Diecast #196: MST3K, Stories Untold, Game Jam

By Shamus Posted Monday Apr 17, 2017

Filed under: Diecast 98 comments


Hosts: Josh, Rutskarn, Shamus, Campster. Episode edited by Issac.

Diecast #200 is right around the corner. I’m open to suggestions as to how we should observe the landmark.


0:01:55 Chris Unscammed

In talking about the state of the Nintendo Switch market and the recent trouble Chris experienced with Ebay Amazon, we found ourselves asking the age-old question: Is the proper spelling “ketchup”, “catsup”, “catchup”, or “Gross American tomato substance”?

0:09:14 Mystery Science Theater 3000!

We talk about the new Netflix series, the cable series, the movie, the hosts, and the fanbase.

0:30:40 Stories Untold


Link (YouTube)

Doesn’t the fact that the game exists mean that the title itself is false?

0:34:37 The Ill-Advised Game Jam of Malice

Rutskarn proposes an exercise:

Given a $200 million budget, how can we make the worst possible Deus Ex game that’s still a functional game with a plausible list of popular features? That is, the point is to make terrible design decisions, not to actively sabotage the project with bugs. The design should be something that sounds reasonable on paper (and would get approved by the publisher) but is most likely to generate outrage or dismay among players.

Let us know how we did. Feel free to add your own ideas. If we work together, we might be able to make something really abominable.

 


From The Archives:
 

98 thoughts on “Diecast #196: MST3K, Stories Untold, Game Jam

  1. Syal says:

    Stories Untold presents a series of titles and ideas for stories that aren’t followed up on at any point. The protagonist plans to get around to them later but never does. It’s actually Depression Quest 2.

    Bad Game Design idea: “A revenge story with branching storylines, meaningful long-term consequences and loads of collectibles”, and then the “meaningful consequences” are you have to collect atrocious amounts of collectibles to unlock the good outcomes, even for the sidequests, and most of the collectibles are locked behind other collectibles, and several of those collectibles can be permanently missed.

  2. Wide And Nerdy® says:

    You mention the more developed riffs where they developed running gags and alternate takes on characters and such, something that Rifftrax still does. But this show seems to be more riffing the moment by moment. Its closer to how the That Guy with The Glasses stable of critics approach a movie.

    (EDIT: Chris you mention the riff density from all the writers vying the pack their gags into the riff, that could be whats making me feel that way. There is a lack of consistency in the gags that makes them feel like they’re there for the moment.)

    I want my “Joe Don Baker’s character is fat and slovenly” running gags, or the Rowsdower stuff, or the long list of nicknames for Reb Browns character. Those are the less subtle examples, really I want more complete gag narrative that they were able to produce back in the day.

    Felicia Day was better than I was expecting. Whats funny there is her performance is not entirely unlike what I was dreading it would be but I was surprised by how well she turns out to work as a Mad. Mads are headstrong and louder than she ends up being, but they’re also cringey and awkward which I’d forgotten. She can essentially take her The Guild character, which is the only other Felicia Day character I actually liked, and make her more nutty and gregarious and thats a Mad.

    Patton Oswalt, I’ve never known what to expect out of him as TV’s Son as TV’s Frank and I still don’t. I wonder if he was still dealing with his wife’s death when he shot this stuff so I’d feel bad bashing him. But for now (I’ve only seen five episodes) its Felicia Day carrying the Mad segments while Oswalt is good enough to be functional. I very much thought it was going to be the reverse or that I was just going to be skipping their bits.

    Jonah is great. Good fit. He feels like his own mix of Mike and Joel. Feels like he’d probably be more Mike if Joel wasn’t the one creating the show.

    1. Bloodsquirrel says:

      I can’t stand Felicia Day at all, so she’s been an obstacle that’s been preventing me from checking out the show.

      It’s funny to see Best of the Worst mentioned in the same space as MST3K. I guess there’s some of the same function, but Best of the Worst has never been about riffing. It’s more into the flat-out deconstruction of the material they cover.

      Dammit, now I’m thinking about the Redlettermedia crew forced into the MST3K format.

      Jay would probably be the Mike/Jole.
      Mike would be the mad.
      Where do you stick Rich/Jack, though?

      1. Wide And Nerdy ♤ says:

        Honestly, if Red Letter Media were forced into that format, Mike would be best for the host because of the flavor of show they’d be most likely to produce. Imagine the host as a complete degenerate as opposed to a loser everyman. The Mads would be more cruel but you could still laugh because Mike’s character would be the sort of victim you wouldn’t feel sorry for.

        I think Jay would be a human pal who Mike keeps treating like a robot for no good reason and Jay lacks the backbone to push back. Jack and Rich would be negligent mads.

        There’s no way they’d play it straight. It would be a much darker show.

        I can't stand Felicia Day at all, so she's been an obstacle that's been preventing me from checking out the show.

