to use acronyms, you got to make sure that the audience knows what that is. Cause that is an acronym that only people who play that know what it is. Yeah.
00:48:33
Speaker
Uh, Dimitri gives side dollars and says, ah, realism. Reminds me of when dev diary viewers miss the point of something's in the sea, camera zoom in when you're close to the surface. Yes, I did an episode of dev diary when I was making my something something in the sea game.
00:48:47
Speaker
Because I was saying that I wanted the game, like your visibility to get to expand the deeper down you swum and all the comments were like, wait, wouldn't it be more realistic for things for visibility to get poorer the deeper you go? And I was like, yeah yes, that would be more realistic, but it wouldn't work for the game I'm trying to make to piss off. Yeah. Piss off.
00:49:09
Speaker
It was funny going back to the other thing, which I was thinking of is it feels like racing games, sports games, and I guess now flight sims like Microsoft flight sim like that seems to be the one area where everyone's like, okay, I guess the only thing we could do here is continue to make it look better.
00:49:27
Speaker
Yeah, because mechanically, they are about realism, right? And they have kind of repeated that apart from using... that rateing in that's what the That's what the audience of truck sim and train simulators want, because the audience is like retired truck drivers and train drivers. And dad's. He's my favourite.
00:49:46
Speaker
And they're the ones who are buying all these like thousand dollar DLCs to have like super realistic versions of real life trains and trucks in the game. ah I don't understand. I don't think a retired truck driver would play the truck driving game. Wouldn't they just keep truck driving so they could get paid? My dad was a retired train engineer and he had a model train set in the loft. Oh, I guess. Yeah. It's just like wallowing in nostalgia for one's glory days, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah.
00:50:16
Speaker
Anyway. Uh, hairy, sudden 94 member for 10 months in tip jar. Thank you very much. Uh, blank member for nine months in the green gang who says PS pre-rendered backgrounds were a perfect balance. Oh yes. Like you just said. ah Yeah. Yeah. I thought they were great. I do. I do quite like that game. Crow country that tried to create the vibe of with a very simple 3d model over the top of it, even though everything was fully rendered 3d.
00:50:46
Speaker
it It does that smart thing that um it ah it feels like what you remember it being like. It doesn't emulate exactly what it was like, but it like taps into what your memory of it is, which is better and less cumbersome than it actually was.
00:51:05
Speaker
Robin of the Stop gives 10 euros and says, I wish realism was in service of the game's themes. Realistic and animations and physics in s SOTC. yeah classic thank the field so thank you yes out of the pause Great, make the feeling of being small and weak even stronger. Reddit Redemption 2, I could barely notice, narrative-wise.
00:51:25
Speaker
Yeah. Realism certainly helped shadow of the classes, giving you the sense of the bigness of the things you were fighting quite impressive that they pulled it off on the PlayStation two actually extremely. Yeah. All three of their games, eco shadow of the classes and last guardian have a ton of those little, mo like eco, just like the hand holding mechanic is something I've never seen in a game before where you you there's a button to hold Yorda's hand and to you when you're running around away from shadows, you go to a bench and the two of you sit on a bench and you save. And when the save is done, like she's fallen asleep and her head's on your shoulder. And I'm like, this is the most incredible thing I've ever seen in a game. Realism has peaked. No reason to make any... Did you find them all in Astrobot?
00:52:10
Speaker
I did, yeah, including the big one who's there, he's which is very good. Is 2001 where realism peaked? Now that I'm thinking 2001 had Silent Hill 2, it had a Metal Gear Solid 2, it had Eco, and it had Grand Theft Auto 3.
00:52:24
Speaker
realize I think, well, I've said in in the past, gaming kind of generally peaked in the PS2 era because it was the it was the point when ah there wasn't such a huge gulf between indie and AAA design. It was the point where the technology was capable of realizing most ah visions ah for game design.
00:52:45
Speaker
Uh, without being too like, um, uh, out of the reach of lower level developers. And even triple A felt like, uh, a lot of big companies were just families that were making the same things just better over and over rather than being swapped from company to company and getting laid off a bunch in service of, um, small profit margins and stuff like that. yeah But a better time, probably in all industries, let's be real.
00:53:13
Speaker
It was also around the time for peak PC first-person games because that was when that was like a year after Deus Ex. Yeah.
00:53:24
Speaker
ah to but but Tsunami Dushar gives $20 and says, personal motto in design, don't be realistic, just be convincing. That's a really good word. Yeah. Yeah. Cause that's what like a movie that tricks you that what you're seeing is real. That's, there you go. It's immersive. I'm telling you, that's the word. Yeah. Uh, Doran Grossman nipples gives $5 and says, like most things, it comes down to intention. Is realism a deliberate artistic decision or are you just doing it? Cause that's what everyone does.
00:53:57
Speaker
white I mean, you're making me think of the you know the sort of cheapo unity acid flips these days that have these beautifully rendered lighting and environment engines and beautifully rendered characters pissing about on like a blank green field with like a boxy house on it.
00:54:14
Speaker
Yeah. Or even those like, we're seeing a bunch of those, uh, like body cam shooters that it like are like photo realistic. And it kind of looks like, I think a few came out earlier this year. You might've tried one of them, uh, at some point, but, um, it's like, well, you're making me think of pools where it's like, yeah, this is like, I guess as like a gif, it looks realistic, but then you're like, you know, I guess there's the difference. It's almost like the museum thing where Astros playroom, it's, it's things in the environment feel like someone described as a pile of leaves, like jumping into a pile of leaves as a kid. It's very interactive and tactile. Whereas I would say a game like final fantasy seven rebirth, which has some gorgeous places you go to and visit, uh, feels like a museum. It's very look, but don't touch. You're not really doing anything there. You're kind of just and like I was saying earlier, it's you said it there. It looks good in a GIF or a screenshot because that's what's going to sell copies. Yeah. Yeah. I like when a game ah has a really reactive environment, you know, i love people praising like the Luigi's Mansion games because yeah basically everything in the environment reacts to being so and being blown and being missed by it.
