TychoCelchuuu

Also I guess since I already made these long ago I might as well post them.

Ahem it is possible to write unbiased reviews - my website publishes them.

I mean yeah no question, Sean is a dreamboat.

Over in the (IGN.com) thread, we got into a discussion about objective game reviews. For whatever reason (an excuse to procrastinate plus a desire to try my hand at "the web," I think) I decided to just go ahead and register objectivegamereviews.com and throw up a website with, well, some objective game reviews, but with scores at the end. I wrote my first set of reviews and tweeted them at the game developers. January 1st, 2014, done. The next morning, Tom Francis, creator of Gunpoint, tweeted my Gunpoint review. That drove some hits to my site. I got an request from someone who wanted to be a writer for the site and two review codes. Then Luke Plunkett, who follows Tom or someone who retweeted Tom or who knows what, posted the site on Kotaku. That drove many hits to my site. My site crashed. I upgrade my hosting three times in a few hours, added a caching plugin, and stuck my site behind a thing called "CloudFlare" which works in a way still opaque to me. My site stopped crashing. The bandwidth usage began to climb. I received another request to write for the site and another few review codes. Lots of people started following the site on twitter, talking about it, and so on. About ~600 people were visiting it concurrently while it was all crashy, a number which dropped to about 200 by the end of the night. Throughout the day I wrote more reviews. Hotline Miami now featured a blurb from my review on their Steam store page. I went to bed. This morning, January 3rd, the concurrent visitors had dropped to about 100. I updated the FAQ, tweeted at people, tried to figure out Google+, and so on. I have received another couple of review copies for games and more offers to write for the site. There have been fun things that have happened. Just now, I managed to have a dry enough wit to confuse Chet Falizsek, which I heretofore had thought impossible. Evan Lahti follows me on twitter. 6 people are reading my review of Cry$tal Warrior Ke$ha right now, and I'm glued to my Google Analytics real time tracker because it's hypnotizing to watch people visit the site. I got linked on On the Media which is a classy sort of NPR site. As of right now, three offers to write for the site have been earnest, or at least not "clued in" - they want to write objective game reviews because they like the website. The fourth is from someone who understands what is going on. I have six review codes and a seventh on the way for games that I don't have a lot of time to review. I'm still nailing down the style of the site but I think I've fallen into a rhythm and I've got a way of writing reviews that works, and now it's just up to me to do a good job writing reviews that fit the template. So far the most surprising thing for me has been discovering how much I actually like the reviews. I would've thought an objective review is about as useful as skimming a Wikipedia page, but I'm finding that restricting myself to basically objective statements forces me to think about what I want to say in different ways. Instead of saying how a game effects me and how I think it does it, I have to just mention the affecting thing the game does without mentioning why it is affecting. I also end up distilling games to their core when I try to just objectively summarize the game. I think, for instance, that my Stanley Parable review turned out fairly well in terms of addressing what makes that game good, without ever outright saying it. It's a roundabout way of doing things but that's what makes it interesting. I'm also struggling to fit humor into my reviews. I managed to get some jokes into the BF4 review, for instance, but it's a very fine line to walk because I want to keep the site's humor as dry as possible, so as not to ruin the objective editorial voice. The original goal for this site was to have something to link to whenever I saw someone ask for "objective game reviews" online. The goal was to shut them up, either by revealing what's wrong with that or just giving them what they want. At this point I feel like I'm more or less accomplishing that. And I owe it all to Idle Thumbs and the forums! Without that conversation in the IGN.com thread I probably wouldn't have bothered. What do you all think?

So in addition to losing Jenn Frank to this bullshit we've lost Mattrie Brice. Pretty lame. This is a good post on the whole business. I also waded into the ring and wrote something.

http://www.objectivegamereviews.com/objective-game-reviews-gamergate/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=LeJc-jij01o JazzPunk! It looks kickass. It's being made by Necrophone Games, which consists of two dudes in Toronto. We don't really know much about it, although it does give off a very Gravity Boney atmosphere, don't you think? Aside from that sweet teaser trailer there is this blog post on their site. I'm like, 75% sure it's serious. I think. It reads: So yes. I will keep this thread updated as we learn more about what is sure to be an incredibly interesting video game. Also it's coming "soon" for PC and Mac. Additional Info Official Website twitter account for Luis Hernandez, artist for and 50% of Necrophone Games; also it is apparently the Necrophone Games twitter too

I'd consume a lot more football coverage if it talked about the homoerotic subtext.

