Cleinhun

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by Cleinhun

  1. The Good Place

  2. Movie/TV recommendations

    The fact that Steven Universe starts out fairly mediocre is unfortunate. On the one hand, the effect that it has once the serialization kicks in is legitimately cool. If you're watching it with no expectations, it feels like a slightly worse Adventure Time-like, but then the bottom drops out and suddenly everything is re-contextualized, there is a serious plot, and the quality ramps up considerably. On the other hand, it takes most of the first season to get to that point, which leads a lot of people to abandon it before it really gets anywhere, and I can't really blame them for that. Once it gets going it becomes one of the best things currently on tv, but it does not do a good job of convincing new watchers that it'll get there. My best advice is that if you watch a handful of episodes and aren't feeling it, it may not be the show for you. But if you feel like it has potential, if you're at all curious where this might be going, keep with it. I promise you, it lives up to that potential and then some.
  3. Modest Tech: The NX Generation (Nintendo Switch)

    Much like Mario's "threat neutralized" I can't help but hear Toad's "time for adventure" as "sniper adventure"
  4. Other podcasts

    I'd recommend Video Games Hot Dog, they're friends with the thumbs crew and have similar sensibilities. They used to record in the same room Idle Thumbs used, I believe.
  5. Modest Tech: The NX Generation (Nintendo Switch)

    Breath of the Wild was such a curve ball that it almost seems pointless to speculate what the next one is going to be. I doubt they're going to go back to the traditional Zelda formula with a series of dungeons and whatnot, but I could see them trying to incorporate more traditional style dungeons into the open world. They could also essentially remake botw but with a different environment, and while that wouldn't be exciting it would probably sell well and be generally well regarded. Many people have also wondered if they'd go the Majora's Mask direction and take the same engine and possibly assets but take the story and mechanics is weird risky directions. People seem to generally agree that Nintendo is pushing a different direction than they were a few years ago, but it's not clear to me what exactly that means.
  6. Does this mean that In the Valley of Gods will be Valve's first game to not use the Source engine since it's creation?
  7. The Good Place

  8. Movie/TV recommendations

    When I tell people to watch Parks and Rec I usually suggest skipping season 1 entirely. It still doesn't hit it's stride until part way through the season but that's true of most shows, and telling people to start at the beginning of a season feels like an easier sell that an arbitrary episode in the middle.
  9. What's the Name of the Game!?

    I think 26 is
  10. The buff that would make the most sense to me would be to give the judo mech the ability to suplex a unit onto another unit, as currently you can only toss then onto an empty space. Even aside from the fact that they are probably the weakest squad (or at least the hardest to use effectively) it would just be a fun ability to use. I would assume they tried the ability and ran into clarity issues (if both units survive the damage it's not clear what spaces they should end up occupying) and while I understand wanting the interface to be as readable as possible I was honestly surprised when that wasn't a thing I could do. From a purely narrative standpoint, if I have a giant mech that can suplex alien bugs I want to be able to suplex a bug onto another bug.
  11. Idle Thumbs Streams

    I was kinda sad that Chris skipped all the cut scenes in Celeste because I actually really like the story in that game. I can understand the instinct, since platformers aren't generally known for their writing, especially ones with such a mechanical focus, but I found it extremely worthwhile in this case. The story is pretty simple and it doesn't have much capital L Lore, but the characters were nice and it generally worked as a nice break between bits of hard platforming. Also the character portraits during dialogue are kind of adorable.
  12. I'm gonna second that Sneakers endorsement. That movie is legitimately good despite what everyone apparently assumes.
  13. The elf on the shelf thing is basically a garbage-ified version of an actual Christmas tradition my family had. We had this little elf that my parents would move to a different place in the house every night. It didn't have the connotation of being some kind of surveillance thing, he was just some magical elf guy and it was a fun game to find where he was hiding every morning. He would always be sitting on the TV or hanging from a lamp or something like that, so the "behavin' badly" aspect is probably just a product of the marketing machine, but the "christmas tradition" part might not be 100% manufactured bullshit.
  14. Ok that makes way more sense than what I said but I'm not happy about it.
  15. On the cast someone made a joke about New Donk City being a Truman Show type thing but one of the other levels actually is pretty much that. In the forest level with the robots, if you look closely at the skybox it's pretty clearly made of tiles on the inside of a dome: I don't think any other levels are like that, and it's never mentioned anywhere in game.
  16. Super Mario Odyssey (One D, Two Ss)

    I think the reason I bought into the hype for this one so much was that Breath of the Wild actually was as good as people said. I'm only in New Donk City and I'm willing to believe it gets better in the later game, but as of right now it is merely a good video game rather than an amazing one. The thing that I think is holding it back for me is that the moons are so common as to not feel special. There are enough of them sitting it random corners that I know I'm not going to get all of them without thoroughly scrubbing every area (which I won't do), so that makes it less exciting to get the ones I do find, since I'm not building toward any goal. There's still a lot that I like here though. I love those little accordion enemies. The cutscene that plays when you possess the first enemy is a great way to open a game, and the music in the Wooded Kingdom is one of the last things I would have expected from a Mario game (I don't understand how "forest level" ended up leading to surf rock but it somehow works).
  17. And then, seventeen hours after that, you can watch yourself watch your previous self: "hey, stop watching that, you know he's not gonna do anything!"
  18. Transistor has a pretty interesting way to encourage switching up your weapon loadout. If you used a given ability in enough fights you would unlock what were essentially lore dumps about the game world, but there was no mechanical incentive other than that. I though the content of those lore dumps were one of the weakest parts of that game, but somehow it still worked on me. Maybe it's because on some level I know that playing around with all the different builds is fun, so it only takes the slightest push to get me to do that.
  19. "Catch a flash of the horror of the mundanity of your own life" is an intense sentence. 10/10 cast.
  20. I forgot to subscribe to the humble monthly so I have to wait until this releases in December, but I'm looking forward to this. I legitimately liked Sexy Hiking. despite it being neither sexy nor even hiking (it was more like mountain climbing really).
  21. I just assumed it was from a different ride that had similar seats or whatever, which in retrospect doesn't make a whole lot of sense but that kid looks exactly like Nick. Also photoshopping that would be exactly the sort of thing you guys would do. When you guys were talking about Clifford Nick made some sarcastic off-hand comment like "wow, sounds like a great book" and the only thing I could think of was that it sounded like something he'd say to his 10-year-old self.
  22. Psychonauts 2

    There's barely anything there but it already looks really good. The art style is fantastic and the gameplay looks smooth. I've always loved Double Fine games because of their interesting ideas but despite the jankiness in the mechanics, and they appear to be doing a lot more work on the mechanical side they they usually do in the lower budget games. One other thing I noticed in that video is that a lot of the people working on the game look young enough that they were probably still in school when the original game came out, meaning this is a game being by fans of Psychonauts.
  23. That seems like it just increases the moving expenses for almost everyone in exchange for very little benefit. Regarding VR, I don't think it's going to get big for pretty much the reasons mentioned on the cast, but I do think that within the next 5ish years the technology is going to get cheap enough that it can be a profitable industry from just the niche enthusiast crowd.