00:55:29
Speaker
Luigi's Mansion 3 has the best animations in any game I've ever seen ever. Like it's immaculate. And a lot of it is how Luigi navigates and moves around the environment and reacts to things. It's so, you know, stretch and pull like this cartoony, um, non-realistic, uh, animation style, but it just sells the emotion and the world so well. And the way like your, um, you know, your little Hoover and your, and the ghosts interact with the world.
00:55:57
Speaker
but Makes it feel more cohesive and solid. And everything you point the Hoover at at least rattles when you point the Hoover at it, if nothing else. Yeah. So good. Anyway, Jackson Jewel, member for 10 months in the Green Gang, says, hi all, finally caught another one live. Welcome Jackson. yeah you um And then Robo Knob the Snob gives 10 euros and says, that the last of the two's insane animations were great to emphasize the whole brutality of the game world. Can't say the same about Hellblade 2. The gritty grimy graphics maybe were a mirror of how shit the game is.
00:56:29
Speaker
Well, Hellblade 2 certainly feels like a look, but don't touch kind of game. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That again, but that is one of those games where there was a couple of rocks in that game where I'm like, why don't they just sell these rocks to every other developer? Cause there's no need to, like, this is the best rocks are ever going to look. And no one should have to make their own rocks anymore. Cause they've like made the rocks. What if I want to make a stylized game? the Your rocks are no good to me. No. Right click, save as rock, uh, cell shading.
00:57:00
Speaker
rock dot cel shade. Oh yeah. Okay. Just, yeah, just changed the, this file name. That's all you need to do. I never made a game. I assume it's that easy. Snake in the garden gives two euros and says, Oh, what food are you best at cooking? Well, my wife usually does the cooking, but she makes a special point of leaving it to me when it comes to steaks. o you and st likes Yeah. She doesn't even try anymore. She's like, Oh, we've got steak. So I'll leave that to you.
00:57:30
Speaker
I mean, I say to her, I could just, I could write down all my steps. And she just says, no, I've tried following your steps. It never works for me. You are the one with the steak instincts. You are the steak guru in this house. The steak guru. What a masculine thing to be good at cooking. It's not that hard. You pat
Cooking Techniques and Anime Humour
00:57:49
Speaker
it dry. You sprinkle on salt and pepper, give it a little rub. So to work the seasoning into the fibers of the meat, drop it onto a very hot pan, make sure it's very hot before you drop it in. So you get a good sear.
00:57:59
Speaker
A few minutes side to side. Make sure you sear every side. If it's a big thick bit of steak, finish it in the oven. Bam. Lovely, lovely steak. How do you have your your steaks? you it' ah Medium. Okay.
00:58:13
Speaker
like a little bit of blood. I like to make quite a lot of pasta dishes, but I tend to make a lot of my sauces from scratch rather than like store buying stuff. um i'm I've lived with um ah someone who was a ah chef, like a Michelin star chef for years, and I'm in no way anywhere near as good as him. I will always have him cook if I can, but i' like he's taught me how to make a lot of sauces and like how to properly season stuff. so I, my, my favorites are like my pasta dishes and stuff like that or chili. I really like chili. Ooh. I like a good chili. I think I'd make the best tuna salad I've ever had in my life. Ooh, that sounds nice. Inga tuna. theygo ah Dale Mallows gives idolas and says, when did Nintendo drop out of the cold war? I remember them being competitive back in the N64 days, but I was also 10 and even stupider than I am now.
00:59:05
Speaker
I think they stopped being graphically competitive around the Wii era. The Wii was but famously described as just two Gamecubes glued together because they were very ah decisively decided to focus on game design and ah the the motion controls at the time. The motion controls eventually sort of dropped off, but they still are more heavily design focused as a company. Were they doing that with the Gamecube? Was the Gamecube considered a competitor for the PS2?
00:59:33
Speaker
And I mean, it had Resident Evil 4, which was arguably the best, one of the best looking games of that generation. So it had it hads it's had stronger graphics tech than the PS2 did. And the controller was like, look at how good good we look. Not necessarily, but there were a lot of whole bit era kind of stopped after N64. There were a lot of games, there were a lot of games ported to PS2, Xbox and GameCube because they all had basically the same controller. Yeah.
01:00:02
Speaker
I think the GameCube was... Yeah, I mean, do there was the whole mini-discs thing, but the GameCube was... It did feel like it was trying to compete ah with the rest of the industry still at that point.
01:00:15
Speaker
I think it was around the time of the Wii that Nintendo made it a point that they' they would not lose money on hardware, which is why the Wii U and the Switch, even when they released, felt underpowered compared to competitors, is because while PlayStation and Xbox tend to, especially in the opening years of a console, lose money on hardware sales, ah Nintendo doesn't. They make a profit on hardware. Yeah.
01:00:45
Speaker
Super Switch coming soon. There you go. Katmonalima gives $5 and says, I'm fine with can't swim, but I take issue with can't sit. All games that go for immersion need to allow you to sit. Why Katmonalima? I mean, you're just going to do nothing and then get up again when you're bored.
01:01:09
Speaker
It's, um, it's consistency, uh, for me always. So an example of this was I was at a, uh, one of the university, uh, events, uh, the union used to work out. The students were showing off games and showing off their final year projects. And I was brought into, you know, judge some of them and give feedback and stuff like that. And there was this one really, really stunning environment that this student had made. And, uh, I was exploring it as the character walked up to a ladder and then.
01:01:38
Speaker
couldn't go up the ladder. And I was like, oh, I can't go up the ladder. And they were like, yeah, it's just, you know, it's just that. And I'm like, why have you decided to put a ladder here um if you can't go up it? And they're like, well, it makes sense for the world. There's like, you know, the ladder would be here. And I was like, OK, well, then why can't I go up it? And they're like, well, you know, it takes I have to make that and I have to do that. And I was like, OK, then why didn't you remove it? Why is it here?
