The Digest • Video

Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers

Games Of June 2012: Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers

A game where you tear the desert apart in search of a good pair of underpants. Neat idea, but does it have legs?

By John Teti • July 11, 2012

In case you missed it: Monday’s installment of The Digest covered Lollipop Chainsaw, and yesterday we gave the chat-and-chew treatment to Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes.

We finish up this edition of The Digest with a cool-looking indie game, Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers. The “leftovers” in question are a pair of magical underpants. Playing as Tiny, you chase after them with a bunch of terraforming tools. The game looks beautiful and has a killer soundtrack, but the terraforming bit lost its appeal for me after a while. Steve felt differently, but he ate more of the fried Twinkie than I did, so maybe he was just more motivated to retrieve the magical underpants.

Thanks for watching this week! We’ll be back next month with more vile vittles and hopefully a few marvelous games.

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  • KidvanDanzig

    Is it me or did they crib the main character design from Adventure Time.

  • KidvanDanzig

    Re: game soundtracks – definitely possible with a lot of games on 360, it seems like most will just cut in-game music out and leave in sound / dialogue. With a lot of games, namely EA titles with shitty modern rock radio soundtracks, it’s a goddamned necessity. Burnout was not meant to be played while listening to New Found Glory or whatever.

    It’s much easier on PC, as you might imagine. In most cases you can just knock out in-game music, alt-tab to itunes and play something, but sometimes it’s worth a little extra effort to make it feel just right. I just recently started playing Fallout New Vegas again and modded it to add in whatever music I liked to the “master list” of Radio New Vegas songs, making them essentially deigetic. Mr. New Vegas will pop in between random tracks to deliver news and very non-specific song intros (usually “and now I’m going to play one of my veeeery favorite songs for you”, followed by Darkthrone or whatever). I try and keep it limited to things that are very similar in tone to the first two Fallout soundtracks, but I throw in a bunch of Caretaker tracks to balance it out with the more 30′s/40′s/50′s pop format of FO3/NV. Perfect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRw4TKYvZHs

    • caspiancomic

       I was surprised to hear that anyone would consider listening to their own tunes while playing a game, which I guess isn’t as outrageous as it sounds to me. When I play a game I like to experience it fully, and I tend to play games where the soundtrack is a well considered and vital component of the total experience.

      It also strikes me as a little odd that a game would give you the option to cycle through its tracks at will. I’d have thought that ideally the needle drops would have been purposefully selected by the game’s designers to heighten certain moods or create a given atmosphere. Allowing the player to set his or her own tone is an interesting experiment (although not necessarily one committed on purpose), but I’d probably choose a more curated experience given the choice. Maybe I need to see it in action.

      • KidvanDanzig

        It’s not something you do with every game. Burnout lends itself because any good driving game deserves good driving music. When a game has good music and sound design that’s well-integrated into the game, there’s no need for meddling. I never replaced the music in Bioshock or Mass Effect (though there were times in the latter when I wish I could).

        With New Vegas, there was an issue with the sheer amount of content in the game relative to the dozen or so tracks they had licensed for the radio, resulting in an endless repetitive loop of “Johnny Guitar” and “Big Iron” and “It’s a Sin to Tell A Lie” whenever you had your radio on. 

        It then became a fun challenge to find music that fit aesthetically within the series and adding it. For a music-oriented person like myself it changes my experience of the game significantly  - add a lot of plaintive, drawn-out ambient pieces and I move away from the cities toward the wilderness, where the vistas more befit the accompaniment.

        • http://www.avclub.com/users/merve,96925/ Merve

          I tried playing New Vegas with the radio on for a few minutes, and it annoyed the crap out of me. For me, the experience is better with whatever ambient music the game provides, but I’m glad that customization exists for those who want it.

        • Destroy Him My Robots

          1) Agreed, it works well for most racing games. I mean I’d never want to play Out Run and not listen to Kawaguchi’s tracks (or Jacques’ remixes), but Gran Turismo 5 + Dave Rodger’s Deja Vu from Initial D — while cheesy and obvious — worked for me. I also tried some Charles Mingus. That didn’t.

          Another big one for me was Civ 4. There’s just no better music in this world to go to war to than the one-two punch of Poledouris’ Anvil of Crom and Riders of Doom. Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, you know the deal. I’m pretty sure I went Jonah from Veep there a couple of times because this is fucking PRIMORDIAL. Follow that with some sad Kajiura or Kanno piano and strings pieces when it’s all just smoldering ruins and you’re golden.

