tberton

PROJECT XING YES! Too bad about Buried Metropolis, but there is stuff on that list I can get behind, so I'm happy. In fact, the only one there that I'm not interested in at all is Eras of Adventure.

Buried Metropolis.

My heart is breaking in slow motion.

I'm fairly sure that the story is referred to in that episode as though "grenade rolls down a hill" was a already a joke. In any case, the core of the joke is "emergent Far Cry 2 gameplay."

This is the only thread I can think of to pose this question: should we have a "explaining Idle Thumbs in-jokes" thread? If there was just an influx of new listeners, I would have for them to be confused about wizards, Far Cry 2, Dishonored, Lords and gold game cool blum.

Thanks, but I didn't make that. This person did http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=100005614&postcount=115

I wanted to follow the "Always Bet on Petty" principle, but Headlander doesn't seem that neat. I won't be sorry if it gets made though. Unless it gets made instead of Project Xing. Seriously: Smash Bros! Elemental combat! Woodcut art style!

I imagine a large portion of that 250 000 was not at full price, but that's a pretty impressive figure for four people with no publishing contract. I have to imagine they're pretty happy with that number, especially 6 months in. I doubt Gone Home will sell a ton more than that, but if it goes on sale again this year or gets featured in some Humble Bundles, I imagine it will get pushed up to 300 000 by year end. That's got to at least give them some wiggle room. And it means there are 250 000 people who know who they are and might be interested in their next game. Congratulations, Fullbright!

Cool, that means you don't mind voting for Project Xing just for me! EDIT: Yeah, even though I didn't vote for Dear Leader, I would be super happy to see it made so that there's a female project lead.

Oh hey, turns I did vote for Mnemonic. Sweet. EDIT: Please vote for Project XIng people! I will be heartbroken if this doesn't happen.

I just read the PDF for Mnemonic and now I'm wishing I had voted for it.

For Pendleton Ward, I picked Little Pink Best Buds because it had me laughing out loud and I love the idea of Nintendogs where the dogs are fighting to be your friend.

I went Dear Leader, Project XIng and Buried Metropolis, but there are a ton of other ones I'd love to see.

Fucking pumped. I haven't voted yet, but I know at the very least I want Project Xing to get made. Smash Bros. meets Avatar: The Last Airbender is the coolest damn idea.

I'm not making this, but I just read an interview with Tom Francis and this came up: A stealth game where you have to avoid people you don't want to talk to would be amazing. Somebody do this.