01:02:05
Speaker
um And I can kind of see that with the sitting, like especially if you see NPCs sat down, like, oh, me and my character, I want to just go sit down for a minute. It doesn't mean anything. You could just put the controller down and go away, but maybe you want to sit your character down as just a nice little role-playing thing. um The question is, why is that here? And it's the thing I was saying about the rope. Well, if it's going to cost so much to do it and it's going to do all this, then why have it in the first place? like Just remove the ladder.
01:02:33
Speaker
Nobody's going to know that there used to be a ladder here. You've just got to think about those things. I think games should bring back the board fidgets from Sonic the Hedgehog games. If you leave them alone too long, he starts getting bored and eventually he just sits down and gives you a baleful look. Yeah. And what I've gotten games to do is that if you keep them waiting too long, they should just interact with whatever their closest to. So if they're standing in front of a chair, they'll sit on the chair and cross their arms and look impatient. Yeah. Or they'll start flicking with like a pull cord that's hanging from the ceiling.
01:03:03
Speaker
I think we're realism. Where am I? No, that's all good. I was just going to say that Star Wars Outlaws has a few things like that, like a lean. You just lean against the wall or lean against the bar. Those things make the world feel more solid to me. And it's like what Luigi's Mansion does really well. It's what a lot of these realism games do really well is in the sense that they make the world feel real and your interactions with them feel solid.
01:03:32
Speaker
Like, Oh, I can sit here. I can go up this ladder. Um, I can throw an object at a wall and a painting will fall off. Um, and something like that. It feels less of like an asset and more of a, an environment that you are interacting with. And as soon as they, you can't do that where it feels like you should, your brain is immediately taken out. Like, why can't I go up this ladder? yeah You just feel like you should be able to do it. Right. So why isn't that a thing?
01:03:59
Speaker
Alex Armstrong gives side dollars and says, off topic, thoughts on snack games. Games around $1 last about an hour and feel more like fun, short project stroke contest entries. Best example, Tori 3D. I think the success of that sort of model would depend on ease of use. Like one thing i've that one could easily take the piss out of, but which I've been sort of appreciating, is the new YouTube Playables feature. Have you seen those? No. Yeah, I haven't done anything with them.
01:04:26
Speaker
Where if you fidget, you could watch a video and if you get bored, you could just like put it on one half of your screen and then put YouTube in another window and play like just, you know, like a bubble pop game while you're watching the video.
01:04:40
Speaker
hu Interesting. A lot of them are just like shitty rip, like shitty ports of mobile games. But, uh, you know, I appreciate having something to fidget with while I'm watching YouTube videos. It makes a lot of sense to me as a call second screen in YouTube. That's that's a smart play from YouTube. Honestly. Yeah, exactly. Rusty's retirement there. Yeah. Um, yeah.
01:05:02
Speaker
Yeah, i don't ah this isn't a $1 game, this is an $8 game. I swear it was cheaper when I bought it a little while ago. But ah there's this game called Castaway that just came out a few weeks ago that is ah very, very much, you click it and you see it's very much inspired by like Link's Awakening, like a top-down Zelda game. ah But the main campaign of the game is about 90 minutes long.
01:05:21
Speaker
And they say it's about 90 minutes. Like you land on this island, you lose three of your things and you get three of your things from these sort of mini dungeons. Um, and then there's like an endless tower mode that I didn't give a shit about. But like, as it going in and being like, this is a 90 minute Zelda experience, I played it and I was like, this is delightful. Like I'm, I'm, I'm totally fine with if I go and knowing, yeah. Yeah. Like if someone was like, you're saying shooter campaign, that is 90 minutes long. i feel good that Okay, that sounds cool. I'm more motivated to play a lot of games if I knew going in that they were short. I think the most famous example that people complained about a lot in the reviews, but I think it's one of its strengths is like Katana zero is extremely short, but it's one of the most memorable
01:06:06
Speaker
like 2d experiences i've ever had and if we get the the general consumer base used to the fact that shorter games are coming out and devs aren't scared to make them because of like the refund policies and stuff like that if i knew that sucks yeah yeah right if i knew some of these games are short uh as someone who you know i play games for a living so in my free time i don't have a lot of time to put into games if i knew there was a cool narrative game that's going to last about the the the amount of time of a movie I'd be more motivated to buy it, but devs are just scared to say that or make them. I love yeah i love short games. I can get through it if I'm reviewing it. And then I've got the rest of the week free to piss about. Or short games. Short game revolution. Dr. Theo gives $2 and says, Halloween topic idea. Can horror be cozy? All right.
01:06:59
Speaker
here let here's Here's my take. Dredge. Dredge is a cosy horror game. Yes. yeah Perfect. Yeah. For me, the Dredge has a sort of secondary horror moment where you realize after you've been playing it for a while, holy shit, I'm part of this world now. This shit has become completely normal for me. Yeah. And and there's no going back to boasting about the big tuna I caught to the dudes in the bait shop.
01:07:26
Speaker
Yeah. I like that. thees will come it's how It's when you realize you're comfortable now in this horrific world where you get that sort of second order a horrific horrific realization of Dredge. Yeah, that's a good example. I'm trying to think of other examples. Dredge is a great example. I don't know if like, I didn't i didn't like it, so I didn't play a ton of it, but Cult of the Lamb, was that like? Yeah. I wouldn't call that horrific. Yeah. It's it's very like cartoony exaggerated. I mean,
01:07:56
Speaker
Yeah. I guess it's horrific if you, if you'd call binding of Isaac horrific. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of it is to me because it's it's a little too cartoony and exaggerated to be horrific, horrific. It's more sort of. What's the word? Like Tim Burton, he like macabre almost or macabre would be a good word. Yeah. Yeah. I get what you're saying. The difference there. Yeah. I think <unk> or I think in the sense of like Halloween decorations. I was just about to say that whenever I think of Halloween, um, I don't necessarily think of, you know, horror and scares. I think of things like, uh, the old universal black and white horror movies. I think of, um, uh, what's it called? af but
01:08:46
Speaker
ah the the Disney but witch movie about witches in Salem. hocus pocus Hocus Pocus. I think of that warm orange fall Salem, you know, that kind of horror. And that to me, like, that's what I think of when I think of like Halloween and it's very cozy and very nice. and Um, I, not a lot of games emulate that, but I think dredge is the best example yards of just like, it is going for a horror atmosphere, but does feel quote unquote cozy. Um, I think it's the best example for sure. Did you ever watch, uh, over the garden wall, the animated series from.
