Jake

You probably definitely picked up "the best!" "the worst!" from Idle Thumbs Chris also played DeathSpank, and was pretty positive about it. It was embargoed, so we cut that little bit of conversation out of the cast (no bargo bustin for DeathSpank), but then I guess someone broke the 'bargo who wasn't us, so other people posted their shit, but then it was too late, so its not in there. Hopefully next time we record we'll bring it up again.

Pretty much. For some reason Sean (Famous) got the Goldblum noises video stuck in his head and started doing it at work for the week leading up to the previous cast. It reignited the Goldblum fascination. Breckon posted this on Twitter a couple days ago which didn't help either.

t-minus one "Bargo Busters" For all your bustin' needs, we present: video games. We create a scale and proceed to visit both ends, taking gentle, guided adventures with famed explorers and robot pals, while our asses are gingerly handed to us by murderous hoards and off-brand knockoff platformers. Note: No bargos were busted in the making of this episode. Games Discussed: Torchlight, Uncharted 2, Machinarium, Super Mario 86, Uncharted 2, Diablo II, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Game), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Film), and of course Far Cry 2

Hahaha this is the best thing. I don't know if Telltale's team had any business beating anyone because we mostly fart around and blow ourselves up and then laugh about it (other than the couple months SR was going on, during which we had to fumble around to find enough mics for everyone, and figure out how to practice), so it was great to find a team we could not simply beat, but roll, if just that once.

Dear Mr. Ebert, VIDEO GAMES!

No you're not shafted. We didn't anticipate an uproar over it so we are scrambling now to get a solution in place, but there is one. Valve has given us a bunch of Steam unlock codes for just the Sam & Max TF2 content which we will be tying to customer's Telltale accounts. Details and timing are forthcoming.

Did you try giving the engagement ring to Max outside BoscoTech labs? Er I mean... what?

Im glad oops all bullet time has been implemented in at least every game ever, but we haven't bothered to play them.

His right what?

He tried to add contrast and restore black levels. The paintings by Chan and Purcell, they weren't afraid to go super dark, to the point where chunks of the composition are pure black. They were also less afraid to have the highlights be very bright. Laserschwert points it out pretty well here. The sun hitting the planks of wood on the ship and glistening in the choppy water cut to almost pure white in the original paintings, whereas in the special edition everything is far closer to the same value. I'm looking forward to MI2 special edition for a lot of reasons, but I wish they had been a little more bold with the backgrounds. Everything feels more flattened and airbrushed than I personally think it should, even if it is looking really nice. Playing through this on a high def TV is super appealing to me. edit - whoa I missed an entire page here. Oh well. Contrast WAS a huge part of the MI look, but starting with Curse it got a lot more washed out, intentionally. Apparently it was a deliberate choice by the background painters on CMI to never ever use pure black in the game. They rarely used pure white either. Part of the whole dreamy storybook thing, I guess. Then in EMI they kept going with it, but seemingly with no real intent behind it other than "CMI did it." I, um, I tried to bring visual contrast back in Tales chapter 5 but we only had like two months to make that episode, so, my apologies if that one is fucked up too.

They licensed that car's likeness from my face.

Speaking for myself personally here, and not Telltale obviously. I've played plenty of Wii, and worked on a lot of games released for it. The interface is almost great for point and click, but its still an IR pointer. The screen resolution is fine but it is objectively lower than other platforms. WiiWare games max out at 40 megs which means your life is sad if you want to make a game with voiced characters, etc. The Wii is an easy to use system for a lot of people, and it is slightly refreshing in that it doesn't demand life-ruining amounts of time to build art assets for it, but I wish it had fewer limitations. I'm obviously familiar with (and enjoy) building content with limitations, working at a company which spends half to 2/3 of each year putting out a game a month, but for me personally, the Wii is a little too constrictive. All that said, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see The Devil's Playhouse show up on it at some point, after the season is over. Telltale has gotten reasonably adept at porting a game's asset and codebase over to other platforms.

