Meet Shawn, aka forgeforsaken. He wants to talk about – get this! – Chromehounds, a soon-to-be-extinct game in an extinct genre with gameplay conventions that drive away online gamers in droves. Plus it has a stupid name! Why would anyone want to talk about Chromehounds?
Listen to find out and you might win a copy of Solium Infernum, allowing you to enjoy one of the 847 Solium Infernum threads. And congratulations to chemdem for winning a Collector’s Edition of Demigod, which will allow him to enjoy that single Demigod thread that’s scrolled back about three pages or so.
I didn’t think the District 9 rocket snatch was that outrageous, actually. I was drywalling a few years ago, and one of the guys I was with was stringing the electrical wiring over one of the ceiling vents. He lost his grip, and the the wire snapped back because it was under a lot of tension. Without thinking, I reached out and caught it as it passed. It was a totally instinctive move, and there was no way I could have done it had I thought about it. There was just no time.
The reason I bring this up is because maybe part of the reason he was so awkward with the mech was because was overthinking his movements. In Battletech, for example, Mechwarriors rely on their brain’s ability to balance on two legs to walk their mech. All of the weight shifting is handled at the subconscious level, the systems just tap into what their brain already knows how to do.
Maybe he just saw it and caught it the same way I caught that electrical wire.
Excellent podcast. It really made me sad that I missed out on Chromehounds. It definitely sounds like something the Mechwarrior fan in me would have enjoyed.
Chromehounds sounds awesome. The bit about flashing the lights and later on, lime green paint as basic IFF is brilliant.
Is Chromehounds impossible to monetize? A few thousand players, as mentioned, would seem to be able to pay for a server (even at 100 Microsoft points a month or something). Or is Sega prohibited from charging for access to their servers?
Something else I’ve always wondered about–do third party developers see any money from Live subscription fees?
Amazing podcast. You totally captured the feeling of Chromehounds in the early days. I’m impressed enough to not be all that offended that you didn’t remember that I was one of the Qt3ers playing a lot in the early days. I remember putting together a spreadsheet on the then just-launched Google Docs listing all the parts for each of the sides.
I remember some intense discussion over Hound colouration as well, with strong opinions emerging. The lime-green mention was a trip down memory lane.
One thing not discussed was the weirdly international flavour of the online war. There were so many times we got our asses kicked by some of those incomprehensible Japanese folks…
Yeah apologies to those I didn’t mention, I think I only called out like 4 or 5 of the 20 folks in our squad. There was lots of other stuff I had on my list to talk about but never quite got around to. I do wish I remembered to bring up the crazy useless on foot stuff when your hound got destroyed though.
Yeah, I was wondering why that wasn’t mentioned in the part of the podcast when you talked about how the game was unforgiving because it was “over” when you died. I have fond memories of just kind of hanging around our bases while on foot, chatting with people nearby, and shooting at nothing with that little pea-shooter you had while on foot.
Just think, if Miyamoto was a designer for From Software, you could have been piloting a little bomb ghost hound with a lit fuse after you died… okay, maybe not.
That was an informative and interesting podcast, as always, and I regret not being able to enjoy the Chromehounds experience.
Thanks for the name-check Forge. I really enjoyed the AWACS role a commander took. Didn’t play that game hardly enough, but at least I got out before the artillery exploiters became too rampant.