01:09:22
Speaker
I have six years ago. It's really, it's a, it's like a short 10, 12 episode bite size thing. Uh, that is it that exact sort of cozy, that is cozy horror in my mind. kind Yeah, really good. Okay. Uh, Mikael Houdon gives five Canadian dollars and says running through postmodern offices in mirror's edge shaped me as much as the meme fueled over animation in Sonic adventure. Both are important. Uh-huh.
01:09:52
Speaker
All right. Then I guess you like overly going fast. mirale houdon The only good games are the ones where you can go fast. yeah have a sprint engine and i'm not playing I do like it traversal game with a good sense of flow and often, you know, a fast game.
01:10:09
Speaker
Neon white, that's a good traversal focused fast game. Yeah. But for those, both of those examples of games that are not going for realism in any sense, like, yes, maybe the graphical fidelity of mirror's edge is going for a bit of realism, but the way it lays out and colors, it's environment is completely designed to have flow in gameplay, which I think is its strength rather than the fact that you can see the main characters fucking knuckles or whatever. I guess it's what you'd call hyper real.
01:10:36
Speaker
i not Unlike Sonic Adventure, where you can see the main character, Sonic, fuck Knuckles. yeah Exactly.
01:10:48
Speaker
Oxdee gives $5 and says, say what you will about realistic graphics aging badly, but I'll never forget emerging from the sewer in Oblivion on my first genuine beefy gaming rig. but Yeah, and I can look at Oblivion now and all the characters look like What did I say in that one video? They look like fluorescent tube lights covered in prosciutto ham. Yeah. That is extremely evocative. ah Yeah, but that is the power. You know, back then, I feel like we got those kind of moments at a relative frequent tick. um yeah And I think we just might have hit a point where it's diminishing returns or or or
01:11:26
Speaker
such incremental improvements. Yeah. That rough of the world moment coming out to the Vista, you go, yep, this was the thing I meant to see moving on. yeah Yep. And then Jackson Jewel comes back with $5 and says water in monster hunter world always made me thirsty to look at ever since then. I judge water on its thirst factor. Ooh, I like that. Well, looking at the, the food in monster hunter world made me hungry as well. Oh my God. animation the animation with the, like the cat chef making the cooking up the beef, the massive steaks and the, Oh, what the hell's that? It's a water. It's a watercolor painting of the cats from months on the world cooking a meal. Incredible. It's beautiful little palicos.
01:12:13
Speaker
best of good food and games. Final Fantasy 15 had really good looking food. um but Nintendo does weirdly realistic food in some of their games. The new Mario Party that's coming out has a steak cutting game where you need to cut a steak like as perfectly in half as possible, and the steak just looks so realistic and good in a fucking Mario 3 game.
01:12:32
Speaker
what is it month What is it with this? I mean, um this was in Star Wars Outlaws as well. Really realistic looking food that the game focuses on and has a little quick time event sequence. It's done in animates a whole bunch. Like people just respond to highly hyper-realistic food in yeah and media.
01:12:53
Speaker
Yeah, Miyazaki movies do that all the time. There's always food in history. I guess it's, I guess it's a universal thing that makes you go. meat respond to food People eat every multiple times a day. It's just probably one of the few things where, you know, everyone, yeah, everyone who plays this game probably has a positive food that are immortal and can cross language barriers of food and music. Is it big to alcohol and pick three and we island before and violence, big five. Okay. We need it.
01:13:20
Speaker
Uh, Alex Armstrong gives two dollars and says, pretty please read next super chat in Bain's voice. All right. Uh, the book, the hair that uncle height gives two euros and says. but sp portable real if we most confess Sounds like that's something he would actually say when he was getting ready to blow up Gotham. yes That is truly Gotham's reckoning. Uh, yeah. you're on teams yeah Yes. I, I say immersion, but it's all much for much. No, it's really potato potato snake in the garden. There's two euros. There's realistic farm game. No, thanks. IRL farming is hard. Well, farming simulator. Yeah. If it's realistic, once you have to wait months for your crops to go, they cut the causes of waiting, which is a lot of fun. Yeah. You'd have to get up at like 3 AM to start playing the game and yeah.
01:14:18
Speaker
ah Tincare gives two dollars and says, real life, don't go jiggle physics. Real life bad. Well, real life can have jiggle physics as long as women don't wear bras. Real life does have jiggle physics. They're just, turned they're at 10 rather than turned up to like 50 like they are in games. Mind and you, I mean, I've seen fucking jiggle physics is in some animes. They'll have women turn around and then their chest like continues animating for like five more seconds.
01:14:45
Speaker
Oh, that's disgusting. What are the exact names of those anime and where can I find them to watch them so that I don't watch them?
01:14:54
Speaker
i was thinking of I was thinking of a specific moment, but I forget what it was called. I mean, as, as I said in my old extra punctuation about the anim enemies I like. I used to live with a huge anime fan in my Bachelor days, and he would watch anime like every night. And ah the moment I think of when I talk about anime girls' boobies animating like five minutes, five additional seconds after the rest of them are finished turning around, the it was from one specific moment that I, from an anime he was watching, but I forget if it was called, it was some generic giant robot shit.
