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I can't believe that people are complaining about weapons degradation on the Far Cry 2 Idle Thumbs Podcast Network forums!

This is good advice

I picked up Unity of Command not too long ago when it was on sale on Steam, and now I totally get all the hype! I am not particularly great at it, I seem to have a real knack for almost consistently being 1 turn away from capturing the objectives I need to capture, but maybe that is what makes the game so addictive, never seeming to be quite good enough...

I recommend anything by Cesar Aira. He's a prolific Argentinean novelist, although only a handful of his novels have been translated into English. I've read all that are available though, and they are incredibly addictive. They also have the added benefit of being brief (typically only around 80 pages), and fitting in a coat pocket very easily making them convenient for public transit reading. He writes in a surreal style where his novels often begin in a very conventional realist style, but nearly imperceptibly shift into stranger and stranger territory.

I think I discussed this on the forums before with regards to Torchlight 2 (or maybe I just meant to discuss it...) but the kill & loot formula of action RPGs (Borderlands included) just doesn't do anything for me anymore. I also really enjoyed Diablo when that came out, my line of thinking was that it was like Nethack, but action-y. But over time, that breaks down. A game like Nethack or any of the other famous roguelikes work because of all the consequences, risks, and obstacles that occur. With ARPGs its all the highs without any of the lows, which results in a flat experience. When the game taps into that gambling addict portion of your brain you don't really notice it that much, or if you do you don't care. But if it doesn't get it hooks into you that way you're just not going to feel anything about the game. I had a good time playing Borderlands 1, but when I think back on it it was just because I was playing online co-op with friends, and we would just be talking about other random things, I don't really recall the gameplay experience at all, it was just this sort of thing going on in the background of hanging out. I remember the few times I played single player it just felt really dull.

Hilarious intro. Keep up the good work!

I like today's XCOM update as an example of what I like to see in future game designs, where you can alter the difficulty along many different lines rather than the more typical mode of simply increasing the number of enemies; make them tougher/more lethal. Of course that sort of modularity works better for some game designs than others. A game like Dark Souls probably needs a singular, specific type of difficulty if the game design/experience is to work at all.

I finally got around to trying the Gods & Kings expansion. I basically have a similar view as the cast, it added a little more replay value for Civ 5, but didn't ultimately do anything to radically change my opinion of the game. My problem is that for all the improvements that have been made since the game's release for the A.I. the diplomacy still feels completely schizophrenic to me, and that is arguably as serious a flaw as a Civilization game can have because it interferes with my ability to enjoy the game as either a strategy game to be mastered, or as a role-playing type experience by either subverting my need to have a rational type opponent or else breaking the suspension of disbelief. It's a shame because while Civ 4's stacks of doom never bothered me, I do really love Civ 5's elegant UI, so I really miss that whenever I load up Civ 4.

I'm lucky enough to have a pretty solid group to play board games with. However, for whatever reason the one game from my collection that I haven't been able to sell people on is Divided Republic. I'm not sure why, a 4 player 1860 election game seems awesome to me. http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/99078/divided-republic

I also picked this up on Steam. I'm using a gamepad and mostly loving the controls on that device, although navigating the menu is a little awkward with it...

I definitely have come around to this view where I just stop playing games as soon as they start to feel like a slog. I loved Dark Souls, for example, but as I was getting near the end of the game I just suddenly felt like I had gotten everything out of that game that I was going to get out of it, so I just stopped. Every once in awhile I contemplated getting back into it, but never doing it, and now I'm at the point where if I were to restart I would need to relearn the whole game so it is kind of pointless now.

Tropico 4 is totally relaxing. The Anno series as well...

Love the image of the Ticket to Ride board & Agricola cards used to showcase this episode on this website!

I say let Thumbs dislike whatever it is they're gonna dislike, and let them talk as long as they want about it! I found I learned much more about Far Cry 3 during the extended critique than from all the positive reviews that were written up, or even the in-depth examinations of the game's alleged racism (I only stick to alleged since I haven't played the game myself). For example, there were some complaints that wouldn't have bothered me (I'm not too concerned about arbitrary restrictions of where you can explore because of a mission), and others that would bother me. However I came down on whatever particular issue, the Thumbs clearly articulating their stance whether negative or positive will only further enrich my own view of the game, regardless of whether I agree with them. For me I don't intend to pickup Far Cry 3 simply because of the whole "edgy" vibe that the game designers chose to embue their game with. To me, I have a feeling that is going to result in so many design decisions that I find obnoxious & off-putting. The game won't pass what I call the girlfriend test, namely, will I feel some sort of sense of embarrassment if my girlfriend walks in the room and starts watching me as I'm playing this game? If the answer is yes, than why am I even wasting my time on earth with something that I'm not totally on board with? I think that's an important reality check because I think we're used to just accepting that most games are going to have some ridiculous tropes & conventions (incidentally, I'm also a big fan of those "Conan O'Brien reviews video games" shorts precisely because he is able to so ably play the role of an outsider examining games), and as I get older I find a lot of that stuff just hard to stomach. My sense is that Far Cry 3 has these sorts of elements in spades. Yet reading reviews of the game I don't think I ever saw anyone mention something as banal as a loading screen. Yet that can be important! So kudos to Idle Thumbs!

Unfortunately I'm facing similar problems. It seems like there is an awesome game in there somewhere, but I'm having a damn hard time trying to find it...

Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but I find discussion of game mods to be very rare on boardgamegeek. Especially for popular games... to such an extent that if anyone writes a negative review of a game, people will respond by stating that the reviewer must surely have misunderstood some rules, and therefore was playing the game incorrectly. My interest in the board gaming hobby definitely started up with the ascendancy of Euro games, so I was very interested to hear that for people playing more classic war games that modding was a more commonly accepted approach to boardgaming. I do disagree with Julian's assertion that re-skinning Agricola as a post-apocalyptic Fallout type game would somehow make it a better game than what it is. I agree that on paper, saying that you have some board game about medieval farming sounds pretty dreadful. But people get into it. Why else would people spend good money on animal meeples? People buy into it, however ridiculous it sounds. I am deeply skeptical of the idea that collecting nuka-cola caps instead of carrots or whatever makes for a better game. I also note that many gamers complain when they feel a theme is merely "pasted-on".

Dude, yes! The Mass Effect 1 soundtrack is probably my favorite soundtrack from a triple A title. The sequels had their moments, but they got weighed down by the bombastic orchestra stuff.

Haha crazy... I could have sworn it came out this year... but you're right. I must have just picked it up this year...

For me it is XCOM by a long shot. Combat is always so satisfyingly tense, and I love the pressure the game puts on you to move things along before global panic gets out of hand. The last level is a bit of a drag (can we please have a moratorium on final video game levels that sequentially throw everything you've previously encountered at you?), but otherwise I love the whole experience. Honorable mentions go to FTL and the XBLA version of Spelunky. I think Deus Ex would be on my list except the boss battles kind of ruined things for me. I had a super-stealthy/non-combative developed character, and I couldn't handle the 2nd boss on normal difficulty, which made me feel as if I was playing the game wrong by focusing on stealth. That's lame. I've yet to pick up Dishonored, but I'm pretty stoked about that game too (after being burned by Deus Ex it was very encouraging to read something on like Kotaku or Joystiq or somewhere that quoted one of the designers saying that they didn't feel any necessity to include bosses... awesome). Overall, a great year for games with randomly generated content.

Also if Space Base gets the green light that will mean that between that and the middle managers of justice game coming out there are some really interesting management games coming out of Double Fine.

Rad. Double Fine #1!!!

Thanks for the responses. I'll check out the demo sometime this holiday weekend.

I agree with everything you're saying... with podcasting you want a free flowing conversation generally, so if you were in a position where you had to carefully consider every single utterance that would be antithetical to the process, but since it is a recording, that does create a somewhat tricky balancing act. I don't remember the exact context of the Tim & Eric comment either, it was just a sort of casual offhand comment that allows the podcast to be what it is, but I guess also creates lots of opportunities for misinterpretations. For what it's worth, I'm not actually a fan of theirs either (I appreciate what they do, but it's not something I really seek out), but for some reason I imagined their comedic style would be something you guys would be really into, maybe because it seems so Python-esque to me, and I know that's something you guys have mentioned approvingly on the show.

Neuroshima Hex is great. Probably the best iOS implementation I am aware of, although they really need to fix the bug where sometimes the game freezes up if you try to get info about what a particular unit does... I'm glad so many people enjoy Puerto Rico. It's a really fine game until you learn about its dirty little secret.

Are you really arguing that known sexual harassers should get a pass because there are also unknown sexual harassers?