Diecast #26: Not Gone Home, Sim Stuff

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Aug 20, 2013

Filed under: Diecast 58 comments

We don’t talk about Gone Home in this episode, but we wanted to. We do spend the first segment of the show talking about how we reacted to the game. I don’t know if it’ll get its own one-off special, or if we’ll just give it a couple of weeks so people can play through it. But I will say the response from the cast is universally positive.


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Hosts: Rutskarn, Josh, Mumbles, Chris, and Shamus.

01:00 What is all the peoples doing this week?

Josh is playing Gone Home. He’s also playing Warthunder and suggests that you sign up using this link in order to most optimally benefit him.

Chris is playing Gone Home and Spelunky. He also made this video about Gone Home.

Mumbles is playing Gone Home and Guild Wars 2.

Shamus is playing Gone Home, Valley Without Wind, and Kairo. (I called it “Kairos” throughout this segment. In my defense, a friend of mine owned a coffee shop called Kairos and saying “Kairo” is like trying to say “Borderland”. It’s hard to make my mouth stop before the s!) But mostly coding.

Rutskarn is playing the Humble Origin Bundle.

27:00 (ish) The Sims, in general.

Not a planned topic, but we spent some time talking about it.

38:00 Sim City News

The “Gimmie five bucks to not stab you” video is here: Doctor Who – Hey Ash Whatcha Playin’?

 


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58 thoughts on “Diecast #26: Not Gone Home, Sim Stuff

  1. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Wait,why did you gag Rutskarns dad?

  2. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Josh is right,there needs to be bunny hopping!How else can I immerse myself in it without bunny hopping?

    1. Hieronymus says:

      I agree. Every game needs bunny-hopping in it.

      I don’t care if it’s a first-person shooter or a real time strategy game. SOMETHING needs to bunny-hop.

    2. Shivoa says:

      I don’t know. I can live without bunny hopping but I didn’t feel like I could connect to Gone Home on an emotional because of the lack of other people… to stab and shoot and generally end as quickly and efficiently as possible. I mean a ‘game’ without any people in, to kill, just doesn’t really feel like a game, does it?

    3. MichaelGC says:

      OMG no. Josh should be prevented from bunny hopping by court order if necessary. Well, if it’s a Spoiler Warning episode – he can bunny hop all he wants in Total War: Shogun 2.

      1. Klay F. says:

        “So you see children, how Oda Reginald became Shogun. He taught his yari peasants to jump on the heads of all the samurai in the land, thereby rendering them helpless. The test will be tomorrow, so you better study.”

        1. Spammy says:

          “Historians would later record Nobunaga’s greatest triumph as getting his foes to face him on a server where landing upon the head of an enemy player would deliver a very deadly ‘Goomba Stomp’ and trained his soldiers to take the high ground and become quite proficient at rocket, sticky, and flare gun jumping.”

  3. Corpital says:

    Regarding Guild Wars2, I’ve been playing a bit of it the last two weeks.

    Actually I’ve been meaning to for at least a month, but I, too, found these constand events quite off-putting. I can do some NEW random fetch quests and running around doing extremely mundane and lowly chores, but the event has been going on for three weeks and I won’t bee able to do everything and nobody will be in the other areas and who are these people bla bla bla.
    And as soon as the event is over, the next one starts. But yeah, everythings mostly empty. World versus World still has a few people in it and people regularly tour all the cities to gather people when a world event started, so everyone can beat on the ice dragon or something similar. It was a bit depressing. Anyone up to revive dXX a bit for a day or two?

    On a happier note, Ruts didn’t mention Sims3 Late Night added a boob-slider to the character creator. Yay for adjustable boobs, way more important than bringing back all the goth gear they removed since Sims2.

    1. Corpital says:

      Took too long to edit…ah well. No link to the article Campster mentioned ? I find it a rather interesting topic, most games either ignore “adult” themes (except violence, of course, can’t have a game without violence), elevate them to ridiculous levels or make it all cute and nice, like the Sims.
      But we can all at least agree that drugs are unquestionably awesome, regenerating health, giving your sweet combat boni and all that without any kind of penalty or side effects or long term effects whatsoever. And the best thing is, even your lowlevel Khajiit, sitting broke in his newly bought shack in Whiterun with only an alchemy table and a shabby bed, can scrounge up a few ingredients and make his own potions without any problem or danger to anyone. Lovely.

