feelthedarkness

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by feelthedarkness

  1. if you want to dig mildly deep, i remember really liking the Otogi games, which From used to lay the groundwork for the Souls games. There are some bafflingly hard sections where you need to traverse a lot of aerial space in a game that doesn't have a distinct jump mechanic. You can do an uppercut that lifts you up, and if you start whomping on enemies you won't fall. so you'll chain a LOT of uppercuts and dashes to enemies.
  2. Movie/TV recommendations

    i guess you can ALWAYS pull the sanity rug out from under somebody, but it's played super straight, including "rules" about what happens when things from different times come into contact. it figures heavily into the first episode.
  3. Movie/TV recommendations

    I honestly don't remember! I saw the movie so long ago.I think tonally it has some resemblances, and the movie is frequently referenced in easter eggy ways. It's not totally dark, and they do a neat thing in the first season where they they weave these cool knots. Earlier episodes will have elements that sometimes seem unusual, but events in later episodes (where Cole might go to a an earlier time) provide new context. Yeah! I think it went a little off the rails with "the traveler" stuff and didn't have enough time to fully realize him/his invaders, but I really liked the way they continually realigned the Liber8 people, and I think the last episode nailed it. Given how the future was potentially going to play out, I like that it had a sort of down ending with positive implications.
  4. Movie/TV recommendations

    I think it matters that Elliot takes it seriously, and that shakes out a few different ways. Also, I don't think anybody is really watching it, but I'm loving 12 Monkeys. It has the same hallmarks of the "kind of hokey at first" but overachieving shows that wind up being personal favorites. (Terminator: TSCC, Continuum, Fringe)
  5. I only played a match or two of Doom, and I would say that the defining element of Doom should be "physical projectiles" which I think this had. The big groaner moment for me was the hard man posedown after the match, which felt un-Doomy.
  6. Front Page Layout

    all other podcast banners must be half the size of idle thumbs, unless a host beats a thumb in blood combat, then a conclave can be called to determine a revised size for that podcasts banner.
  7. Tales can totally be fun, but I think you NEED to prep regular game players with that idea that it's a silly narrative generator, and skills don't positively affect outcome. I think on our first play (with a bunch of experience board game pals) I had like two boating skills, seafaring, and nautical navigation. i had some boat and sailing encounters and either they skills WEREN'T on the list, but stuff like bread making was, or they didn't do anything useful. I found it frustrating.
  8. Phones

    One other thing! I was initially given a Nexus 6 by mistake, and was stuck with it for two weeks, and the 6P is major leap forward. Fingerprint scanner to open, thinner, more powerful responsive. If you're interested in Android I would reply recommend peeping it.
  9. Revoke Kansas Statehood

    i wonder what it takes for things to break? i know people with less means can't really leave, but based on the reading, i feel like people who have, or will have kids and have some means would be looking into it. will college acceptance rates start to suffer from ill prepared students? my fiance is a professor at a fairly tony private college here in texas, but one that mostly serves in state students. and said there has been noticeable decline in the quality of writing year on year, and drastically so from her pre-graduation days at east coast schools.
  10. Phones

    i've got a Nexus 6P for myself, and work gave me an iPhone 6. i'm only a few days into my iphone, so i can't really render an opinion. however i think the nexus is the best phone i've owned. it's what i've always wanted in terms of unbloated, intuitive ui. battery last a full day of heavy usage.
  11. on botting! in Star Wars Galaxies you could write in game macros for your characters, and bind them to a key. so you could make your Han Solo execute a specific pistol shot, and then say "no ticket" every time, for action and cross property synergy. people built these macros to be increasingly efficient. you could set your character up to accept group invitations, follow the player, enter a vehicle they entered, target their target, heal them when they're low on health. eventually they figured out the commands to make the players walk to the mission terminals, accept missions, then navigate to the waypoint of the mission. my friends got to the point where they would get on skype and drink beer, watching their characters party up and play themselves.
  12. Movie/TV recommendations

    Yeah, they said they thought gargantua 2 was a separate special, but found out later that it counted toward their episode count, so they wound up coming up 2 episodes short. In a separate interview, they had said the really long delays were due to animation studio issues they ironed out. It's still just the two of them writing, so that adds time, but it also keeps things immaculately plotted in terms of interwoven backstory. On the opposite tip of immaculate plotting, I just saw a preview showing of Hardcore Henry, which was outrageous. I'm a sucker for delightful nonsense, and this nonsense spoke to my core my fps preferences. there is even a turret sequence but it is very brief.
  13. What happened to Sean on Idle Thumbs?

    sounds like Idle Weekend needs its THIRD. also, i want more gaynor podcasting however i have to get it!
  14. Books, books, books...