        If you’re at the “I hate her stupid face” level of hating her (and I wouldn’t judge you if you were) then yeah its a bit of an obstacle though you could always just skip the host segments.

        Otherwise, she’s not bad here. She actually seems to have picked up a lot from Beaulieu and Pehl, admittedly benefiting from what they’ve established.

        But then you look at Beaulieu’s first couple of seasons and he was terrible. He got much much better as the series went on and went from being one of the worst to, IMO, the best performer of the cast. He just kept adding to his character and growing as a performer.

        Day is nowhere near as bad. If anything Oswalt is kind of reminding me of Weinstein. Except Weinstein at the time looked like the life of the party next to Beaulieu and only seems bad by comparison now because the rest of the cast had time to evolve after he left. Oswalt looks worse next to the competent performance Day is turning in even though he’s competent here.

        1. Bloodsquirrel says:

          Mike’s usually been the schemer, though. Jay certainly couldn’t be assed to be a mad.

          I mean, obviously you’d also have Mike and Rich as voices for the bots.

        2. Daemian Lucifer says:

          (and I wouldn't judge you if you were)

          I would.Bloodsquirrel,consider yourself judged by some internet rando.

        3. JakeyKakey says:

          “If you're at the “I hate her stupid face” level of hating her (and I wouldn't judge you if you were) then yeah its a bit of an obstacle though you could always just skip the host segments.”

          Phew, I thought it was just me.

          1. Wide And Nerdy ♤ says:

            Its like spinach. I hate spinach but I also know there’s nothing wrong with spinach and that it actually has a lot of good qualities. I just can’t stand the flavor or texture of it.

            I think some people are spinach for other people.

    2. Groboclown says:

      I think the first episode seems a little empty on jokes because the crew seems to be trying to only add in their comments between the movie dialog. The first one had a lot of talking, which didn’t have much of an opportunity to add comments, while the second one had long spans of no dialog.

      Unfortunately, I don’t think much of the humor works well.

      There seems to be a large number of just call-out style references, rather than humorous references. To me, the difference is between just naming something that’s tangentially related to what’s on screen versus forming the reference into the context of what’s happening. For example, just yelling “Sweetums!” when bigfoot appears isn’t funny to me, but saying “Hey! Wait for me! I wanna go to Hollywood” is.

      The only other one I’ve seen so far is Starcrash, which happens to be one of my favorite films. Maybe I was too distracted by the glory that is Starcrash, but the commentary seemed to be a bit more in line with the older Joel episodes.

    3. Thomas says:

      The return of MST3K should be a monumental event for ThatGuyWithTheGlasses producers, they made their settlements in the ruins of the old gods and lo the gods have risen again.

      1. Wide And Nerdy® says:

        I really like how you stated that. Made me laugh.

        1. Sunshine says:

          I second your emotion.

      2. Sunshine says:

        I vaguely hear that TGWTG is a fallen empire of its own these days, though I haven’t looked it up for a while

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Theres just too many people there to care.Not to mention that most of them already have sites of their own,and everyone is on youtube now,so its much easier to follow who you like on youtube than to visit the site.

          1. Wide And Nerdy ♤ says:

            With what has been happening to YouTube lately, there may be a return of relevance for niche portals. If I’m really into the type of criticism that type of critic provides, I don’t want to visit ten different sites. That’s the value of YouTube as well but if YouTube is having problems then the portal site returns.

  3. Joe says:

    You have to have celebrity performance and/or voice capture. But the wrong ones. Like, Megan Fox doing voice work. Michael Hogan (Tigh from new BSG) as the body of some older male character.

    The crafting system can pay off, if you put enough time and effort into it. But it should be incredibly fiddly, enough to drive even the biggest crafting-lovers insane.

    When you pay real money for in-game currency, make sure the amount doesn’t match.

    And DRM. I hope you’re using Uplay and Desura. What else is out there?

  4. Henson says:

    “Deus Ex: the MMO.”

    Did I win?

    1. Bropocalypse says:

      Only if there’s an “I didn’t ask for this” emote

    2. sheer_falacy says:

      Yes, I think you won. That’s the most beautiful possible way to waste as much money as possible on something that absolutely no one wants to play. I think you’re a bit late for actually getting it greenlit, but if you’d presented it like 4 years ago you’d have instantly had a giant pile of money to toss into the incinerator.

    3. Sunshine says:

      Can I play a Illuminati character?

      1. Henson says:

        Only if everyone in the world knows they exist.

  5. Wide And Nerdy ♤ says:

    Horizon Zero Dawn was really popular so our Deus Ex reboot is going to be open world. Cybers will be running wild in the streets but otherwise everything will be normal. Our hero will be looting cyber-chips off of the cybers he kills and using them to craft new implants.

    The game will have Watchdogs style hacking but it will always be faster and more convenient to just shoot people and you need to shoot people to get the stuff for the crafting system anyway so hacking is a really bad idea if you want to keep up with the power curve. And the hacking won’t work during important story missions. They’ll either have a hand wavey excuse or just plain forget because the hacking gameplay was added mid development by an exec.