Bruno makes all the other casters look bad and boring and unfunny.

Alright everyone's voting for two weeks, so let's do two weeks, you slow pokes!

Not to be a dick but I'm pretty sure she meant she had seen basically the whole film in pastiche because all the famous indelible scenes have been recreated in various works of pop culture ad infinitum such that one has "seen" Jaws even without having seen Jaws.

I feel like in 2014 computer humans should look a little less like plastic.

I voted for the Top Gun one because I think Val Kilmer is interesting.

I thought it was implied that Dumbledore and Grindelwald were a couple in the seventh book but maybe that's false.

I love him already.

I can't download it in Firefox, Chrome, or Opera - only Internet Explorer works for me. Same deal with last week (and maybe the week before?). Speed is fine though.

Sean mentioned how sometimes, no matter how many movies you watch, there are just some movies (like Casablanca for him, holy shit) that you haven't seen - well, if you'd like to fix that to a certain extent, drop by the Idle Thumbs Criterion Film Club and join us as we watch all those movies you ought to have seen already. Chris talked about how Wings of St. Nazaire is actually like those space sims from back in the day but I have to correct him - Wings of St. Nazaire is indeed like Wing Commander, which used sprites rendered at various angles to represent all the ships, but it's very different from X-Wing and TIE Fighter, which, even back then, were full 3d games using polygonal ships rather than sprites. This, incidentally, is why I was a much bigger fan of the Star Wars games than the Chris Roberts games - everything was much smoother, there was a far better sense of scale and of movement, and the capital ships particularly worked far better. Of course, Wing Commander could be far more detailed with its prerendered bitmaps than X-Wing could (X-Wing had to rely on just plain Gouraud shading, which meant the ships were the right shape but entirely untextured) so Wing Commander's screenshots were much prettier, but X-Wing played much better with its full 3d fidelity. Which, incidentally, is why I'm not a massive Wings of St. Nazaire fan. I mean, yes, it's gorgeous, and it does work better than Wing Commander worked (in large part because I think it's using 3d models for its capital ships, or at least it was when I tried it like a year ago) but honestly we're at the point in video games where you can make something like Enemy Starfighter in Unity and use actual 3d models and get all the benefits that come from that, and we've been there since, you know, X-Wing came out in 1993. When someone was describing the Chris shirt and mentioned his face falling off the bottom like a "Goku shirt," the "ugh" reaction there on the part of all the Thumbs was amazing. That was maybe my favorite of the many hilarious parts of this cast.

I can't quite recognize casters by voice yet but whoever is doing the multicast right now is fucking hilarious whenever he chimes in to talk about the multicast switching to another game or whatever.

Also, all the Thumbs missed the chance to make a really obvious "Dishonoured Canada Day" joke.

A partial list of things I liked in this cast: Nick's WiiU story, Chris saying that one way to acquire games you didn't know you owned was "a Steam sale happened and you went into a fugue state," Danielle saying "A thing can go viral among four people. Like, a virus."

This was a great episode! Does anyone have a link to the "rat Nature's Prophet" game that they talked about, or at least info about which game it was so I can watch it myself? All that info about TI4 is nuts. The beginner's stream, the multicast... you can really tell that Valve just has some people who are like "what would the best DotA 2 tournament in the world look like? Let's just do that." This is the sort of stuff you usually only get to dream about in esports. edit: forgot to mention how glad I was to hear all three of you talk about how gaming needs to work on being more inclusive and less racist/sexist/etc. It's always a breath of fresh air to hear people who understand how much work there is to do rather than people who make it their life goal to insist that everything is fine.

http://jezebel.com/uk-judge-thinks-man-who-raped-sleeping-woman-isnt-a-c-1600613924

http://leighalexander.net/but-what-can-be-done-dos-and-donts-to-combat-online-sexism/

I've always wondered what kind of human being would have that thing in their possession. Like, if I were ever in someone's domicile and they had a plastic statue of Pagan Min sitting anywhere where I can see it, I'm not really sure what I'd think, but it wouldn't be a good set of thoughts, I suspect.