Berzee

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Posts posted by Berzee

  1. Posted

    I drove thru a drive thru yesterday and ordered Root Beer and got Dr. Pepper instead.

    Why do people do that? Is it ignorance, or is it malice?

    Is it both?

     

    But then I got a bunch of free jellybeans, so I'm ok now guys; don't worry about me. Thanks.

  3. Posted

    Pomes are just like short books, right? If you have a favored pome, maybe you can post that pome here. Or, if it is a long pome, maybe you can break off a piece of it to put here and leave directions to the rest of it, LIKE SO:

     

    "The Song of the Wheels" by G.K. Chesterton (full pome here)

     

    King Dives he was walking in his garden all alone,
    Where his flowers are made of iron and his trees are made of stone,
    And his hives are full of thunder and the lightning leaps and kills,

    For the mills of God grind slowly; and he works with other mills.
    Dives found a mighty silence; and he missed the throb and leap,
    The noise of all the sleepless creatures singing him to sleep.
    And he said: "A screw has fallen---or a bolt has slipped aside---
    Some little thing has shifted": and the little things replied:

    "Call upon the wheels, master, call upon the wheels;
    We are taking rest, master, finding how it feels,
    Strict the law of thine and mine: theft we ever shun---
    All the wheels are thine, master---tell the wheels to run!
    Yea, the Wheels are mighty gods---set them going then!
    We are only men, master, have you heard of men?

     

  6. Posted

    O I Remember the other thing I was going to say about this episode:

     

    This talk of Karateka being a fighting game that boils things down to timing and reaction instead of combo-memorization makes me think I will probably acquire it! That's what I always enjoyed about the Smash Brothers games...each character was capable of very different things, but I appreciated having an entirely common control scheme among all characters that only required a direction and a button press. Getting good with a weird character's special moves in Smash Bros always felt like more of an accomplishment than memorizing yet another combo in Soul Calibur (or Ballz for Sega Genesis, which I think was the only other fighting game I ever owned NO WAIT, I think I also had the PC version of Brutal Paws of Fury).

  9. Posted

    Well, the people who don't understand are going to say they don't, while the people that do are going to stay quiet, unless they want to be mean and mock ignorance.

     

    I guess that's the benefit of watching most of the streams after-the-fact -- when there is nobody to listen to your complaints in real-time, it frees you up to watch the screen with your eyes and mind until the light of understanding dawns in those eyes and in that mind, as was my experience. (The only mysterious thing was what the cherries did, but that was explained in both sessions).

     

    Note, I'm not opposed to the creation of a Pikmin 2 101 video-recording. I enjoy watching that game particularly so more vicarious multiplayer with wacky banter, in lieu of owning the software product my own self, is welcome.

  10. Posted

    Just watched the Pikmin 2 pinch-hitter-for-Sim-City stream...

    it boggles my mind that a lot of people (seem to?) still be mystified by watching Pikmin 2 and require more detailed explanations. I thought it was pretty obvious what was going on just a few minutes into the original Pikmin 2 stream (and I haven't played Pikmin 1 since probably a month or two after it first came out).

     

    So either you have a vocal chat minority of people who claim to be confused without actually wanting to understand, or I am truly elite in my astute comprehension of Games.

  11. Posted

    Z ) This episode was funnier than average!

     

    A ) I'm glad this podcast referenced so very much High School Baby. You've no idea how many times I have imagined making a High School Baby browsergame (it would just be Jagged Alliance with an arcade machine border, with a voice in the background saying "No, this baby is cool!"?)
     
    B ) Why is it sad to see Danny Glover specifically needing to get his computer fixed in Best Buy? Is it just because it's _always_ sad to see anyone needing to resort to the Geek Squad (true)? Or is it because Danny Glover has a particularly pronounced patina of pathos (ALSO TRUE)?
     
    C ) Clash of Heroes! I played the demo months ago! It was super fun, and then my game locked up before I could save it (most of the way through the demo) and the prospect of sitting through all those Elf Heads again was just unacceptable (I don't even think the conversations were ESC-able, but am not sure) was just more than I could stomach. Also, for some reason it ran really really badly on my laptop (which is capable of playing Fallout 3 with low-end graffix). Weird. o_O But the game systems were very fun, yes! I felt like they might even get strategically interesting.
     
