Urthman

Oh, that sounds fantastic. A stealth game where, instead of hiding from enemies, you have to accomplish your objectives without being seen by the dude you're helping who thinks he's the hero.

Guys, I think Idle Thumbs needs to do some serious soul-searching about how much blame they need to take for this: The Falcon iPhone 6 Bespoke FALCON iPhone 6 Platinum Black Diamond $1,650,000.00 FALCON iPhone 6 24K Gold Emerald Cut Diamond $2,250,000.00 FALCON iPhone 6 Rose Gold Burmese Ruby $4,750,000.00

Which is amusing, but of course even these reviews which are supposedly entirety factual aren't actually unbiased as the writer still uses her or his biases to decide which facts are relevant.

The point is that a genuinely unbiased reviewer would be someone who doesn't already like video games. Nor dislike them. Someone who has no opinions about video games. In other words, asking for completely unbiased game reviews is like demanding reviews be written by pink unicorns.

It's nice to see proof that Zoe was really being hacked (although the idea that she had doxxed herself for sympathy was always pretty ridiculous) and to see these jerks admitting that the whole claim that Zoe had hacked hacked the FYC group of female game devs (which they refer to as a PR smokescreen to defuse charges of misogyny) was false (they say the supposed DDOS was an accident). But the real smoking gun is to see them saying that the whole #gamergate thing was just a handful of sockpuppets for a few days until other people started assuming there must be a fire behind all that smoke: "a few days of 4-5 of us doing it, but it's taking off."

Spending days attending meetings that no one else is paying attention to and carefully recording and documenting what goes on, it's almost like...what was that thing a bunch of people were upset about the integrity of? Journalism? No, I'm sorry. Journalism is a blog post that says, "Ubisoft e-mailed me a link to their newest AssCreed trailer. Here it is."

Is this the first time Chris has mixed in the new theme song without the introductory harpsichord? I found it really weird. Usually when the organ kicks in after that little nod to the earlier theme songs, I find it sounds unexpectedly cheerful and bouncy. The feeling I get is, "Okay, we're gonna have a good time now." But this time, fading the organ in directly underneath Sean's "Let's do this!" it sounded determined, serious, almost sinister. I almost didn't believe it was quite the same music. Did anyone else think it sounded really different without that harpsichord contrast? Chris, was that effect intentional, given the tone and subject matter of the podcast?

Ah, yes. I remember. It's because having Danielle on the podcast is an exceptional treat, like Junior Mints at the cinema. Thanks.

Could someone remind me (or point me to the episode that mentions) where Danielle's 'Mints Jr.' nickname comes from?

Some do. Others use a lot of self-depreciating or "zany" humor. Or bend over backwards to establish their gamer cred. Or some other thing I mentioned in the paragraph you snipped that one phrase out of. The point is, you won't find many videos of women talking about games who present themselves and talk about their subject like Sarkeesian does. I personally found her off-putting at first, and I realize now that was for mostly stupid and superficial reasons. And even if there are good reasons for disliking or disagreeing with her, they are far less important than the principle that we shouldn't allow her to be shouted down by the mob. I admire her quite a lot for continuing to make these videos exactly the way she wants to make them in the face of all this hostility. Just continuing to put her own face out front-and-center after the gross things people have done to her picture is pretty bad ass.

Imagine a woman gets up in an auditorium and says, "Wind Waker, on the Xbox 360, was the first game in the Legend of Zardoz series." An angry mob of dudes gets up and starts shouting at her, demanding that she shut up, threatening to rape her and kill her family, distributing fliers with her home address. A bunch of people get up and confront the mob, demanding that they stop threatening her. If your contribution to this scene is to go over to the second group and start pestering them about how, "You know guys, you gotta admit what she said about Wind Waker was wrong. First off, it was actually a Nintendo game..." then you should rightly expect a hostile response. Because all this furor isn't really about whether Sarkeesian is right. It's about whether a woman should be allowed to talk about video games without being subjected to threats and abuse (spoiler: yes, she should). A woman should even be allowed to say something completely wrong about video games without getting a bunch of rape threats. I think a big part of why Sarkeesian in particular infuriates the misogynists is that she doesn't pander to them. She doesn't jump through hoops trying to prove that she's a "real" gamer. She doesn't use "gamer" lingo and rhapsodize about the SNES RPG series she grew up with in an attempt to show she belongs in the clubhouse. She doesn't wear tight tank tops and flirt with the camera. She takes herself and her subject seriously. Compare her with pretty much any of the female talking heads at a video game website, and the difference is pretty stark. When she got started, I thought it was a shame she wasn't more of an insider, wasn't the kind of person I thought would be more persuasive to people on the fence about these issues. But as this goes on, I'm really glad that Sarkeesian's the person the gaming community is rallying around, because anyone with an interest in games should be able to discuss these kinds of issues without harassment and without having to demonstrate she's "one of us" first. The guys that Chris has been mocking who are doing a Patreon for an anti-Sarkeesian video made a plea for people to stop threatening her, not because threats are wrong, but because it undermines their argument that women don't really face abuse from the gaming community (while also insinuating that she's likely just making it up for publicity). They also thought it was a good idea to promote their video series arguing that people denouncing abuse of women are making a big deal out of nothing by giving backers a copy of an actual game that really exists called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian, where the player gets to punch a picture of Sarkeesian's face until "rewarded" with a picture where her face has been photoshopped to look like she's been grievously beaten.

