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Sacred Symbols+, Episode 136: 30 Questions With Colin (Patreon)

Published:
2021-11-09 17:01:03
Edited:
2021-11-12 16:14:12
Imported:
2022-01

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Content

It's been more than two months since we last did a Colin-centric + mailbag, and this episode seeks to break the trend. Better yet, while we went through last go around, this time there are 30 inquiries in the hopper. So let's chat about subjects like the meaning of criticism and reviews, whether games have become too complex, which Microsoft-owned studio makes the most sense with PlayStation, and dive deep into games, both real and hypothetical, ranging from The Getaway and The Last of Us to Infamous and BioShock. Put on your thinking caps and hit play.

Files

Comments

Remington James

These are always amongst my favorite episodes. 48 Minutes in & glad when I checked I still had 40 more to go! Keep these in the rotation

Justin Matkowski

Only about 25 minutes in and looking forward to listening to the rest, but the topic of criticism struck a chord in me and I wanted to comment before I got distracted. This issue in gaming is indicative of a far larger problem in our culture; everything, from diet to art / entertainment preferences and politics is approached with absolute religious devotion. In that framework, counter perspectives are not perceived as a different outlook, but as an expression of heresy. Keep up the awesome work!

Piston Pants

These need to be a smidge more frequent.

MonstaPontes93 (Ricky Pontes)

Appreciate the help and advice Collin couldn’t agree more on the resident evil village being perfect example when it first came out I knew because of speed runs being a possibly of being behind a trophy and stuff I put in my head I might never platinum something like re but didn’t take it away from my love of RE and the franchise and going in not knowing is perfect I do it now with Psn profiles I love the tracking of trophies and such on ur account such a awesome system long story short appreciate the advice my man!

Kenneth Oms

Woah, amber is the color of your energy. Woahh. Come on, who can hate 311.

Max Stahl

I have never seen such baggery, before. You would.

Anonymous

This still hasn't populated in my patreon RSS feed so not currently showing in podcast app. Knockback came through on Monday however. Looking forward to listening when I have to chance!

Michael Cook

Great episode! When I teach people how to critically appraise research evidence, I get them to think about positives as well as negatives of the research as its much easier to pick flaws (and is the way of the world these days) Also would you be able to share the link on the MIT online lecture- always interested in the psychology of communication.

Max Stahl
>>71501014

It was a douchebag-mailbag joke, but said with love. 👍🏻

Jack Sibert

Great episode Colin 👍

Andy

The fact that Chris hasn't seen Grandma's Boy is appalling and now I feel he can't be trusted.

David

Great episode as usual. (insane quality content!) I have a PS5 & Series X and although I like Game Pass I hardly use it. I will play Halo and played like the first hour of Forza so far (it is beautiful). But I only wanted it for the Bethesda games. I even tried out Star Wars Fallen Order on gamepass and once I figured out I liked it I bought it on PS to get the trophies instead of playing through it on Xbox where i don't care for achievements.

David
>>71728118

Ngl Colin's opinions aside, grandma's boy is a terrible movie

MISZCZOGRZMOT

Great job as usual, Colin. If Naughty Dog don't understand what made U3 inferior to U2, then I feel they are truly lost with their pursuit of (intrusive and distruptive) cinematic storytelling. U2 was a hi-octane blockbuster start to finish, with a videogamey final boss being the only knock against it, and with enough charm and character moments to make it a decent story, that you wanted to experience time and time again. That game made me a fan, and I've got a platinum in every Uncharted game, including Golden Abyss. U3 meanwhile is full of their trademark one-off story levels with 0 replayability (like the young Drake levels), forced walking segments were starting to become an issue at this point, stealth sections were straight-up broken, melee combat was worse, too, and the first half of U3 was just boring. Even the story felt very familiar, and it introduced a few plot-holes and inconsitencies. A few minute-long segment where you just go through the desert, and do nothing but sit there and hold 'forward', tells you all you need to know about where their priorites lied with this game - Story>Fun. Then U4 came, and first 4 hours were those ~8 one-off story levels with 0 replayability strung back-to-back, and there were even a LOT of those barely interactive levels sprinkled throughout the game later on, too. Huge open levels brought nothing but boredom to the mix, too (at least for me), since it just meant you had to waste minutes to just get from point A to point B. There's only like 25 enemy encounters in the entire 25hr game, and they're not spaced out evenly, creating hours of down time, and then making you tired of combat encounters when they're strung together, too. It's not even a contest between the amount of set-pieces in U2, U3, and U4, either - U2 is still the best in that regard. Every U4 review I've read mentioned pacing issues, and I honestly had to force myself to finish my second playthrough of that game because of them (same goes for TLOU2, since it shares a similar story over gameplay design philosophy). You can't skip another young Drake level, you already know the story, you are forced to walk the entire level - it's just a giant waste of time on repeat playthroughs, and I'd take a black loading screen over them, ever time. I'd much rather just play the Vita game again, or U1, then go through U3 or U4 - at least I'd be playing the thing, and having fun. I've got no problem with slower-paced games with less action, like Detroit (which I found to be very good), but those kind of games are consistent with their pacing, and recent Naughty Dog games are just all over the place when it comes to their story and gameplay balance, imho.

