Diecast #14: Sid Kickstopper, Nintendo’s Cut

By Shamus Posted Wednesday May 22, 2013

Filed under: Diecast 101 comments

This was a bit of an odd week for us. Not a lot of playing games and not a lot of news. (That interested us.) But the show must go on. And really, “I have to talk about videogames but I’m not completely prepared” is about the most awesome problem you can have in this life. I mean, it’s a pretty mild affliction compared to hunger, ticks, migraines, or stubbing your toe.

Hosts: Shamus, Josh, Rutskarn, Chris, Jarenth.


Direct download (MP3)
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Podcast RSS feed.

Additional note: I mentioned before that the new season of Spoiler Warning would begin this week. Various technology problems have pushed that back. We’re basically throwing out our entire production pipeline for Spoiler Warning and starting over. We’ll try again next week.

Show notes:

01:50 What’s everyone playing?

Shamus is is playing ow I have a headache and no time to play videogames.

Chris is playing DJ Hero.

Jarenth is playing Monster Loves You, Starseed Pilgrim, and Game Dev Tycoon. (Links go directly to his reviews.) He’s also played Reus.

Rutskarn is playing Spec Ops: The Line.

Josh played some more Stardrive and Civilization V. He also saw Star Trek: Into Darkness.

13:30 We regret to inform you there is no bad SimCity news this week.

14:00 Sid Meier not interested in Kickstarter.

26:15 Valve is currently developing and testing a trading card game.

The “cards” are digital and awarded just for playing. Then groups of cards and be crafted into other things, which consumes them. The exact mechanics are unclear and probably still in flux.

39:00 You want to LP a Nintendo game? Nintendo wants all your YouTube money.

Yes, we already covered this in my column, but apparently the other people on the show have their own opinions and ideas?

54:00 Mailbag!

 


From The Archives:
 

101 thoughts on “Diecast #14: Sid Kickstopper, Nintendo’s Cut

  1. Erik says:

    You listed the 39:00 marker twice :)

  2. Merzendi says:

    Hey, Shamus? You put up the timestamp for 39:00 twice.

  3. Shamus says:

    You guys informed me of the same mistake twice! :)

      1. Zagzag says:

        Did you fix it twice though? That’s the real question here.

        1. ENC says:

          Did he fix it twice? That’s the second assertation here.

          1. Erik says:

            I see what you’re trying to do here, but I reject the notion ;)

            1. tengokujin says:

              But even as I notice what has been done, I refuse to partake.

  4. wererogue says:

    I’m not really with Josh on Into Darkness. I enjoyed it just fine as an action movie, but for a Star Trek movie it had exactly nothing to say, and acting-wise Cumberbatch basically played Neo from The Matrix, which was rubbish considering who the character was supposed to be.

    1. Phantom Hoover says:

      Star Trek (with the exception of DS9) has never had much to say about anything anyway, except “hey look at me, talking about this high-concept issue. Aren’t I clever?”

      1. LunaticFringe says:

        Not to mention that the Federation as a whole was basically Gene Roddenberry saying “Hey, my political beliefs make this perfect Mary Sue utopia!” Although TNG pulled away from that image a little bit, it was only really DS9 that went out of its way to highlight the Federation’s flaws. DS9 gets a bit of crap for being ‘too gritty’ but I’ll take more depth over idealistic Baby Boomer fantasies any day.

        1. Thomas says:

          I’m not a Star Trek fan and I’m not going to buy that a series whose original conflict was a commander struggling to choose between the ideas of a person who carefully thought them out rationally and the ideas of a person who ‘just feels it in his Bones’, is the height of intellectual achievement, but what confuses me about the reboot is, if Star Trek wasn’t about it’s slow ponderous sci-fi tone, what was it about? I guess I don’t care enough about the characters to understand why I should be care about them when removed from their genre and style.

          It just seems all kind of unnecessary to me, and if it wasn’t Star Trek people would watch them enjoy them(well I wouldn’t enjoy the first one. I hated the plot and the visuals but lots of people would) and then forget about them and it wouldn’t even be worth talking about

          1. LunaticFringe says:

            Well I’d argue that when Star Trek’s ‘pretentiousness’/’pseudo-intellectualism’ (for lack of a better word) is good it’s outstanding. Wrath of Khan is a prime example of this, there’s a lot of references to Moby Dick and Paradise Lost that make Kirk and Khan’s actions seem almost pre-determined, as if they’re simply just playing roles and repeating the mistakes of literature. Wrath also brings its themes down to a personal philosophical level, with Kirk questioning the actions of his youth and wondering if they’ll come back to haunt him. Trek’s “big picture” philosophizing never really worked out that well, but when it focuses on personal, individual experiences instead it tends to come out stronger.