  4. Sabredance (MatthewH) says:

    Wow… I think Shamus might have gotten the best pun ever and everyone missed it.

    “This is the game like world of tanks,”
    “But with planes.”

    Shamus: “Booooooeing.”

    I’m not even sure it was intentional.

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      It sounded like a HSR reference to me. Still though, good catch! That’s a gem.
      I actually do some work for Boeing… I’ll have to use that one.

      1. If I were a passenger, I’d rather you used a fire extinguisher.

  5. Sabredance (MatthewH) says:

    With the Sims (granted, I play Sims 2), “You can’t have a self-sustaining farm, you can’t be a millionaire making money off interest.” Speak for yourself -I’ve created entire farming communities and small towns. I am, in fact, on a quest to make a completely sim-driven autonomous metropolitan area (takes a few generations to pull it off).

    It has, in fact, been a great exercise in learning how much a banking system matters to modern life (and also why mechanized agriculture is a wonderful thing -an 8 person family with all of them maxed on gardening can only barely support a farm just because they don’t have the time to weed and water everything).

    1. Ithilanor says:

      Wow, I didn’t know that The Sims let you manage that big/complex of a system…now I know what old game I’m going to check out next.

      1. Sabredance (MatthewH) says:

        I don’t want to over-sell it. Multiple years I’ve never managed fully self-sustaining.

        But I can create a town where almost everybody makes money by owning and working at sim created businesses. Now, sims can’t make everything -so the furniture store and car store are really importers who sell manufactured goods.

        Hard currency is required for construction and to get businesses started (and there are small sinks in the forms of the T/R bills -which scale with construction size, so either property taxes or rents).

        Alas, the only method of getting currency is to export food (which then cannot be consumed by Sims -unless you go to a grocer and buy imported food) or small-scale artisinal industry -toys, flower arrangements, robotics construction. There’s also fishing and tourism.

        OK, now that I’m describing this, I realize I’ve been playing the wrong simulation -I shouldn’t be trying to create midwestern farming towns -I should be trying to bootstrap a remote developing-world village.

        Anyway, I do occassionally use the cheat codes to helicopter some money to sims to keep the economy working. With fixed prices, if agricultural yields drop it is the only way to keep everyone in their homes. Which is why lacking a central bank is such a problem -prices are fixed, there is no interest rate to speak of (nor are there loans), so fiscal policy and printing money are the only policy tools.

        1. Paul Spooner says:

          It’s interesting to see how so many of the Sims games are focused on the actions of the individuals, but built on a Keynesian economic foundation. It would be neat to see some Sim games based on the Austrian School.

  6. Ilseroth says:

    While I understand that this cast probably took place a few days ago; I humbly suggest if you (Shamus and others) haven’t tried it, you should try Sir, You are Being Hunted.

    Procedurally generated islands based on the British Isles wherein you are being chased by Tweed wearing robots that act like old timey gentleman, it is a stealth survival first person game. It is kinda shooty at times, but since enemies can kill you so easily it manages to stay tense most of the time.

    That being said, it is open access via steam, so it is still a little unpolished, and missing some of the “biomes” that will be available when done (Castle and industrial) but still worth a look; especially since shamus <3 that procedurally generated coding.

    1. I spent far too much time last night playing Sir (or Madam) You Are Being Hunted. It’s amazingly fun to play, has lots of tension, and my only complaint is that I want to be able to shoot down those spotter balloons (or be told how to, if it’s possible).

      There’s also loads more content to come (2 biomes, new uses for objects, new sentries, etc.) so it looks like good value for the money.

      “I heartily endorse this service and/or product!”

    2. Lisa says:

      I wondered if Shamus had seen this game. I’ve been playing it a lot since it first hit Alpha and it’s not only fun stealh/tense gameplay, but the procedurally generated worlds feel “right” (Whatever that means).

      1. I think you mean “British!”

  7. Blake says:

    On Gone Home, Mumbles recommends playing it in one sitting, how long does it go for?

    1. krellen says:

      About the length of a movie – an hour-and-a-half to two hours.

      1. Somniorum says:

        Err, depending on how you play it. Apparently I moseyed a little more, it took me between three to four. The write-up I read on rockpapershotgun said it took them about as long as I did.

