Jake

Wild beasts! Idle Thumbs 85: "An Indulgent Dateline" or "An Indulgent Episode Title" Call me Halo. With Sean away, Idle Thumbs is accompanied by Kotaku's Kirk Hamilton for a long walk in the first person perspective through jungles and space stations and all sorts of places. Join us! Games Discussed: Far Cry 3, Far Cry 2, Crysis, Halo 4, Halo: OSDT, The Halo, Waking Mars, The Dig, Gameboat For Kinect Episode page. Direct episode download. iTunes page. Feed RSS.

Is it a portmanteau if you consoder that the word "ad" is nested within?

We'll all be the same people when ep 2 comes out, but I'd rather any noobs to the discussion brought on by ep 2-2,000 don't have to start with the first 10 pages of this one.

Games as wish fulfillment power fantasy is definitely a big big thing. Even Tim Schafer says he designs his worlds and player characters so that the player always gets to be the coolest person in the room when playing his games. For what it's worth I feel this thread has run its course. I'm tempted to close it just to keep it from becoming fertile ground for drive by necro trolling, but I'll keep it open for a bit still. Either way, I think the conversation would be better served long term by starting a fresh thread whenever the second FemFreq episode comes out, as a new conversation within this thread would have a lot of trouble overcoming the baggage of this thread.

CliffyB owns apparently.

Oh right. I know that re otacon, but have always been so inexplicably shit at MGS that its characters and lore just slide off my brain.

I think that your counter examples may actually prove her point rather than dismantle it, because they both sound like events which were presented as surprise twists. I haven't played the MGS games so I don't really know, but from your description it sounds like you are intended to be surprised to find out that these women have broken you out of jail, defying expectations, like they are successful moments in part because they are playing off of the tropes discussed in the FemFreq video. Maybe that is incorrect.

Sure, both Cart Life and Hotline Miami are pretty minimal in their presentation, but I think that's also okay. Making specific choices about what you include in your work is not unique to indie games... creators in most other mediums employ that all the time, it's just uncommon in AAA games. (and AAA films)

Fuck me I am the worst. There was a post here a second ago and I accidentally hit "delete" instead of "quote" on my phone, and without any confirmation, the mobile site just wiped the post from the face of the earth. I'm really sorry about that. Fuck all things. I meant to reply instead. Worst. The post was:

Yes. EOT for me.

Sadly cutscene Nico exists, and expresses infinite other wants and needs divorced from the mechanics available to the player. Hotline Miami's ambiguity or Cart Life's consistent specificity do better jobs of what you describe on both ends of the spectrum for me.

This thread is terrible and also fascinating. I kind of hate it but I can't stop reading it, or posting in it. Also, this is only tangentially at best related but is interesting to me... ... Enhance. It's amazing how much people basically "learn how to have sex" from porn at this point. By which I mean, learn what you're "supposed to do," not how it works medically or practically. I wonder what the percentage of kids who saw porn online before they had their first sex ed class is at this point? The number has to be high, and it's weird. There are many distressing reddit threads with examples too small and dumb to be made up for karma. We live in a messed up time. The end.

I cant tell what this post means. If you think that's what I was trying to argue for -- doing whatever you want with the money -- I don't think you read what I said at all. I specifically said "people got what they paid for."

The budget versus amount she raised is the least relevant thing in the world. If this wasnt on Kickstarter -- if she had said "I raised 30k from a grant to make some videos, and am putting them online for free but please donate if you like them," and then the same exact backlash and subsequent outpouring of financial support had happened, nobody would have expected the quality or intent of the production to change. That is, however, essentially what happened. That the funding and donations came in via the same means is irrelevant to FemFreq as a work. We're just holding it to a different and more insane standard. She had a goal, she met it, meanwhile there was a backlash and an outpouring of support using pretty classic means of capitalism to say "we support you and what youre doing." I don't think the people who gave her extra money thought that with their money they were saying "now because we support you, we are expecting you to do something subjectively better and objectively different from what you said you were going to do." And thank god they weren't because that would be insane. That is not supporting someone's vision, that is using your financial leverage to corrupt and change their vision under the pretense of being supportive. As a creator, changing your intent, plans, and vision under pressure from the money is usually called selling out, compromising, etc. Instead we have something that does exactly what it says on the tin and its somehow an issue? Garbage. The notion of "stretch goals" have muddied the Kickstarter conversation significantly, because people just tend to assume that with Kickstarters, regardless of content or context, there are ALWAYS stretch goals. Stretch goals are not a part of Kickstarter as a platform, they were invented by people who develop kickstarter projects, to TRY and get more money out of backers. Sometimes a Kickstarter is just people donating to a person or cause they believe in, and not entitled shoppers force-feeding a creator to make them do more than they wanted. FemFreq never asked for significantly more money, and never promised anything but the original and uncompromised vision. In my opinion that's stronger than buckling to the money, or the peanut gallery. Whether you agree with me on that or not, I don't think there is any way to make a relevant argument that people who pledged got anything but what they paid for.