01:15:24
Speaker
And I remember very clearly as well as turning around, like a button flew off the lady's shirt. Oh my God. Yeah. At the moment that she turned around. Disgusting. I agree with, I agree with two 49. Can someone give us the source so we can add them to our blacklist? Do you guys ever have that? Um, do you know, like when you're, you know, living with your parents and then, uh, it's always embarrassing to see, like, say new to see your sex scenes when, when you watch some of your parents or something back in the day, I always had that thing when, uh, when I was younger, I was living with, um, my mother.
01:15:53
Speaker
I would watch JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and if anyone's seen JoJo's, it's not, well, it is incredibly sexualized, but towards the male end of things, they're incredibly masculine and flamboyant. But there is always one episode in every season of JoJo's that is like really weird and like kind of wrong.
The Evolution of Graphics: From Childhood to CGI
01:16:12
Speaker
I won't give specific examples, but my mom without fail would always come in and want to talk to me when that that nebulous episode was on. a jojo I'm like, I'm watching Jojo's. It isn't usually like this, like the weird Pido orangutan that has a stand. That is a ship. That's an episode with.
01:16:34
Speaker
a witticism gives $5 and says, what's the earliest example of realistic graphics that you remember blowing your mind? Mine was probably Oblivion, one of the first 360 games I saw. Well, when I was a kid, I had a friend who had ah like at a Commodore Amiga before everyone else did.
01:16:51
Speaker
I think I was still getting by with my Commodore 64. I went around his house once and he played a game. It was like a point and click adventure game that was ah based on the film Nightbreed, the old Clive Barker film. Oh.
01:17:06
Speaker
And I was watching animations of that. There was like a scene of a dude being interrogated in an interrogation room and he was shaking his head and his hands were coming up and I was like, that is the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life. Video games are here forever. That's not the one, Eric. There were multiple night breed games and that's not the right one.
01:17:26
Speaker
oh Yes, that's the one one with the map screen. That was really quick. Just had a list of all the night breeds. yeah I used to, I mean, pretty, pretty often in like the nineties, I'd have those, like, I remember getting the super Nintendo and having Mario world and small things like, uh, you, you, you climb on chain link fences and there's certain areas where you can punch and then you rotate to the,
01:17:54
Speaker
far side of the fence. And so Mario's now on the opposite side of a fence and like layering was a thing I just never remember seeing in games where it's like, oh, Mario's behind the fence. like There's a third dimension to this world. ah Small things like that I felt i felt all the time.
01:18:10
Speaker
toy story. I can't remember if it was one or two on the PS one. Like I remember as a kid just being blown away by like, I think you start in like Andy's room or something and just being able to explore something that I was so familiar with and to feel the scale of it from the perspective of a toy blew my mind. And then going into the garden, the tree Yeah, that that blew me away. um remember When the first Toy Story movie came out and blew everyone's minds. Yes. learn now you know Consider in retrospect, ah the and noticeable absence of fuzzy characters in Toy Story 1. Yeah, that all have that yeah everything want just sell everything's smooth plastic. I mean, I remember but when
01:18:56
Speaker
um Monsters Inc. came out. They made a huge thing out of the fact that they were able to do furry characters now. Sully was full fur and stuff like that. It almost feels like that was one of the reasons they like made the movie was like, okay, look what we can like how we can flex here with Sully. It's weird, isn't it? like the The kind of you noticing the advancement in graphical fidelity in movies is still a thing. I know it was a while ago, but I remember watching Rogue One and seeing them rendering Peter Cushing and being like,
01:19:26
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Ghoulish. Yeah, it's Ghoulish, but like was impressive. And um I was like, this is impressive that they're even attempting to do this. Yeah, maybe they're attempting to do this as well. But I remember being like, Holy shit. And I've seen a lot of movies like the latest Avatar movie. It's like the way they render water is objectively super impressive and really, really cool. um But we don't really do that for games anymore. We don't see those big leaps.
01:19:56
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, he could still tell Peter Cushing was a CG character in there though. A hundred percent. Yeah. They're very much skating down the sides of the uncanny valley. Uh, John Brooks gives 10 pounds and says, put this in Yahtzee's Silent Hill two jar. Oh, that's going to go in the Silent Hill two jar pretty soon. Yeah. Yeah. Jar is going to overflow in the next month. Uh, hipster doofus gives $10 and says, finally caught you guys live Yahtzee. I am very much enjoying. Existentially challenged. Will there be a third deed of files book?
01:20:26
Speaker
Yes, but I need to start writing it. I've got plans. I've made notes. I could probably start any day now. I just haven't. Cause I haven't been asked. That's like 90% of the work you you already got done starting it. That's the easy thing. Yeah. Well, the gun is best begun and the best begun is nearly done. Exactly. Fuck.
01:20:53
Speaker
Ryan Betts gives $5 and says IMU, more graphics doesn't need to constitute looking more realistic, e.g. the fan-made Unreal Engine Zelda remakes that still have the OG's art style. Man, I don't i always think those Unreal Engine remakes of a thing of like Nintendo things are so ugly. I always feel so lifeless to me. um Like you see that with Zelda, you see that with ah like Mario, and I'm just like, what? Because it's just missing an artist's eye, like. I agree. but I'm currently making a game in Unreal Engine 5. And ah man, if you just plug shit into that default, it looks fucking gross.
01:21:31
Speaker
And you need an objective and you need to tweak. And if you don't, they all just look the same and lifeless. And it's a shame. It's a huge shame. Isn't that true of real life though? Oh my God. Photographs very easily look like shit. That is true. That is true.
01:21:55
Speaker
ah A superb but owner gives $2 and says, I'm late. Did Marty bring up Jacob Geller's video? Somebody did. A superb owner. Marty didn't. And then several of us were like, Oh, that was a good video. Uh, and I just did hear everyone should watch that video. Good thumbnail too. SPS Guru 2000 gives five euros. It says how authentic was the British dude in crisis warhead? Uh, as authentic as any character, British character who just speaks in a thick Cockney accent the whole time.
