Borneo Bulletin Digital

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12 13
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2020
Gene Park & Elise Favis
Ideas to lift up ‘Fall Guys’, the surprise hit of the summer
The indie studio is suddenly swarmed with AAA expectations.
THE WASHINGTON POST - Fall Guys isn’t too
big to fail yet, but it’s also too good to fail.
It’s not like the game isn’t big. Fall Guys:
Ultimate Knockout by Mediatonic is the sur-
prise hit of the summer, with more than two
million copies sold on Steam and countless
more people playing the game for free on
PlayStation 4.
Fall Guys twists the “battle royale” concept
by having players navigate bean-shaped folks
across minigames and obstacle courses. The
small team who developed it said the game
was inspired by old game show’s like Take-
shi’s Castle and Total Wipeout. As Launcher
reporter Elise Favis wrote, it’s a game that will
make you laugh, especially when you lose.
But being developed by a small team, it’s
grown bigger than anyone expected. Spotty
service and maintenance issues abound,
keeping the game ofˆline for hours at a time
as Mediatonic deals with the deluge of bonk-
ing beans hoping to get a crown (the ultimate
prize at the end of each “episode”).
But even beyond patching up some of the
technical glitches, there’s room for an already
enjoyable game to improve. To that end, Elise
Favis and Gene Park put together a list of sug-
gestions or ideas to consider as Mediatonic
moves forward with evolving the game.
TOGGLE GRABBING ON AND OFF
Grabbing, which lets you pull others toward
you or be caught in someone else’s grasp, is
one of the most controversial elements of Fall
Guys. Though some minigames like Tail Tag
and Egg Scramble require it as a core me-
chanic, other minigames do not. A well-timed
grab can launch a jellybean neighbour off a
seesaw to their death or, if you’re not careful,
result in your own demise.
Grabbing brings a sense of unpredictabil-
ity, but for many, it’s not welcome and makes
the game unfair. In the most extreme cases,
you can be prevented from racing through a
ˆinish line if you’re swarmed by griefers like
this streamer experienced.
Rather than removing grabbing entirely -
because some enjoy gooˆing around by using
it with friends - it could be reimagined as an
optional feature, where every player can tog-
gle grabbing on and off in the settings menu.
NEW MINI GAMES IN LATER SEASONS
Developer Mediatonic is promising a con-
sistent refresh with every new season of Fall
Guys , and the team vows to expand on the
current 25 minigames. In fact, that’s already
happening: Mediatonic announced that a
new variation to the level Jump Club, called
Jump Showdown, is arriving Wednesday via
a patch after its popularity within the closed
beta that occurred before launch. This is
great news, considering the limited variety
can grow stale after several hours of play.
Hopefully we see completely new additions
soon, rather than just spins on levels we’re al-
ready familiar with.
EXIT A MATCH WHENEVER YOU LIKE
One of the best things about Fall Guys is
being able to hop in and out of matches
easily, but this process can be slowed
down if you don’t leave a match as soon as
it concludes. With only a small window of
time to exit, you’re otherwise locked into
spectating or playing until the round be-
gins, which usually means a minute or two
of wait time. It’s a small gripe, but the abil-
ity to leave whenever you like would be a
welcome change.
CHANGE UP STARTING POSITIONS
At the start of a round, all jellybeans are
randomly positioned in rows at the starting
point. Being in a back row, however, can leave
you at a disadvantage in some minigames
(particularly Fall Mountain, a race through an
obstacle course that appears as one of the
game’s ˆinal rounds). Sure, you can still win,
but it requires more effort, strategy, and luck
(i.e. if someone ahead of you messes up). Fall
Guys would beneˆit if this system was adapt-
ed somewhat, so that everyone is left with a
fair chance.
PRACTICE MODE
I love Hex-A˜Gone - a platforming minigame
- but I rarely get to play it. Minigames are ran-
domly queued in Fall Guys, and Hex-A˜Gone
is especially uncommon because you need
to survive until the ˆinals to experience it. A
practice mode could remedy this issue, as
well as give players a chance to hone their
skills more regularly.
PRIVATE ROOMS WITH FRIENDS
Playing with up to 59 other random beans
can be hectic and fun, but it can be easy
to lose track of your friends in the dense
crowds. Private rooms would be an excellent
alternative for players who want to waddle
across obstacle courses together or go head-
to-head against a friend in a game like Fall
Ball, a minigame similar to the premise of
Rocket League.
IN GAME REPORTING SYSTEM
Fall Guys has seen its share of cheaters and
hackers. Some have used exploits to ˆly over
obstacles straight to a ˆinish line, others use
speed hacks to run quicker than opponents.