While a good PC (or Mac) will always be able to run the game at the highest res, etc, the PS3 port of the Telltale engine is the best console port that exists. Framerate is good and none of the rendering stuff was nerfed. I'm annoyed that our 360 ports of Wallace & Gromit have framerate issues (and the Wii is the Wii), but the PS3 one looks nice. There will be a PSN (and PC, Mac) demo for those who want to make sure.

Hello! I am not working full time on Sam & Max; my time is split between a bunch of projects at the moment. I did do the opening title sequence, and most of the artwork for the menu, dialog and inventory interfaces. If I'm more directly involved with the games it will be later in the season. And yeah it comes out on .... Thursday?

I hate this thread the most.

Yes!

I'd have to use one for a bit. The features sound extremely promising on paper, but the whole point of a device like this is that all of it works together. I've been using an iPad on and off since a few weeks before they were released and I like the way the software and the hardware are put together. It feels very much like a deliberate thing, front to back. Also, though the lack of multitasking is frustrating*, one of my favorite things is the way almost all of the OS gets out of my way the moment I'm in an app. I don't know if that's what I want all the time (I will likely get sick of it the moment I intend to do anything productivity oriented), but at the moment it's extremely refreshing. Does the Slate run an operating system built around touch, or is it running straight desktop Windows 7 or something? Or worst (and most likely) of all, is there a questionably-responsive "touch layer" of UI stuff bolted down on top of Windows 7? I want a filesystem that is exposed, and it's frustrating that the iPad is built on synching, but the iPad has reminded me that I don't actually need or maybe even want the desktop metaphor all the time anymore. Especially on a touch device. Anyway, very curious about the Slate, but dubious of its actual usability and interaction...smoothness, despite its more impressive feature bulletpoints. Also, that video shows the opposite of using it. It shows a montage of a bunch of flashy video and scrolling things, unfortunately, so I have no sense of how it would actually feel to use. This is just marketing versus marketing, but I think with the iPad/iPhone, Apple has done a great job with their videos of letting you "feel" the device in your hands even if you haven't used one. I have no clue what the Slate does or how one uses it, other than it plays flashy rock videos and scrolls past a PDF of the New York times. * Fortunately this one aspect will soon be remedied to some degree.

Epic lord.

Sometimes he cleans it up for release on the site.

Haha. Apple always builds hardware like this -- pushing one big thing at the expense of everything traditional -- and people always freak out, but I think it's the only real way to make things work in an industry as big and in-the-groove as tech. (This is depressing considering how new tech is compared to, say, automotive, home appliance, or even something like film.) Apple introduces a new product which is basically a technological filibuster -- a personal computer with no floppy drive, serial, or parallel ports; a music player with no fm receiver, etc -- to get everyone to pay attention, and to wake the rest of the tech industry up. I don't think that latter thing is high on their priorities, but it has an effect. Science fiction, and general nerd lust, have been asking for touch interfaces, modular, and wearable computing for decades and decades. Apple shows time after time that these things are possible with today's technology as long as a few things are let go of and you are willing to commit to actually, you know, making it, instead of sitting in advertising and product positioning committees for 2 years. The App Store part definitely sucks, but I think it is undeniable that Apple's internal continuing to push the hardware and software they do is driving consumer technology into cooler and cooler places. Smartphones suck less now. Consumer PCs suck less, too. Soon, maybe netbooks will suck less, and so will HDTVs and small home displays. We have little things in our pockets, and now sitting on our desk, which seem to have literally fallen out of Star Trek or the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and the internet is pissed because the first popular models have an app store. I'm not saying we wouldn't have modern MP3 players, or that PC's wouldn't have shifted to USB and burnable media instead of serial ports and floppys, if Apple wasn't around, but Apple is extremely good at making people with dollars actually demand change and progress from the industry, instead of being passively fed it. Maybe they're being passively fed it by Apple, and everyone else has to catch up (I'm sure smaller coffee shops around the world are tired as fuck of hearing people order a Venti cappuccino)... but at least personally for me, most of the big changes Apple pushes align with things I already wish the tech industry would do, and I'm glad for it. Would I like it if there was a more officially open channel for independent development on Apple's mobile platforms? Absolutely. I wouldn't be surprised if someone eventually does it better anyway (will that be Android? People in Reddit comments seem to think so, so who knows), or even if, after a few years, Apple themselves opened up the platform, either because they finally got comfortable with the idea, or because the App Store as a platform cooled and they realized they could make more money with less control. For right now, though, the benefits and the potential for the platform, and the new ways of interacting and using a computer it effectively tries to force through its limited design, interest me a lot, and I think far outweigh the fact that you have to write the software for it on a separate platform and get it approved by the manufacturer. Also, if something like Coda or a BBEdit/CSSEdit suite comes out for the iPad, you can expect to see kids and hobbyists writing solid web apps right on the thing, which is a huge step up from Atari 2600 Basic or something like that. Not a 1:1 development:consumption relationship, but more than what most closed platforms can offer. It will be a huge foot in the door. I'm done shitting out stupid posts about the iPad now, I think. Oh yeah one last thing: iPads are, in practice, really fun to use.