          2) That club music from the Afterlife in Mass Effect 2 was MY JAM. I’d take some time out between missions to head to my quarters and blast it in front of my dead fish. I had no idea that track was from NfS4.

      • Aaron Riccio

        Well, there’s all sorts of games that are now built around YOUR soundtracks (try it to some Regina Spektor or something else with an off-kilter beat), and for those, obviously I’ll use my own library. But I’m with Caspian (and Steve) on this: the game meant for me to have a certain experience with certain sounds at certain times (Tiny & Big being an exception, of course, along with other radio-like games like GTA and Fallout). Since I’m already following their direction on everything else, why wouldn’t I want to see how the music peters out? (I imagine playing Final Fantasy VI with my own music. It *could* work, but as well? I don’t believe it.)

      • http://www.avclub.com/users/ghaleonq,4597/ GhaleonQ

        Because I never miss a chance to namedrop Lovedelic, Moon: Remix R.P.G. Adventure was (I believe) the 1st game to allow the player to change and collect full tracks in-game (that is, not in the Outrun 1 way).  That continued with some of their other titles, like Giftpia.

        It’s actually 1 of my favorite parts of the game.  There’s brilliant incidental music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_KHJuRo3Q but you’re otherwise allowed to find and customize your experience.

        Not only does this help ease the purposefully slow portions of the game for impatient people, it creates a personal memory for each portion.
        If I’m hiking, I want my favorite track  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDG7-cqiLP0 , but a friend might choose a loving throwback http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiVygvRvX7c .  If I’m hitting the psychedlic portion, I might put on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H0BijzQHSg for a stoic feel, while a different person would go serene  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25RulLDSJWM  .  They alter mood too little to upend the experience, but just enough to make discussion interesting.  The creators can still curate the experience by limiting the total number of tracks.

      • Xtracurlyfries

        Oh man, I used to play Team Fortress (the original) with Rage Against the Machine playing non-stop. Usually, I needed to lie down afterwards.

      • ToddG

        For an extra challenge, try playing Rock Band with an alternate soundtrack.

    • jarviscockblocker

      Caretaker, nice! I remember putting a bunch of my songs in GTAIII and GTA:SA, but always making it very era-appropriate, so CJ was listening to Aphex Twin and Loveless, and Claude was running over people with early Out Hud playing.

    • Raging Bear

      It’s been a while since I replaced a game’s soundtrack with actual music instead of radio comedies or audiobooks, which can’t really be said to fit the action particularly.

      I really only listen to the game’s audio after the first time through if it’s exceptionally good, or the game isn’t mindless enough to let me follow whatever I’m listening to anyway, or if it’s actually important to the gameplay, like in Dead Space where audio cues might be the only warning before you take a scythe attack right up your airlock.

      • Electric Dragon

        I could never do that (replace game audio with audiobooks/radio comedy/podcasts) because I just can’t concentrate on two things at once like that. I have had to pause the video to read these comments, because otherwise I’ll get halfway down the page and find I’ve not listened to anything John has been saying for the last three minutes.

    • StephenM3

       To me, replacing a game soundtrack just sounds nonsensical.  It’d be
      like muting the voice acting for a game and your friends filling in
      reading the lines — it could be fun, but it’s certainly no way to
      experience a game for the first time, if you think the creator put even the slightest thought into their game’s sound design.
       

  • Aaron Riccio

    Yeah, Teti played this game exactly the same way I did: sans rockets. Like Steve, though, even though there’s some repetition, I do think that there’s enough in this (very short) game to sustain it: the levels make you use the tools in different ways (as when you disarm Big’s telekinetic rockets, though that same fight happens three times), the penultimate level has you descending instead of ascending, and there are a few tricky slicing puzzles in which you really have to figure out HOW to cross the various chasms. 

    My biggest problem, I guess, was in getting frustrated with DOING all the physical stuff (an issue I shared to a much smaller degree with Quantum Conundrum). I can tell you that even WITH keyboard and mouse, the precision here isn’t quite up to par, especially for those harder sequences that you guys point out at the end. (I’m thinking of the finale of Level 4, when you have to pare away the pyramid top in order to scale it.)

