Jake

That's true, and I completely glossed over it. Maybe I'm dumb.

I wouldn't get your hopes up on it being objectively better, it's just very different in a way that was striking. Re the "concentration camp" portion: The characters call it a concentration camp (and for all I know there is one) but all we got to actually see of it was a traditional prison. It was, I think, most surprising to see Nazi characters in a game have actual race-motivated hate as part of their goal, and not just be "ultimate evil bad guys, just because." It felt relieving, and goes very much hand in hand with the rest of the game's comfort in just saying with a shrug, "well, that's the way it is" about just about everything narrative, theme, and mechanic related.

Yes! This makes my day.

The site takeover from before sites were built to have site takeovers. Looking at it now, it's clear why people were so shocked by it -- they actually comingle editorial space with ad space. Now sites are built with takeovers in mind, so there is plenty of room in the margins and off to the side of the site for the ad exist, so you don't need to squeeze little McLogos into every sidebar header and horizontal rule. Writing that out and reading it as I was writing it was slightly saddening.

Don't defend your movie taste to these heathens! Look at all those gameboys!

People only don't say goodbye on the phone on TV and movies!

No, I think we all knew that it is a piece of history. It's fascinating/exciting how well it captures the way you imagine the political machinations of that time and place working through such simple interlocking systems.

You wish it was called dazzle. Unfortunately, it's "zazzle."

It was a mix of both. It was all of us collectively saying "you all realize that anything but a unified front means that Nels will win right?" and everyone was already thinking that. We just made it official. Super Metroid is almost entirely gated with mechanics, isn't it? You need crazy missile type X to bash through this wall, or you need the grappling beam to swing across this otherwise insane gap! I'm sure there are parts of the game which you can complete if you have near-exploit-worthy levels of wall hopping traversal skill, but that's not explicit in the design of the game, right? I'm not anywhere near a skilled Metroid player, so while I know about speed run type scenarios, my understanding of Metroid design is "the player sees an interesting place that they can't go but find intriguing, and then when they gain a new unlock or ability they realize they can backtrack to that interesting place and discover they now have the mechanical means to access it." That's pretty different than core-skill-based gating.

Idle Thumbs 103: A Person-Shaped Thing is a Person In the darkness of space it becomes hard to tell friend from foe. It seems landing a crew safely in unknown territory is harder than you thought. You realize your mistake: "I'm low on fuel; need to load up." Without getting up, a simple gesture is recognized and your display flickers to life. "One 16-pocket crazy crust cheese pizza, please. Extra olives." Satisfied, you lean back and wait. Games Discussed: Neptune's Pride 2: Triton, Pizza Hut for Xbox 360, Kerbal Space Program, Papers Please Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

I almost called this episode "Thomas Was AO" and didn't, and now I regret it. Around 1.y, probably. Chris talks about the systems in the game but not about the story much at all. He's played the whole game, so he's speaking from the perspective of having completed the experience, but there aren't a bunch of specific spoilers that I remember.

I think it was just a corruption of that line combined with that sentiment in Vertigo, when Stewart gets increasingly aggressive with his weird requests.

I'd need to listen to that again to be sure, but that probably wasn't specifically related at you and that particular phrase. Maybe we're just assholes, though.

That is the preferred way, yes, but saying "hi!" "hello!" "hey Jake" "whoa, hey I heard your voice on the internet!" or "[looks scandalized, throws drink in my face, punches me]" are all acceptable in a pinch.

Whoa, welcome to "we are all awkward: the thread." We are all apparently super awkward. I am the worst at meeting people I only know online, and somehow even worse than that at being normal when someone actually recognizes me. Also: Scott I know who you are! And: Derek/Ronald if I had known you were the guy with that one Twitter avatar I would have recognized you immediately. Sorry that was weird. It was mostly a surprise to be identified by our voices in a bar. Bonus fact: The owner of that bar (Dear Mom) is a Thumbs listener as well.

I want to know what that means.

Every episode since we got the studio set up has been in stereo, but it is a subtle mix. I think this time I accidentally got thrown further to the left than the default settings because of the ridiculous panning Chris put in on me saying "noooOO! NOOOOO!" at the start of the episode. The pan slider probably ended on a key which was leaning more left than usual.

The claim at least a while ago was that the consumer kits would have a higher res display.

Idle Thumbs 101: Introduction to Video Games There's an old saying in video games that when one door opens, there's probably another door inside of that one that looks sort of the same, and you have to open it, too. We complete BioShock Infinite, Nick and Chris take their first delicious bite of StarCraft 2 in a long while, and Jake's intro stock plummets. Games Discussed: BioShock Infinite, StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, Super Crate Box, Ridiculous Fishing, Injustice: Gods Among Us Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

I saw that student film years ago and enjoyed it. At this point I like that Solo looks like Harrison Ford coupled with Jeff Goldblum.

I can't speak for how WELL the AI plays, but I know that it plays honestly. Also I'm beyond proud of finding a reply to the full house dunk question in that tweet.

That's definitely why it's a grey area. It's a move which is made way easier because it's an in-office game versus a mostly-anonymous online one, but the game is also a game which (as said on the cast) seems to have very few systemic walls specifically to facilitate meta-gaming-based backstabbing and subterfuge. It feels like a cheap shot, though, because while it didn't violate the letter of the law, it violated the spirit of it as established through play up to that point. Thinking about it a bit more, I honestly don't think most players in that game would have done it, if they had the same idea. They don't feel burned because it wasn't them who pulled off the clever deceitful move, they feel burned because the rules they understood everyone to be playing by were subverted. It's not outright cheating, but it is a little like when you're playing a new board game at your friends house and they neglect to tell you until half way through the game that there is an additional technique you could employ, but they didn't reveal it was even possible until they did it. You know they technically aren't cheating, but it doesn't exactly endear anyone to anyone else, nor does it make you want to keep playing the game. But I guess if you want to be smarmy about it, there is an infinite well of "oh they're just butthurt because they didn't think of it first" that you can dredge from and never be proven wrong, because that's a point that is impossible to actually prove one way or the other.

Wow, okay, I think you're overreacting to our conversation about Monaco. We played 40 minutes of it and I enjoyed it a lot. We're not going to give up because we got busted once. We did have a lot of situations in early game play where we were going through the environments in tight clusters, we'd trip a laser and would just get beaten to a pulp by the guards in a way that we weren't skilled (or fortunate?) enough to escape so we'd just get chased around like a trapped Pac Man until the inevitable happened. I could tell (and I hope I expressed this on the cast) that there was more going on, but our early play experience was a pretty negative one because of a few things which kept happening. I want to play more of the game though, because I could tell that there was a ton of stuff happening there that we weren't quite scratching as two brand new players, playing a 4 player co-op game with only half the playercount. Nobody outright cheated, but the admin player went and asked an AFK player to log back in for a second to move their hundreds of AFK'd ships off a star, so the admin player could land there. It's not technically cheating, but it's such an intense rule bend as to make everyone want to stop playing.

I think from a pure rendering standpoint, GameCube was measurably more powerful than the PS2, but maybe not quite as nice as the original Xbox. Except it had those tiny discs so nobody could actually fit ports from the other platforms onto the GameCube without spanning multiple discs and stuff. That blew my mind. The same way the N64 was cartridge based when PS1 was CD-ROM based... So weird.

The Super Nintendo and the GBA were by two favorite Nintendo systems and they were also technologically adept for their time of release and had robust third party support. They were also incredibly straightforward. I think Link To The Past is one of the best, most tight and harmonious games ever made, and it's depressing and incredibly telling to see that modern Nintendo's creative way to sequelize it is to put a chalk drawing of your character on a wall. It makes it seem very much like they didn't realize what they had in the first place, or if they do they just don't care. Maybe they take it for granted that their underlying game blueprints are great, and that everyone else takes that for granted -- they're the expensive and understated men's suit of the game world -- so they're now convinced only way to make people pay attention is to affix a loud spinning polka dot bow tie on top and hope that brings people in long enough to notice what's underneath?