      2. Daemian Lucifer says:

        But that would require you to not pick up and diligently examine every pen,brush and a box of tissues,and why would you not do that?

  8. Annikai says:

    The funny thing about the Sims 3 juice bar thing, and this might be an unintended thing, but in certain states juice bars are actually things. They a strip clubs that serve juice because if they were to serve alcohol they wouldn’t be able to go full nude.

    1. Or in some places outside of most major cities, you’d be allowed to… um… kind of “unlock premium content.” Nothing like the Hot Coffee Mod, at least, not according to those who claim to have gone to a certain bunker-like building near a small Missouri college town, so make of that what you will.

      But yeah, if an “exotic” club serves juice rather than alcohol, it’s a trade-off for other activities most of the time.

      1. Sabredance (MatthewH) says:

        One of my favorite examples of this is Florida law, which has apparently resulted in establishments that share a wall -but owned by the same person, who takes the wall out and replaces it with a line-of-sight block -but you can freely pass between establishments. One side has dancers in lingere and alcohol, the other has nude dancers and no alcohol.

        And quasi-related, I’ve seen one outfit which was built across a city line. No nude dancers -or dancers of any type -but the city side of the establishment was dry and the county side was wet.

  9. krellen says:

    Josh, that was me with you while you played War Thunder – though I suppose I can’t blame you TOO much for conflating us old men like that.

    1. Josh says:

      I remembered you were there, I just thought Shamus was there for the beginning of it too.

      1. krellen says:

        No, Shamus and I cannot occupy the same virtual space, don’t you remember? I was filling in the “grumpy old man” role that night.

        1. McNutcase says:

          Lies. I’ve seen you both be in the same Borderlands 2 game.

          In which Josh was the youngest and least grumpy person present, since I was crashing. It was almost grumpocalyptic until you asked me to leave so Glitch could join.

  10. You want Call of Duty: Aerosmith?

    They already made that game. It was called “Revolution X.” :)

    1. Von Krieger says:

      This. I came here to say exactly this.

  11. sofawall says:

    COMPLETELY UNRELATED

    Shamus I thought this was relevant to your interests.

    http://preparefordescent.com/about/

    1. Volfram says:

      THIS IS RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS! VERY RELEVANT!

  12. burningdragoon says:

    Oh man, Rock Band/Guitar Hero. Was such a great thing to have in college. The only thing that wasn’t so great about was a lot of the more technically challenging songs weren’t usually ones that people wanted to sing for some kareoke fun.

  13. Hitchmeister says:

    I’ve been dabbling in Guild Wars 2 a bit lately and it’s not as dead as Mumbles’ friend led her to believe. I get the “Hurrah. You did something. Open a chest of goodies.” for completing dailies. The way the dailies work is they have a new list of things to do some PvE some PvP each day. Complete 5 categories and you get a pat on the head and a Scooby Snack. The PvE ones include stuff like craft x items, gather x items, kill x things, kill x veteran things, kill things in this region, complete events, complete events this region, etc. Most of these can be done in low level areas and many people working on dailies seem to do them there, so in the lower zones (particularly Queensdale) chat will be filled with announcements of which events are up and people flock to them. So it’s not a lonely experience with no one around.

    Now Rutskarn’s story about the golf game is something that amuses me about the model of that game. You can unlock everything for free by putting in enough time in the campaign or you can just pay to get it right away. Which always feels to me like, “Listen, you’ve already paid for the game, if you just pay us a bit more you won’t even have to play it.” Yay?

    1. Rack says:

      Sadly none of this really helps if you aren’t level 80, low level zones give miserly levels of experience and wholly unsustainable amounts of loot. You can’t level up in the newbie zones and the other zones are effectively ghost towns.

      Unfortunately this just all falls down to Arenanet’s idiocy in reverting back to a WoW style XP system, if they stuck with 20 levels or even fewer it wouldn’t really be an issue, or would at least be largely fixable. The game would pretty much have to be raised to the ground and started from scratch to allow new players or let old ones rejoin now.

