rincewitch

Today's episode made me too terrified to ever contemplate building a PC.

Thank you, Idle Thumbs, for doing your part to inform the public about Bigger Luke, and the menace he poses to decent society.

As soon as Nick mentioned that he had "all" of the CK2 DLC turned on I knew exactly how his story would end: in Aztecs and defeat.

We had the Mac RAM doubler (imaginatively named "RAM Doubler" on our old Performa 630CD, but in the end it didn't really matter whether or not it worked since everything was in the middle of transitioning from 68k Macs to PowerPC-- our computer had a 68040 processor, so either something didn't require a PPC and we could run it, or it did and we couldn't, and all the RAM in the world wouldn't help. I think it says a lot that I somehow remembered all of this garbage from 1995 but couldn't say what processor my current machine uses if you put a gun to my head.

I remember when Dropsy was just a thread on Something Awful, and here it is on a GOTY list! They grow up so fast. ;___; Re: game music, my favorite game music of the year was definitely the OST of Undertale-- which makes sense, since my first exposure to Toby Fox's work was the music he did for Homestuck. The Undertale soundtrack simultaneously fit with the retro-JRPGish look of the game but also conveyed a lot of narrative meaning through the use of leitmotifs, recurring themes, remixes, etc. And in a game that puts so much emphasis on the relationships between its characters and the player, it makes a sense that the player is also able to track the relationships between the songs on the soundtrack. Plus it had a bunch of extremely cool boss fight songs, and cool songs are the most important part of any boss fight. I also really liked the music for this year's Final Fantasy XIV expansion, so maybe cool boss fight songs are the secret calculus through which all video game music can be judged.

All the talk about media you seek out when you're depressed was real as fuck.

Dragon Age: Inquisition managed to pull this off with just two voices for each gender, but I guess since you can't play as a lizard person or a talking cat or whatever in Dragon Age they basically just needed to cover the two main accents your character might plausibly have had. Anyway, I'm tremendously pleased that 2015 really was the year of the PS3 all along.

I'm trying to learn TyranoBuilder for small-scale projects that can be played in browsers (as opposed to a Ren'py game or whatever--I'd feel weird asking people to download and install a separate application to play a 15 minute game), so it's nice there's a thread about it here!

The discussion of how to make sure that there's still a completable critical path in open world games made me think of something J.E. Sawyer for Obsidian posted on Something Awful about quest design in Fallout: New Vegas: The way the goon he was replying to (Reveilled) described it has always kind of stuck with me-- "the game had to be possible to complete, even if you had a infinite ammo, always-on flamethrower sticking out of your chest." Anyway, I believe that philosophy was one of the reasons the character Yes Man existed-- because he's a robot who can just transfer to a new chassis every time you kill him, you still have at least one main quest path open without having to mark the other main faction NPCs (Caesar, House, etc.) as essential/unkillable. And I guess, further afield from open the Big Open World Game but still in the realm of RPG critical path design, all of this also kind of made me think of Undertale, where the critical path you're on is actually defined by how much havoc you've wrought and how many NPCs you've massacred (you monster).

Thanks!

Is there a good rundown of the Brood War match-fixing scandal to read somewhere?

Anyway I've been slowly working my way through the full Idle Thumbs archives, and Episode 80 came up right in the order right after I finished listening to this one.

I came to this thread for Daddy Long-legs photos and was not disappointed. 80 Days could really use a Daddy Long-legs train section.

I related so much to the discussion of "unsanctioned nerds". Idle Weekends might wind up covering a perfect venn diagram of the sorts of games I'm into. :V Anyway! Since it's share your vague impressions of Mario 64 day here on the Idle Thumbs forums, I have extremely vivid memories of the first few times I saw Mario 64 as a kid. I never had any consoles of my own back then, and grew up playing stuff like Bungie's old Mac games, Escape Velocity, Sim games, WarCraft II, shareware RPGs like Realmz or whatever, and anything else that washed up on the bleak shores of '90s Macintosh gaming. In retrospect, all of that was probably extremely formative in terms of how I think of games, but at the time it meant it was always super exciting to visit a friend's house and play on their console. And the N64 was the most exciting console of all! It had 64 bits, which was twice as many bits as 32, so it had to be the best. We were just old enough to have been around for the tail end of the 16-bit era, so when the N64 arrived it seemed like some kind of wondrous alien spacecraft from the future that had landed in our midst, bearing a new Mario game. And Mario 64 looked incredible-- all of these huge, sprawling levels! All these varied environments! All these three dimensional spaces to traverse! Suddenly, instead of a bunch of goombas walking back and forth forever you had massive armies of rival bob-bombs clashing in battle. I wasn't thinking of it in these terms, because I was like ten years old, but the overworld map conceit of jumping into paintings seemed apropos-- the generational shift in consoles felt like jumping from a two-dimensional representation into inhabiting a real world. So that was the idea of Mario 64 that had fixed itself in my brain. So imagine my surprise in, like, 2007 or something, when a college friend brought his old N64 to his dorm and it turned out that Mario 64 had aged horrifically, and it just looked like a blurry, incoherent, garish nightmare world. Meanwhile, all the 2D Mario games have aged fantastically, and we're still happily staring at those art assets in Mario Maker or whatever. I've always wondered if that '90s low-poly 3D look will ever become cool and retro like 2D pixel graphics have, and Mario 64's aesthetic will be rehabilitated, or if those 2D games really have just aged more gracefully.