TychoCelchuuu

Baby steps. I need to write at least 10 reviews before I contact McDonalds.

nidhogg is the latest in a series of games that makes me wish I had friends who play video games who lived near me. All this local multiplayer stuff is so great if you can find someone to play it with. Makes you wish you were an Idle Thumb or a game dev or a games journalist or something just to be able to play stuff like this.

I've just opened up a new gaming review site. Check it out, and follow it on twitter and Facebook!

Good about my Google ad revenue, bad about humanity. So, overall a wash.

So... all this talk about objective game reviews may have caused me to do something silly yesterday evening. Specifically, I may have purchased a domain name and hosting space and then created a website...

I said non-casual PC gaming. Sales for something like Call of Duty are way lower on PC than on consoles.

Apropos of the GOTY discussion, look what happened when PC Gamer picked Spelunky as their GOTY. Keep in mind that PC Gamer is more niche than IGN.com because PC gaming is already the nicheier, nerdier side of gaming (at least non-casual PC gaming) and Spelunky is a hardcore highly polished platformer with no pretensions to socially conscious narrativity or anything like that (it's even a little racist!) so it's not like they picked Gone Home or some other "non-game" that addresses a topic like lesbians which people love to hate. (If you want to see blowback from PC Gamer praising Gone Home, you can see what people said about picking Gone Home as the narrative game of the year.) Check out the comments on the article: they include things like "...wat"; "they must have meant "Indie Game of the Year 2013" surely..."; "PC Gamer is a joke..that's wat."; "April Fools is in 4 months PC Gamer..."; "Wait, game of the year? The whole year? All of it?? In all ~365 days of 2013 this was the best thing that happened in PC gaming???"; "A fucking sidescroller with completely unoriginal concepts, flash game graphics, and terrible artwork. Great. fucking great. PC gamers have turned into a bunch of fucking hipsters." and so on. That's what you get when you pick Spelunky as your GOTY - you alienate a huge swathe of people who are expecting Bioshock Infinite to win, because Bioshock Infinite is the sort of game that wins GOTYs from places like PC Gamer, and Spelunky is just an indie game. That's where we're at. IGN.com, PC Gamer, and all other media outlets have specific audiences that expect specific things. There's no objective best game for anyone to pick: all there is are games that individual journalists like, games that people expect to win GOTYs, and the choice between the two when they don't match up. It can all be summed up in another comment on that Spelunky GOTY article: People are so sure they know what games are GOTY material that they can only see a win for Spelunky as some sort of betrayal. PC Gamer no longer stands for what they thought it stood for: perhaps they will no longer bother reading PC Gamer if it keeps acting like this. I leave you with this gem (another quote from that page):

Harvest mummy puke in the skull receptacle.

I played for a few hours a few days ago and I think what I learned is that I'm past the phase in my life where these games are something I want to spend time on. I feel like Chris Remo.

Randy Smith is easily one of my favorite people named Smith who worked at Looking Glass Studios on some of the best games ever made! Can't wait to listen to this one.

It represents the fact that IGN is the sort of place that needs to tip its hat to a game like Gone Home but give the GOTY to a game like The Last of Us. I think we all know that IGN is this kind of site and that lots of sites are these kinds of sites because gamer culture is a certain sort of culture and people frequent certain sorts of sights to hear certain sorts of things. If IGN were giving Gone Home and games like it the GOTY it wouldn't be in the position it is now, and some other site would spring up to give The Last of Us the GOTY and capture the readership of people who, for various reasons, want a game like The Last of Us to win.

You can sum up basically any game, movie, or book in one or two pages. Star Wars is about a farm boy who finds out his father was a warrior, joins up with an old warrior and a rogue to rebel against the evil empire, rescues the princess from the giant space station, then blows up the space station. That was just a sentence. Imagine if I had two pages! I could've gone into detail about basically every scene. So just because a game can be described in a short stretch doesn't mean that it's bad. You could CERTAINLY sum up the story of Gone Home in two pages.

I've never unlocked a character during a daily - I would've thought the coffins just don't spawn.

Approximately 3.1 million children will die of hunger or poor nutrition.