  14. David F says:

    So, for Guild Wars 2, you’re partly right, and partly way off. The issue with the temporary content is annoying, and a common complaint. I didn’t play GW1, so I can’t say anything about that comparison. But the open world is not dead at all. There’s always a big group at the dragon fights, and other world bosses. The starter zones might be server dependent, but at least on Tarnished Coast they’re still well-populated. There has also been new permanent content added, it’s just not well advertised so you might not know if you don’t do a bit of research.

    1. Corpital says:

      Tried to play through some of the event of the week last night and it was a bit bizarre.
      The crazy villain sent some minions to attack Fireheart Rise and the map was so full, everyone got shoved into Overflow. It apparently is an hourly event, but for some reason it refused to start in Overflow for over an hour.

      So much fun.

  15. lethal_guitar says:

    I also bought Gone Home because of Chris’ Video. Really wanted to watch it to the end. Does he have some kind of deal with the developers? ;)

    But I really liked the game, don’t think I’ve ever played something like this. And I’m also amazed by how scary the game was at some points, considering there’s never a real threat.. But I would have felt exactly the same had I been in the player character’s situation. They did a really good job with the atmosphere here.

  16. lethal_guitar says:

    Sorry for the double post, but I wasn’t done listening to the podcast when I wrote the first comment.

    I totally second the Guitar Hero/Rockband dedicated episode Chris proposed!

  17. Wes1180 says:

    I had never heard of gone home until I got the email saying campster uploaded an errant signal of it, I immediatly bought it as soon as I could.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      The power of Chris compels us all.

  18. KremlinLaptop says:

    Gone Home spoilers ahoy!

    Re: sprint function. It would’ve been really neat if the game at the point where you listen to recording where Sam says that she’s gone up to the attic to sleep– if the game there just forced Kaitlin to sprint. Because god knows I wanted to run up there as fast as my legs would carry me and I was TERRIFIED of what I would find there.

    And then I had ALL THE FEELS. At once.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      The thought came to my mind as well,but then I remembered the note at the front door and relaxed.The ending wouldve been much better without that note.

  19. Rack says:

    I would like to stick up for Plants vs Zombies 2 here actually. It doesn’t exactly make you replay missions over and over to unlock future worlds but rather there are a bunch of extra challenges you have to replay levels to complete and that’s what unlocks the new worlds. The challenges are actually a lot of fun and introduce quite a bit of variety to in how levels play compared to the levels in PVZ1.

    The issue I still have with it though is you can’t exactly ignore it’s a F2P game. While there isn’t anything you can buy that I think actually makes the game more fun, it’s all skipping interesting content and cheats it has the aggravating habit of continually begging for money. Inbetween levels it pops up with ads for cheats, whenever you unlock a new zone it gives you the option to buy your way past it anyway. On the plant select screen it highlights all the cheat plants you can buy and so on.

    When it comes down to it I’d pay happily £7 for the exact same game without the opportunity to buy all this stuff and I wouldn’t pay £7 to get rid of all the nagging. Somehow in between it all I’m getting a fun game for free and resenting it slightly but as free to play goes it’s remarkably generous and undemanding.

  20. Paul Spooner says:

    Shamus: 2:39 “Cause that’s a whole other question.”
    I love how you have resisted the common phrasing “whole-nuther” with your excellent diction. Well done! I can’t properly express exactly how satisfying it is to hear this. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one.

    I wish I had something to say about all the other stuff you talked about, but it mostly comes down to “yep”.

    1. Sabredance (Matthewh) says:

      And that’s why we call him Shamu-

  21. 4th Dimension says:

    Ahh, more publicity for Warthunder excellent.

    So for all Twentysided Warthunderists (all 2.3 of you), apart from Warthunder being now on steam, they are offering a Ace Steam Pack (basically 70$ amount of content for 35$), only unfortunately it’s not so good like it was at the launch itself when I got it for ~20€ or something.

    Anyway, in case you hate Josh, and want him to suffer, you can join using my CAREFULLY CRAFTED LINK .

  22. Velkrin says:

    I picked up the Humble Origin Bundle too, just to give Mirror’s Edge a shot since the chatter on the internet seemed to be fairly positive. You don’t have to use Origin for five of the six games in the non-average bundle.

    I also don’t recommend Mirror’s Edge for spoiler warning, as anyone playing the drinking game will suffer from liver failure from the ‘Drink on Death’ rule. Outside of spoiler warning I thought it was pretty fun. Short, light on the plot (apparently a lot of dialog was left out), but fun.