01:22:23
Speaker
I mean, it wasn't Dick Van Dyke. Did he at any point say apples and peas? No, it wasn't that bad. The one thing I remember about that character is that at one point in Crisis 1, he refers to a female character as love, and the and the female character in question gets offended. And I was i'm just thinking, that's just how British Cockney men talk. Yeah, all right, love. Yeah. All right, love. It's just like a verbal tick. a Yeah.
01:22:51
Speaker
don't hypersensitive much. That will take like, leave leave like shockck me people are disabled. Yes. Leave the poor, leave the poor Cockney man alone. What's the most realistic portrayal of someone from a specific nation in a game? Is it, uh, what the fuck was the name of that horror game on the oil rig from like two months ago? Well, that was, well, that was made by British people. That's just, I mean, you're asking what's the best portrayal of someone made by someone who isn't from the country that person's from?
01:23:21
Speaker
Oh, I guess that's what I'm asking, which probably doesn't count. I don't know. Um, such a brand name people do regional accents pretty well. Like I was playing recently, uh, the excavation of Hobbs Barrow and like people have really good, like kind of Northern accents. Um, and I always appreciate that. I also really appreciate it. Well, kind of when a lot of, uh, games and or media use ah in English dialect as like fantasy, ah like Hobbits always sound like they're from Devon or like the South. Hobbits are from Devon. Orcs are from South London. Yeah. ah ah the Peasants are from Scottish or Northern. Peasants these days are mostly from the north of England, I've noticed. yeah
01:24:11
Speaker
I think yeah we can blame Game of Thrones for that one. Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Thrones. Yeah, it is funny that ah there's a new Ridley Scott's making a new Gladiator movie that's coming out in November. Yeah, Gladiator 2. And Denzel Washington is in it. And in the trailer, he just sounds like Denzel Washington and like anything. And people are like, why doesn't he have a British accent? I'm like, this is a fucking Gladiator movie. like Just because like Yeah. Just like no one knows. Like fucking speaking English, you fucking him having just like his normal speaking voice is just as accurate as game of thrones and everything where everyone has the flourishy, you know, British accents. Just Americans understand the British accent as the history accent. Yeah. If it's happening in history, they have to have British accents. I can, I can 300. Yeah.
01:25:02
Speaker
ah
01:25:05
Speaker
ah but but Hunter Road gives side dollars and says, can't think of anything clever to add. Good consistent aesthetic is better than hyper realism. Keep up the good work, guys. Thank you. Consistency is king. And then Will Cooling gives side dollars and says, what doesn't have realism is a long video by some deluded misanthrope chasing fake phantoms, but enough about the latest ah RLM video. Keep rocking it, guys. Who's a fake phantoms?
01:25:32
Speaker
yeah but those Yeah. Did you see the latest red letter media video? Yeah. They're going to go on a ghost hunt apparently. I was watching that while I was writing today. Yeah. it's It seems like Mike is just indulging his fantasies in tracking. Yeah. I'm not the general audience a bit put off, but you know, let a man have his passions. Yeah. You go on a ghost hunt in Milwaukee because there are some spooky boys. No, they went to somewhere in your tell me out state, man. It's like just to this just to the southwest of Wisconsin, Iowa, Iowa, the acts acts murder house or something. but Yes, the expert house. Iowa is the face of the chef.
01:26:17
Speaker
There we go. So Yachts knows. And for anyone who doesn't know, boy, can you learn all of this information? If you become a $10 patron and check out Yachts' video.
The Future of AAA and Indie Gaming
01:26:27
Speaker
I'm a $10 patron and watch a weird video I made for no particular reason in which I explained how I remember all the locations of every US state. And just one of many wonderful things you could see as a Patreon supporter.
01:26:42
Speaker
Oh God, what a video. Um, yes. Anyway, uh, FoxD gives high dollars and says, triple A gaming peaked in the PS3 360 era. Skyrim read and read from one mass effect. Indie gaming's peak is still fully in front of it as indie tools get more powerful. You know, that was a pretty good time for indie gaming as well with the whole Xbox live summer of arcade.
01:27:05
Speaker
where some of like the most famous indie games in ah indie gaming history were highlighted through that method. Limbo, that was one of those. Yeah. Raid, Meat Boy, Bastion. Raid, Meat Boy, Bastion. Castle Crushes. I remember when things used to be nice. I remember when we used to have nice things. I do. Yeah. At least we have Astro button. Because you know what the summer of Arcade was, it was a curated a bunch of indie games. Yeah, I was about to say something that sounds a little bit gate keeping. So I'm like, no, it's not. i So the tools are getting better, allowing people to a wider array of people to have access to make games, which is beautiful. But that does also mean that, you know, back in the day, the people who are making these indie games were devs that had been in the industry for 10, 15 years who wanted to go make something independent, right? So there was a certain level of quality.
01:28:04
Speaker
to their work, um, and for them to get funding and to actually be made. But now, you know, people can just asset flip, churn shit out and not have to, you know, even the non-asset flips, there's a little part of me that dies a little inside. Every time I see a new indie game come onto the communal steam account and I see it's a pixel art, roguelike platformer or a pixel art, uh, souls like Metroidvania. Yeah, for sure.
01:28:33
Speaker
Um, uh, Tinker gives $5 and says, I've always been fond of the rice farming segments in Sakuna of rice and ruin. It gave me pretty good lesson on how rice is cultivated. Hmm. Yeah. That was, that's a fun, uh, that's one of those games that's like half, uh, half farming and then half like 2d hack and slash them up so levels instead of rope, the game it's rice, the game. like that Was there any, more was there any mochi making?
01:29:02
Speaker
Oh, I didn't play far night. There's got to be much making. Yeah, absolutely. Why isn't that a game making? motion It's like so elastic fun experience. Like someone absolutely needs to make a much making game. I'm sure there probably is one. There's probably like of a micro game in one of the warrior where games where you make. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you make mochi chat where you just have put some wet rice in a barrel and then hammer it a million times.
