TychoCelchuuu

Yeah I definitely let out an audible "fuck" when this episode started with "hey use code Breckon" because so recently I had just used the outmoded slash wizard.

Valve definitely solved the escort mission years before BioShock Infinite ostensibly did the same, and Valve did it without turning it into a "woman cannot engage in combat so she hides the entire time and is inexplicably invincible" situation.

Not too long ago I used hover.com/wizard to get 10% off my domain name registration: do you think that URL stacks with the Breckon code? That would be cool.

Thoughtful perspective here, carrotpanic.

The current stance on reviews written by other people is THE FIRST ONE JUST WENT UP BY OUR VERY OWN ERKKI http://www.objectivegamereviews.com/flatout-ultimate-carnage-review/ The reason I can't just ask this guy is because it's not clear if he understands the site is a joke so I need to not tip my hat until I know if he's one of you or if I have to find out a way to figure out if he thinks it's a joke without giving away the fact that it's a joke.

And in the game!

I may have to rethink my strategy of asking the Idle Thumbs forum a serious question.

No the way it works is that every puzzle can be brought to the car's trunk, thus simplifying the process of trying every item on it.

Are any of you Ryan Garry? I just got a review submission from him via email and I can't tell if it's from out of the blue or if he's one of you, because he didn't say anything other than "here is a review."

This is straightforwardly false. Right now you can donate money to programs like the Against Malaria Foundation and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative that have huge, measurable, fast, positive effects for people in extreme poverty. Clearly there are positions between "nothing" and "robots solve all problems."

Also I loved that there was an email about what producers do. Producing stuff (games, movies, software, whatever) seems like a job I would be really good at, but it's never something I've seriously pursued or even vaguely looked into, so it's always great to hear more about that side of things, because it's so often ignored in favor of relatively sexier, creative stuff.

I guess it seems odd to me that people aren't entitled to food and shelter and medicine and so on. Those seem like basic human rights to me. I can't imagine what someone would have to do to not deserve to be able to feed and house themselves - certainly being unable or unwilling to find a job isn't such a terrible crime that the punishment ought to be homelessness and starvation and no medical care and stuff like this.

The following are contexts in which chromatic aberration is good: 1) The player teleports in Teleglitch. 2) You just did something to your camera lens that you think fucked it up and you want to confirm that you actually fucked it up. 3) Never anywhere else.

A DayZ podcast is the sort of thing I could imagine myself doing either back when I was a teenager and had free time or some day in the future if/when I have a job that doesn't suck up all my free time. Stories that come from games are so interesting to me and DayZ is like a story machine. When the Thumbs discussed the idea of Vlambeer or some other group doing a Patreon to fund game development as if it were a hypothetical I wanted to yell out "Porpentine does it already!" but I didn't because they would not have heard me. But yes, Porpentine is doing the Patreon game thing, so there you go!

I don't understand what you are saying. Your point is that the basic income won't work because people will want more money? How is that a problem? It seems to me that people want more money even when there is no basic income. Money is useful for buying things. Is the problem that people with a basic income feel like they are entitled to more income? How is that a problem? I know a lot of people here in America (where there is no basic income) who also feel like they are entitled to more income. I don't see what's wrong with that or why it would be specific to a place with a basic income.