Alright, somebody needs to talk up Majora's Mask and I guess that's going to be me. First off: I love Graceland and have never listened to Rhythm of the Saints, but I prefer Marjora's Mask to Ocarina of Time (although I suppose I have never actually personally completed either of them, since my brother did most of the controller handling when we played Zelda growing up). I'm going to compare Majora to Groundhog Day, because that's obviously it's closest counterpart, although I don't know if the film was a direct inspiration for the game. Both are very character-based stories and their characters succeed because of the familiarity you get with them. In Groundhog Day, you get to know all the residents of the town extremely well, just as Phil does, because of how often you see them in the exact same situations and how they change ever so slightly every time, while remaining essentially the same. The same thing happens in Majora's Mask. You get a great sense of who the residents of Clock Town are, because you encounter and re-encounter them constantly, but as the game progresses, you see them in slightly new situations and learn a little bit more about them. Heck, the main subquest of the game is entirely based around getting to know people and help them out. Likewise, both works have a great sense of place. In the movie, you come to know Punxsutawney extremely well, because you see it so often. I've now been through Clock Town so many times that I could probably map it out. But the constant re-treading of the same spaces doesn't feel tedious: they may never change, but every time you go through, you're a bit different, so you see something different. Or maybe you're this time you're there at a different time, so something knew happens that you weren't able to witness before. Essentially, the limited scope of both Majora's Mask and Groundhog Day makes them feel extremely dense, which I think is something that appeals to Idle Thumbs. Majora is kind of like the "One City Block" game that Warren Spector always talks about: a small, well-defined space where every nook and cranny is fleshed out. Granted, Majora is still a rather large game and it's not entirely as fleshed out as one might hope, but it does a wonderful job of feeling packed to the brim with stuff whereas Ocarina feels empty. The game feels truly alive: there's always something happening, something moving around, changing and, after you go through your first three-day cycle, you always know that no matter what you're doing, things are happening elsewhere in the world. It means you fill in the blanks and make the world bigger than it actually is. In this way, it's very similar to The Last Express, another Thumbs favourite. That brings me to my final point, which is that Majora's Mask is the most thematically coherent and interesting Zelda games and near the top of those categories for games period, at least those from AAA publishers. The game is about inevitability: right from the start, your failure is looming down at you. You try to save the world and get kicked back to the beginning. This world is called Termina: it's end is contained within it from the start. Every time you help somebody in a side-quest - lay a troubled soul to rest, re-unite a couple, prevent a crime - you know that it means nothing, because you turn back the clock and everything resets. The idea that the entire world is a clock with the gears constantly turning in a pre-destined motion shows up everywhere in the game: in the main mechanic, in the tower at the center of Clock Town, in the way people move through the world, even in the mechanistic feel of traditional Zelda puzzles. The theme works so well because it takes into account the limits of video games: a world that seems to change but never does, with people who seem real but move on rails, pulled inexorably to their end, goals that seem important but are ultimately trivial. It's a rather dark premise, but there's a hopeful ring to it as well. Part of that is a theme it shares with The Walking Dead: regardless of consequences, choices matter and have meaning in the moment. It doesn't matter that the Moon will fall minutes after a young couple has married - you as the player chose to spend your time giving them a few moments of happiness and that has meaning. So your actions do matter. Even moreso, while the world always moves the same way, Link is free. He changes and he effects change. Eventually, with enough work, he breaks the cycle and saves the world. It's a message that says that inevitability isn't as inevitable as it seems; that small steps can agglomerate to have big consequences. It's remarkably eloquent and that's without even going into the themes of loss, exclusion and acceptance that are also present throughout. TL;DR Everybody should play Majora's Mask. If there is any Zelda game that Idle Thumbs would like, this is it.

So I was just thinking, "Man, I'd like a Tone Control episode with Greg Kasavin." So I looked at the upcoming episode hits and whaddaya know, March 1 is "???? ??o & ???? ?????i?" which fits perfectly with "Amir Rao & Greg Kasavin". Sweet!

"Sleep no more" is a famous line from Macbeth, so it makes sense that the "Sleep No More" show would be based on that.

Just finished re-listening to this episode and I wanted to chime in on a topic Steve and Randy were talking about: the "deadness" of environmental storytelling. It's interesting that you guys refer to this as "archeological" or "forensic" storytelling; as a history student, I've always thought of it as "historical" storytelling, since you're sifting through documents and objects trying to discover something about the past just like a historian does. So when you mentioned how these are dead stories, I immediately compared that to history. The thing is, people think that history is "dead" in that it's in the past and you can't change it, but it's very much alive. Historical narratives change all the time: new information is discovered, previously ignored topics get attention, interpretations differ among scholars, new popular representations emerge. Our conception of history is always moving, because history is gigantic and it's impossible to understand the whole thing. I think this is a possible avenue for adding life to the stories in games like Gone Home. While there is often a lot of subtlety in how these stories are told, once that's figured out, the stories are fairly unambiguous. Gone Home has some ambiguity: but for the most part, I didn't have a ton of doubt about who these people were and what happened to them, especially after reading other people's impressions of the game for stuff that I missed. Adding more ambiguity and contradiction, so that there are a variety of legitimate, competing interpretations of events and maybe more significant holes that people have to fill in for themselves could, I think, go a long way to making these types of stories feel more dynamic.

This is the raddest idea for a game I've ever heard.

YES!

How quick is quick? I'm guessing under an hour. Based on what you mentioned, here are some suggestions: High Society and For Sale are both simple, fast auction games. Coup is a very good deduction and bluffing game. Carcasssone is a classic tile laying game. King of Tokyo is Yahtzee where your dice represent attacks made by giant monsters. Any of those would probably suit your purposes well.

Do you want classics, contemporary or both?

In response to Frenetic Pony's spoiler: