Jake

Video game art is still suffering growing pains in its transition from using representational/symbolic artwork to depicting reality or a facet thereof as it actually is (even in stylized games). I think a lot of it is outdated problem solving ("it needs to be scaled up or it won't read on a TV or small monitor" or "that texture will just disappear because of mipmapping" eventually goes from a pain to a skillset to a religion) and has now become a sort of tacit aesthetic choice. Valve and other developers are increasingly less guilty of it, but I think that autopilot left over from the really early purely-representational days of gaming 3D is really hard to shake.

I would like to come back but life clobbered me and I wasn't even at the halfway point by the time recording came up so I sat it out. My first ever Idle Thumbs episode as a reader!

The episode's out! Here's the episode thread for further discussion.

Same.

Yeah all beefs or complaints are fictional. Except that there is really only one true scoops and it's Steve. Or maybe some wry fast talkin newspaper reporter from the '20s.

I hear shots were fired?

Black Mesa has taken on an incredibly mighty task: Update Half-Life 1. I am enjoying Black Mesa and am going to keep playing it, and yes, seeing someone else's interpretation is interesting. I didn't mean my remark of having to think about Black Mesa as basically 30 frame a second fan art as a pejorative. I think fans reinterpreting an original work within the same medium as the original work is crazy. I also think seeing Black Mesa the research facility in higher res is super fun. I can't help but notice the details and moments which are missed. Sometimes it's the absolute tiny things, for instance in the start of the original Half-Life, we fade up and the train is already moving down a tunnel, from an unknown point of origin to an unknown destination, while in Black Mesa we fade up in the train, but it's stationary -- nothing is moving in the scene -- and we're at a station! It's tiny tiny stuff, but they change the meaning and implications present in the very first shot! A bold task.

James Benson's Half-Life stuff is so good! Also that guy is a reader. I wrote him once about those HL animations and he replied back asking for more Thumbs episodes . He's working on some sort of indie game full time now, which I hope is public soon.

There are a lot of details which are present in Half Life 1, a lot of just little moments and touches, or tiny but deliberate creative choices, which are going to be lost in something like Black Mesa (through a deliberate choice to cut, or just lost through the inevitable lens of adaptation and re-creation). It's like watching the shot for shot remake of Psycho because you don't like black and white. You will get the same narrative content and big beats, but you'll never see that look on Janet Leigh's face in the shower scene that helped make it a classic in the first place.

The voice work in the actual mod is far less offputting than in the video with the guard conversation. I'm finding Black Mesa a very weird experience, but not necessarily a negative one.

It used to have more of that stuff when it used custom frontend code but recently has been using the Bootstrap CSS framework, which makes it far easier to build and update, if not quite as easily to lace with injokes.

Lords discussed within. His Cyborg Familiar Thumbs returns from its whirlwind tour of every convention and expo one could reasonably cram into two weeks, to ruminate on the rise of Facebook, the fate of real games, and whether or not Nicolas Cage will ever leave the bathroom. Also lots of games. Games Discussed: Joe Danger, Crackdown 2, Marble Madness, Klax, SWAT 4, Plain Sight, Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, BioShock 2, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Neptune's Pride, Kayne & Lynch: Dead Men, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Bad Boys 2, The Last Express, Hitman: Codename 47, Far Cry 2, BioShock Demo, All Other Games

The proper spoiiler tag got blown away at some point and was never replaced. I'll look into it.

That's fair. I don't quite know how to express what I'm saying I guess. I feel like there are definite ups and downs to each approach, but with a traditional Steam arranagement, you can potentially know a couple weeks or months in advance of your public launch if you are on Steam or not, and then you have the opportunity to plan how you close your game, and how you build your marketing campaign and assets, around that fact. If the way to go for Greenlight is "finish your game, you have to build the Steam marketing assets anyway," that seems like it's placing even more burden of unknown on developers who are trying to close and market. I'm not concerned that we'll have fewer games -- I agree that we will end up with more games post-Greenlight. I am concerned that we'll have different games. Steam is currently undeniably biased about which games get on there. That said, I don't think Greenlight will fix that bias, I think Greenlight will change the bias. It may allow more games onto the service, but it has the potential to do it at the expense of other titles which are already getting on there. That's not an optimal solution. I'd like a system which allows more content onto Steam but throwing a giant binary lever from "approval process" to "crowdsourcing" seems like it's going to have a lot of less than ideal side effects, regardless of the positives it also brings. It's also all speculation, and Valve does seem attentive to what's going on so far. I don't think anyone sees Greenlight as a catastrophe or something, but the potential ramifications seem worth discussing.