            And I think that many fans see the new films as lacking that element. Character development in the first movie (I have yet to see the new one so I won’t comment on it) was lackluster at best. It felt like the movie just assumed that people know who these characters are, and therefore, they don’t need to develop them or provide them with motivation because the audience already knows it all, right? In fact most of the plot has this problem. We’re supposed to feel bad about Vulcan being destroyed because it’s VULCAN, not because the movie gives you any reason to care. Characters who don’t achieve anything are simply given stations and ranks because their character in the original had that position. The movie’s writing is just incredibly lazy and hollow, the entire thing reeks of an action-driven cash-in to a franchise while completely failing to understand what the franchise is about. I can complain about a lot of things in Star Trek (and I do) but at least it had heart.

            1. Thomas says:

              Star Trek definitely had a similar tone and I’ll agree that the greatest episodes really are great.

              I’m in agreement with you about the lack of heart, what I fail to understand is why people care about the new Star Trek film (the first one) without Star Trek it’s nothing but a slightly poorly written sci-fi show that explores 0 elements of it’s aliens and with Star Trek… I don’t see what elements that carry over that makes it worthwhile. Still there are fans who are glad at the update, so there must be something they see that connects it with what they liked in the old series, I just personally can’t see it

              1. LunaticFringe says:

                Well I think you answered your own question there, it’s simply the brand recognition. And I think that’s further encouraged by the plot problem I mentioned, the studio thinks that simply putting actors on screen and saying ‘this is Spock’ makes it so. The fact that the studio is so dependent on brand recognition for revenue drives fans to pay attention and be very critical, and thus their lazy approach is criticized more than say, a bad Trek episode where the writers were at least trying to say something.

        2. krellen says:

          You damn kids and your cynicism. Let me have my ideals!

          1. LunaticFringe says:

            I should qualify that I only used the term ‘Baby Boomer’ to refer to the fact that a lot of Roddenberry’s more obvious, politically motivated ideas on the show were ‘shocking’ then but are now largely normalized. A fifteen year old in 2012 is not going to have the same response as a fifteen year old in 1966 to a Russian serving with Americans or Kirk kissing a black woman (a man, on the other hand…)

            1. krellen says:

              But you did say you preferred the “realism” of DS9 to the “idealism” of TOS, to which I was replying. I hate DS9 (though not nearly as much as I hate Enterprise.)

              1. LunaticFringe says:

                I wouldn’t call DS9 ‘realistic’ either, I was more referring to a common complaint that DS9 was ‘too gritty’. I prefer DS9’s approach to the Federation because it feels, I don’t know, less like blatant propaganda? There’s been some great academic work discussing the problems of the Federation (economists, for example, love to talk about how they have no way to solve the pricing problem) but Trek mostly just runs with the utopianism without context. I give DS9 credit because it helped tear away that Mary Sue utopia image, and showed that for a society like the Federation to survive, it has to employ rather nasty people at times. Section 31 and Sisko’s own actions (that episode with the Romulan ambassador for example) are twisted callbacks to Spock’s ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’. The fact that the Federation would act so morally superior while employing a group like Section 31 makes them more interesting. Now they have flaws, they’re arrogant, or possibly ignorant of what horrible things go on to maintain their ‘perfect’ society, etc. Much more depth in my opinion.

                I sometimes compare how Roddenberry’s Federation is portrayed to Iain Bank’s Culture, both of which are basically the utopian fantasies of the author. Banks, however, goes out of his way a lot of the time to highlight both benefits and criticism of his weird anarcho-libertarian/socialist/robot/whatever society within the context of whatever novel he’s writing, usually as character motivation. Trek, on the other hand, largely just handwaves the Federation as a utopia while steadfastly refusing to go into detail (Banks does have the advantage of print medium rather then visual however).

                1. Jan says:

                  I disagree with the premise that the Federation was portrayed as “perfect” in TNG (or for that matter, in TOS): we didn’t see the Federation at all, just some of their representatives, which were very clearly human beings who struggled with their ideals in a most human way (especially Data).

                  Sure, there was some talk about this perfect society back on Earth, but what did we see of that: nothing. The crew of the Enterprise(-D) had to make decisions: what ideals (Prime directive) to keep, what to break, etc. Sure, the ideals were portrayed as something to strive for, and their opponents were either aggressive bastards (Klingons), deceptive bastards (Romulans), greedy bastards (Ferengi), or outright space nazi’s (Cardassians). But remember that it never portrayed the protagonists as perfect, the “perfection” of the Federation was clearly something in progress. Sure, the food came out of replicators, but is that much different from where the food comes from in any TV-series or movie (except those about kitchens of course). And in TNG we had episodes like Chain of Command, or The Pegasus, which clearly showed that the Federation was ready and willing to carry out Spock’s mantra.