Kevin Cooper

When it gets to the point that I know I'm not going to chase a Platinum trophy, the [somewhat OCD] rule that I have is to get a trophy percentage equal to or higher than what my completion percentage is on PSN Profiles (currently around 42% I think). Even if that completion percentage doesn't necessarily translate into the trophy percentage for a given game, it's the metric that allows me to walk away from a Platinum without too much anxiety about it.

Faan

Thank you for answering my question! I think by now enough time has passed that Syphon Filter could be rebooted or Sony could make a new IP with stealth gameplay. I prefer the latter option. Or hopefully, third-party developers are more keen to make stealth games, especially given the success of this year's Hitman 3 and the Metal Gear Solid series in general. Hopefully IO's Bond game brings back the stealth to Bond after the recent movies have had over-the-top, crazy action!

Faan
>>71756577

I agree with you, MISZCZOGRZMOT. I think Uncharted 3's gameplay is good and the level design is overall well-made and even better than Uncharted 2 at some points. However, it's clear that set pieces were favored over story, as the story is simply much more messy than 2. U3 also retreads so much of the previous Uncharted games and the villain is disappointing due to a lack of motivation being revealed. I do think that U4's pacing is not that good and makes it not very replayable. Tho TLOU2 for me has better pacing and is much more replayable IMO.

MISZCZOGRZMOT
>>71756577

@Faan Personally I think that U3 was worse gameplay-wise. O button was assigned to lunging at enemies and inititating melee combat in U3, and since this button was also used for rolling out of danger, it created scenarios where you wanted to escape enemy fire, and Drake would jump straight into it instead, just to die within 2 seconds. This was my main cause of death on my crushing difficulty playthrough, and the 'O grab' was never reintroduced in ND's future games. Then there's only like 3 setpieces in the entire game - plane, chateu and sinking ship, and that is a far cry from U2's bombastic gameplay. Colin destroyed the stealth sections in this game in a U3 spoilercast on IGN, so there's no need to write why I think they sucked. U3 was also a bit rushed to reach the 11.1.11 date - I've been thrown through walls by grenade explosions in the same locations on multiple playthroughs, the spiders+torch section ran at like 15fps (because the torch was casting complex real-time shadows there), and I've gotten stuck in geometry in coop missions constantly, so we dropped U3's whole MP offerings pretty quickly, because of that. Then there's the story - not only does it quote the previous games pretty much verbatim, is full of plotholes, incositencies, fake-outs, and it rethreads the 'will they won't they', or 'Nate will drag Sully to his death' threads (again - the game just seemed a bit rushed), but the storytelling was starting to get pretty intrusive at this point, with the one-off story levels and forced walking segments being the biggest culprits. The first half of the game is just pretty uneventfull, at least for me, and the fun only seems to start around the bermuda triangle pirate section. The production values and technical achievements were of course great (lighting in particular made U2 look a bit flat in comparison), the cast gave great performances, and it's far far from a bad game, but I always thought that outlets gave 10/10s to this game, just cause they missed out on giving it to 2009's GOTY, and the best game in the series so far - U2. All in all, I would still play U3 over U4, though.

The Eclectic Gamer

Not playing a game bc you might have difficulty getting platinums is just plain dumb…and this is coming from a trophy hunter. And no, Colin you shouldn’t encourage people to look at secrets trophies because more often than not they are tied to gameplay systems or just plot points in a story… If you’re just playing for a meaningless digital reward then you missed the whole gravitas and experience of playing through a game

LastStandMedia
>>71939404

People can get whatever they want out of games. I make games; I cannot control what someone takes out of it, or why they play it, or to what end. That's reality.

LastStandMedia
>>71923675

It begs the question if it's been so much time that rebooting Syphon Filter would be meaningless, and they might as well go new IP!