Steve is on break this week, but Famous' revenge is delivered in laugh form. Shoveling Your Hat and Crow Special guest Sean Vanaman joins us on a slow motion journey through strategy and space as we talk about the Infinity Ward kerfuffle, the most honest week in StarCraft history, and how from the outside, bullet time looks really fast, and dumb. We think it will pique your magic, in an interesting way. Games Discussed: StarCraft, Flotilla, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Red Dead Redemption, Oops! All Bullet Time, Neptune's Pride, Imperial 2030, The Impossible Game, Dark Void Zero, Team Fortress 2, Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony, Mr. Bucket, and Far Cry 2 as Alice

It's okay, I'm sure they'll do something responsible with the money.

Idle Thumbs made 4x it's original asked for Kickstarter goal, yet we had no stretch goals, and we missed (and continue to miss) all our reward delivery dates. The number of complaints about our Kickstarter campaign, with its thousand+ backers and tens of thousands of listeners, can be counted on probably two or three hands. All things the same, if we were women and our podcast was focused on feminist issues, we would need to buy out an umbrella factory to shield us from the shitstorm that would have been sent our way. So basically, fuck everything. FemFreq put out a pilot episode -- a first stab --and it didn't blow minds but it did its job simply. If its not for you, then it's not. There are a lot of things in the world that aren't for everyone. I only got half way through this thread before being tired out by the hating (though on average I think this thread beats a lot of what is out there online). In the video (only the first of dozens, right!?) she pointed out more than enough examples to show that these tropes undoubtedly exist in video games. Whether one particular game or another is an exception, or has an exception, is totally irrelevant. It doesn't invalidate anything she says, it doesn't make you smarter than her for noticing it. Exceptions exist. If anything, doesn't combatting the video's examples (most of which are from the biggest and longest running franchises in gaming) with a deep-dived smattering of obscure, hand-picked counter-examples just prove the rule?

I don't know if that's true or not. Either it is true or it is plausible enough to be true, both of which lead to: Games are dumb.

Wind Waker passively suggesting it was so good. An actual legend of Zelda. It becoming explicit was a bummer.

Idle Thumbs 96: Historical Beef This week, Giant Bomb's Brad Shoemaker stopped by the Fancy Space to talk Tomb Raider looping back on itself, witness the culmination of Chris' Zuma addiction, and wonder what the PlayStation 4 means for gaming's past. Games Discussed: Tomb Raider, The Banner Saga: Factions, Zuma Deluxe, Zuma's Revenge Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

Pretentious as "aiming for the sound and feel of something from higher art or culture for its own sake or for the sound of it, without the meaning or maybe even raw talent to back it up" is what I think people mean when using pretentious that way, not "I don't like it." I think they're trying to say "your attempt to elevate your work tonally came off as affectation, not as genuine to me," and are shorthanding it in a way that doesn't always work. Honestly, I think people mean something close to that more often than not when they use the word "pretentious" as a pejorative, and that is a far more specific criticism than "I don't like this," so dismissing it out of hand as people not having anything to say seems... too dismissive.

Idle Thumbs '95: H.D. Cool Spot Your first choice runs ahead, sliding over the embankment and out of your sight, lost to the sparkling dunes. Your second choice is fine, but seems preoccupied with aesthetic decisions made by architects of the future, and he too fails you with time. Resigned, you accept your fate. Your third choice. The worst choice. Video Games. Games Discussed: Karateka, Anno 2070, SimCity Beta, Journey, Zuma Deluxe, The Receiver, H.D. Cool Spot Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

Yeah. Whatever one wants to say about the actual types of games, rule sets and core mechanics of PopCap's output, they are masters of the nuanced physical feeling of controls, of player feedback, etc. it's easy to dismiss their stuff because of the wacky rainbow sparkles that come out of everything, but the weight and readability of control at the crucial points where your input is interpreted by the game as intent and represented physically and visually in the game world is so tight it'a almost invisible and easy to take for granted.

Looking at videos of Tokyo Crash Mobs it looks like the actual pace of play, movement of stuff on screen, controls etc, have very little in common with Zuma. Just the "shoot things to make match 3 in the midst of a chain" part is shared. That's clearly a big part of the game, but the feel of Zuma is a large reason for why it's fun, not just the ruleset.

The frog itself doesn't really make a noise, I think. It just has the wackiest fucking face so when it pauses for a second at the end of a board and then just goes sproinging into the camera, I always imagine it making the most excited goobery nerd sound as it flies outta there.