Jake

Hello! That was probably the same for everyone. The meet was both ear- and voice-destroying.

If anyone wants to play casually on a reasonably full server filled with not-assholes, and gets decent pings to north america servers, we play on tf2.telltalegames.com nearly daily at 12:30pm and 6:30pm pacific time.

Seemed like there were 30ish people on average, but maybe closer to 40. Good turn-out.

Blog updated with deets on the meets. ...

CA.

You and me both. Hooray for us! Except I wasn't going to the keynote I don't think.

Hey surprise, we did a real one this week, too! "The Future of Games" You can't shut your eyes. A small child spots you, waves eagerly. You try to reach him, but are stopped short as the cables restraining your fingers go taut. Struggling against wires and straps binding your shoulders and feet, you get one last glimpse of the boy before he's dragged screaming into Max Payne's departing van. Games Discussed: Overlord II, Max Payne 3, King's Bounty: TL, Blueberry Garden, Dawn of War II, StarCraft II, Pikmin 2

We made it to 20 somehow! Idle Thumbs 2000 Has your desire to explore and investigate given way to a guided experience that just wants to hold your hand? Find out at the next waypoint. Join us as we offer up impressions from the DICE Summit, discuss this week's surprise assault of great games, and eat our own butt. Games Discussed: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Noby Noby Boy, Empire: Total War, Tom Clancy's HAWX, Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned

Nice!

Between Will Wright's talk at the end of GDC and us going back to Chris' to record the episode, a bunch of folks got together for drinks and food and things and there was way too much horrible discussion of that sort of thing. Basically an entire unpublishable episode of idle thumbs was had in that sandwich shop, entirely themed around horrible industry stories involving feces/bathrooms and other horrible body themed things. It was horrible/excellent. So you could say we got most of it out of our system before sitting down to record.

BM sat on the couch the whole time. Limited participation.

At the beginning??? Pff! We will put it 32 characters deep into the title thank you very much.

I know that Chris and Steve and I will be there, as well as Bronstring "Marek" B.M. Bronstring Marek Bronstring. Maybe others? I don't know if any meet-up is planned, but we will be roaming around attending things, for sure.

That's from a Shackmeet from years ago.

This has been pointed out before, but yeah you could say it's spread: No that's Jared Emerson-Johnson. We've known each other since we were 13 years old or something, and both of us have done that stupid "MacinTalk Pro Bruce High Quality" voice since high school. Jared ended up doing it for real for Synth (or whatever he's called... Curt?) in Sam & Max.

Nintendo Help is his name. His game consists of helping, which seems to involve playing FMVs of Nintendo's QA department.

Mario 3, World, and Yoshi's Island are all great for reasons like this. Like you, I wouldn't go so far as to say "Mario 3 was just a stage show!" but that there was a specific aesthetic at all besides "cartooney" is so great. Galaxy finally has that back to a certain degree, but I thought it was hugely lacking in the Yoshi spinoff games, and Mario 64, Sunshine, and New SMB. It's nice when it looks like someone was actually trying for something.

TF2 almost supports that with its crafting system.

I expected exactly what happened, and it was fun. Dave Grossman isn't on the TTG inter-studio league team, but he regularly plays TF2 on the office server, which continues to strike me as awesome.

I will suck hideously but I will try to stop by sometimes. It's hard to be bothered connecting to any other server when we run our own TF2 server in the office, as everyone just jumps on that at lunch/after work and has essentially no ping, no worries about admin access, etc. That said, I should probably occasionally play on the SR server just to mix it up. There's only one guy in our office who regularly plays on SR and he was going to be a ringer for BioBlizz if he played at all. Traitor! And yeah, to nobody's surprise Telltale got completely rolled by BioBlizz, but that's okay. We occasionally captured a point before being wholly destroyed. The novelty of inter-studio play, and of the Telltale office turning into a first person shooter team is entertaining enough that I don't care how we fare. Coming in not-last in the league would be cool, though, if that happens.

That is my favorite trick. I use it sometimes in the Print stylesheet of a page -- that way when you print it out, the logo at the top is effectively a print-ready high DPI image.

Oh man I miss the nightly Worms Armageddon matches. Only on my most recent home PC did I not immediately install WA out of instinct.

Welcome to video games! So we're going to be doing some more podcast content. (See, we weren't lying!) We don't have a schedule of any sort worked out. Weekly is highly unlikely. After talking about a new alternative name to "Idle Thumbs" for about 30 seconds, we landed on the blindingly original "The Idle Thumbs Podcast," so, yeah. Here it is! "THE GREAT GATLING-GUNSBY" Idle Thumbs is dead. Long live The Idle Thumbs Podcast. It took a little longer than we thought, but we're here. Chris, Jake, and Steve catch up on the last few months, talk about video games a lot. Welcome back! Games Discussed: BioShock 2, BioShock, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Heavy Rain, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect, Aladdin (SNES), Dante's Inferno, War and War, The Body Count of Monte Cristo, The Origin of the Species: Origins

When "The Big Sister" was announced, I also thought that there was going to just be one. I guess that Big Sister is a new enemy class, though. That makes it less interesting for me, but I have yet to play the game, due to my personal need to make sure my GFW Live account is tied to my Xbox Live account, which is currently impossible due to my Xbox account seemingly having no valid Microsoft login tied to it. I hate everyone. But I really want to play Bioshock 2.

I couldn't get into Fahrenheit but, like Heavy Rain, I can tell why people would get into it. The games aren't complicated and look very nice. Every tiny interaction gives you an immediate, huge reward -- the action continues with more cutscenes, you get to meet new characters, you get to go to new rooms (basically, a game made entirely out of the reward content in traditional adventure games, without the puzzle part in between). It's that super casual game style overload of rewards and feedback for not doing a whole lot, couched in the aesthetics and tone of something like 24 or the X Files. It shouldn't be a surprise why a lot of people like looking at it/playing it. The fact that you don't quite know what you're doing or why you're doing it (other than "it advances the movie") keeps me extremely separated from it when playing, though. Even when there are a few different options/paths, I still feel like I'm trapped in a dark room blindly flailing my arms against the walls in the hope that I'll find a lever which opens the door.