    For main story sequences, the hacking will be you guarding an actual hacker who is hacking something you could normally hack but its got the new DRM on it so it is totally uncrackable so you need the most leet hacker ever to crack it and even she needs a special tool from the company to do it. (She will have a normally male name so we can do a gender reveal and have an awkward moment even though this is decades in the future.)

    The end choice will be one of the following.

    1) The hero has to upload himself to everybody in the world to copy over their bad stuff. Each person is going to get a small bit of him and not the same bit because you can’t upload a copy of the data, you have to upload the original data leaving you an empty shell.

    2) The bad stuff needs to be downloaded to your daughter-figure, thus effectively removing it from everybody else. This will overwrite her brain and turn her into the final big bad. You can’t just delete the bad stuff from everyone else or copy it to some other data storage.

    3) If you’ve looted enough cyberpoints off of everyone else’s bodies, you can copy bits of everybody onto everybody else. The world grows closer together as all the copying fosters understanding. Because this ending is one of the options, the next game will be a prequel or be set on another planet.

    1. Mintskittle says:

      If we’re going to have a massive open world, we want to make sure the players get their moneys worth exploring every inch of it, so we gate story content until the player has completed, say 80%, of the side quests in a given area before they can move on.

      Different weapon classes deal different damage types, and enemies only take full damage from one damage type, and anything else only deals 1/3 to 1/4 the listed damage, forcing players to constantly switch up their weapons.

      1. Wide And Nerdy ♤ says:

        I like where this is going.

        To hold player interest for that long, the chips and implants for the crafting system will be randomized so it takes longer to get what you want but because of the power curve much of the time you have an odd mix and match of implants. A huge pink beefy piston for a left arm and a spindly green right arm with talons, and so forth.

        In a DLC we’ll add the ability to dye the implants but this makes them even uglier partly because we weren’t thinking about a dye system during the original dev cycle.

        And the cybers will attack in waves so that stealth never works for dispatching a fight. You can get the first couple of guys sometimes but then 3 other cybers will pop out of the ground or through walls to ambush you for gripping intense gameplay.

        The dialog wheel will now include Platinum tier dialog options. For a small price, unlock dialog options during dramatic scenes to win at dialog and look cool while doing it. Finally tell off that snide annoying manager character you can’t talk back to any of the 126 times you talk to him in the base game.

        1. stomponator says:

          Now add a gimmick that is shown off in every trailer, yet comes up only once in the game. Like a wingsuit, but since wingsuits are totally overdone, maybe add a submarine-suit.

          And add a couple of graffiti saying “the cake is a lie”.

  6. In Diecast #200 you should go full circle and revisit Diecast #1
    http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=18831

    Only now you can compare Farcry 4, 3, 2.
    And how has Disney and Star Wars fared since then.
    And how have Obsidian fared/is doing these days?

    And pepper in a sprinkling of other retrospectives. Maybe look at which diecast’s where the most popular and revisit some of the topics in them? (hindsight being 20/20 and all that).

  7. Bloodsquirrel says:

    You should do a mailbag episode where you answer one question from Chris that turns into an hour a of unrelated, meandering nonsense about something completely unimportant.

    1. Josh says:

      So you’re saying we should do a normal episode.

      1. wswordsmen says:

        No, normally you get back on track at least once. This time follow the rabbit hole all the way down.

        1. Bloodsquirrel says:

          I like it:

          Make the 200th episode into a *shock game where the podcast shows up as a series of apocalypse logs, detailing the show’s descent into anarchy. The last one is where they finally work their way around to SimCity 2013, and finally go made.

  8. Wide And Nerdy ♤ says:

    You could do a clip show. Have a podcast topic that serves as a framing device for lots of flashbacks to earlier diecasts. Ironically this ends up being more work for a podcast rather than less as it typically is for television.

  9. Echo Tango says:

    For Diecast 200, spend two hours playing 10 semi-random indie games. Then do a segment discussing the state of the games industry. Alternately, just play Hollow Knight until you don’t remember what tim/day it is, and enjoy the hell out of it. ^^;

  10. xedo says:

    Alternative DLC structure. Have unique content for pre-ordering, the collector’s edition, the GOTY edition, and the season pass. Also have dlc not included in the season pass, like costumes and equipment.

    It should be really, REALLY hard to figure out what DLC to purchase when buying the game 2 years on and get all the content, by making it obscure what DLC packages include what content. Ideally, there should be an overlap between the various DLC packages, so that if you just buy everything, you get the same worthless content multiple times just to rub it in the buyer’s face.

    1. Phantos says:

      Halo 4 is a wound that will never close.

      1. Sunshine says:

        Thinking of this comment, the trailer should use Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” because it’s a shortcut to cheap gravitas.

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      And of course,only the standard game should come with the actual game.All of the special editions should come without the game itself.

