Henroid

I understand the route that makes "gambled" assets in Diablo 3 real world gambling, but disagree with that assessment. A better argument for why gambling being removed would be that the gambling NPCs are all about money sinks, but since your real world dollars can be turned into gold and thus pissed away into nothingness... It's consumer protection, but gambling?

"Ah ah ah, you didn't say the magic word!"

But the route is so convoluted that... ugh. Whatever. It's Schrodinger's Gamble.

The heck? Why is 'gambling' (random roll items bought from an NPC) illegal?

I wasn't expecting to come across this sorta thing, but adding onto that stuff regarding Blizzard's music capability. Someone just linked me this: It's like an orchestration / grand choir mix of Blizzard music I guess, in this case Zerg music from Starcraft. Even if they mix in some techno into things, I think it really goes to speak for Blizzard mistaken medleys and orchestra music for being epic no matter what. Which is false. This style of music production started for them with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion and it's really been producing some bland things. I'm not saying that orchestrated music is bad, by the way, but any time you take existing themes that were done in a certain style and sound the way they do because of that style and put it through orchestra-filter, it might not actually be good music as a result.

I've had people react oddly at me when I get critical (or have high praise) of music in video games for some reason or another. I never studied music in any formal sense but it's something I'm naturally sensitive to. When you started talking about Diablo 3's music I was pretty much on board 100%. I made fun of people for getting upset at the game's art palette being more robust, and then when more of the music started showing up near the game's launch I started to become one of those people over that. I'll also say that, for better or worse, it kinda bugs me to read people say they shut off a game's audio tracks or replace it with their own. Background music is part of experiencing a video game and really makes or breaks a lot of moments.

And the way you get Jake on board is by giving the Big Dog toe socks. Okay I'm done.

You know how Gamepro has their April Fools issues? Idle Thumbs should do the same thing. Idle Toes. With a picture of toe socks.

If I didn't have an internet alias to go by, this episode would have driven me to pick up on "Treasure Goblin."

Downloading the shit out of this episode, can't wait to hear what inspired the episode title. Welcome back, Thumbs!

By the way the audio levels sounded just about perfect in this final progresscast, so many kudos to Chris for getting the setup complete. Though I guess a side-effect was Jake going insane.

"Was it a cat I saw? Was it a rat I saw?"

I tend to remember the shtickiest of things. "What is a man?", "Master using it and you can have this", etc. Let me try to think of something obscure... "Congratulations Your Pandimensionalist, Hell's roads are running disgustingly efficient, briskly transporting the damned from one punishment to another with a minimum of fuss." "Heeey wait I minute, I thought you said-" "Wait for it... Unfortunately, an efficient road system is the LAST thing you want in Hell."

Yeah, I wasn't able to beat the game at ALL on my own. I had to strategy guide it to my shame. And because of how large the game is, I forgot everything I learned (I usually retain that sorta knowledge). Still, it's phenomenal. I cannot endorse this game enough.

Wow, that's a pretty chaotic way to get a freaking game to work.

I was disappointed to come into this thread and see that the poll was just a loaded question (and thread title was quite literal in choices). I haven't used XBL at all, since I haven't owned any MS consoles (not out of any spite or lack of trying). But sometimes when I hear people describe in as much detail as possible what the interface is like, I wonder if there's an actual problem with it or if people are just easily frustrated. I mostly get the impression that it's the latter. I can agree that sometimes the interface changes to be more frustrating, but more frustration (an unquantified amount) on top of what I perceive to be very little frustration to begin with still adds up to not very frustrating at all. How much of people's frustration with XBL simply has to do with using it for years on end? Stagnation can cause perceptions to skew when things are fine but generally monolithic.

The maker of Hawken is on board, but it wasn't stated that Hawken itself is coming to Ouya. Yeah. The rhetoric in all this is too uniformed and that doesn't make for good news at all.

Something to add to Chris' take on this: People seem to be under the impression when it comes to porting games is that all that needs to be done is copy, paste, compile, and 'wheeee'. And while programming was my weakest point in IT education by a large margin I know enough that the process is more complicated than that. Same goes for dampening a game's resource demands to run on less efficient hardware. You're not just changing a number to a smaller one. Shadow processing alone is complex shit and the only swift way to change it is to axe it entirely. But retaining it in even a less detailed manner? That's work.

You're right. Just opened the game to test it out and yeah. I remembered there being a way to trigger traps early / not trigger them at all. Turns out throwing things in their path does that.

Oh yeah for sure, everything else mentioned is in the PC version. The arrow trap thing, by the way, I think if you train your eye carefully to look at the ground you can spot the floor triggers. Though it sounds like Sean knows to watch for them and Jake is that guy who just walks along whistling. Oh, here's my first question to idle thumbs dot net... on the forum... You guys should totally talk about Afterlife, since Sean brought it up on Twitter last night and forced my hand in playing it again. Even though I've already had it installed.

Yeah but the multiplayer experience is what made the discussion what it was.

I'm like an hour and a half outside of Dallas, but Quakecon is out of the question for me. That Spelunky discussion, by the way, makes me jealous the PC version can't do any of that. Sooooooooo good though, those stories.

Sweet! I hope you like Wendy's. I'll get you a frosty. My treat.

Hey!

Yeah but the Thumbs aren't charging you $5,000 for a behind-the-scenes-Thumb and $10k for the Thumbs themselves. It's not necessarily the type of reward, it's the pricetag associated with it.