Diecast #370: The Blandcast

Diecast – Twenty Sided

Sooner or later every man reaches the point in his life when it’s time to make the stereotypical “out of touch old man rants about a thing he doesn’t understand”. For me, that point is this week, when I rant about TikTok.

(Although I suppose you could argue that this ENTIRE WEBSITE should fall under that category. In which case this week is more of the same, only moreso.)

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Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast370

Link (YouTube)

Show notes:

00:44 Endless Space

I didn’t get into it, but apparently Paul had some fun with the sequel. For me the game was SO similar to Master of Orion that it felt like the same game with a new UI. I don’t have any suggestions on how the game should distinguish itself, but I feel like it needed something to set it apart from the 4X titles of the past. As it stands, I think there’s more variety between the versions of Civilization than there are differences between the major franchises in the 4X genre.

17:26 Making a Spaceship in Blender

On the show I talked about an interview where Adam Savage talks about creating stories for the little greeblies you’re adding to a movie model. That bit is at the 5 minute mark in this video:

Link (YouTube)

29:38:27 HeroForge

If it sounds fun, you can try it for yourself.

37:47 Penny Arcade

It’s been ages since I read PA regularly, but I don’t think the strip has declined in quality. It’s as funny as it ever was. I just stopped clicking on it back in 2012 or so and I don’t know why.

Anyway, here is the strip Paul mentioned.

39:54 Shamus Doesn’t Understand TikTok

Old man yells at cloud.

46:31 Mailbag: “Big Idea” flops

Dear Diecast,

I am not sure how to exactly explain this, but I am wondering whether either of you have any stories about games (or game adjacent products) you remember that were also ill-fated, but earnest efforts at being ambitious “big idea” projects. One example for Shamus would of course be Active Worlds, who was always selling itself to investors on what it could be.

For me, I used to play the “Creatures” series of games (you can find them on GOG or be familiar with their Active Worlds town “Albiaville”).

The idea behind Creatures was basically like a complex Tamagotchi. You raised digital creatures from newborn to old age. You taught them to speak, helped socialize them, taught things to avoid, bred them, etc. The breeding mechanics were fairly complex, I believe. And you could even do everything deliberately poorly like teach them to speak entirely in UWU language as well as more malicious things like feeding them to piranhas or breeding them to love booze.

The thing is, the developer, Cyberlife, was originally founded as a research focused enterprise. It eventually changed to a game dev company which then went bankrupt, but the idea was that it was originally going to be this big thing: Artificial life on a computer! but was ultimately just a game.

Thanks for your thoughts,

Mark

50:24 Mailbag: Simulation Hypothesis

Deeeeaaaaar DIEcast,

I am sure that Shamus and Paul are familiar with the popularized “Simulation Hypothesis”: a philosophical theory that would imply that we are statistically more likely to be living in a lifelike computer simulation, rather than living in the actual real world.

As a podcast/website devoted to videogame criticism, do you have any critical opinion regarding our simulated reality? (e.g. graphical fidelity, narrative issues and plotholes, bugs and glitches, romance options…)

…Is our universe procedurally generated?

Yours existentially,

Nick

(P.S If you asked for my answer, I would say that – in a similar vein to the brown color palate of first person shooters in the 1990’s – I would have preferred if our simulation included a wider range of colors than just the blandness of the physical light spectrum).

54:36 Mailbag: Will There Be Another Game Like This

Dear Diecast,

What are game concepts you wish the industry would make more attempts at?
Do you have any hopes that they will do so anytime soon?
And why do you think it is that we don’t get games like Mass Effect or Jade Empire anymore?

Kind regards,
Andrew