  11. Dragmire says:

    Episode #200: Pun breakdown and variety hour.

    No, I’m not joking.

    Alternative: Josh history corner(with cooking and plumbing segments)

    1. tmtvl says:

      If Josh did a history podcast I’d be so interested. He really seems like he knows what he’s talking about.

      1. Echo Tango says:

        I think he’s got a history degree, and his dad’s a professor? Also – yay, more plumbing corner! :)

    2. evilmrhenry says:

      Episode 200: An hour of ominous chanting.

  12. Grudgeal says:

    0:48:00 – No Rutskarn, you are not on “solid ground” about the writing. You forgot the clumsily tacked-on and extremely hamfisted U.S. political subthread.

    Clearly, the whole thing must start with the Illuminati having successfully manipulated [populist politician] into the ruling seat of [major world power] and withdrawing from [major international treaty], causing a proliferation of [bad ideals] that set the whole thing into motion and Noah and Hacker Girl must unify the [noble resistance] using [real-life political slogan], like, oh, I dunno, “I’m With Her”, ‘her’ in this case obviously being the Hacker Girl.

    Note: Not intending for this to actually be a political thread. Just trying to make this game’s writing even more obnoxious.

    1. Bloodsquirrel says:

      Just be sure that everyone comes away with a vague sense that their side has been compared to Hitler.

      1. Wide And Nerdy ♤ says:

        I’ve been resisting the urge to bring that whole aspect into this because it really could pump up the cringe factor.

        The restricting factor here is that it would have to be the sort of thing that currently gets past corporate, per Rutskarn’s rules. And there are things that can get past corporate that will have that effect.

        But I think we should stop it here. Deus Ex will inevitably have a topical theme because Cyberpunk is supposed to be this way in contrast to the remoteness of a far future setting and in the current climate, some loud group will hate how its handled. There’s no need to even try to make this happen. So we don’t have to discuss it.

        1. Falterfire says:

          I don’t think we have to get into real world specifics to discuss how to deliberately make the effect more pronounced. Some people will always complain about anything, but there are a few pretty easy ways to ensure more people complain louder.

          Grudgeal’s on the right track here by incorporating real world political slogans devoid of context, but I think that’s not enough. To really do this properly, you need to do research on a bunch of groups, to find out a few things:

          1. What stereotypes do their opponents hold about them do they like least?
          2. What are their common opinions?
          3. What do they see their goals as?

          Then you make sure the faction based on them (closely enough to be obvious but just loosely enough to maintain plausible deniability) not only embodies the stereotypes they hate most, but also works towards goals that look similar only on the surface for reasons that are totally wrong.

          Basically, you know how you’ll sometimes see That Guy on the internet who is technically supporting the same side you are, but in the most obnoxious and wrongheaded way possible? The guy who is undermining your credibility not through arguing against you but by trying to help you with nonsensical and contradictory arguments? Every faction is made up of a bunch of That Guys.

          But the real trick to make it all explode is to then have every single side portrayed sympathetically as being generally right and correct and have every inter-faction conflict be resolved by them deciding that everything they were arguing about is 100% meaningless and they were silly for caring at all.

          I’m pretty sure that should work for almost any set of conflicting viewpoints to piss off all involved.

    2. Sunshine says:

      Crashingly obvious and cringingly hamfisted political “relevance” that’s simultaneously overdramatic and trivialising people’s experience, lasts maybe a third of the way into the story and amounts to nothing.

  13. Galad says:

    Whatever you do for Diecast 200, please make it at least 2 hours.

    Also, Deus ex: the shitty game was really good, would love it if you could do that more often

  14. Bloodsquirrel says:

    I feel like this game needs lots of hyped-up big choices that the game aggressively refuses to acknowledge.

    Oh, and can we have an alternative protagonist Eve Jensen? But let’s only half-ass the writing so that half the scenes seem like they were explicitly written for a male character.

    We also need to blow a big portion of our budget on a deathmatch mode.

    You’re making the enemies enormous bullet-sponges, right?

    1. 4ier says:

      We were GOING to have a second playable character, and she’s in the marketing materials, but it was too much work to hire more than one mo-capper, and Marketing decided that most of our players will want a male protagonist anyway, so we’re sticking with our brown-haired 30-year-old white guy for the main character.
      But since our lead animator really liked The Girl Character, we can use the model for multi-player companions. Everyone will see themselves as Noah, and will see their teammates as Noelle. One of our guys thought it might be confusing to have up to three of the same character visible at once, so we solved that by having each player’s gamertag hovering over their heads. Don’t worry, we can have an artist whip up something to make it look sci-fi-ish so it doesn’t “break immersion” (whatever that is).
      One of our animators actually volunteered to make some new skins for our female model so we didn’t have to “break immersion”, but we’re not going to do that. I think it really says something to have everyone’s name in your face all the time. Something like “privacy is dead”, but without SAYING it, you know? Anyway, I told him to make the skins anyway, because I figured we could sell them as DLC skins for the deathmatch mode you suggested.
      “Enormous bullet-sponges”? I LOVE IT. Keeps the water theme going, giant mutant sea-sponges with guns and rocket launchers, rising up against the tyranny of man. If you keep coming up with ideas like that, you might be looking at a senior-middle-management position in a few years.