Educational Uses of Realism in Games
01:29:26
Speaker
We love wet rice with a great big sledgehammer.
01:29:31
Speaker
Multiple. Rhythm, it'd be a great rhythm game. I'd dig it. Longshanks gives us $1 and says, hey, I see. Do you have any more updates for Starstruck Vagabond, big or small? I'm not going to say ah never, but I am probably going to move to new projects ah pretty soon. I think it's a about as ah functional and intact as it's going to be for a while. Good time to buy it, incidentally.
01:30:01
Speaker
o It's yeah that's probably going to be fine now. Got rid of ah some like pesky persistent crash bugs in the last update, and now I'm just going to find another project to get really passionate about. I've heard occupied about some of Yachts' new projects that he has in mind, and they're exciting. i i've boun I've bounced a few off Jay as an indie game dev colleague.
01:30:29
Speaker
And, uh, you know, he was just being a sounding board. So yeah, I've got ideas. It's just and trying to pick one to go with. Uh, BSMash gives $9 and says, here's a small donut for the excellent Parasite Eve archive video. I played it back when it came out and it was great.
01:30:49
Speaker
Hey, thanks. b smart Appreciate it. Um, yeah, here's a second episode of the archive. Went up this morning. Uh, Java as always did a phenomenal job on, uh, the edit through the Lincoln. They're all about a pair study and sort of how, uh, this is represented square soft at their creative apex. I would say what great series by the way, am I it's it's really strong? I'm adding you on Java for making, I think it's super unique.
01:31:17
Speaker
right yeah taking these weird trips down down memory lane. Try not to be too weeby. My next, the next one is Peter Jackson's King Kong, the movie, the game.
01:31:31
Speaker
but mu billier Well, that's the opposite of. way Now you're like, you gotta, you gotta lean back. It's the complete opposite of. we but ah Peter Jackson, the video well and instead of being a game about a small fragile school girl with a very short skirt, it's about a giant hairy monkey that doesn't wear anything at all. I don't know. Jack dressed to go can complain about a bunch of stuff a lot. He he's pretty fragile.
01:31:57
Speaker
Anyway, fungus finder gives two dollars and says Louisiana is a boot because we're a muddy swamp. Or maybe you could just go with Louisiana is the one state shaped like its first letter. Oh, oh, interesting. I like it. I Ohio, you can probably get away with using Ohio as an Oh, yeah. Ohio is the state that's holding Pennsylvania.
01:32:26
Speaker
in ah in a tender embrace. Yes. Well, holding it out like it's a big pencil so we can draw all over New York.
01:32:36
Speaker
Anyway, uh, SPS Guru 2000 gives five euros. It says, how much asset flipping is okay to do? Do you need to model your own trees, rocks, common animals, or office furniture? I wouldn't say so, but I think you got to do the bare minimum to make it consistent with your art style. Speedtree is the best example of this. I see Eric's got my asset flipping video up. You want to go see someone asset flip a game in real time? I mean, and out Ludo did that too.
01:33:01
Speaker
varying degrees of success. Speedtree is a program used by all of your favorite games to create foliage. ah They use systems to to kind of birth trees and generate them, and then you use that to populate it in your environments. Interesting. That could be considered. That says flipping. um But it's just taking an extremely tedious process and streamlining it, right? Not necessarily ripping models from online and putting them in and passing them off as your own. Trees are nature's procedural generation.
01:33:30
Speaker
Where's the next branch going to go? You don't know. It's random. Also, just use the rocks from Hellblade. They're the best rocks. You're not going to make a better rock. Yeah, pretty good rocks. still and No mistake. But wait, the those rocks are basalt. What if I wanted ah granite? You've definitely reached the limit of my rock knowledge. I have no more rock knowledge.
01:33:57
Speaker
Tommy Deonoth's archives gives five Canadian dollars and says realism may be ruining gaming, but that doesn't mean stylized graphics are always better. Looking at you, bland diamond and snoozing pearl. ah No, I agree. Yes, that there's nothing. Someone's got an axe to grind. I think the problem with those games is more a lack of energy in the games rather than ah the style of the choice of stylization.
01:34:24
Speaker
Yeah, you're a pretty big Pokemon fan, right? Yeah, I've... Yeah, I own them all. This is weird. I own them all, and every time one comes out, I buy both of them. Oh yeah, I bring it up awesome. I don't consider myself a huge Pokemon fan. It's weird. What would you say was the last Pokemon game that was visually interesting?
01:34:45
Speaker
ah ah I'm like, a yes one like oh oh, wow. We're going that far back. Okay. Coliseum. I really liked Coliseum when it came out. yeah um I just think they've progressively got worse, but I think a lot of the the reason for that is because, you know, game freak is a a very incestuous company. like yeah and They don't need to put the effort in. It's fucking Pokemon. You are going to buy it.
01:35:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's like everyone was so excited for Scarlett and violet or um, Arceus, the, the first 3d rendition and stuff. People were so hype, including me. I was like, this is where Pokemon should be going. Um, but it just, it ran. We streamed it, Marty, I believe like it ran like shit. It looked like shit. um And because, as Yahtzee said, you'll buy it, they don't put the effort in or do not have the skills necessary to make it actually look good and run well on on the Switch. And people just make excuses for it. And um even as someone who buys ah buys them and enjoys them, um that series has a lot of growing to do. I just hope they'll actually do it.
01:35:56
Speaker
Yeah, you can't, you can't blame the switch when first party games like Luigi's Mansion and Splatoon and Tears of the Kingdom and Mario Wonder kingdom fucking look as good as they do. Uh, yeah. Frame rate notwithstanding, but nevermind. I'm replaying the Link's Awakening remake and it is crazy to me that the frame rate tanks in that game, and I'm like, have you guys not just fixed this? The frame rate tanks where you go to the swamp. But I'm like, why is the top down Zelda game chugging?
01:36:26
Speaker
ah Tinker gives $5 and says, adding to my previous chat, what about realism for education purposes? I know of a friend who used PC builder simulator to learn how to build his PC. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. If that that's what you want. It's great.
