Goose Malloy

Haha, that's a good point about the Tom Francis and Nick thing, I was sad to see him leave Crate & Crowbar, but if this does happen (I'm sure it won't but one can dream) that would certainly be an interesting development. I don't have much to say about the main story here since it's mostly already been said, but I am super sad about it for sure :-(

I think you raise a number of good points, but I would resist the notion that a more systems-driven game would necessarily be devoid of "meaning" (like Kyir I think this is probably a difficult to define and unhelpful metric, but I'll take your notion of imparting knowledge "that is going to be useful in the real world, or that will make me think about things in a different way"). Similarly I'm also not convinced that a game that has more of a narrative focus would inherently furnish players with some "useful" information that would prompt reflection about real world issues. Certainly in the examples you choose I think you could argue that this dichotomy is present; Spelunky probably doesn't have anything to teach us about much else other than how to play it, while Gone Home is as I understand it a game that tries to address real-life LGBT issues and might help players to see these matters in a different light (apologies if I'm misrepresenting the nature of Gone Home, to my shame I have never gotten around to playing it). But I think one could find other examples that problematise this dichotomy. For example, the Democracy series are games that are pretty much wholly systemic in their design, with no real "designed" narrative content per se, and yet one can very much see how the nature of the systems within the games and the manner in which the player interacts with them might encourage the player to reflect more deeply about the nature of our systems of governance, the incentives our politicians have when policymaking, and other aspects of our society's political sphere. At the same time I think one could say that a series like Broken Sword (which I enjoy enormously), while very narrative-focused, probably has little to offer the player in the realm of "deep thinking"; they're enjoyable romps but I very much don't see them as having the capacity to shed light on any societal issues. Ultimately I'd say there are definitely systemic games that can be "useful" and narrative-driven games that can be "meaningless", I think this comes down more to the individual game than being inherent to either category.

Fab, glad to hear you (and a lot of others it seems like) are enjoying this game, I think it might be my next purchase. It's been a long time since I really felt interested in playing a JRPG (iirc the last one I really got into was the Golden Sun series on gba), but the aesthetic and and the positive reception have been enough to garner my interest in this case. How are people finding the story? I certainly like the conceit of multiple self-contained stories with more personal stakes than the usual JRPG fare, but I haven't heard too much about whether they're engaging in of themselves. Changing topic for a sec, I must say I'm not quite finding Hollow Knight as good as some of you I'm afraid. There's certainly a lot to like there, but I'm getting a bit tired of the Metroidvania traipsing around the map you're forced to do if you want to get anywhere, particularly as in some instances the map can be quite misleading Yesterday I went to two different areas that were labelled as crossing points into different areas, but after finding both of them inaccessible I didn't really feel like playing anymore and just gave up for the night. Edit: sorry this was meant to be a reply to Yasawas' post about Octopath Traveller, but I didn't quote it correctly.

Great, thanks for reporting back. I pretty much play exclusively undocked so this sounds perfect for me.

Alternatively I think I have an Indian cookbook somewhere in my house that has a curry recipe that literally calls for 100 cloves of garlic, which does seem a tad excessive (I've never tried making it so couldn't vouch for whether it's a good recipe or not), but it could be a decent solution to your problem.

Yeah I just heard that about The Sexy Brutale, it's a real shame as I was looking forward to getting that on the Switch. As you say hopefully it's the kind of thing that can be improved by a patch. I've been really enjoying playing through Thimbleweed Park so I've got a real hankering to pick up some more narrative-based/adventure games on the console, it seems to be an ideal fit. Unfortunately A Night In The Woods doesn't seem to have come out yet; hopefully there will be more news on that soon. As an aside does anyone know how the game Gorogoa plays on the Switch, has anyone here bought it? It got a really positive review on Rock Paper Shotgun but obviously that was the PC version, so I'm wondering if the experience translates well.

I have a much less informative tiny niggle but for what it's worth Dalek is pronounced with the first syllable rhyming with 'far' and not 'day'.

Thanks again Chris, had a listen to a few of those and enjoyed them thoroughly (well enjoyed probably isn't the right word since they're all pretty much about the massively fraught nature of our political landscape right now, but you know what I mean.)

Thank you very much, I'll definitely check out some of those. That's a super impressive list, I'm British and try to stay reasonably up to date with current affairs and I reckon I've listened to maybe two of those, clearly I need to up my game :-p

I hesitate to bring up such a stupid film on a forum filled with intelligent people but in Austin Powers: Goldmember Britney Spears appears as herself at the beginning and is soon revealed to be an evil robot sent to kill Austin Powers who shoots bullets out of her breasts, which I guess in a way is kind of similar to what you guys were saying. So there's that. Swiftly moving on, Chris you mentioned that you'd been listening to a podcast about British politics on an episode a few weeks ago, do you remember what it was?