I would totally buy an "Idle Thumbs: Social Justice Wizard" T-shirt. Just sayin'.

Also, you know that thing babies do before they learn to talk where they babble with inflection that sounds like adult speech but it's just nonsense syllables that don't mean anything? Pediatricians refer to that as jargon.

I pretty much always enjoy the cast, but this was a particularly great one. Especially the way you completely ruined that poor reader's anecdote about kids playing Minecraft (which she kinda brought on herself for mentioning Cards Against Humanity), while simultaneously reflecting on how amazing it is kids (girls even!) are talking about PC mods. It cracks me up that everyone is so amused by "smoke orb" when the actual names for the thing are already so amusing: A censor is a thing for burning incense and a thurible is a censor that incenses the room by swinging it on a chain. I used to go to an Episcopal church where one of the acolytes (kids who carry candles and stuff) would occasionally swing the thurible so high that he'd get it going all the way around up over his head in a full circle, but he had to be careful not to do it too much lest the priest get more incensed than the sanctuary. And you won't believe how many puns I censored from the previous paragraph.

I've tried googling all the games mentioned in the showlist as well as image searching the picture itself, but I still can't figure out where that pixel art pyramid is from on the episode banner. SEGA Predator? SNES Alien v. Predator? Oh, never mind. There's too many games featuring Xibalba.

Could someone please tell me what that picture of the pyramid is from on the episode banner?

I love all these. Just logged in to say that Backadd, my favorite part of your video is the look on Chris's face when he's threatening to kill Jake and Sean. So perfect. Thanks to everyone for engaging with the Idle Thumbs brand and adding value!

Sheesh. You SEGA fanboys just can't ever let it go, can you?

And then Chris should have looped it at the end over the greasiest, skankiest bass line he could find. Which would be labeled in the annotated YouTube version as "(I know you guys are having fun but) I'm still working."

But, yeah, Danielle totally saved the podcast after the "it's" debacle.

OF COURSE Jake noticed. Jake notices everything. Anytime anyone on the podcast says anything that even remotely suggests wordplay, you can almost hear the klaxon going off in Jake's head: TARGET ENEMY WEAK POINT FOR MASSIVE HUMOR! Jake's silliness is always brilliant but I also love the moments when someone says something that is accidentally hilarious and Jake doesn't have the chance to joke about it but I know he's for sure silently enjoying it there with us, the readers.

Did Chris or Sean ever post a picture of that hat Jake lost? It may be unlikely that it could be replaced, but it wouldn't hurt to give us readers a chance to help you look for one.

Regarding the question of why so much of the most iconic video game music comes from the NES / SNES era, Chris and Jake danced around but didn't quite make the point that when you have limited sound channels available for music, pretty much the only thing you can do to make the music good is to have a really good melody. So it makes sense that most of the best, most memorable game music melodies come from the era when melody was about thing you could do with game music. Similarly, as Chris almost said, when you've got a realistic game like Far Cry 2 or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it would be really out of place for the background music to have a catchy melody. Those games use music more like film scores where it's trying to unobtrusively enhance the mood rather than be a noticeable thing in the foreground. Conversely, a game like VVVVVV has no subtlety to the environment or the soundscape, so it's fine for the music to have a catchy melody right out front. It's not stepping on anything else.

My android phone is usually surprisingly good at taking dictation, but the other day I was trying to set up a grocery aisle category with the name "ethnic" and I couldn't get the phone to recognize that word. It suggested "Catholic" and "attic" and then when I tried to say the word very slowly and distinctly it typed: "F Nick". With that exact capitalization. I had never written or spoken that nickname to the phone before. I think that since we've now had over 100 episodes since Nick ruined Idle Thumbs forever by taking the Bethesda job, we could retire the "F Nick"name, but "Ethnic Breckon" is probably too good to resist.

That must be the evil Jake, mocking me with his Admin powers to post the word "video games" without a space.