  15. John says:

    I think that the inclusion of crafting is an important first step, but if you really want to impress the money guys then you absolutely need to work more survival elements into the game. I’m thinking something along the lines of an open world in which the player builds, equips, and maybe even staffs a base of some kind. To work it into the narrative, we’ll say that the player needs a secure HQ because of all the, uh, wandering Gray Death zombies and, um, also the fanatical anti-zombie street gangs. Yeah. The gangs are full of ignorant, opportunistic bigots who are also simple, honest folk terrified by technology run amok. They’ll attack the player on sight whilst spewing curses and foul invective. We’ll work the simple, honest folk angle by including–what else?–audio diaries for the player to discover. Incidentally, the Gray Death zombies are solar powered, so they’re more active during the day. (It’s a revolution in zombie lore! We’ll be sure to make the devs emphasize this point when we send them out to talk to the press.) Let’s see, what else? Right! The player will need build a new base in each area and we’ll prevent fast-travel from one base to another in order to increase the number of hours of gameplay we can put on the back of the metaphorical box.

    1. Sunshine says:

      “(It's a revolution in zombie lore! We'll be sure to make the devs emphasize this point when we send them out to talk to the press.)”

      That reminds me of this: Surprise: Our Vampires Are So Different That They're Actually Yorkshire Terriers.

  16. SL128 says:

    For 200, bring back Btongue!

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      +1

    2. Alex says:

      Better yet: bring back Mumbles.

      1. Tektotherriggen says:

        Hear, hear! Without her, the Diecast fails to represent three of its key demographics: cute-boy fans, wrestling fans, and cannibals.

        Seriously, though, it’s not quite the same without her. Her enthusiasm was genuinely infectious. I don’t normally give a foetid dingo’s kidney for wrestling, but Mumbles obviously loved it, and could talk about it in a way that, for a few minutes, made me love it too.

  17. Paul Spooner says:

    Make Diecast #200 a normal episode and procrastinate the big deal until #255

  18. Sam says:

    So, I think we need to expand on the story and characters.

    I think noah’s casting is important, so I figure we should get a classic hollywood actor to play him, someone with acting chops, mass market appeal and some good old fashioned charisma. But let’s say it all goes wrong, and we can’t get Sam Worthington, what do we do then?

    In that case, maybe an experienced voice actor, someone not too overplayed, who has been proven as a headliner for a large RPG series. The choice is obvious, I think we should go for Mark Meer.

    Secondly, the story needs a strong ethical and moral underpinning, as it lends an intriguing moral grey area to the exciting world of Deus Ex. Building on Ruts’ idea of Hydro-Adaptible Machines (HAMs for short), I think the debate should be whether the ersatz tools and forms these nanomachines take would classify them as living beings. And if we built and programmed them to do one task, and sometimes they form a sort of grey fuzzy humanoid cloud to do these things, wouldn’t that make them….slaves?

    Obviously the world is in upheaval over this, with nano-slavery abolitionists bombing hospitals (for their, uh, nano-pills) and elitist corporation owners setting their HAMs to kill the protestors in a thrilling third act twist. To keep it morally ambiguous, and thus cool, at no point should HAM’s show any sign of being anything but mindless nanobots. The player should have to take jobs from both Nano-abolitionists and the head of the nanomachine company, Micheal Canaan.

    Missions from the Nano-abolitionists will be about getting things from or putting things in public buildings, (enemies include: innocent security guards, the police who are doing their job, owners of private property protecting themselves, etc) It will be revealed the things you put in public buildings are bombs. Noah will fall for this 4 times.

    Missions from Canaan will be about “”capturing”” activist leaders (who always have an accident a short while after being handed over to Canaan) or getting various things from groups of people. The groups of people Noah will be getting things from (and shooting) are: The homeless. The impoverished inner city poor. Disgruntled disabled people who are trying to enact revenge on Canaan’s company by stealing McGuffins. University security guards protecting labs.

    Finally, after doing all this (you must kill do all the above to get to the decision point), either the Nano-abolitionists will release the safeguards on the HAMs and cause the Grey Death, or Canaan will tell the HAMs to kill the protesters, have it go wrong, and cause the Grey Death.

    Top with a final 6 hours of shooting robozombies and a final boss which is a big mass of HAMs that have achieved sentience, but have naturally decided to be evil and kill everyone. (neatly making each side wrong simultaneously)

    Shoot it with every gun, when it’s staggered go to the computer and release a signal that leaves the Sophisticated Heuristics Electro-Mind (SHEM for short) vulnerable, shoot it, repeat 3 times, The End.