I find it extremely frustrating that this attitude is coming out so loudly from the gamer community. Why the hell are you guys all buying consoles and downloading from XBLA/PSN/WiiWare then?* "This is different because it's more like a desktop machine" is a garbage argument. So it also runs productivity and information browsing apps as well as games. And? I watch Netflix, browse videos, and play music on my Xbox 360. I one time even browsed the web on my Wii. I also have never used any of those platforms for open software development. ... Please tell me why this is different, in any way that isn't purely emotional? Is it just "another tower falls," and we lost gaming years ago? Even though I don't fully agree with the sentiment, that's an argument I could accept from someone -- it would be a fair thing to say, at least because it would be consistent. It doesn't feel like that, though. It feels like the people who are happy to chomp down dozens of Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo approved and licensed games are now pissed as hell because this new thing that seems to be actually in demand, won't run the Linux distro they don't actually run but always brag about on forums. The system is blurring the lines in a way that hasn't happened in ages or ever (I would say the onset of game consoles was the first time, but that happened almost concurrently with the personal computer), and even though the components are extremely familiar (if this system only ran gaming software people wouldn't be saying anything, other than how it would never compete as a gaming device) people are feeling threatened. It's weird to me, I guess. The iPad is a weird thing, and it does represent a potential change and a potential weird future for computers. I doubt the future will be exactly what Apple and the iPad wants it to be, but I think there is the potential for a zillion good ideas inside the iPad and I'm eager to see what comes of it. I hope something cooler and more progressive comes and blows it out of the water, though, because that's what it will take for change to occur, not a bunch of forum hand-wringing and screaming at people to not buy something they want. I guess I'm more of an "In My Life" person than the seemingly "I'm Looking Through You"-subscribing majority of the Internet when it comes to things like this. * Toblix I have no idea if you specifically purchase from console marketplaces, but your argument has been echoed by thousands who do.

I clicked the "download" link and it prompted me to put the MP3 on my desktop or in iTunes. Dunno whats up?

Fuck everything. So good. Dog cone is the sort of shit DLC should be for. So ridiculous.

hahahaha oh shit

By "official Thumbs icon," you surely mean "unofficial Thumbs icon," given that we actually have a logo...? We made that WaChe shirt when "Nintendo Revolution" was a thing people were actually excited about. Then GameSkins (now Penny Arcade store) made their own version of that same pun (Che repanited as Miyamoto, with his hat repainted to have a Mario "M"), and people actually bought that one. I don't think it was ever intended to become an icon for Idle Thumbs (though it became that for some I guess), but we thought it was funny at the time.