    D ) It occurs to me that Miasmata is another game that might be ruined for me slightly by the theme. Because I was trying to avoid spoilers, I didn't realize until after I'd bought it that there is an element of (spoilers)survival horror / psychological thriller(/spoilers) in addition to the cartography and falling down cliffs (I knew about the main thing in the game, but not any of the implications). Now I could go play it some more and still enjoy the exploring, but every time I actually find a journal entry or something I just feel silly by association.

  12. Posted

    Bumping this old topic to say that I just finished a grueling yucata game of A Few Acres of Snow and it was lovely. I didn't understand what "asynchronous" games even were when I got Frozen Synapse, but now that I do, I might have to go back and revisit that too.

    Anyhow, now that I've dredged this up I might as well ask if there are any new developments in this area since last May? These sort of games fit very nicely into my life, since I generally have a dozen or so minutes to scamper away and look at the internet of an evening, but not enough time for a full game of anything really. Now that I understand the appeal of PBEM games, do I finally get my official MATURE ADULT badge?

    Two final thoughts:

    1) For an asynchronous board game about primarily beavers, A Few Acres of Snow left me in a shattered heap of nerves, eyes and fingers twitching, dreaming of future strategies while watching my present ones crumble in a useless parade of bateaux. Excellent. ^_^ So if anyone would like a fresh noob to stomp in a AFAOS game, feel free to send an invite to Berzee on yucata :)

    2) When I wrote "MATURE ADULT badge" just up there, my weary eyes imagined that I had made a typo even though I hadn't, and for a second I saw the words "MATURE ADULT badger". Now I'm conflicted about which of those I truly desire.

  13. Posted

    1. Classic Babywall -- Commodore 64 "Little Computer People" -- refusing to feed the little computer person for days, and when he turns green and gets into bed because he's starving...buy him some dog food. Then pester him to play anagrams with you.

    2. I partially agree with Famous about whether or not characters can be intrinsically appealing. I don't think there is necessarily some quality in Mario that would guarantee his heroic status in any era. I couldn't tell if Sean was saying that there is no such thing as an inherently appealing ANYTHING, or if he was just referring to characters. I have to believe it was just characters, because he does apparently think that "marketing" at least is inherently appealing? =P Anyhow, it's probably not fair to fully dissect a passing podcast remark...bah, anthropology, etc... (p.s. I also have had an undefinable resistance to ever playing a Rayman game...I think I rented one from Drug Mart one time in the distant past).

    3. First-person puzzle games with stark graffix always seem like the kind of thing I would like, but for some strange reason I never actually end up playing any of them. The one about the paint, also this Antichamber, and a few other ones from the past...it seems that I'm the epitome of "casual" for that particular genre and the only thing I can play is Portal. The rest of them I just read about while tapping my chin with a thoughtful finger.

    4. There is a lot of enthusiasm / loathing for the idea of "games as platforms" but while listening to this podcast I had the strange realization that I just simply don't encounter those games in the wild. None of the games I play fit the mold, or at least not the way I play them...I think I must be instinctively avoiding them. I like feelings of completion, and being able to lean back and say "yes, it is over" and imagine that at some point in development, the developer did the same thing. =P

    5. And most importantly: yesterday I put this cast on my mp3 player to listen to on the drive back from work...then I stopped at a Wendy's 10 minutes down the road (to buy a tea that was too big for my cupholder and spilled everywhere...in the last 13 years medium-sized teas have actually outgrown the capacity of a 2000 Focus Sedan's cup-holding receptacles! >_<) and when I started driving again I was so distracted by laughing at babywalls that I accidentally drove the wrong way and didn't realize it until I was back at work again. So I was 20 minutes late and covered in tea when I got home, but it was a good podcast so I didn't mind overmuch.

  14. Posted

    I once met a person who thought an anecdote was a trend,

    but I'm noticing more and more that I keep meeting people who think trends are anecdotes.

    Both of the previous statements are false, but they carry a deeper truth.