                  Banks does the same thing (except the Culture is not evolving at all, the perfection is a done thing, there is no significant technological progres, and everything is decided by computers): his novels don’t take place in the Culture, but on the fringes of it, and the struggles of his characters highlight their flaws and good traits. The books I’ve read never dwell long on the possible flaws of the Culture, except for the fact that Special Circumstances exist (which IMO is just a way to start his plots: afaik all his books revolve around SC, or at least have some of the main characters be SC (I still like Culture books because Banks is such a good writer)). Yes they do sneaky stuff, but so does the Federation in TOS and TNG (remember that they fly around in heavily armed ships).

                  I guess most disagreement on whether the Federation is portrayed as “too perfect” is whether you agree with Roddenberry’s ideals or not.

                  One interesting observation I read a few days ago was that current culture is not striving towards a Federation type civilization anymore, but another civilization type portrayed in the series. We are becoming a society where everyone is connected to everyone all the time in a big network via small electronic devices, and disconnecting a person is a disconcerting, maybe even traumatic.

                  1. Dave B. says:

                    we didn't see the Federation at all, just some of their representatives,

                    Therein lies my problem with Trek, especially TNG. We see very little of what the Federation is like, except for some flawed, human characters. Yet those same characters are forever spouting nonsense about how they have evolved past character flaws and human weakness, in tones that range from arrogant to condescending to downright preachy. Suddenly the Federation looks less utopian and more delusional. I can understand having ideals and optimism, but I found early-TNG-Picard’s unfounded smug superiority grating. I’m not a cynic, and I want to believe in the Federation. I just can’t.

                    Now, I should point out that I still like TNG quite a bit, and TOS never really bothered me in that way. I would still call DS9 my favorite, though, because it always felt more…honest.

                    1. warlockofoz says:

                      My take is that the Federation is actually a rather repressive government. The various trek episodes we see are it’s propaganda films.

                    2. LunaticFringe says:

                      @warlockofoz And the Mirror universe episodes are actually documentaries.

                  2. LunaticFringe says:

                    The Borg point is definitely an interesting one. Horza’s entire motivation in the first Banks book was a criticism of the Culture, namely, that it was a stagnant machine civilization where organics were nothing but parasites. Banks also loves to compare the decadence of his post-scarcity society to aristocracies for some reason.

                    I disagree with your ‘too perfect’ point. My views on the Federation don’t come from a disagreement with Roddenberry’s/Whoever’s Writing Trek That Week’s politics, just his absolute sloppiness in execution (I’ll also admit that my background in economics and politics may cause me to demand more detailed answers than most). I’d certainly give him more credit if he offered up better technical solutions than “nobody uses money anymore just because and somehow we have near perfect resource allocation. And yes, this system is somehow run by incredibly flawed humans.”

                    Edit: Dave B summed it up better for TNG than I did.

                    1. krellen says:

                      I’m pretty sure a background in economics soils the whole Star Trek experience, because a post-scarcity society is a concept that economics is fundamentally – and rather deliberately – designed to not understand. You don’t need economics in a post-scarcity society; the fundamentals of economics are rooted quite firmly in the idea that we CAN’T do everything.

                      I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an economic argument against Star Trek that does not immediately dismiss the idea of post-scarcity.

                    2. LunaticFringe says:

                      @Krellen Despite what Star Trek claims, the Federation is NOT a post-scarcity society. They still have limited resources that cannot be replicated, like dilithium crystals (and I’ll grant you that economists point this out all the time, it’s known as unavoidable scarcity). The unavoidable scarcity problem is also applied to land, population growth, etc. (which is why a lot of scifi utopian writers try to offer up solutions in the form of rings or Dyson spheres).

                    3. krellen says:

                      While dilithium cannot be replicated, it can be regrown. It’s actually a renewable resource.

                  3. Zombie says:

                    I’ve always been partial to the one episode (The name escapes me) where the one Admiral comes on board, they find out that one of the crew members had Romulan parents, and the Admiral turned into a space racist and Joe McCarthy all rolled into one, and Picard has to balance working within the justice system with protecting an innocent member of his crew from petty allegations. There were a lot of episodes that portrayed the Federation as imperfect, lazy, incompetent or just following red tape to much. There was the episode where they wanted to take Data apart because hes was just a robot, or the episode where to comply with a treaty they forcibly remove the Native American people from their planet, and so many more it’s pointless to list them.

