Problem Machine

Just finished. Kind of digesting the ending now. I was having a very hard time interpreting S-man's motivations, though the conversation here has helped some. Also I'll probably play through again when the DLC stuff comes out. I get the feeling I missed a bunch of little things. Agh- um, i seem to have something in my eye excuse me.

Speaking of which, where might Danielle's interview with the designer be?

I just got around to starting in on Dropsy with the Winter Steam Sale and it is SO GOOD. I completely know what Rob meant about the art style being off-putting at first, but I really think that isn't because of an intrinsic property of the style itself so much as the kinds of things similar styles have been associated with. It works incredibly well both because of and despite that association: Despite of it, in that the cartoony style seems to evoke how Dropsy himself sees the world, simplified but beautiful, and because of it in that, as Rob says, the reaction of a lot of audiences tends to echo the thematic content, expecting something crass and creepy and finding something incredibly heartfelt and earnest. The Hug is amazing as a game design mechanic. It simultaneously rewards you for helping someone and subtly indicates to the player that the interactions with that character have reached an end and they can focus elsewhere for puzzle solving. The actual animations for the hugs are incredible, each NPC has their own reaction of embarrassment or friendliness that makes it feel all the more like you've helped an actual person. Though it took me a while to actually get to buying the game for money reasons, the trailer totally sold me on it:

Huh. Spelunky's an interesting one, I was under the impression that it was too randomized for the organizers to be comfortable with. Binding of Isaac is one thing, but a run can easily end in a randomly generated instant with Spelunky.

Poe's law

Also the holo-rifle is sweet as fuck. Once it's repaired it basically stays repaired no matter what you do with it, so I just loaded it exclusively with max charge cells and it one-shots pretty much everything that's not a deathclaw.

You might want to at least do the Ultra-Luxe/white glove society one, it's fairly short and pretty entertaining

aw man I didn't realize it was console only

Sad games! Sad games are rad! Sad is part of why Dark Souls is so good, and sad is why Silent Hill 2 is a classic, and for all the talk about the crazy action-packedness of Left 4 Dead the first game still had a tone of subtle but overwhelming melancholy over the top of the frantic action. I'm surprised we can have an entire discussion about the ways in which playing a sad game can make us feel better when we're down without the word 'catharsis' coming up, but man playing TWD sure brings to the surface any buried feelings of anxiety and depression one may be struggling with -- which can be a blessing and a curse, because those emotions can be overwhelming but also they're easier to address when given shape and brought to the surface. I was dealing with a lot of stress when I played it, and after each episode I zoned out for an hour or two playing Super Hexagon and trying to unpack my feelings about what had just happened. Anyway! Sad games! Should I check out this The Darkness thing Rob was talking about? Seems like it might have a similar tonal appeal to Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, which is another excellent melancholy sort of game.

https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/10426-idle-thumbs-readers-slack-discord/

I don't like the framing of these kinds of games as somehow fighting for time from each other. There's plenty of rough and avant garde out there -- substantially more than there is of the highly polished stuff, primarily as a result of how much longer it takes to make something highly polished. I think that these styles both kind of coexist just fine?

I thought Joshua Graham was a cool idea for a character, but that just made it more disappointing that he really doesn't do much interesting in Honest Hearts. The survivalist's logs were neat, though, and the change of scenery was nice, it's just that the actual content was so tedious, preachy and vaguely racist.

Personally I really wanted to avoid responsibility for driving the core design of a project this time since I have so much of my own stuff to worry about and just to be a free pair of hands for whatever needed doing. Maybe we could offer some sort of automated team building for people who aren't sure how they want to self-organize? Just basically a hat with names tossed in and it automatically groups people into teams of 3 or 4.

I just got around to playing through this recently -- not because of Fallout 4, but because I've meant to for a while and a youtube personality I follow just did a LP of it which I wanted to watch without spoiling the game for myself. It's a good game! The world feels a bit sparse, in that even the most populous areas only have like 50 people, but I really like how many options you have to solve quests. Afterwards I went back to play Fallout 1 and was surprised how often you have to resolve situations by fighting, and NV more frequently gives you options in that regard. I love that all of the skills are nearly equally useful, and can be used in multiple ways. In the first two games several of the skills are of questionable utility, though the incredibly taut stat system of the original 2 isn't nearly as tight in New Vegas. The DLC is mostly pretty good, though I thought Honest Hearts was both boring and vaguely racist and I very quickly tired of Ulysses' monotone blathering. I gather a lot of people hate Dead Money, I think for the same reason a lot of people hated Far Cry 2: Some people just don't like being disempowered. I thought it was great though, and in terms of tone and story it was the best part of the game. Getting attacked by a hologram as it's simultaneously playing back a panicked diary of someone trapped while the missiles are hitting is one of the most clever and poignant uses of audio diary I've seen in a game. Personally, I'd say Old World Blues > Dead Money >> Lonesome Road >>>>> Honest Hearts

more liek 1milliongamerswrong amirite

but, you know------ if we really wanted to keep things clear we could always just, like, uh, make a new thread for each film...

never saw it

hey what do you mean it's not November any more THIS IS NOVEMBER'S TRACK OKAY More Than The Sum Of Our Parts

I always thought Cars was an okay, just suffers by comparison to Pixar's other films. Sort of the same for Monster's U, I don't think it's bad, just not remarkable.

One thing I love about Wall-E is that so many movies would play the fat couch potato people for laughs, but instead the movie portrays them with this kind of dormant sense of longing. In general, I really like Pixar's tendency not to use characters just to make fun of or play the role of a villain, but to be actually fleshed out and interesting characters in their own right. It's less unusual now, but at the time Pixar came on the scene that was really rare in kid's entertainment -- and, honestly, in pretty much all entertainment.

I don't have a problem with his science, I just said he's a shitty face for new atheism and he popularity is a big part of the reason why that movement is perceived as shitty, as well as probably a substantial part of the reason it is shitty in such ways as it is. I think this handy chart says it all:

It doesn't help that the face of the movement is Richard Dawkins who is kind of a garbage fire

I pretty much like all Pixar films. If we're doing top fives, let's see... 1) Wall-E 2) Ratatouille 3) The Incredibles 4) Toy Story 3 5) Inside Out Maybe? Subject to change if I think of a good one I forgot. Haven't seen Cars 2 or The Good Dinosaur either.

Oh I see how it is! Shoddy, console, peasant, port, greedy devs, mobile app, grave insult to their core gamer pc gamer core audience... something?

It's kind of weird to talk about how amazing the demo for quake 3 was when up until I think like Quake 2 Id's business model was basically to give away an entire campaign of 8 or 9 levels and then sell two more like it. In that context it's pretty conservative. What with episodic games making a resurgence I'm surprised that that model hasn't resurfaced. Was the idea of making the first episode free and charging for the rest of the season discussed at Telltale? It seems like if anything it would be more effective with the more story-focused titles, since rather than selling more of the same thing you'd be selling the conclusion to the story once people are hooked. Then again, I don't know if it was ever an especially good business model, even if it was commonplace for a while.