Not really - it would just leave out any basic information that wasn't couched in terms of an opinion. For example, if my review of the general thumbsensus (Idle Thumbs consensus) of Far Cry 2 is "Far Cry 2 is a masterpiece because it marries tight, reactive shooting and movement mechanics to a series of systems that serve to create surprising and exciting emergent results while simultaneously undercutting the any potential power fantasy by making the player's explicit missions a series of terrible deeds and showing the results of the player's actions in brutal ways, like a person dying on the ground. The weapon jamming system is a perfect example of this: it is not so intrusive so as to make the game a pain to play, but it forces the player to confront their limitations and also leads to interesting moments in gameplay when the player's plan has to change on a dime in response to their weapon's failure. The graphics are also gorgeous while being simultaneously understated - the colors are muted and the lighting diffuse. The selection of weapons has enough variation to give the player genuine tactical choices in how they approach situations but is spare enough that the player is not overwhelmed and is encouraged to try out the various weapons" then that's basically an entirely subjective review. This is, in a way, why I've sort of come around on the idea of an objective game review. In less than 500 words someone can get a summary of the main mechanics of the game, get the basic numbers (levels, weapons, party members, etc) and basically get a sense for how the game works. Then they can go read legitimate reviews to get actual opinions. Something like Objective Game Reviews saves reviewers the chore of having to list all those boring numbers and explain all the main game systems in their review. Want to review BioShock without bothering to talk about the Little Sisters, the plasmids, the weapon selection, and the plot, because you think the most interesting thing is the combination of System Shocke-esque environmental storytelling and the retro art deco stylings of Rapture, combined with the NPC barks and the soundtrack? Write that shit up and if anyone complains that you left 90% of the game unexplained, just link them to Objective Game Reviews' review of the game and say "look, you can read this, or watch some gameplay videos, if you want to know the basics. My job here is to tell you what I think about this game, and when I think about a game I don't think about it in terms of bare objective facts. You can get those from anyone. I'm here because I have something interesting to say." One thing I'm trying to do everywhere with the branding of the site is to note that subjective game reviews are not worse, they're just very different. Remember, the entire point of the site is to point out to people who ask for an objective game review what it is they want. Everything I'm doing is satirical in that I don't (or, more accurately, didn't) think it's the way reviews should be written, but that's not incompatible with making the site something that isn't awful in other ways. I want the site to review all kinds of games, not just AAA shooters, and I want those indie games that nobody has heard about to get equal billing with BioShock Infinite or whatever. I want the site to be clear that subjectivity is not bad, it's just a different way of reviewing (and, implicitly, it's the worthwhile way of reviewing things, although the site doesn't say that). I want the site to be interesting to read and easy to navigate and informative and funny and free of typos (thanks for pointing out the missing subject in the BioShock 2 review by the way). In other words, another way to satirize the idea of objective game reviews would be to make a really shitty objective review site: copy and paste from Wikipedia, badmouth the "opinions" of "reviewers" who probably aren't actual gamers and just have a biased agenda to push, only review Halo 3 and BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us and give them all 10 out of 10s, post a bunch of "funny" YouTube videos from PewDiePie, write about the console wars and rank consoles objectively based on how many megahertz their processors run at, and stuff like that. Just generally satirize the kind of people and culture from which we get requests for objective game reviews. That's definitely not what the site is doing, though, so in the hypothetical non-existent future where I add the "switch to Subjective Game Reviews" button, I'd at least be able to brand it in a way that I hope wouldn't lead to massive boycotts ("this button takes you to a subjective site, more like other game review sites, where reviewers give their opinion, which you may disagree with. If you prefer your game reviews to be objective, simply don't press the button and keep reading this site, which is dedicated to providing objective game reviews for the games you want to know about"). Whether people would still get pissed off is up in the air, but I like my site because it plays it as straight as possible, and part of playing it straight consists of not knocking people who write normal, subjective reviews, because they don't deserve knocks.

Except for the chromatic aberration

My favorite part of the video is the Breckon cameo.

If I had infinite money and time and were doing this for a living, I would hire a web designer to whip up a neat thing where the website would have a button floating on the UI, and pressing it would switch between "Objective Game Reviews" and "Subjective Game Reviews." Ever review would be paired with its comrade on the other site. Thus with one button click you could swap between the objective review and the subjective review. The objective review would be basically what it looks like right now, and the subjective review would be a personal opinion/report on the game, free from the burdens of having to do the boring stuff like talk about game mechanics, number of levels and weapons, and so on. Just one of the many ideas about the site. This one's an idea that will never come to fruition - I have more feasible and sensible ideas that I do plan to carry out in the future. In other news I managed to use the word "boring" in an objective review which I'm pretty proud of.

The saga continued:

That video helps explain why The Walking Dead Season 2 is doing pretty well. She (aka Nick Breckon) also posted this a little while ago:

Cool!

How does that even hampen?

People would clearly realize that their comments aren't getting through and it would frustrate them at best and make the joke obvious at worst. The site generally wouldn't work so hot with a comments section, I think, so I've just disabled them entirely. I've thought about adding forums a few years down the line, and the forum would auto-post threads for each review where people could discuss things, but I want to keep the review pages themselves pristine.