TychoCelchuuu

There are a few objective reviews. This one and this one. There's an objective GTA V review somewhere but I can't find it.

New Vegas is way better than Fallout 3.

I barely have any characters unlocked but when I got that purple lady I was really happy so I just use her forever now.

What a fat, heaping load of complete and utter bullshit. That's like saying from a critical perspective a movie critic has to balance the acting and the action sequences. Some movies don't have any action sequences and that doesn't mean they're worse movies. They're just not action movies. Some games don't have a lot of things to do but this just means they're just not the sorts of games where you do a lot of stuff. That doesn't mean they're somehow worse than an equivalent game where you do more stuff. If Gone Home had a bunch of puzzles to solve that wouldn't make it a better game or give it more gameplay to balance out how good it is versus a more traditional game like The Last of Us.

I suspect the amount of self-serious dialog in Borderlands 2 is approximately negative seven lines of dialog.

Kentucky Route 0 Act One Uh, wow. That was really good. Taking a bit of a break before I play act two. I can already tell that waiting for acts three through five is going to be tough.

My Steam review for this game encapsulates some other reasons to prefer Far Cry 2 to Far Cry 3 I think.

The games industry is not ready for a GOTY where you can't shoot someone in the face.

If you listen to the Tone Control with Clint Hocking,

When every thread you start turns into people getting mad at you, the common denominator is you, not the various other people.

I liked it when... Sean? said he figured out why Day Z was using the "Take On Helicopters" engine, because helicopters were in Day Z, failing to realize that helicopters are also in the ArmA games. This episode also made me learn of IT'S-IT ice cream which is interesting.

Here is a sound that could play out of someone's speakers or headphones: A voice saying "Happy New Year!" and then the *fwee* noise that one of those party horn things makes. That would be a good sound to signify time passing. Which is what you wanted.

*the sound of something flying far above your head*

Seeds don't give you a belly-ache! In fact you can eat the entire apple core. The stem's the only part I ever discard.

Not being thrown away? Surely it's still being eaten! There's like 1/3rd of the apple left on that thing.

Just beat The Swapper. It's a really, really great game. I got stuck on two puzzles but aside from that everything went well: some I solved pretty fast, some were some real headscratchers. The story was really well written and the atmosphere was just tremendous all throughout: wonderful music, graphics, and sound design. My only complaint is that some of the dialog was not loud enough compared to the music, and the options menu doesn't have different volume sliders for each. Aside from that though I would definitely recommend it to everyone.

You said, of the emergent gameplay that makes Far Cry 2 so amazing, that "An example would be much appreciated." I linked an example: Nick was trying to ambush the convoy but right as he fired, the lead vehicle drove in front of his bullet, preventing it from killing the driver and thus causing him to fail the mission because he had to get into the jeep to pursue the truck but in doing so he got himself shot to death. A lot of people would disagree with you about how the guns feel in the two games: most people find Fallout (3 and New Vegas both) to be clunky shooters compared to most traditional FPS games, especially something like Far Cry 2 which really nails the shooting mechanics. Your desire for shooting that "happens more frequently" is also one not everyone shares. Just like some people prefer movies like No Country for Old Men where the violence is sporadic and meaningful because it punctuates moments of calm and creates, with those moments of calm, a variegated, textured experience, and just like those people don't quite enjoy movies like The Expendables or Transformers that are just balls to the wall action all the time, some people prefer games like Far Cry 2, where the action feels more meaningful and interesting because it's not just a steady drone of constant shooting. This is not to say you're wrong or something, it's just to explain what so many Idle Thumbs people, including the podcast hosts, love about the game. It's not about the bare number of things you have to deal with: it's not like you just list out things that you have to deal with in a game and the one with the most things is the winner. It's about the kinds of things you have to deal with in the game. In Far Cry 2, how many things do you have to worry about? Just two: shooting people and collecting diamonds. And the diamonds are optional. If you're playing a shooter because you enjoy shooting, Far Cry 2 can be a very rewarding experience because nothing takes you out of the shooting. This is one of the things the Thumbs hated about Far Cry 3: that game was very focused on pulling you away from gunfights and giving you animals to skin and medicine plants to pick and stuff. It ruins the flow of the game and forces a lot of tedious busywork on the player in place of allowing them to play out the core gameplay loop that is combat. Again, this is not to say you're wrong, it's just to point out what people like in Far Cry 2 that isn't present in STALKER or Far Cry 3, games which require you to think about a lot more than shooting enemies. These things strike me as just as hard or easy as anything you'll ever encounter in Far Cry 3 or STALKER, and as to their tedious nature, you'll find that people who enjoy Far Cry 2 don't find sneaking, driving, or sniping from a distance to be tedious, or if they do, they take an alternate approach. Far Cry 2 lets you handle situations in whatever manner you enjoy, so if you find something tedious, then you can simply not do it. Far Cry 3 is forthrightly stupid racist worthless bullshit. Far Cry 2 isn't Shakespeare because it isn't anything - you can ignore the story entirely and just play missions forever, which is what Nick Breckon does, for instance. The difference between the two is that Far Cry 3 has an omnipresent UI element always urging you to get back to the story, which is offensively terrible, whereas Far Cry 2 has none of that. The UI isn't a big deal to you but it's a dealbreaker for a lot of people, and the clunkiness of the map in Far Cry 2 is part of the charm. The map taking up your screen is what leads to so many wacky moments like driving into a rock on accident while running away from enemies and having to abandon your vehicle and finding yourself stuck in a ravine and so forth. Far Cry 2's "something to do" is shoot people - that is what a lot of people are looking for in a first person shooter, and Far Cry 2 doesn't make stuff get in the way of that the way Far Cry 3 does. If you don't want to spend as much time shooting in a first person shooter as other people, this might explain why you don't like Far Cry 2, which is a game all about shooting people and not at all about crafting. You also don't need to do detours in Far Cry 2 to replenish your healing items, generally, because you can find water at outposts and health syrettes at the safe houses. Your overall feeling that the other games are "far more competent" simply isn't shared by a lot of the people here, so unless it relies on observations than the ones you've already mentioned, you'll have to remain at least a little mystified about why people enjoy Far Cry 2 so much.