    I would recommend Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brisset. It's main characters are all people of color, and predominantly lgbt. Really good first novel. My elevator pitch for it is "would you be interested in a kind of Cloud Atlas as written by Murakami?"
  15. Firewatch Spoiler Thread | Henry Two Hats

    Henry's state in regards to his wife is basically the only choice that matters and depending how you played it he reaches different places by the end. He will have made a kind of peace, or tried to move past it. You could leave the ring or put it back on.
  16. Firewatch Spoiler Thread | Henry Two Hats

    Finally finished it. Lovely game. Loved the kind of down ending. That's life. No clean resolutions. Half baked decisions lead to transient relationships, always wondering what the other person thought. With the comparison to Gone Home I appreciated the "they're not fine, but they'll be ok" ending. First the complaint: Man, I wish any game with exploration options that would force me into level exit would like put a Y/N over that choice. It also makes me feel weird when I've sussed out that exit button by how strenuously I avoid the most important thing. Towards the end I stumbled into the Elk, and Henry says some like "they were tracking animals like they said." I definitely caught a "they said" and thought I got off the crit path so reloaded and then later I railroaded myself into missing that part. Also, I think because it was during the evac stage I picked up the tape, radio'd D, but I didn't get an option to play it. I see Ned described with "PTSD" which I don't think is accurate, and sort of like putting it in a box in a way that does everyone a disservice. I think there could be a few things going on. First, people become really devoted to "doing the thing they're doing" and not rocking their own shaky boat. Making bad decision to keep themselves on whatever path they have accepted as theirs. It's why Deliah messes up so much, lying to avoid scrutiny, which could expose her drinking etc. I also think about Christopher Knight, who lived in the Maine woods for 27 years stealing shitty paperbacks and food from campers. I assume Ned's line about running out of books as a reference to that? Second, while I think the game avoids too much meta-game stuff, I see some meta-ness in "Ned's Conspiracy", who is "doing things because he can do them." Some of his actions practically read like another adventure game player checking the interactions. Take everything. Smash the glass. Steal their notes, observe their thoughts, rewire their lives.
  17. The Next President

    I think my ideal situation is "brokered convention coalesces into Cruz nomination." There is NO WAY that dude will win. I think the jerks for Trump crown will not show up, because they will be rightly mad, and it will be a downballot blowout. Does this affect census year stuff? Since 2020 is a census year and is one of the few hopes for breaking certain strangleholds. Now, here is where my logic unravels a bit, but it will put to lie the notion that the GOP is losing because they haven't run somebody conservative enough. It's come up after every election. Nobody is more conservative than Cruz, but for this to work the GOP would need to accept evidence which is not how they govern, but I'll take a Pyrrhic victory.
  18. Yeah, I feel I've posted about it a bunch, but I totally agree with Fog's interpretation, in that it's about the implications of the type of "war media" people consume rather than just scolding you for video games. I think it came up in a Thumbs episode, where they weren't super taken with it. I really like it. Definitely one of those games that I think you need to play on harder levels so it's pushing back a little. It's also been mentioned before in other threads, but in terms of PTSD elements, the slow change in the games barks from "flank right, hold position" to "kill that fucking fucker" is slow and well done.
  19. I haven't listened yet, but was "two tickets to (burnout) paradise" tabled as a potential name?
  20. Idle Thumbs 254: Welltris and Wetrix

    hey, WELLTRIX looks kind of cool! what a weird mechanic.
  21. The Next President

    Yeah, the need for "balanced narrative" is infuriating, and genuinely harmful. The right has been pushing relentlessly hard to the right, and frankly being totally irrational, and they're held up as just "the other side." It's like those Oregon ranchers that are militantly anti-government people who subsist entirely on government benefits.
  22. Revoke Kansas Statehood

    yikes. i'll sign that. man, i've read a little about kansas's issues. i can't fathom it. i try not to be judgmental, but after brownback's first term blew a mile wide hole in the budget and seemingly halted all economic growth, i was flabbergasted to hear they reelected him. it's hard not to judge. haha. i just can't wrap my head around the aspect where voters keep electing these slash and burn types, despite the fact that it empirically doesn't work as well as whatever blue states are doing. not that they're without problems, but so many of the metrics are in their favor.
  23. The Next President

    If there is one thing I'm sure Clinton is ready for, it's the GOP hate machine! haha. She's been living under their microscope since the 90s! Also, to jump back to something a few pages ago, I believe the media kind of buried Sanders. He was packing large venues well before anybody else. I saw pictures of friends in full stadiums well before Trump paid actors to stand around his rallies. The media has built a huge story around Trump's appeal to populist anger, but Sanders was doing a reasoned version of the same thing, and succeeding with no coverage. I guess I can envision a world where they covered that organic growth and things went a different way. Also, see the NY Times treatment of him.
  24. want some rye? course ya do! man, looking at a video, i really want to try this again. i played it in 93, but i feel like i didn't get too far. all those contextual icons were something else to my young dumb brain.
  25. Idle Weekend March 11, 2016: Buried Treasure

    There are parts of the Alien talk that brings me back to the previous "7s are the best games" conversation. I don't have a good fleshed out point on this, but with other media something being hostile to the audience can be a valuable quality. Haneke wants his movie's violence to revolt you, etc... Plenty of good music is made to disorient, offend (sticky area here!), or offend aural sensibilities. I guess this just lands near the "Game reviews are tech product reviews" point, and maybe a sign that game criticism is still maturing? Though I feel the creators are pushing ahead of many critics in this area.