    I also didn’t like the fact that the solutions seemed so open-ended. I’ve got nothing against games with multiple solutions, but I like to know that when I’ve solved something, I’ve ACTUALLY solved it, and not just forced a solution to fit. (If ever there were a game in which you could fit a square peg into a round hole, this would be it.)

    PS. Networked Quake! I’m right there with ya. 

    • http://www.avclub.com/users/ghaleonq,4597/ GhaleonQ

      Is there a PC-native action/adventure/platformer game in the past decade that has console/handheld-level precision?  I NEVER hear that someone’s nailed it unless it’s by Sega or someone emulating non-PC games (Cave Story).

      • Aaron Riccio

        I don’t remember if Super Meat Boy was developed for PC or XBOX first, or if The Orange Box’s Portal was multiplatform for the get-go. Hamilton’s Great Adventure was smooth . . . Spelunky? I’m sure if I give it some thought, I can think of others, but there’s really no reason why a PC-native game SHOULDN’T have controls as solid as (if not better than) a console.

        EDIT: Is there?

  • The_Misanthrope

    You can usually play your own music on 360 games, as long as you’ve copied the music to your 360 hard drive.  There are also ways to get music off networked computers as well, but I haven’t fooled around with that too much so I can’t tell you how it works.  All you have to do is start up the 360 music player (in system settings or by pressing the center button), start the game, mute the game music in the game’s options menu, and voila…you can listen to Ministry’s Psalm 69 as you trudge through Tamriel.

    • ToddG

      In my experience, most games are even “smart” enough to mute their own music if they detect the Xbox music player is active.

    • http://gameological.com/author/johnteti/ John Teti

      I did not know that. Thanks for the tip, TM!

    • HobbesMkii

      What I want to be able to do is have my XBox recognize my music library on my computer and play files on it that way. Is that possible?

      • The_Misanthrope

        Well, if you’ve got a decent, non-hacked version of Windows and a good wireless network, it appears you can do just that:
        http://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-360/audio-video-setup-and-use/xbox-360-as-media-player-mcewindows7

        Mind you, I’m *just* testing this feature out right now, so I’ll let you know if it ends in a spectacular disaster, like my 360 gaining sentience or something.

        • HobbesMkii

           Hrm… that guide seems like it’ll be difficult to pull off if your computer and XBox use the same monitor for output.

          • The_Misanthrope

            No, not really, unless you have some really weird/complicated setup, like the computer and 360 being in separate rooms, requiring you to lug the monitor back and forth. I don’t think there is anything that requires simultaneous/time-sensitive input, so you just have to switch over when you need to work with the other. There is an eight-digit code the 360 will give you to activate your computer on the network, but if you can’t commit to memory, you can always use an Ink/Graphite-based Stylus and a Pressed Wood Pulp Sheet (or a “pen/pencil” and “paper”, as those kids are always calling it) to record it for future use.

        • HobbesMkii

           So, my local BestBuy or other major tech retailer would probably have one of these…”pens/pencil” and “paper”…things available? What section would I find it under? Xbox Accessories or Computer Accessories?

          • The_Misanthrope

            Obviously it is in the Mobile/Tablets & iPod. You can even play an ad-free version of Draw Something with it.

  • Brian Stewart

    That was the most time I’ve ever spent listening to two people calmly discuss something I have no interest in. 

  • HobbesMkii

    I’m not exactly sure where to put this, but last night was the first Gameological Society Steam Magic: the Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 Game Night (yes, it’s a mouthful). Hopefully Comment Cat won’t ignore it this week. Tomorrow (Thursday 9:00PM Eastern time) we’re having a TF2 Night in a dedicated server volunteered by one of our members. Log onto Steam to get the details. Or “deets,” as I like to call them, in my head so no one else will hear.

    Here are some of the screenshots I took from Magic Night:
    http://steamcommunity.com/id/hobbesmkii/screenshot/576709682172088944/?tab=public

    • Fyodor Douchetoevsky

      Holy shit awesome! Who offered up a server? That’s SO COOL. AHH. I’m pumped.

      • HobbesMkii

         Slogan did. I’m not sure who he (or she) is on Disqus. Could not be on Disqus, come to think of it.

        • Fyodor Douchetoevsky

          Sounds like we got ourselves a MYSTERY!

    • Mooy

       Might I recommend using an acronym instead? GSSMtGDotP2013GN rolls off the tongue so much easier than what you said.

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