I listen to the cast while I'm cooking and while I'm driving.

The reason you would play this instead of Fallout is because the shooting is far more responsive and fun. The reason you would play this instead of STALKER is because there's less fiddly RPG stuff and monsters and anomalies to deal with. The reason you would play this instead of Far Cry 3 is because it has a less intrusive UI, a story that doesn't make you want to claw your eyes out, missions that don't autofail if you go out of bounds, and no stupid crafting system.

You came to the wrong neighborhood, motherfucker.

Who is emotionally tied to hating PA? Is it the journalists who boycott PAX but not E3? Or the other people on the Internet who boycott both? If it's the other people (like me), why think we're emotionally tied to hating PA more than we are to Microsoft? Or that we're emotionally tied to anything?

This to me is the heart of the issue: Jerry doesn't know enough to know how little he knows (I used to think he did, but he doesn't) and Mike has not learned to avoid the issue entirely. Jerry wrote a news post defending the Hitman trailer where 47 lovingly strangles sexy nuns in slow motion and Mike can't make it through a year without saying something hateful about some marginalized group. That these two people are old men who don't really get it any more would be the end of the story if they weren't also titans of gaming culture with a legion of fans who hang off of their every word and defend them voraciously. Gaming culture is a fucking shithole, as pointed out in that excellent Gamasutra article by Leigh Alexander that Henroid linked, and it's a shithole because people feel safe saying terrible things about women and so forth. Why do they feel safe saying these things? Well, in part it's because people like Mike and Jerry have got their backs on certain issues, so you get this kind of echo chamber effect. People who self-identify as gamers and who very much want to fit in to gamer culture definitely get their cues on how to act from Penny Arcade - they're an integral part of gaming culture. You can mention "that Penny Arcade comic" that touches on some given issue or another (like "bullshots" or whatever) and people will know what you're talking about. So saying that Mike and Jerry aren't as bad as people who threaten to kill Anita Sarkeesian kind of misses the point. Nobody's mad at them for threatening people with death. We're mad at them for using their position of power to help keep gaming culture shitty. Tell me where I can find the people defending everything Microsoft does on Internet forums like this one, donating to Microsoft's charity, attending Microsoft's convention, and so on and I suspect I'll be able to tell you where you can find the list of stupid stuff Microsoft has done. That PA timeline thing popped up because there was such a controversy over the what PA did, and there was such a controversy because people give a shit. Nobody cares what Microsoft does. Obviously when they're sexist we hate it, but nobody's around to defend them because nobody gives a shit about Microsoft. Nobody's identity as a gamer is tied up in what Microsoft does and nobody looks at Microsoft's deplorable behavior and says "oh, it's okay to treat people who get up in arms about rape like this? Well, I guess I can keep being an asshole to feminists then, and I can keep my gamer card!" I can't speak for Rock Paper Shotgun or Fullbright, and personally I would never go to E3 (or at least not to the old E3 - I dunno what it's like these days). Has anyone else boycotted PAX? I think what you're seeing in terms of everyone piling on the "boycott PAX" thing is mostly a bunch of people whoa re in a position to boycott PAX saying that they'll do it. I for instance can't boycott E3 because I'm not invited. Most people are like me. A lot of indie developers wouldn't be at E3 anyways so they can't really boycott it. But PAX is open to everyone and lots of indie games are there too. So I suspect what you see as deafening cries to boycott PAX in the face of not a lot of whining about E3 is just a function of more people having that choice when it comes to PAX.

TycHolkins

ROUND TWO Note that listing a blog does not mean I endorse all the thoughts written about on the blog. Read responsibly. http://goodgameswriting.com/ http://www.hitselfdestruct.com/ (see the "video games" section in the bottom right) http://exploringbelievability.blogspot.com/ http://gamesthatexist.com/ http://www.reactionzine.com/ http://twofoldsilence.diogenes-lamp.info/ http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/ http://thiscageisworms.com/