01:36:41
Speaker
I mean, all this realistic graphics, realistic graphics has its place in non-gaming sectors, like, uh, for making CG movies, for making, uh, uh, you know, ultra realistic 3d models for all illustration and graphical purposes across the board. We don't have to, it doesn't have to exist within the interactive gameplay field as well.
01:37:08
Speaker
There was a for a couple of Assassin's Creed games, Ubisoft did those like museum modes almost or discovery modes or whatever it was where there was like, remember that they stripped away the combat and objectives and anything and you could just like wander around the pyramids and learn about them, which is neat, I guess. um I don't know like how effective it was, but I don't know. Yeah. Frog?
01:37:35
Speaker
I used to like the museum aspect of Assassin's Creed games, but the way I thought of that was, uh, there'd be like an in-game database and the glossary. And every time we discovered a new thing, you could go into the database and it would tell you a little interesting fact. Usually like narrated by, uh, I can Danny Wallace's character in like Sanskrit to games onwards. They just stopped doing that. I think it was from origins onwards.
01:38:00
Speaker
Because up until that point, when they ended it with Syndicate, Assassin's Creed had been more sort of Magic School Bus explorations of historical periods. Then from Origins onwards, they became more RPG focused, so they stopped doing the educational thing. and Magic School Bus, that's a good comp. That's a great way of describing it, yeah.
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:38:20
Speaker
Well, it was at its worst at Zindiger because, you know, you'd be walking down a street and fucking Charles Dickens would bump into you. Oh my God. It'd be like a fucking celebrity appearance in The Simpsons. They'd be like, oh my God, it's the famous Charles Dickens. What are you doing here, Charles Dickens? Oh, I'm having such trouble writing these famous books that I write.
01:38:40
Speaker
I'm being stopped by these Templars. Could you stab them in the throat for me? Can do, the famous Charles Dickens. but I hope you don't have great expectations for my performance. And oh, that gives me an idea. He asks, he asked the brother and sister how it went and one of them says it was the best of times and the other one says it was the worst of times. And he's like, Oh, we did that at school. Look at us. We did it.
01:39:07
Speaker
We did it. We're done complaining about realism for now at least.
01:39:16
Speaker
ah Well, guess we'll wrap things up then. Thanks for watching Stroke Listening to the Wind Breaks podcast. Let us know in the comments how you feel about realistic games, Call to Action, Call to Action. And don't forget to subscribe if you'd always, always like to be informed when we've got new videos up on the second wind channel, Call to Action, Call to Action. And hey, leave a like, it doesn't take much effort, and it shows that we're doing the right thing. The Call to Action, Call to Action.
01:39:44
Speaker
ah Don't forget to watch Fully Rambla Batting this week, call to action, call to action. It's going to be on the subject of Space Marine 2, which is a popular game, plug plug. And ah then that's going to have my Yahtzee Tries ah stream. You should all come to that and ah find what I'm going to be playing this week, call to action, call to action. ah Who's next? Jay, plug your stuff. ah good Design Delft, that is coming out this week on Concord being, in my opinion, the biggest failure in gaming history. um And I'll go over the evidence of such.
01:40:22
Speaker
Uh, and yeah, we just had a dev heads, uh, which with a boob a car, which was really, really fun. Um, and a bunch of other podcasts and streams that I was on. And other than that, yeah, I'm going to be on a few, few streams, um, late in the week, I believe. So keep an eye out for that and call to action, call to action and check out our Patreon, the biggest call to action. That's how we mainly fund all of this bullshit. So you want to help keep this bullshit alive.
01:40:47
Speaker
It's easy to like ah to stop listening when people say, ah ah please subscribe to the Patreon, but it really is ah the thing that keeps us going. so if you If you enjoy the content we make, if you've enjoyed listening to us today, all we ask is that you think about it. It could be as little as a dollar a month, and you'll be doing your part to keep us going. Call to action, call to action.
01:41:10
Speaker
so yeah beautiful called dragons um and even my faults mar take take over some call I didn't even realize action was being called. ah Yeah. As we mentioned, a new episode of archive went up just a few hours ago on parasite. Eve, check that out. Hidden gems will be returning this evening at 6 PM central. ah They will be playing a relatively new indie game called death bound. It has mixed reviews.
01:41:33
Speaker
oh Um, well, recent reviews are mixed. All, uh, all reviews are mostly positive. So, uh, an update that people didn't like but the, uh, the normal, uh, Casey, Jesse and Jess crew, uh, we'll be playing that. And, uh, yeah, we just got a banger week tomorrow. Uh, we'll be back for the rewind podcast. Aaron will be back. Um, I'm chatting about Beale juice and some other garbage. Uh, the backdrop, Darren's got a wonderful backdrop going up tomorrow. Uh, that Omar edited on, uh,
01:42:01
Speaker
on the the the life and ah the the um impact of James Earl Jones in the wake of his passing last week. So that's a wonderful video. um All of Yahtzee's stuff on on Wednesday. Jack and I are going to be finishing Elden Ring on Thursday and just good goods just good stuff, all sorts of special stuff next week. Jack will never finish playing Elden Ring and I think we all realize that.
01:42:24
Speaker
No, no. But in theory, this is going to be our last dream, whether or not, whether he could beat the boss of Shadow of the Earth Tree or not, he's going to attempt on Thursday. And of course, don't forget, Adventure is Nigh on Saturday. We're still pumped about the remastered season two. Things are really hotting up now. Ooh, hachi machi. In last week's episode, my character almost died after getting stabbed by a poo-covered worm. Happens the best of us.
01:42:53
Speaker
Did I survive? Uh, guess you'll find out next week. Uh, yes. Uh, call to action, call to action and et cetera. And whatnot. Uh, guess we'll go then. Uh, now I'm going to call myself to action in that I'm going to have some lunch. Perfect. Great. Let's call the action. Thanks for watching everyone.