  15. Posted

    Edit: Excellent: New Saturday Morning Streams Thread

    --------------------

    http://www.twitch.tv...mbs/b/363355110

    I enjoyed that. Did you enjoy that? I know I did. It was very exciting! (I realized I had been rooting for Olimar for the first half of the stream simply because near the beginning it was stated that Jake was worse at this Video Game...and then I felt guilty and partisan and changed allegiances).

    ALSO: I think the streams should have their own Idle Thumbs Episodes threads; they are deserving.

    I don't have Pikmin 2, but this makes me wonder why I never played more than a couple of levels of Pikmin 1. I must rectify this problem in the future.

  16. Posted

    Now if only someone would make a game that is to blacksmithing as Receiver is to shoot-smithing (and then put that game into an MMO to replace the "double-click on a stack of iron bars; watch an episode of Little House on the Prairie; check to see if you made a sword" system).

    mp3.com has songs by Chris Remo that aren't about video games

    this frightens and confuses me

  20. Posted

    Is this thread supposed to be trailers for upcoming games, or classic trailers of awesomeness/awfulness?

    If the latter, here's the only trailer in recent memory that utterly convinced me that I needed to preorder the game:

  23. Posted

    Minus!

    (This comic arc is completed, though the author is still making lots of other, even weirder stuff. If you imagine Calvin as a mostly-mute girl whose imagination can affect actual reality, that will give you some initial idea about what this internet comic is like. It's all lovely watercolors, which I like so much that I bought the coffee table book).

    An example of one of the best ones (this one only features Minus the character in the background though...she's the one holding onto the balloon in panel 3)

    minus39.jpg

  24. Posted

    Also to throw in three of my old favorites

    "Young Adult Novel" by Daniel Pinkwater, which is a young adult novel about a group of junior high school boys who write satirical young adult novels starring a character named "Kevin Shapiro" (satirizing mainly the fact that 75% of the Young Adult shelf in every library nowadays is books about suicide, divorce, or body image problems)...who are then stunned to discover that a new child has joined their school and his name is: Kevin Shapiro. O_O

    Also, The Mezzanine! It's a 144-page book about one man's thoughts while riding an escalator up to the next floor of an office building. It has digressing footnotes on almost every page, some of which take up half the page. I love this book, but I've never actually met anybody in real life who loved it half as much after I forced them to read it.

    And, How to Be Funny, by Jovial Bob Stine (incidentally author of the Goosebumps series which was popular when I was a child and yet which I never read). I know that the cover and title combine to make it seem like the worst book ever, and that it treads halfway over into joke-book territory, but as it contains instructional chapters on things like how to make a joke last fourteen minutes and also has a scientific chart of various fishes' top speeds, I found it to be an invaluable guiding light in my formative years.

  25. Posted

    I'll second Wodehouse! (I actually didn't enjoy the Jeeves book I read very much, but the "Psmith" -- the P is silent, as in physics, or pshrimp -- books are some of my favorites. If you can stomach long play-by-play chapters about cricket matches, by all means start with "Mike and Psmith" -- but I started with "Leave it to Psmith" and then jumped back, and they were still excellent.)

    Recommendation:

    "The Squires Tales" series by Gerald Morris is comprised of nicely-crafted Arthurian adventure stories, most of which contain (as a primary or secondary theme) some calling out or criticism of the more superficial or misguided aspects of knighthood and/or "courtly love" (he also shows up certain types of French Minstrels, Religious Hermits and Royal Courtiers -- and by implication their modern equivalents). Usually this is done by having sensible characters and ridiculous characters stuck traveling together, so that they may engage in chuckle-worthy bickerings...some of his characters act more or less naturally, and some of them are painfully and deliberately knightly (impromptu vows of silence, or archaic language, or hunkering down at some river for years at a time to force a joust with every passing knight).

    It might all sound a bit didactic except for the aforementioned bickering, and also the fact that his protagonists have flaws and silly mistakes aplenty, too...and perhaps above all, a willingness to include a casual decapitation on any page at the drop of a hat (coz, y'know, knights!).

    Most of the time, I read through these books and chortle at the silly people while simultaneously making a mental note to stop acting that way myself. =P

    I have sworn myself to silence now, so that I will not accidentally spoil any of the books.