I think the difference here is that, regardless of how you use Steam as a store, Valve seems to be setting up Steam Greenlight for a loop of browsing, appraising, and voting. That might not be true, but it's my experience with it so far. If true, that means that some amount of putting on a show (screenshots, videos, demos, vertical slices) has to happen -- in public -- a stage or two before that is usually the case. The pitch process isn't the same thing as marketing the game, but it feels like the presence of Greenlight makes those two things intermingle in a way that they didn't have to before. That is more understandable to me for something like Kickstarter, where you are appealing directly to that audience for funding -- in that case you ARE pitching literally to the people who will be giving you money. I guess that is technically the case with Greenlight, in that Steam customers are the ones reviewing Greenlight submissions, but the equation is different when they're just hitting "Yes" or "No" buttons. You are asking a community of gamers if they think they or maybe someone else might be interested in a product once a (now uninvolved) third party stocks it in a store. It feels off kilter to me.

Yeah we say "Day Zee," not "Day Zed." Also, "Zee" (Z) and "See" © are distinctly different sounds to my ear... WAIT! I just re-read your post. Oh man, guh ... gha--- Let's get one thing clear, here: There is no way in the history of American culture that we would have abbreviated "Football" to "Soccer." That came squarely from the Brits, a shortening of "Association Football," to, well, "Soccer." Yes, only in England would they pull the "soc" out of "Association" and append an "-er" to it as some sort of casual term, then formalize and codify it over a series of decades... only to abandon it later and then act posh about it. So, in conclusion, "soccer" blood is not on our hands.

1) I fully agree on why this game is sweet. I can't wait to play more. 2) When your opening is "anyone who disagrees is wrong," you relinquish your right to be surprised if an Internet argument ensues in its wake.

You are the most militant motherfucker in the world. You've also been consistent about it for like 15 years, which is impressive.

The 3MA guys aren't yet updating the homepage and we dropped the ball, sorry.

Chris an I both read it devoid of the context of any of LeCarre's other books and at least in our opinion it holds up very well in that stand alone context.

Note it's by Klei, the developers of Shank, not the Behemoth, the developers of Castle Crashers. They're not related.

Plant Trees is the killer app of the Skyrim mod community. I may have watched the third trailer like 15 times.Also sorry for being a dick re: that Skyrim remark; that didn't mean to come out the way it did.

That's been there since that episode was first published when we were hand-coding the site every week. We all cracked up when that carried over and continued to work on the current site.

Oh it was a bug in Telltale's Wallace & Gromit game where as Wallace was dropped through his bedroom floor by his morning wake up machine, the engine was switching him to the wrong character skeleton so it looked like his own invention had broken every bone in his body. He turned into this lumpy sort of shambling mess which was then being dressed in a sweater and started drinking tea. My favorite collection of bugs put to song, though, is Buggy Saints Row: The Musical.

Hands down the original performance. It's cheesy but it fits. The new stuff just sounds like garbage. It sounds like it's stylized to be bad, which goes against my perceived point of the mod. Shouldn't the fidelity of the voice work be raised along with the graphics? They got so excited about how their voice work would be stellar early in production. It sounds like they didn't hit the mark and are now being defensive apologists about it. The visuals look great, the music and sound effects sound great, why the heck would the voices be justifiable in any way as the exception, or as an homage to shitty '90s voice work? (That also falls apart simply because their voices in the new game sound like anime voices, which have nothing to do with anything in the Half Life aesthetic.)