I indeed found it pretty repulsive and out of keeping with Twin Peaks' usual style. I mean, it's incredibly graphic but doesn't really contain an iota of the sense of horror that made BOB's murder of Maddie in the original series so terrifying. Instead it just felt needlessly unpleasant to me. Then again while watching the E3 trailer for the new Wolfenstein game I was again rather repulsed by the graphic (albeit fairly normal for an FPS game) violence on display there so maybe I'm just at a period where I'm waking up to the uncomfortable reality that quite a lot of my entertainment frequently depicts extremely graphic violence.

Yeah that seemed like quite a notable counterpoint to me. Equally the Lady in the radiator, while obviously physically "deformed", doesn't seem to display any negative moral qualities (I think, it's been a long time since I've seen Eraserhead.) I think the principal probably works better when solely looking at "unkempt" features instead, i.e. long greasy hair, dirty clothes and a generally dishevelled appearance, although this doesn't really work fully either.

What is the weird 90s music revival thingee that Chris refers to? I think I could half understand what was being talked about but wasn't 100% sure.

If you have posted this before I thank you for mentioning it again as I was completely unaware that this was the case. I'm not well versed enough in Marker's works to be able to call myself a fan (I've only seen La jetée and Sans soleil which seem to be the only two easily accessible on DVD in the UK) but as someone interested in French new wave cinema in general this is a fascinating insight into a facet of one of its most accomplished directors' work that was previously unknown to me, and an intriguing confluence of different forms of media I enjoy.

God I hope not. The stroking animation is already really uncomfortable and creepy (I kept on having a weird tingling sensation at the back of my neck while watching that video, and I found myself unconciously having to turn around several times to ensure there wasn't a horrible green haired man behind me). If you're correct about the source of the animation that makes it even worse. Oh and just as a heads up Fallout Shelter is now available on Android. I have the feeling that it won't end up being nearly as entertaining as Chris' stories are, but I might give it a go out of curiosity. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bethsoft.falloutshelter&hl=en_GB

I kinda feel that the amount of people who have played Majora's Mask without having played Ocarina first is small enough, and that their experience of the two games will be interestingly different enough from our own to make it worth Horza waiting until they've completed Majora's Mask and maybe posted their impressions before they finally get around to Ocarina, classic though it is. The people who say that it's not a good starting point for the series are probably looking at it from a point of whether it is most representative of the general feel of most entries in the series, which I guess from a conventional viewpoint would be Link To The Past for the 2D games and Ocarina for the 3D ones. Oddly enough, going by this viewpoint, the actual first Zelda game wouldn't be a very good first Zelda game for a newcomer to the series, due to the series having largely moved from that more exploration and combat focused style to a heavier emphasis on puzzle solving. It's also possible another reason for this opinion is due to the perceived difficulty of the game, which although certainly more pronounced that Ocarina probably isn't insurmountable for most gamers. There's also the view that MM is a sort of companion piece to OOT, and thus it is necessary to play the former to have the context to understand the later. While this is an understandable viewpoint I don't see it as hugely persuasive, as previously stated MM is completely standalone, and I rather like the idea of someone coming to it without the context of OOT and not having their perception of it coloured by the earlier game, but maybe it being the other way round, so someone thinks that Hyrule is actually the bizarro-world form of Termina.

As something of an aside, that figure of 90% of all films made before 1929 being lost always saddened me greatly, despite my no longer being the cinephile I once was. Looking at that list, it's pretty astounding to think that we did have at one point a large amount of film from the Victorian period (sorry, I know this is a rather anglocentric term, and most of the film produced then was probably French, but it does really help convey the sheer oldness of the stuff to a Brit), most of which is now lost. I'm a Classicist, so I'm used to dealing with much of the written material from that period being lost, but it still feels incredibly depressing to know that such a wealth of visual evidence from a comparatively close period to us is gone forever.

Thank you again for your additional comments TheLastBaron, I've read the first two chapters of Southern Bastards and it's shaping up very nicely, I'm eager to get to the apparent mindfuck of a twist at the end of chapter 4. The bundle definitely seems worth it at this point, I'm actually fairly new to Anglo-American comics but I'm really appreciating the breadth and depth of Image's range of titles and this seems like a good selection even taking into account the stuff I already have. Btw, I've got a copy of the Adrian Tomine book and I can thoroughly recommend it (though I guess you've bought it now so it's not like I can influence your purchasing decision!) Have you read any of his narrative comics? I also had my eye on the Rutu Modan book for a while, but I think it kinda slipped from my attention, so thank you for reminding me of its existence!

This has happened to me several times while listening to Idle Thumbs, there's something simultaneously excruciating and wonderful about doing one's best to conceal the ridiculous grin on my face so that the other people in the street don't think I'm some inane moron. Please continue to do this Thumbs!