    1. I tried playing Dead Space from that bundle for the first time last night. I wish I’d known to mess with the V-Sync settings, as I uninstalled it after about 14 minutes due to severe motion sickness.

      Also, that kind of game is why I hate the over-the shoulder perspective for shooters. Give me first-person view or give me a different game to play. Ugh.

    2. Gruhunchously says:

      I actually really hope that Spoiler Warning does a one off special on Mirrors edge. It’s a short game, so they could probably finish it a week or two, and I think it’s a worthy game to discuss both in terms of what it does well and what it doesn’t do well.

      But if Spoiler Warning doesn’t do it, maybe Disclosure Alert could at some point.

    3. Simon Buchan says:

      I found the best way to enjoy ME was to play the time trials, and treat it like it was a racing game, eg. replaying the stages over and over again to get a better “line”. Getting 3 stars gets *really really* hard pretty quickly, and looking at wikis will quickly give you an idea of how complex the parkour simulation is (though not particularly realistic, I would guess). Crouch jump over pipes and ledges instead of mantling! Look up while mounting a wall or fence! Make wide radius turns! Leap onto balance pipes as far as possible! Lots of weird things to discover. A pity the leaderboards are packed with hacks, and even the legit best times are using insane glitches that are pretty hard to pull off, like the basic side-dash for instant acceleration (turn 90 degrees to where you want to go, then side dash towards it, then *before you land*, rotate back to face where you are going and start running forwards and you will land with full speed)

    4. Zak McKracken says:

      When I read about the “Humble Origin Bundle” I thought they’d sold their soul.
      The Humble Bundle is about platform independent Indie games with no DRM! This stuff is not just tied to windows but to effing Origin! DRM at its worst!
      Then I saw that EA wasn’t even making money on it, which got me to think.

      Then I came to the conclusion that they’re just gioving away stuff that doesn’t sell otherwise, in order to make people install Origin, while looking charitable. Nooooo, I’m not falling for that trap! Even the non-Origin games are at least tied to Steam, aren’t they?

      Not happy at all that the Humble Bundle Guys are doing this.

  23. BeamSplashX says:

    Joel Goodwin did a write-up on Kairo that explains its appeal pretty well.

    Sounds quite nice, put his way.

  24. JoshR says:

    Shamus: have you seen the Sims 4 teaser trailer?
    they talk about how sims 4 is not an online experience and will be available with full offline. (if you are using origin)

    so you can sort-of count that as a win?
    maybe they are starting to atone for what they did wrong.

    Also worth noting i saw this trailer on origin, because of the mentioned humble origin bundle :)

  25. Zak McKracken says:

    My Theory of Karaoke:

    There are three types of Karaoke:

    One where a bunch of more-or-less drunk people tries to sing Barbie Girl and Bohemian Rapsody (five people on stage, no less, everyone trying to sing each of the parallel voices at the same time). It sounds very very crappy, but people are just drunk enough to don’t care about embarassing themselves, and also are too busy laughing about the other drunken idiots who can’t sing either.

    One where everyone thinks they’re the next Celine Dion, and it devolves into a competition on who will give the best interpretation of a Whitney Houston piece and become famous. Noone has fun, people apologize for missed notes. People try to “win”. Most of these people probably take casting shows serious.

    And finally, the one that I would be very very grateful if I could just find something like it in my current place: A bunch of people with wildly differring tastes in music, most (not all) of which can sing quite okay are having a ball singing stuff they like, making fun of stuff they don’t and generally aiming to do hilarious stuff on stage.
    The place I used to go to had a guy who couldn’t sing very well but could do the best Lenny Kilmister impersonation ever, and discovered that for “Ace of Spades” you don’t really need to sing. He even learned a fake guitar solo on a ukulele. A troupe of three doing Backstreet Boys songs complete with over-the-top choreo, many people involving the audience to some level, and most not impressing so much with their voice but by putting on a show (although some could do both if they decided to). It was basically the Punk of Karaoke: 3 Chords are enough, but you must play them the right way, and no apologies. Oh, and lots of respect for everyone. Good times…

    … I would think that all of these different types have different motivations. And I would tend to think that Rockband and co are mostly appealing to people in the first group who don’t want to embarrass themselves by actually trying to sing, even just in front of friends.

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