                    However, we did see earth in the episode where Picard heads back to Paris for his shore-leave and we see….. Nothing has really changed. Yeah, the weathers perfect, but his brother is still growing grapes, still making wine. He lives in an old French farmhouse and lives kinda like people do today.

      2. wereogue says:

        Some awesome discussion ITT :)

        Personally I’d rather a movie have something to say, even if I don’t agree with it, than be bland and safe. Every time. I don’t see that as being pretentious and high-and-mighty. I see it as putting a view out there, and hopefully starting a conversation.

        If original Trek’s moral quandaries were overly reductive and simplistic, what does that say about *new* Trek?

    2. Chauzuvoy says:

      Yeah. It works as an action movie because the focus gets pushed onto what it does well: the action sequences. Effects are great (as well they should be in this age), score is excellent, cinematography is good, and all that. But the story is… serviceable. It connects the various sequences together without being offensively bad, although there apparently wasn’t enough writer’s spackle to cover a few plot holes. As an action movie, it’s not bad enough to matter, but as a Star Trek movie, it could have been a lot more.

      The big reveal/twist isn’t really as big a deal as the marketing would have you believe, but it’s not awful. Just not as important as it could have been. Really the biggest problem I think it has is that between all the fanboy shoutouts and obvious references, it keeps inviting comparison to a far, far better Star Trek movie. Seriously, this movie could have done itself some tremendous favors by not referencing Wrath of Khan so often. At best it reminds me that I could have saved my money and watched a better movie at home on Netflix. At worst, the occasionally awkward timing can completely kill whatever emotional investment it’s built up.

      1. wereogue says:

        Yeah, I think the constant referral to Wrath of Kahn just highlighted how hollow this film was.

  5. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Shamoose,could you also list the questions in the mailbag section as well?

    1. Shamus says:

      Most questions are a couple of paragraphs of preamble, topic introduction, and questions with sub-questions. I’d rather not reproduce them in their entirety or take on the job of editing them for length.

      1. Paul Spooner says:

        It’s almost as if people are trying to write articles in the comments!

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Make them ask on twitter instead of email.

          1. X2-Eliah says:

            This. So much this. At 140char/tweet, at the very worst you woudl get three-tweet questions which would still be a single sentence.

        2. Otters34 says:

          I did that exactly once(Diecast #8)! And that was because my emailed question was so embarrassingly long-winded I figured I might as well put it and convoluted thoughts down in full.

  6. Colin says:

    There’s actually no colon in the new Star Trek’s title, which led to much gnashing of teeth on its Wikipedia article.

  7. Nimas says:

    A minor point, Fair Use is *not* strictly non commercial. You do however have a *stronger* Fair Use claim if you’re non profit.

    1. krellen says:

      The Daily Show’s entire format is built off Fair Use.

  8. Paul Spooner says:

    I’ve sent three questions to the address on the image, and only one was read on the show. Not that they were particularly good, but are questions getting lost? Did they just get thrown out? Is there some other address I should be sending them to? Should I just start asking better questions? Am I asking the right questions right now?

    1. anaphysik says:

      No, you just asked two many questions. #BADUMTISH

      1. Trix2000 says:

        And I thought the puns in the cast itself were painful enough… you people are EVIL.

      2. Paul Spooner says:

        Perhaps I’m trying two hard?

        1. Woodthorn says:

          Trying to make the same pun twice? I don’t think people will go two easy on you for that.

          1. tengokujin says:

            Twice the puns? Not two many people will permit it.

  9. Aaron says:

    i just had to comment on the nintendo thing. i made a similar comment on Shamus’ escapist column. nintendo made the game not the player playing/commenting, i can see them asking for a cut from those with adds or having adds put on those with out, but not all of it.

    ill wait for all the lets plays of mario just standing stock still with no commentary for a 10 min video

    1. Zukhramm says:

      They’re not asking for a cut, they’re taking all of it. And the commenter made the commentary, not Nintendo. Surely it must be equally wrong for Nintendo to make money off of content that is not theirs as it is for let’s players.

      1. Syal says:

        I’m pretty sure they see it this way.

        They have the legal right to get the video removed; even if they don’t technically have the right to take the ad money, they can kill the video entirely if anyone fights it, so most people won’t.

        1. Zombie says:

          Sadly, they probably thought they were being the “good guys”, or the marginally less bad guys, because they weren’t taking down the videos, but were just asking for all their money. Because I bet to them stopping people from getting money sounds so much better than “Take down the video showing our stuff”.