A little late, but I got to the ice caves for the first time ever in the daily from a few days ago:

eh, try using the chair that's turned away from the desk to jump on one of the desks on your left at the beginning, then fall outside the map. If that's not entertaining then I'm not sure what else would be.

Apparently it is, yes.

Again, if you think there's a "wrong" way to play it, you don't "get" it. This video breaks it down pretty well:

Funny you should mention The Psychology of Video Games - I just discovered (or maybe rediscovered) that site a few days ago and posted some comments on the latest article, but I'm not super impressed with it. Most of the articles boil down to "here is a thing in psychology. Here is that thing in a video game. The end!" I always come out the other end feeling like I got a portion of a psychology textbook that is easily explained with a video game example, but nothing more. Maybe that just says more about how much I enjoy psychology textbooks than about how good the site is...

If you quit the museum because it felt like a spoiler you're not really "getting" what the game is about. There is no wrong order to play it in. You have not discovered a bunch of realizations you were supposed to discover later.

Great podcast. Funny, insightful, full of Dishonored date references, sound effects, discussion at the end about fashion, etc. 1: All this hat stuff is fascinating forever. 2: If you all are anything like me then this kind of effusive praise probably makes you want to throw up, but I'll say it anyways - when someone talked about how that one sentence in the email that started with "From Mario to Gone Home..." sounded like the beginning of an awards speech or something and Chris chimed in and said "I was thinking the exact same thing" that sort of encapsulated one of the things I love about this podcast so much. A group of people like the Thumbs who go around primed to see the world in various informed ways (in this case, a group of people who, among other things, go around with an understanding of the sorts of tropes that occur in speeches at awards ceremonies such that they are able to recognize phrases that fit the tropes) are just genuinely interesting to listen to. So much of life, and so many podcasts, are full of rote contemplation and regurgitation that fits established ways of seeing the world and talking about the world, and we get stuck in these ruts and never break free in weird, surprising, off-kilter ways. Even something as small as saying "this email made me think of awards speeches" is the sort of thing that not everyone would do and that not everyone would feel like bringing up in a conversation with others, and it's not so much that as it is the tendency to examine life from different angles that that instance represents which I think makes Idle Thumbs such a great cast to listen to. It's not like the Thumbs are awards ceremonies buffs who go around primed to hear sentences that sound like the beginning of awards ceremonies speeches. Rather, the Thumbs are observant people conversant in the things that (for better and for worse) suffuse our culture, and they're ready, able, and willing to constantly link these things together and see everything they experience in light of everything else they've experienced. It's just one small little piece of the sort of attitude that makes people read books and watch movies and play games with an eye towards seeing what's interesting about them and with an eye towards forming a coherent view of the world that's made up of interrelated parts that all fit together. So few people are willing to do that, consistently, and so few podcasts are made up of people doing that. It's this sort of attitude that is inimical to the sorts of things some other podcasts do when they talk about games: the rote recital of various opinions about various topics ("what did you think about the graphics," "what did you think about the plot," etc.) even though the Thumbs talk about the exact same things. It's being those kinds of people with that kind of brain forming those kinds of connections and being brought up in these kinds of conversations that leads to the great conversation that took place in the back half of the podcast about fidelity, specificity, the Coen brothers, and so forth. That Chris saw these sorts of things in Inside Llewyn Davis and wanted to link it, however tangentially, to the topic at hand, and that games like Blood Dragon and Grand Theft Auto got folded in so naturally to the conversation, is a result of this interconnected, informed way of looking at things that makes Idle Thumbs great to listen to. 3: Chris mentioned not having seen Oscar Isaac in any other movies but I think I recall Chris having watched Drive, which not only has Oscar Isaac but also Carey Mulligan, who was also in Inside Llewyn Davis. Pretty funny how those two ended up in another movie together. 4: The "Please Mr. Kennedy" song has a pretty interesting history, at least if Wikipedia is telling the truth:

I'd be better off choosing not to have to sleep but all my life I've worried about starving to death (that and dying of exposure) because maybe I'm useless and nobody will hire me to do anything ever so I'd go with the food thing.

This Year in Video Game Blogging: 2013.

I'm active on these boards.

You mean the documentary about actual real life as it is occurring right now?