    I wouldn’t play it, but I’d watch the shit out of a Spoiler Warning season of it.

    1. tmtvl says:

      You have to work together with some rich guy and Noah says: “that’s the guy who killed my parents!” But there won’t be any consequences to that and the guy doesn’t appear again after the section ends.

      Gameplay-wise, I have only one comment: Awesome Buttonâ„¢. One button to: sprint, interact with objects, take cover, unstick from cover (cover is sticky), and loot enemies. And tweak it so it constantly does the wrong thing in every circumstance (when you want to open a door you keep taking and coming out of cover, when you want to take cover you loot nearby enemies).

      Every open space is also slightly too large, so it takes just a bit too long to run through a level. The movement speed should also be just slightly too slow, and movement should be overly fluid. So if a player alternates between pushing left and right Noah runs in a small circle, so it’s hard to get into the position you want and dodging laser alarms is nigh impossible.

      And all corridors and rooms are lifeless, same-y, and grey.

      1. Sam says:

        I think there’s another subtle way of making the open levels slightly more kinaesthetically pleasing. And that, is having the animations of actions not quite match the speed of the action itself. So, for example, Noah would have a very cool run cycle, but move sliiiightly slower than his run implies.

        It could also be used to make the action of reloading be about 0.5 seconds longer than the animation, so the player has to wait half a second after the animation is over before they can actually shoot.

      2. Sunshine says:

        “You have to work together with some rich guy and Noah says: “that's the guy who killed my parents!” But there won't be any consequences to that and the guy doesn't appear again after the section ends.”

        Or this plot thread is discussed but never goes anywhere, like the way Fallout 4 has plenty of dialogue options about being a 200-year-old defrosted living artifact of pre-war times, none of which draw meaningful answers.

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Shia LaBeouf should be the main voice actor.

      Or even better,make the main guy be chinese,but have Chris Tucker voice him,because all those coloreds look alike.

  19. TMC_Sherpa says:

    Wait, Johnny Mnemonic the movie or the short story? The movie means you have Keanu Reeves as a voice actor which will eat your budget nicely but the short means you can have a dolphin hooked on smack and tooth buds. Decisions decisions…

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Whoa!

  20. LapnLook says:

    All of your terrible UI design choices, and especially the weapon comparison system, are almost exactly like the abhorrent menu system of Mass Effect Andromeda…

  21. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Diecast #200 is right around the corner. I'm open to suggestions as to how we should observe the landmark.

    You should all get together and mud wrestle.

    1. Christopher says:

      Best suggestion so far, but I don’t think they’ve got the travel capacity to just meet up and do it.

      My suggestion is to bring back as many hosts and guests as can reasonable make it and want to do it and pay your kids extra for one more hour, a twice as long diecast party where everybody’s invited. Maybe everyone could be encouraged to bring with them one topic, mail or game they’ve played to talk about.

    2. Blake says:

      How to make Diecast 200 special?
      Make it a musical.

  22. Merlin says:

    So the first step of making a good game is getting a good, catchy title. Given that we’re sticking all biblical, I think you can only make it Deus Ex: God From the Machine because screw anybody that knows any latin words is why.

    Next up, if you want to bring the franchise back, there’s only one way to do that these days: expanded universes. But that’s hard and Deus Ex is already kinda world spanning, so we’ll have to go the easy route: Crossovers! And if we’re going with viruses that are actually nanomachines (possibly that cause viruses? No bad ideas in brainstorming), there’s a clear front runner: Metal Gear Solid. But that’s expensive, so let’s go with Trauma Center instead. Heck, that game/series isn’t above throwing you into a South American civil war already, so there’s lots of common ground. (Trauma Center is great you guys) Make it an extra minigame where you’re surgically installing your own augments. Make sure to emphasize how dumb the old system of picking upgrades off of a chart was when advertising this.

    Best of all, this will let us parlay the game onto Nintendo hardware, which the suits will love because (A) more possible users, and (B) no discounts. So we just need to find a compromise/innovative/no, mostly compromise art style between stylish anime doctors and leather enthusiasts, add a few towers and Riddler trophies, and we’re set.

    1. Christopher says:

      There’s a South American civil war in Trauma Center?

      1. Merlin says:

        In Trauma Center: New Blood, yes. You start as an Alaskan doctor who is also a wizard (well, two Alaskan doctors who are also wizards), get swept up into Anime CDC operations, which spirals into terrorism, bomb defusal, a surgery-based game show, and at one point find yourself in the base of some South American revolutionaries. At one point, one of the revolutionary’s dogs takes a shotgun blast for you, and you need to operate on the dog to extract the buckshot and repair the damage.

        Uhhhh spoilers for this crazy friggin’ game.

        Edit: Per the Wikipedia article, it seems you’re working for a South American government to suppress revolutionaries. Naturally, the revolutionaries are being financed by a mafia family who kidnap you earlier in the plot and force you to conduct surgeries because… nanomachines.