  10. Annikai says:

    I’m a couple hundred pages into The Witch Watch and I have to say that I’m enjoying it so far. It’s definitely a fun read and I really enjoyed the opening. I had a bit of an odd question though, I noticed that on the site where you have Free Radical listed it was free to get an ebook version but on the nook store it cost money. I was wondering if you make money off of it in the nook store or if you were even aware of the difference.

    1. Zagzag says:

      I’m pretty certain that the physical copies cost money purely to cover their production costs. Most people would go for the free e-book version, and I don’t think the physical copies were intended as a serious competitor to something that costs precisely nothing, but were merely there as an option in case anyone wanted them.

    2. Shamus says:

      Free Radical is sold at cost. (The price of the hardcopy is just the cost of printing.)

      Witch Watch is sold for-profit.

  11. Thomas says:

    “they see it as way to launch your games’ sounds a lot more attractive to me, because that’s what I’d prefer a game to do. In fact if they didn’t have to launch a launcher to launch my game, that would be pretty sweet. I’d love a system that aimed to do that. At least there’s always GoG

    And ‘they see it as a platform for DRM’ is also a bit rich when Steam sells Steam as anti-used game DRM to other publishers.

    Gamification of anything is cruddy, it’s never based around fun, it’s training your brain to do things which you wouldn’t be engaged to do anyway because it’s triggering the same parts of your brain that gambling does. If I don’t feel like playing a game, my brain compelling me to play it so I can ‘win’ a badge isn’t really bringing me more joy. I’d rather not play the game if that’s what I’d really wanted to do. It’s not like games are such a positive experience that me playing more games will increase my quality of life a lot

    1. Zukhramm says:

      Three are games on Steam that you don’t need Steam to launch. Don’t know how many though.

      As far as the trading cards go, they’re not going to make you play games more, the number of cards are capped in such a way that you get all the cards you can get really quickly.

      1. Thomas says:

        I really don’t know why Steam bugs me so much. And I’ve now experienced a sample of DD sites and it’s still just Steam (not even Origin). And I can recognise they’re trying to be intelligent and helpful by informing me clearly what they’re doing and whilst it seems like Origin games start up instantly, it’s probably just that they don’t flash the grey box at you to make you wait and having to press buttons because I don’t have my wifi on shouldn’t really be a hassle and when it keeps flashing the clipboard at me and tell me to shift+tab out of my game so I can grab a CD key, they’re just making sure that I can play the game and it’s not their fault that I’m not interested in their chat or I dislike having to go through options turning all this stuff off but it really does drive me to complete distraction. I just want to play the game

        1. Thomas says:

          Missed the edit window :( I wish I was better at not posting when my mindset clearly isn’t right. Sorry for the rambly weirdly misplaced angry rant guys

        2. Zukhramm says:

          While I do like both Steam the store, Steam the downloaded and launcher and Steam the community and multiplayer platform, I do wish they were more separate sometimes. Steam is a big bulk of everything, even the times I only want to use the chat or download a game.

    2. Sleeping Dragon says:

      I will admit it worked for me on Kongregate…

      1. Thomas says:

        Oh good point. I was a Kongregater for a while and I didn’t complain about that. It did help me to discover some really cool games too

        1. anaphysik says:

          Cards, badges, xp… I’m surprised the Kongregate analogy hasn’t come up more…

          1. Thomas says:

            I guess Kongregate doesn’t rouse up the feelings so immediately because you aren’t directly playing games and browser games are short and finding good ones is often a fairly effortful activity. When I got to Kongregate it’s to find new games to entertain me for a length of time but I go to Steam to play a game I bought hopefully with the full intent of playing and (hopefully) I’d stop playing them only for good reasons. I know I’ve got a lot of unplayed Steam games though (admittedly most are the remains of various bundles).

            1. Sleeping Dragon says:

              Well, I could quote a dozen examples against the “browser games are short” thing but I get what you mean, for some reason playing flash games doesn’t feel like “playing a real game” for a lot of people. Also, Kongregate does assign badges to one of those “limited, recharging actions and lots of microtransactions” games from time to time and there’s usually a lot of grinding of teeth then.

              On the other hand the profits are probably more apparent with that, since Kongregate is largely ad financed and making a badge can earn a game even a couple hundred thousand views (so a couple thousand pageloads).

              On the gripping hand this makes the developers strive to make games that are badgeworthy (putting aside rumours of shady backroom deals), plus a number of other sites have adopted the model afterwards so it must have been pretty successful.

    3. Trix2000 says:

      The way I see it, you can pretty much ignore all the extraneous bits of Steam and just use it as a launcher for games if you want. All the extra features are there if you want to use them. Personally, I really like having an easy place to have and purchase games that doesn’t ask much of me and also keeps me in easy contact with friends (who I can game with too).

