Jake

You can just skip them if you don't like them. On shows like the Wire which start with a cold opening, I think it would often be weird to just cut to black for half a beat between the pre-intro content and the main show. The intro, when done well, works great for pacing purposes. I'm not saying that's always the case with the Wire (I watched the entire series on DVD and probably intentionally watched the intro twice per season), but as a general rule I think that's the case. Futurama, for instance, often opens cold, cutting right into the show pre-credits sequence, and they also mix things up with the intro each episode, so you'd not only be screwing with the pacing/timing/flow of the show, you'd actually be losing content if they were cut. Also, I'm glad they leave them there just for the sake of preservation. If I'm paying money for a TV series on DVD, I'd like to get as close to the original cut which appeared on TV as possible. Maybe that's me being an obsessive dorko, but I like having reasonably pristine (to the reasonable best of DVDs capabilities) copies of the shows as they were originally produced, not cut down for someone else's assumption of what viewing convenience would be.

Quantum of Solace exceeded my expectations by a lot. The editing duding the action sequences were sometimes cut too fast (like the second Borne movie), but they were extremely well choreographed and paced in my opinion (again, like the second Borne movie... only a bit more skillfully than that.). Much like Casino Royale, I was disappointed that they ended the movie in a completely ridiculous situation which sort of pissed on the earlier parts of the film (last time it was a building in Venice which was exploding while falling apart and sinking into a canal, and this time we get a hotel which was for some reason constructed entirely out of explosions), but I thought in general that it delivered more than what I ever hoped to get out of a modern Bond movie. Before Casino Royale, I don't think there was a good Bond movie made in my lifetime, and I'm enjoying the reversal of that trend. Obviously, compared to Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace isn't nearly as solid as a "film" or whatever, but it was a more competently put together action/espionage movie than most any that have been made in a long long while (short Casino Royale and the better parts of the Borne films probably). What would you prefer? It seemed like a pretty inspired choice to me They use the original Tom Waits recording of the song in season two, so maybe that will be more to your liking.

I don't play a lot of games, admittedly, but this was the first time I'd seen the "fmod" logo at the start of a game. (Fmod being an often-used realtime sound and music processing/mixing engine.) With the amount of great realtime interactivity going on with the music and sound, it's a well deserved placement right there up front.

That surprised me for a bit as well. Fortunately, it becomes less conventional the more controllers you plug in and occupy with friends.

I wouldn't have it any other way. It may be because I went through bouts of writing a lot of news, and the old Idle News stuff had a tendency to be amazingly potent food for search scripts, parsers, bots, and the like. My favorite fucking thing, though is that the two biggest words are "game" and "games." I wish one of them was "Video" though. That would have made me print it out and hang it up possibly.

On the other end it might be 2 wholly inaccessible pretentious hours of Hoffman flopping around. That's pretty unlikely, but you know, just tempering things a bit.

That map still doesn't represent population per state or per county. It would bubble even more. I mean, remember, Obama also won the popular vote.

Nope that wasn't a shot at you. It was just one of the things that came to mind when I heard the question so I rambled incoherently about it for a bit.

Despite making brief fun of norfolk'n'clue's name (and threatening to poop in his mouth in an earlier thread a few weeks back) I tried to give that question (maybe the longest and most rambling question ever) as decent and realistic an answer as I could, tried to speak from my experience playing games and helping to make them, etc. I dunno. With a lot of the questions we, I think, really don't know what to say.

Well, this time the wizard made his presence known during the break and it broke our minds.

Sorry to be a thread-closing asshole here, but... come on.

For the first time ever I hate my lack of PS3.

If you have to ask, even ironically, after this thread, maybe you shouldn't buy it. PC.

Haha that was made by a friend of mine. He was pretty bummed that Apple rejected it for the App Store.

All is well.

Holy crap that r-type level.

Since this is kind of a free time thing that we do to enjoy ourselves, you're probably mostly going to hear us talking about 1) games we like or are interested in because we think they have potential to be good, 2) news and current events we find either 2a) awesome and great, or 2b) ridiculous or stupid. (That probably sounds like familiar ground to those who read Thumb regularly back when it had regular content, as those broad topics were sort of the loose boundaries containing much of the writing we ran back in the day.) We probably won't talk about ridiculous or stupid games all that often unless they're hilariously so. I don't think any of the three of us currently on the podcast really find that much humor in "LOL this game is dumb lol" unless there is something exceptionally unique about what makes it dumb. There are so many horrible games out there and so few standout exciting fun games that it seems like a waste of life (and a waste of time in a 60 minute podcast) to talk about a shit game for the sake of some cheap hatey-hate laughs... especially when we manage to perpetually amuse ourselves during these damn things just talking about stuff we like and think is awesome. That was maybe a longer explanation than was needed, but whatever. I feel that, with few exceptions, once you've seen Alex Navarro's video review of Bad Motha Truckers Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (maybe not the best example in terms of quality piss-take reviews, but definitely one of the most cited), you really don't need to do that schtick unless there's a damn good reason. PS: n0wak this isn't meant to be bagging on your for suggesting that, and I know you were mostly joking around, but it was a good excuse to dump some of my thoughts on content covered on Thumb new and old. So, yeah!

... The manual, of course:

Congrats to those organising, though!

The guy who's making that is cool. He interned/worked at Telltale in Summer '07 and helped write/design the first few episodes of Sam & Max season two. The sound/music/visuals in that trailer are intriguing and good, but yeah, I'm also curious to see how it holds up after the first few minutes.

John Walker's really liked a few of the Strong Bad episodes, though. A surprise to me, for sure.

Hooray! You may have finally defeated the classic marek dancing animated gif. edit: BONUS PRESENT UNLOCK I have unearthed, from my old Thumbs and Mojo project directories, some rarely seen, often discussed BRONSTRING GOLD. See , and the original, .That is all. * may not be true gold

So I was cruising the "toblix upbeat for once" comments and came across this thread. I rarely take credit for shit like this on forums but this post made me happy so I might as well... That was me*. You're welcome. Also me, and a lot of work by another guy. You're welcome again.* And our composer, and the animator who did Sam's run cycle and shoot animation which I stole from the trailer.

I enjoy how nice you are.

I personally wouldn't consider it an appropriate topic of conversation for the podcast. And if we had asked it, what would Steve have said about it? It wouldn't be appropriate for him, as an employee of 2K and a friend of a lot of ex-Irrational folks, to say anything in public beyond a PR-approved response. Again, I can't speak for Steve, but if I were in his place and my friends awkwardly asked me that question while recording a podcast, I wouldn't know what to do but to give a polite non-answer, completely regardless of my feelings towards Ken Levine. This particular hot scoop (if it is one at all) has a zero percent chance of being dropped in the context you're hoping for.