        1. Christopher says:

          Wow. Obviously you were right, Trauma Center seems amazing.

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      You know whats the saddest thing about that title you proposed?DMC:Devil may cry exists….

      And the worst thing about that game(other than the title)is that its not really a bad game.Its mechanically sound,it has plenty of good things in it story wise,the level design is interesting,but the giant middle finger it constantly keeps shoving in the face of any long time fan of the series just keeps ruining the whole thing.And I say that as someone who never played any of the other games in the franchise.But even I am disgusted by the open contempt shown by it.

      So I guess that is the worst thing a game can do.Be a solid game that attracts a bunch of new people to the franchise,while openly shitting on the old fans.

    3. Sunshine says:

      “Deus Ex: God From the Machine because screw anybody that knows any latin words is why.”

      I particularly love/hate this bit.

  23. Writiosity says:

    For the Deus Exercise… basically, make Fallout 4, rename to Deus Ex.

    1. Sunshine says:

      “Deus Exercise”, a licenced reskin of Wii Fit, or dancing and other, less developed mini-games, like Star Wars Kinect.

  24. baseless_research says:

    I can’t believe you haven’t discussed the save system. Obviously we need a checkpoint-based system. Given that we are a narrative-focused game and we put great stock into our writing, the checkpoint will be before the mandatory cutscenes. Additionally, we understand that gamers would want to skip these after seeing them so we’ll allow you to skip the cutscenes. However, because of the way our engine works, the cutscenes will have an internal timer to make sure that the next area is properly loaded before skipping. In playtesting, the safest margin would be about 1 minute 43 seconds after the cutscene starts.

    Also the key to skip the cutscene would bound to scroll lock by default.

    1. Nick says:

      You also have to hit scroll lock to start the game when loading a save, and scroll lock is bound in gameplay to shoot your gun into the ceiling.

    2. sheer_falacy says:

      I’m sorry, but you’re just not thinking this through enough.

      Yes, we need the minute 43 seconds of load time into each cutscene, obviously. But we don’t want to inconvenience anyone who does want to skip it, so of course the button to skip the cutscene is any key at all. Mouse clicks, too. And don’t bother having a confirmation – if someone pressed a button it means they want to get right back to the action! Yes, playtesting shows some people miss dialogue because of this, but that’s just playtesters being whiny.

    3. Fade2Gray says:

      I think you’re on the right track here. I’d like to add that the mandatory stealth sections should have a maximum of two check points, and neither should be closer than half way to the end of the section. Obviously, we don’t want to distract the players during these segments, so there should be no indication of any kind when they trigger a checkpoint.

      Bonus design point: The stealth sections should be instant fail. That way the players will feel like true stealth masters when they complete the segment.

    4. Sunshine says:

      Yessss. I mean, what is wrong with you?

  25. Paul Spooner says:

    Nightmare Deus Ex remake ideas:
    One of the combat bark lines is a mission specific piece of character backstory exposition for each teammate, so it’s much longer than the other lines, and it never plays all the way because the other companions are always interrupting, and you wouldn’t want the combat barks to overlap each-other.

    The mission music is on infinite loop, and doesn’t duck character dialog, but does duck the footstep sounds during stealth sections.

    The hacking minigame is just the normal game, but color inverted, and with 3rd person ironsights mode.

  26. silver Harloe says:

    I’m wondering if the “commercial breaks” in the new MST3k aren’t there so they can sell the netflix episodes in syndication later, without having to worry about them being broken up incorrectly?

    1. Groboclown says:

      To me, it felt like a forced insert of breaks, which is kind of nice. The host segments do that too, but this allows for more breaks. But it does feel like, “We had commercial sign in the original show, so we need it.”

      1. Wide And Nerdy ♤ says:

        I like it for that. The show has always been sort of cheap and anachronistic. Its a puppet show. Those weren’t popular even when the show first aired.

  27. Groboclown says:

    So, favorite MST3k episodes.

    For me, my favorite Joel episode is SST Death Flight (K13). Just the star power in that old made-for-TV film was incredible. My favorite Mike was Werewolf (904).

  28. Steve C says:

    Ok Josh, why is “Stories Untold” good? The trailer looks looks like pretentious crap. I know you don’t want to spoil anything but there’s got to be something you can say that is better than that trailer.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      I hate the “I dont want to spoil anything,but trust me,its good”.Just put a spoiler warning and let me decide if I want to read/listen to the spoiler.Thats how I got into madoka magica:Not by listening to a bunch of “but trust me,its good” empty reviews,but by watching the first three episodes heavily being spoiled by SFDebris.

    2. Andy_Panthro says:

      I haven’t played it yet, but it does have a demo on steam (and possibly elsewhere). http://store.steampowered.com/app/558420/

      Also you could watch this video which shows a bit of the game: http://coolghosts.net/cool-stuff/2017/4/13/stories-untold-the-house-abandon

  29. Benjamin Hilton says:

    The one thing you forgot with Deus Ex was to completely misuse the Icarus mythology.