It’s something Mediatonic is closely monitor-
ing, and the team said they’ve cracked down
on a number of cheaters, but the issue isn’t
completely eradicated. An in-game report-
ing system for both console and PC would
streamline a player’s ability to report wrong-
doing (right now, the most effective way is
hopping onto the game’s ofˆicial Discord).
MATCH HISTORY AND METRICS
Currently, the only metrics for tracking prog-
ress in Fall Guys are how much you’ve levelled
up through the battle pass and what rewards
you’ve subsequently unlocked. As someone
who has poured 20-plus hours into this wacky
game, I’d love for more insight on my win/loss
ratio for each minigame so I know where I need
improvement. Even some goofy metrics would
work well here, recording how often you’ve
been bonked on the head by a spinning propel-
ler or how many tails you’ve grabbed.
SINGLES AND PARTNERS ONLY MODES
The game has only one mode, which consists
of mixing up free-for-all matches and games
that divide the player base into teams. This is
fun and all part of the chaos that makes this
game fun for most. But it’d be nice to be able
to funnel players down episodes that fea-
ture only free-for-all solo play or only team-
based games. This is great for folks who feel
weighed down by bad random teammates, or
who have a bunch of friends who just want to
keep coordinating through the episodes.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Her name was Silvia and as soon as
she walked into my ofˆice, I knew
she was trouble, I just didn’t know
how much.
“You are Tidhar, the obscure
novelist?” she said.
“What’s it to you, Toots?” I said.
“It’s about our column,” she
said. “It needs writing, and fast.”
I was behind on my rent and I
was down on my luck, and besides,
I knew our editor would cut all this.
“What’s it about, anyway?” I
said. “The column.”
“Noir,” she said, “Fantasy noir.”
Silvia: Let’s lay down the bread
of this sandwich and talk about the
origins of fantasy noir. Other peo-
ple may want to correct my evolu-
tionary tree, but I say the daddy of
fantasy noir was William Hjortsberg
with Falling Angel in 1978. Even if
we could trace a different ancestor,
it’s a great book. It combines all the
old-fashioned hard-boiled tropes
with a detailed description of 1950s
New York, and adds murders, mag-
ic, a coven of ideologists and a voo-
doo priestess.
Sadly, I don’t think anyone
knew what to do with this book
when it came out. It was an odd
product, like making a peanut
butter and pickle torta. It did get
adapted into a movie in 1987 - An-
gel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke
and Robert De Niro. Hjortsberg
also wrote a fantastical, historical
murder mystery, Nevermore.
Lavie : It’s a great movie. One
book I’d pick as a harbinger of things
to come is strangely obscure. Mar-
tin Scott’s Thraxas was published in
1999, a sort of hard-boiled private
eye story set in a classical sec-
ondary world fantasy - think Philip
Marlowe in Middle Earth. It wasn’t
like anything else at the time, im-
probably won the World Fantasy
Award for best novel the following
year - an ofˆbeat selection even for
that most ofˆbeat of awards! - and
spawned more than a few sequels.
It was ahead of its time in that, 20
years later, that formula seems to
be everywhere. You can’t browse a
bookstore without tripping on hard-
boiled detectives ˆighting wizards
and elves.
Silvia : And of course, urban fan-
tasy was big for a while, giving us
an abundance of noir books, includ-
ing Laurel K Hamilton’s Anita Blake
novels. That wave seems to be over
- telling an editor you write urban
fantasy nowadays is like telling a
music producer you play the lute -
but we still get bits of noir. Daniel
José Older ˆirst cut his teeth writing
short stories, which were collected
as Salsa Nocturna. Then he went
on to write a series of novels with
a character from those stories: Car-
los Delacruz, a half-dead man solv-
ing supernatural cases in New York
City. Older is from New York and,
like Hjortsberg, he describes a city
that feels real and lived in.
For books that veer toward paro-
dy, there’s Who Censored Roger Rab-
bit? by GaryWolf and This Body’s Not
Big Enough for Both of Us, by Edgar
Cantero. In the case of Cantero, the
detective’s body is inhabited by two
people. Cantero’s style is comedic,
so if you hate Joss Whedon or Ready
Player One, stay away. But if you love
that stuff, well, this is deˆinitely zany.
Also crude, foul-mouthed. ... You get
the picture.