Thank you for that post TheLastBaron, that's very helpful. Judging by your recommendations the bundle does seem worth it, but I might wait to see what else they add before I plump for it.

There's a new Image bundle on Humble, which would be enormously exciting if I hadn't bought a lot of the series on this bundle fairly recently. Still there are quite a few things there that I don't have, could any of you recommend some of the lesser known series on it? (Basically the ones that didn't appear on the end of year "best comic" lists.)

I see, thank you very much for the recommendation I shall attempt to have a look at it when I manage to find the time. I guess what I found really captivating with Blindsight, as someone who really is very ignorant with the state of written sci-fi as a whole, was its attempting to grapple with really rather deep philosophical questions while tying it them into what I found was a very engaging narrative. I would hazard that, being someone who kinda comes from a background perhaps more grounded in philosophy (albeit mostly ancient stuff), this style of sci-fi as essentially being an examination of our own speculations about the nature of conciousness and so forth is much more appealing to me than the received image I usually have of sci-fi as often either using analogous aspects of future societies to critique aspects of our own (perhaps this was more the historical role of sci-fi with Nineteen Eighty-Four and whatnot), or the kind of space opera thing that I guess comes to mind when one thinks of Dune or 2001 (I'm aware "space opera" is an incredibly simplistic manner of referring to those two works.) This is of course a very reductive and perhaps rather slighting way of viewing vast swathes of the genre, but I really would like to read more books in a similar vein to Blindsight, so when dipping my toes into sci-fi I'd much rather read one of those than try and slug through a 600 page space opera. I apologise for the somewhat rambling nature of this post and also possibly for being one of those assholes who barges into a genre where geeks are existing quite happily and starts insisting that everything possess more literary merit, hopefully I didn't do this too much.

I utterly loved this book when I read it a while ago, and was pleasantly surprised to see this thread about it today, as I'd been thinking about it only yesterday due to my recommending it to my brother, so this was a nice coincidence. I hear Watts has recently released another book set in the same universe, I'll have to pick that up. I apologise for not attempting to discuss the thematic contents of the books but it's far too early in the morning for me here and I would undoubtedly embarrass myself (and it's been a bit too long since my reading it for me to be particularly insightful), but may I ask if there are any other books of a similar vein that you would recommend, give that you say you've absorbed a lot of science fiction? I'm actually really quite a novice when it comes to the genre, despite my general geekiness, so I really found Blindsight's exploration of the philosophy of mind and the nature of conciousness really fascinating, whereas perhaps for you the effect was somewhat lessened because you were aware of antecedents that looked at similar themes. I've been wanting to ask this question for a while on the internet, but never found the right place to do so (any good scfi forums out there?) so your thread is much appreciated :-)

KOTOR on Android is now a thing, which is awesome. I'd meant to play 80 Days a lot over the Christmas period but the surprise release of the former suckered me in and I spent most of my time with it. Touch controls were a minor annoyance at first but soon I got over them (the old style pause fighting obviously made this a lot more bearable than it would have otherwise been) and just completed it today. Still one of my favourite games ever, might have to do a dark side playthrough now.

Yeah, having a rethink about the episode I think you might be closer to the mark than I was, your line of thinking seems to be more in keeping with the way Koenig operates in the podcast as a whole. Yes, looking back on it I think you're right in this regard. I remember someone here saying that Serial could be deemed problematic insofar as Koenig was using a personal tragedy among ethnic minorities to make points about the flaws in the American justice system, and thus could be said to be disregarding their private grief, or even exploiting it, to mount a standard middle class liberal attack on the justice system (I can't remember who said this, but I believe this was the gist of it, apologies if I am interpreting your argument incorrectly.) While I'm not claiming that my interpretation is any more correct than anyone else's, to me this is exactly not what Koenig does, she seems entirely focused on the specific details of the case and at no point, as far as I can tell, attempts to extrapolate these finer details and apply them to any broader critique of the justice system. For example in the part when she is discussing plea bargains with Adnan she doesn't say something along the lines of: "and so you see that the justice system effectively forces suspects to plea guilty to crimes they might not have committed in the hope of receiving a better sentence, a huge flaw in the criminal justice system." Of course, as you state, it seems probable that everyone who listens to that section will probably come away thinking that this is actually true, but Koenig doesn't attempt to state it outright. Thus although recognition of flaws in the justice system (boy I'm getting sick of using that phrase) might be an inescapable outcome of listening to Serial, as far as I can tell Koenig isn't exploiting the case to make these points, she's letting the facts speak for themselves. I think in hindsight that was probably what she was doing with the possible examples of racism, she doesn't state that racist attitudes among the jury led to Adnan's conviction, but she presents the evidence that it possibly could have done.