      It’s quite a bit subjective, but I’d take more than less in this case – and Origin certainly has less in comparison (at least from my perspective). Hard for me to say about any other services though since I don’t use them regularly.

  12. impassiveimperfect says:

    Congrats on graduating soon, Rutskarn.
    From, Random Person on the Internet.

    But yeah, when can we start expecting unanticipated (by the general public) best sellers from you?

  13. Sleeping Dragon says:

    What Chris said is part of my problem with kickstarter (I’ll be talking about games but this applies to a lot of kickstarted projects). So many devs take on all these obligations so early in development and not all of them are even industry veterans who might be aware of at least some of the stuff that can come up during the production process.

    It’s why I always cringe a bit when i hear these hyper-enthusiastic that with kickstarter removing the “meddling publishers” from the equation games are going to magically become amazing. Even those “great game of old” often reveal a lot of cut content once people start digging into the files and that’s only accounting for stuff that made it into and was not removed from those. A lot of things get changed, switched or outright rejected because of reasons different than publisher meddling, and it’s not like publisher has some hidden agenda to damage the game (well, at least rarely). Can all of these people accurately judge all the costs and predict most of the risks? I keep saying that this year or at the latest early next year we’ll have a wave of kickstarter failures and there will be a lot of butthurt over it. For that matter, how do you calculate the safety margin into your kickstarter goal? “I think I could do this game for a hundred thousand dollars, but in case things go wrong let’s set the goal to 150k.” How do you account for that money? What if you don’t spend it all?

    On top of that to me it looks like far too many kickstarter projects just promise features that people are likely to like (say, multiplayer or crafting) as their stretch goals. Which really isn’t much better than a publisher putting pressure on them to integrate said features because they are all the rage. This is, again, especially true for games in the very early stages of development, I fear that once those mature we’ll get to seem some odd chimera’s with, for example, a decent story but some strange crafting minigame tacked on, because it was promised as a stretch goal.

    1. Tektotherriggen says:

      What if you don't spend it all?

      I imagine it’s VERY easy to spend more money on a game. There are always things to polish, whether that’s making the soundtrack longer, adding missions, adding difficulty levels, allowing some customisation of the protagonist, replacing some colour-swap enemies with custom art, … . I’ve never made a game, but I have written a PhD thesis, and if the money never stopped, and there was no time limit, I’d probably still be writing it.

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        True, I will admit that the issue of leftover kickstarter money probably won’t come up quite as often as the issue of not enough money. Still, it’s something to think about when considering safety margins.

  14. anaphysik says:

    They’re called die-cast cars because they’re cast… using dies… (Dies are two-piece permanent moulds that get material injected in between them. There might be more technical differences between the two processes, but typically what separates die casting from injection moulding is simply the material used; die casting is for metal and injection moulding for polymer :/)

  15. anaphysik says:

    I like how /immediately/ after Ruts makes the ‘how many [Sids] long is my room?’ callback… you start talking about Sid Meier XD

  16. Tektotherriggen says:

    Osmos is another great game for getting a feel of orbital mechanics. One level in particular requires you to carefully match orbits with a food mote, eat it, and then you have enough mass to reach the next mote. Just a shame there was no tutorial – if I didn’t already know a bit about how orbits worked, I’d have been utterly stumped.

  17. You guys really should list the email for the diecast or at least say it out loud. I feel like most of the people who have it are the ones who heard you say it in the 2nd diecast post.

    Anyway I’m sure you’ll talk about the xbox one in the next podcast but I think what’s really worth pointing out after the announcement is how scary it is for games. It basically means that playstation is the only serious option for console gamers. Remember how lukewarm everyone was after the sony conference? The only reason why it looks good right now is because of how much microsoft snubbed gamers who were probably the largest audience for watching their announcement at 10 am west coast time.

    Of course we still have until e3 when we’ll be overloaded with the absolute scary details that sony and microsoft didn’t want to talk about during the press conferences.

    1. silver Harloe says:

      “You guys really should list the email for the diecast or at least say it out loud. I feel like most of the people who have it are the ones who heard you say it in the 2nd diecast post.”
      I posted a similar comment below, and someone pointed out to me that it’s in the header image (now partially obscured by the title bar in the lower left).

  18. wheals says:

    Jarenth has been in the Diecast so much that it’s actually starting to bother me that he isn’t in the Diecast picture. Although you might call the background a… blue screen of awesome. Or you might not.

    Also, I wonder if I’m the first to notice that Kevin Macleod’s website is still spelled wrong, after 14 episodes.

    1. Syal says:

      I always thought Jarenth was just Rutskarn with a goatee.

    2. Humanoid says:

      The old slimline banner didn’t have the website, to be fair, just “with music by Kevin MacLeod”.

      The Diecast email address is on both versions of the banner, to address the request above this pyramid. Not sure how long it’s been there since I can’t remember when the original banner debuted versus when the mailbag segment was introducted.

      Aside, I wish the new large banners were clickable – been wasting a few clicks on them, heh.

    3. wulfgar says:

      i hope we won’t be regular. crew of 4 is enough. my favorite spoiler warring episodes have 3 hosts.

    4. Jarenth says:

      Just imagine I’m hiding behind Shamus and Chris. I’m not a particularly large guy, it could happen.

  19. Andrew says:

    TheRunawayGuys do nothing BUT nintendo games, it’ll be interesting to see how they respond.

    1. Zukhramm says:

      They’re just going to keep doing it.

  20. Astor says:

    Meh, I don’t agree with Sid’s take on Kickstarter. Most developers outright tell you that this is just a pitch, work in progress and/or a basic idea, they may have goals but it’s all subject to change. The “Big Moment(TM)” was Tim Schafer saying “Look, it may all go to hell, but you’ll at least get a nice video detailing the debacle!”.

    Many of the big names of yesterday (Schafer, inXile, Obsidian, Charles Cecil, Tornquist, etc) have pretty much said “give us money and we’ll do whatever we want” and people flocked to them because they wanted those devs to deliver precisely that!

    It may very well be indeed that Sid Meier has been lucky enough that publishers didn’t repeatedly gut his creative freedom as it has happened with many other developers…

  21. Micamo says:

    My take on steam trading cards:

    “Hmm, I wanna get System Shock 2. Should I play the GOG version, or the Steam version? Well, if I get the GOG version, I won’t be progressing on my badges when I play it!”

    1. Sleeping Dragon says:

      I don’t think this is going to happen to me on Steam much since I’m largely a bargain hunter and buying games when and where they are really cheap (which, very often, is on Steam but still). On the other hand I will bring up the subject of Kongregate up again since this is exactly how it worked for me with many flash games:

      “Oh, a sequel to that really cool flash game is out but it’s exclusive to Armor Games/Newgrounds… I’d sort of want to play it… I’ll wait till it’s on Kongregate, it’ll get badges there and I probably won’t feel like replaying it all then.”

  22. Humanoid says:

    Not sure if it’s already been corrected down the line, but Call to Power had nothing to do with Meier, Microprose, or Firaxis, it was a result of Avalon Hill, owners of the Civilization trademark, having a bob each way.

    Microprose had licenced the trademark a decade earlier, but now Avalon Hill had sold the rights to Activision. After some legal shenanigans, a court settlement resulted in Microprose having the licence but allowing Activision the one-off use of the name for their strategy game. Ironically legal adversaries Microprose and Avalon Hill were both acquired by Hasbro not long thereafter. And in some further irony perhaps, the new entity never did release a Civilization game despite their legal win, Civ3 came after their acquisition, in turn, by Infogrames/Atari.

    As for personnel, you have Meier and Bruce Shelley (later of Age of Empires) for the original; Brian Reynolds (Rise of Nations) for Civ2 and Alpha Centauri; and long time Meier collaborator, Firaxis co-founder/CEO and Microprose music guy Jeff Briggs (who has since left Firaxis) designed Civ3. I believe around that era the game he personally led was the civil war RTS “Gettysburg!”, which is very much not Call to Power.

  23. Just Passing Through says:

    Can someone in the Steam gimmick beta tell me how much has actually changed? Is it easy to ignore like most of the other additions or is the hideous mess of game hubs leaking into the profile page?

    1. Shamus says:

      I couldn’t even FIND it until Chris told me to look in my profile under “badges”. You don’t get notifications when you get cards. You get a small note (I forget where) when you exit the game.

      So, it’s less obtrusive than achievements.

      1. Just Passing Through says:

        That’s good to know, and thank you for replying.

  24. Vagrant says:

    I would buy Josh Dark Souls if it meant I’d get a full 8 episodes out of it. That’s only 2 weeks of play? 4 hours of footage is enough to at least show the epic trek required to just lower that first ladder and progress 10ft into the game world.

    FYI I’m dead serious about the buying if it means the playing.

    1. Touraxus says:

      The steam version is on a good sale at amazon, is $7.50 until the end of the month and it includes the expac.
      Pretty sure if they install DSfix it supposedly fixes many of the problems from the port to the pc. I haven’t gotten to try it yet as confirmation though.

  25. silver Harloe says:

    This might get you spammed and maybe this is why you aren’t doing it, but I notice in the show description: no mention of the mailbag email address.

    I’m not even sure I heard it in this episode of the show. I could find it by going back to previous episodes and listening to them, but that’s kind of my point: if I do think later this week, “hey, I have a question that might be interesting to pose to the spoiler warning crew,” then after jotting down the question, I have to do research to send it, which drastically reduces my odds of sending it.

    I would recommend mentioning the address in the description of every episode, or if that would lead to excessive spam, make a point of mentioning the address in the first 30 and last 30 seconds of each episode so it can be found without a lot of scrolling around and hoping.

    1. Vagrant says:

      Email address seems to be in the header picture.

      1. silver Harloe says:

        I are dumb. Thanks. I always ignore repeated header graphics, and I shouldn’t

  26. AJax says:

    Josh if you ever consider buying Dark Souls for a future episode of Spoiler Warning, I recommend using the DSfix mod to fix the resolution problems so the game won’t look like a horrible, blurry mess on your monitor. Aside from the necessity of needing a 360 controller, it’s a actually a functional but barebones port even with the fix. GFWL on the other hand…

    1. Wolverine says:

      If you don’t have 360 controller, but you have another gamepad, you can use XBox 360 Controller Emulator: https://code.google.com/p/x360ce/
      You can even remap the buttons and stuff.
      PC port is shit, but it’s worth the hassle.

  27. RTBones says:

    Curious – when you say you are ‘throwing out your entire production pipeline’ – do you mean the process is changing? Has Josh’s computer died? Has he updated his suite of software to make things more streamlined? Has he outsourced editing? Did someone gift him some shiny new production suite? Has he moved editing to his garage?

    Just curious.

    1. X2-Eliah says:

      The local oil company accidentaly flooded Josh’s internet pipes with crude oil, and now the SW voices came over very slowly, half-drowned in processed carbon and reeking of an oil rig. That was bad for hygiene (A pretty stuck-up feller), so Josh agreed to wait until the oil company installs new pipes between his pc and the internet wellspring.

  28. Conlaen says:

    Into Darkness doesn’t come out until the 5th of June here in Belgium.

  29. Artur CalDazar says:

    Impressed with the D&D reference there chris.

    “DJ Hero saga” Oh my sides hurt.

    I don’t think every game that gets pushed out the doors early is done because they went over budget exactly, EA for example does try and have yearly games, even when it doesn’t work for the game they were trying to make, I think you guys have talked about this and how it affected Bioware.

    “You had civilisation 3 making a lot of mistakes” What kind of mistakes? I haven’t played the later ones and hardly remember Civ 2, but the game doesn’t seem to have a lot of mistakes.

    “I can’t help but draw a comparison between this and origin” We know Shamus, you need help.

    I think the cards system is supposed to make people want to buy a game on steam over some other venue. “I could get master plaster 3 on service x, but if I get it on steam I’ll be able to earn some cards and maybe get something extra free!”
    But I don’t get why leveling up your page is a thing that matters, but I never check that, I don’t view steam as some kind of social network.

    “Fair use is explicitly not for profit”, thats not true. It is a factor in deciding fair use, but you can earn money and still cite fair use. Not that the legality of it matters because the whole point of this is they are sidestepping that, probably because this stuff can range from unclear to most likely fair use.

  30. ydant says:

    For the people searching for the word feed –

    http://mbafford-static.s3.amazonaws.com/diecast.xml

    Now updated to support iTunes.

    Discussion & source code:

    http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=19368&cpage=1#comment-335329

  31. tengokujin says:

    The ELI5 answer: dies are metal forms that can be used to cast (create with moldable material) objects. In this case, a metal sheet is stamped into the shape of a car’s shell.

  32. Dark Raku says:

    The wonderful thing is, Nintendo is completely in the right to do what they are doing and YouTube’s ToS says that people cannot do or Upload videogames like LPs do, most people just turn a blind eye. And other people actually allow you to go through official channels and get Ad Revenue. And you can go through Official Channels. Most people that make a living are partnered with places that allow them to do that.

    They are not notifications, it is not a copyright claim and it does not pull the video, just means they can’t make money.

    Adobe Products actually have something saying, anything you create with our stuff is yours and you pay for the licence to create and upload that. That is the Adobe Licence.

    Stop bad publicity to their games, tailor the adverts before the games the games being played to suit them specifically instead of just random ads…there are benefits to it.

    But honestly, it comes down to ‘would you like it if someone took your work, showed it off in its entirety and then made loads of money from it and most importantly, have your work be nothing than something someone uses to promote themselves…which is what most of the people Shamus mentioned in his Column actually do.’ I cannot imagine you would like it particularly.

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