Lavie: I did love Ready Player
One - and Anita Blake. And you for-
get Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stack-
house novels. I read through about
eight of them in one go. But if I am
sticking with secondary-world fan-
tasy for a bit, one of my favourite
current writers is Robert Jackson
Bennett. City of Stairs, the ˆirst in
a trilogy, is great fun, a mystery set
in a city where the gods all died -
or did they? He just does this sort
Fantasy noir combines the best of two genres;
these are the books that do it well
of thing so well. A great title I wish
more people saw is Rupert Wong,
Cannibal Chef, by Malaysian author
Cassandra Khaw. It’s a pitch-perfect
hard-boiled fantasy set in Kuala
Lumpur that’s tremendous fun with
a great sense of place. For the pure
essence of noir, mixed in with Love-
craftian horror and Le Carre-like spy
games, I adored Caitlín R Kiernan’s
Agents of Dreamland, which is un-
classiˆiable and wonderful. More
recently, Asaf Ashery’s Simantov ,
translated from Hebrew by Margan-
it Weinberger-Rotman, is a weird
detective novel set in Israel, against
a cosmic battleground based on
Jewish myth. This might be one to
keep an eye out for.
Silvia: Khaw’s Rupert Wong
novels are a breath of fresh air, but
she also has Hammers on Bone, a
novella that again displays a pitch-
perfect understanding of noir with-
out turning into pastiche, which I
think is not an unusual impulse, as
you can see by our introduction to
this column. It’s hard-boiled Love-
craft and a quick read. Really, what
more can you ask for?
Richard Vines
BLOOMBERG - Chef John Chantara-
sak grew up in the United Kingdom
(UK) with his British mother and Thai
father. He well remembers annual
childhood visits to the family home
in Bangkok, where he came to love
spicy dishes cooked with the fresh-
est of ingredients.
He later moved to Thailand
and studied cooking at Le Cordon
Bleu Dusit Culinary School before
working in restaurants, including
the ˆine-dining Thai establishment
Nahm under chef David Thomp-
son. John was sous chef at Som
Saa in London before creating An-
gloThai - a roving pop-up restau-
rant - with his wife Desiree. (He’s
currently in residency at Newcom-
er Wines in Dalston.)
For Bloomberg, he has supplied
a recipe for yum khai dao, fried-egg
salad with celery leaf and sweet-
spicy-tart dressing. “The Thais love
eggs and this dish is very popular
at homes in Thailand, though you
don’t see it so much on restaurant
menus,” he said.
“This is a loose rendition of one
we eat in our family. I think it’s ap-
propriate for the UK, where you of-
ten get big salads, but this is light
and fresh and herbal, with sweet,
spicy, salty and sour ˆlavours.” The
recipe serves two as a side dish and
one as a meal.
Anglo-Thai chef ’s simple recipe for spicy fried-egg salad at home
I found the recipe very straight-
forward and I loved the taste and
the contrasting textures. If I were
to attempt it again, I would prob-
ably reduce the sugar a bit, and I
struggled with the heat from just
two bird’s eye chilies, rather than
the three John favours.
YUM KHAI DAO
Serves one-two
For the dressing:
Two tbsp palm sugar
One tbsp water
Three tbsp ˆish sauce
Three tbsp lime juice (half a lime)
One garlic clove, peeled and thinly
sliced
Three bird’s eye chilies, thinly
sliced. (Add less or more depend-
ing on how spicy you like it.)
For the dish:
Two large free range hen’s eggs
Vegetable oil for frying
Half small white onion, thinly sliced
with the grain of the onion
One tomato, chopped roughly into
eight pieces
Small handful of coriander, leaf
and stem roughly chopped
Small handful of Asian celery, stem
thinly sliced and leaves picked. (If
you can’t ˆind Asian celery then
use the inner sticks of a celery
head with the leaves.)
Wild garlic ˆlowers (optional, to
garnish)
PREPARATION:
Make the dressing by combining
the palm sugar, water, ˆish sauce
and lime juice.
Whisk everything so that the
palm sugar is completely dis-
solved. Add the sliced garlic and
chilies. It should taste sweet, spicy
and tart.
Crack the eggs into ramekins
ensuring not to break the yolks.
Heat two centimetres (0.8 inch) of
vegetable oil in a pan. Once the oil
starts to smoke, gently slide an egg
into the hot oil.
The egg will immediately start to
spit, crackle and bubble so be care-
ful. The whites will puff and devel-
op large transparent bubbles; the
bottom and edges will get brown
and crispy.
Fry for about one minute. Flip
the egg and allow to cook for a few
seconds before transferring to ab-
sorbent paper to drain any excess
oil. Repeat the process with the
second egg.
Add the sliced onion, tomato,
celery and coriander to a mixing
bowl with the dressing.
Cut the eggs into quarters,
trying to avoid cutting through
the runny yolks. Add to the
mixing bowl and gently toss
everything together.
Transfer to a plate and pour the
dressing over. Serve with steamed
jasmine rice.
Homemade Yum khai dao (fried-egg salad). PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
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