  30. Thomas says:

    Designed ground-up for always online co-op.

    It’s the thing that always sounds good to developers and almost never is. And it’d be even more destructive to Deus Ex in particular because what you really need to stealth gameplay in an immersive word, is your friend yelling at you that he can crouch and make his gun look like an NPCs dick.

    Actually Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands is one near-future setting short of Deus Ex gone wrong.
    http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/15/14936894/ghost-recon-wildlands-review-tom-clancy-clancys-ubisoft-ps4-playstation-4-xbox-one-pc-windows-steam

    EDIT: Or The Division!

  31. Nick says:

    On bad Deus Ex:
    The virus you are trying to stop is named the Fully eLectric Overload OmniDevice, or FLOOD, but the virus has a flaw where it can’t see things when they are paired up. Have a terminal somewhere remark this must be due to pair programming in the virus and that this was, perhaps, inevitably once mankind started creating artificial intelligence.

    Then the game completely forgets this lore for the final boss fight and in fact has you being by yourself be the only way to beat the virus

  32. MichaelGC says:

    That was really impressive. I absolutely lost it at ‘Cleveland.’ (Oh, and the ‘how one feels upon not getting a pun’ analysis from earlier was fascinating.)

    By the by, I think it was on Amazon that Chris got bait-&-switched, rather than eBay.

  33. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Rutskarn had his own life wasted by a pun?He finally got his just deserts.

  34. Daemian Lucifer says:

    For diecast #200 you should all just grab a bunch of dice and cast them for two hours.No words,just the sound of a bunch of dice being rolled.Maybe an occasional “Fuck” as one of them falls behind a fridge or something.

  35. GavintheGrey says:

    I’ve been enjoying the new MST3K quite a bit. The jokes are good and every once in a while great, and even though I like original MST3K, I do appreciate that I can get more of the references in the new show. I agree that the delivery was kind of awkward in the first episode, but after that it was a lot more natural, and the movie choice has been pretty entertaining.

  36. Sean says:

    Bad Game Ideas

    Double down on the biblical references

    * Name our protagonist Noah Abraham.
    * Have NPCs refer to him as Noah or Abraham alternately throughout the game.
    * Have the girl be a daughter figure to the protagonist (Do this in as ham-fisted a way as possible. Play up the protagonist’s motivation without adding anything else to get the player invested in the relationship).
    * Make the critical choice the player has to make to save everyone from the Flood be whether or not to do something that will kill the little girl.
    * Then, after the choice is made, completely invalidate it by introducing a “deus ex machina” (a tie in with the franchise title ;) ) that completely resolves the Flood arc with alien invaders from another world.

    Be sure to have an NPC (or better yet, the voiced protagonist) explicitly use the phrase “Deus Ex Machina” during exposition about the twist ending (brand tie in).

    At the end of the game, dramatically shift the tone and genre of the franchise for sequels so that now the game is about liberating the earth from alien invaders via the exact same formula of mechanics (infiltrate via stealth, then shoot from cover to escape). Now the mechanics make sense, right? ;). “Deus Ex II: Mankind Liberated”

    Make it so that the little girl is a companion that provides no support, that you can’t dismiss from the “party,” that you need to keep alive (or game over), that frequently puts herself in the way of the protagonist (adding to the difficulty of getting through doors, accessing items, etc.), and is not immune to friendly fire.

    Make the aliens (call them the Deus Ex) the true power behind the Illuminati, secretly driving Noah Abraham to the game’s foregone conclusion (maybe people in the illuminati or people the protagonist works for are/were actually aliens in disguise).

    Have all of the bosses the protagonist has killed throughout the game reappear at the endgame, forcing the player to defeat them again, but this time they are all stronger (more health, do more damage, immune to player’s best weapons). Have the player fight more than one at a time.

  37. Ninety-Three says:

    For Diecast #200 you should resume the game of AD&D that Rutskarn ran during the KOTOR season.

    Half of me is joking and half of me genuinely wants to hear the Diecast crew play terrible D&D for an hour.

    1. Christopher says:

      Oh DUDE

      I’d LOVE to listen to that!

  38. The Nick says:

    I’m so glad that somebody said, in response to ‘enemy callouts’, the Mass Effect “Enemies everywhere!” line. It’s *exactly* what popped into my mind when I heard it.

    “How do we integrate PvP?”

    The answer of ‘make it totally separate’ is bad. But we can do worse.

    Instead, there IS no separation of PvP and storyline. They’re the same. When somebody loads into your game, their PvP objectives are active no matter what you’re doing. So you might be doing a mandatory stealth mission when “Noah #3” loads into your game and they immediately start shooting you, trying to get their PvP “Kill 5 other Noahs” objective at the same time as the mission fails.

    Perfection.

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