Badfinger

I have been getting more and more intrigued by the game, and then I saw it for the first time today. If you told me that was just Dark Souls I'd believe you and the sails of game enthusiasm were completely deflated. I have not managed to like a Dark Souls, and I have not managed to like things people said in reviews were like dark souls but "maybe too much vania and not souls enough" (Salt and Sanctuary I'm looking and swearing directly at you). Be honest, is there maybe a thing here for me? I'm essentially Jeff Gerstmann's polite no fucking thank you to the entire concept and he is enjoying it.

y'all should really read the article. She's a phenomenal writer. She attacks subjects with a thoughtfulness that Giant Bomb doesn't ever reach, and probably intrinsically never can.

I understand you're responding to multiple people here but my response was agreeing with you on every front. I'm not saying what she is, isn't, identifies as or doesn't, just that for all I know or care she could have been the same as me (Jewish mom)

It's absolutely because she was a woman. It's a shame that was my first exposure to her, the reaction around Giant Bomb definitely colored my impression of her for years when in fact she's basically a better person than anyone on Giant Bomb (sexy uniforms notwithstanding because that was unconscionable drunk or no). Also- I have seen her a lot of times. She's a PoC? Not judging people by the color of their skin is a thing I'm kinda into but she and I could have the same parents, crazy frizz hair from my mom and everything.

Rather than getting yourselves down by thinking you haven't played enough video games to fill a podcast I implore you to let readers play the games and just let your brains fill the gaps, because they do so in a spectacular fashion. Keep bag blasting forever, it's so good.

Oh no, I'm mostly just taking the piss. You said most of what I understand to be true about Amazon re: loss leaders, A/B testing, acceptably low profit margins due to huge sell through, etc but the conspiracy theorying of how Amazon might not want to sell CHRIS the game for $48 was funny. I appreciated the conjecture about purely digital goods and how you sell those. I'm sitting with my elbows in piles of shipping close outs and receiving packing lists for the pallets we just sent overseas so it's fun to hear someone put their logistics pants on.

I will be instantly subscribing to your new podcast, but I'm beyond distraught that Idle Thumbs is ending. Since pre-kickstarter times, this is a community that I've never once had a regret about being part of or sharing with others. I've learned about so many games I'd have never heard of or sought out, I've learned about the games industry, I have enjoyed myself playing along side you all, and I've become a better person (I strive to be as empathetic as Sean is, but I will never get there). I do think, as you said in the cast during the discussion, that starting a new cast is a more internally honest decision. It's the same people and the same microphones, but if you take out the premise it becomes something different. I'll also say that for not playing any games, this was a hell of a blast. The pc's mascot being a muddy desk in 1997 is the insight I (genuinely) come to seek out from Thumbs. So you still got it, guys. Good luck, I'll miss you, I'm with you. Love you and the thumbs community. To comment on an actual thing said in the cast, the Amazon thing is actually massively more straightforward than conjecture. If you are an Amazon Prime subscriber, when you preorder retail copies of physical games you just straight up get 20% off and release day delivery. It may be after release too, dunno? I also WILL miss the logistics discussion, even if most of it is incorrect, or correct accidentally.

I enjoyed the beta from over the weekend. I'm surprised at just how much this game is Rainbow Six: Swords. Literally every RPG element and DLC hook is the same, presented in the same way. I like R6:Siege but I might actually be able to play For Honor because no one can sword snipe you from a belltower you didn't know existed on the map. I liked playing the the mouse more after a few minutes practice, because in that control scheme the guard mode was a toggle and not a hold.

All of the representations of ARMS are hilarious because it's going to be exactly the Thumbs bit from 2008 where the optimal and ultimately expected mode of play is going to be a person leaning deeply into the couch with a focused stare just barely twitching their arms to be as compact in their movement as possible.

AHHHH I gushed about this in slack already but they read my question on this week's podcast and I made them laugh this is great. e: saving the triple post and I'll take Friends talk out of the McElboy thread, I took the plunge and went right to Counter/Weight and Austin described it as "anime as fuck". Austin you're killing me do you want me to listen to your podcast? I'm not going to say "And so I turned it off right then and there" but fucking hell I'm deflated right off the bat.

I'm a silly boy that hasn't linked this yet.

I love the podcast, I just see the parts that frustrate me more than excite me right now. I'm pretty excited for when Travis gets a chance to DM, as he's clearly the most experienced player and has also expressed interest. In other McElroy news, I saw the trailer for the show and it has me cautiously optimistic. They need to thread the needle between the feeling that they got a budget so they went and did something completely unlike the current show, and hewing so closely to the current format that you end up asking why they made it. But it's promising so far! My friend who has watched all the McElboy vids finally listened to MBMBAM and was like "holy shit the dog's purpose episode was funny". Yeah my dude, it's a pretty good show. He pointed out that knowing Justin and Griffin's corpus, it's pretty hilarious that Travis is the one that's painted with the "corny bad joke" brush.

It'll live on in our minds as a cherished alternate reality forever. I should also be clear that I <3 those boys and the podcast and I finished my thoughts with telling them as such. In between episodes of this arc, to fill podcast space, I have been relistening to the whole series and I got to the Flophouse guestcast, so I listened to both of those back to back, and the difference in construction is stark. Those episodes are mostly figuring things out by talking. Should I just give up on S1 of Friends and start S2? I like a lot of what's going on but the audio made me not like the paladin because he was loud and crackly, and I can't (6-7 episodes in? They've split up) hear the fighter even now. I can always go back, right? It feels crazy to skip 30 episodes of a sequential podcast, but...

Fewer party members is how you tone down complexity but it's not as good from a character building standpoint. Not a huge fan at first blush.

That's my particular criticism of the podcast (except, as you've noted, NOT gamey) and when he posted his thoughts I told him as much. I think between his extremely setpiece-heavy narrative and Justin's insistence that talking isn't playing Dungeons and Dragons, they've put themselves in a place where none of the boys feel like they're allowed to say no. They've joked that they should have t-shirts that say "We Do That", but the herding between funhouse rooms isn't amazing dungeoneering. Can you imagine if they stopped the loop, where they didn't accept any sacrifices? Holy shit that would have been amazing. Or if Merle had turned undead (and other Cleric magic) because damn they liches, girl. The chalice is definitely the peak of all the elements coming together to make a good game and a good podcast. It's a puzzle, it's a contained but unconstrained area, and they got to go everywhere and do everything.

I can't find the original article I read, sadly, but it's even worse because he has an old busted Galaxy S3 or something. https://www.wired.com/2017/01/trump-android-phone-security-threat/

I'm curious how the Bombcast will go once they hire a new person. As weird as Matt Rorie is, his completely spur of the moment thought approach to conversation sends the podcast down some weird tracks and livens them up.

Other people have encapsulated what I said, better than I said it. I love you guys as podcasters and people way too much to suggest you should do the thing you don't want to do because I want it. I kinda feel like I'm losing a friend. In the way that Chris has found himself drifting away from games, in the last 6-8 weeks video games have become that much more important in my life as I've thrown myself into them with streaming and other stuff as a creative outlet.

I found Mouth Sounds to be technically impressive, but I really didn't like it as music. I appreciate the skill and knowledge it took to put it together, but you can almost hear all the seams and the glue holding it together as songs are layered over one another and more or less left at that. Listening to Mouth Moods last night was a completely difference experience. That's an excellent album, and at times I was melting into it and forgot that it was a remix. There are actual amazing original creations in that album, rather than just mashups. I think it's a little hand-wavey to say "this is better than Weird Al" without acknowledging that he started making parody songs (googles) Holy shit 40 years ago, and that Cicierega's work is built on top of his foundation of decades of goofy stuff.

I continue to maintain that Vinny is the perfect foil for Dan, and perhaps games media's only deployable countermeasure to The Ryckert. I love me some Shoemaker but I don't think he's cut out to be a host in the traditional sense, and that has an effect on the Bombcast as well.

In my mind games are the bedrock of Idle Thumbs, and I'd be disappointed if it got so far afield that there wasn't any thread tethering discussion back to games or games culture. I actually kind of love the desperate twists and turns the conversations take to somehow make them video game adjacent. At the same time, some of my favorite stuff from Idle Thumbs has nothing to do with video games. Robot News isn't video games, Jeff Gone Goldblum isn't video game news. The other podcast that happens in the same room, Video Games Hot Dog, is often times barely about video games and it's great in the same way Thumbs is great. I love wild tangents and wacky off the cuff conversation, but I will be frank that a general pop culture podcast is much less appealing to me. If what's actually happening is the same thing as always but you're just going to feel less guilty about it, hell yeah.

ahh new musical sting!!! e:

Considering Dan read the correction, they got everything wrong since there's no such thing as a nucular submarine.

Does Amazon Prime in Europe work the same way as in the US? It's 20% off physical copies of games you pre-order (or maybe even just order). If that is the case, then perhaps legit answer is Amazon?

That was my impression, too. Every site that I follow that reports on console news contradicts that and has said it's a single game for one month, contrary to that article. Honestly I would almost be in if it was just solid hardware with decent around the house battery life with a netflix-style back catalog. I don't know how well that would actually do for Nintendo, but anecdotally it seems like that's a thing a lot of people would happily pay for even without the prospect of new games. If it was $200 without all that goofy motion stuff (and a real d-pad) with a solid online catalog I'd have been in for it pretty much right away, and maybe even considered it at $250. Nintendo is not interested in that, though.