People used to tell me sometimes that Vegas airport is filled with slot machines and I thought they were being a little on-the-nose. Well, joke’s on me, I guess.
Puzz and I finished watching “PsychOdyssey” tonight. Really cool documentary about game development. I really appreciated how frank it was about the challenges and the tensions and the difficulties of trying to make a (relatively large!!) video game & focusing largely on the people making the thing, their lives, their relationships, their feelings. Really cool seeing some of the process, & really interesting seeing how people create and affect that process, in different ways, as different people with different ideas and skill sets and feelings.
There were a lot of really good specific moments. One that I keep thinking about is specifically about Microsoft acquiring Double Fine. Different people had different and complicated feelings about it! That’s one of those “well yeah, duh” moments when I type it out, but… I dunno. It’s cool to see that made very apparent instead of spinning it one specific way or another. I feel like that’s something they capture really well in the documentary all the way through.
Do you have a favorite piece of obscure video James trivia or funny weird bits of game knowledge?
AnonymousI don’t know how obscure this is given how it’s a fairly big-ish documentary. Anyways, Puzz and I have been watching “PsychOdyssey”, the big doc about the development of “Psychonauts 2”, and there’s this neat trend we noticed where, like…
Multiple times they’d highlight some level concept, or some mechanic, or setpiece they were trying to create for a given level, & they’d end up going “oh this is too difficult, or this doesn’t fit his world and this story, or this isn’t working out for one reason or another, let’s scrap this.” Nine time’s out of ten it ends up being an idea you see in the released game’s version of Bob’s Bottles. Ranging from “lone boat atop a mountaintop,” to specific puzzle layouts, to “impossibly turning hallways,” to “cake”. A bunch of other examples that I don’t remember off-hand, but it was a neat thing to notice.
Another related one: there’s at least one office room in the Loboto level that’s just a recreation of a Double Fine meeting(?) room. The one with the kinda striking old woman painting.
what’s the best minecraft mod pack you’ve ever played
AnonymousI don’t really play specific modpacks unless my friends make something for me to play with.
Do you have a favorite piece of obscure video James trivia or funny weird bits of game knowledge?
AnonymousI don’t know how obscure this is given how it’s a fairly big-ish documentary. Anyways, Puzz and I have been watching “PsychOdyssey”, the big doc about the development of “Psychonauts 2”, and there’s this neat trend we noticed where, like…
Multiple times they’d highlight some level concept, or some mechanic, or setpiece they were trying to create for a given level, & they’d end up going “oh this is too difficult, or this doesn’t fit his world and this story, or this isn’t working out for one reason or another, let’s scrap this.” Nine time’s out of ten it ends up being an idea you see in the released game’s version of Bob’s Bottles. Ranging from “lone boat atop a mountaintop,” to specific puzzle layouts, to “impossibly turning hallways,” to “cake”. A bunch of other examples that I don’t remember off-hand, but it was a neat thing to notice.
why do you answer some of these asks when you could ask questions back at the person who sent it
What did you have for dinner today?
