Chris

Alternate title: What is Gaem? "What is Game?" This week you, the readers, take control, as we spend the entire episode with our grubby mitts elbow deep in the Idle Thumbs mailbag. With special guests Steve Gaynor of 2K Marin, and each and every one of you readers listening along at home. Games Discussed: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Zeno Clash, Dante's Inferno, Mario 64, American McGee's Alice, Idle Thumbs: The Game

I've watched a number of episodes, and the show definitely is about that, but usually the interviewees involved still actually end up getting the message of their game across, be it through direct or implied means. I don't really see any reason to believe Dante's Inferno ISN'T predicated on the mentality the lead designer acted like it was -- it's really not too far off from a lot of the previews and marketing we've already seen for the game, just more blatant and loud. And it did seem like the "lustminion" is pretty much in there.

I may be overly specific, but I certainly wasn't passive! I've been pretty direct! Anyway I just think there's value in using the correct vocabulary for things. I understand the argument of just saying "if the other person understands what I'm getting at, it's fine," I just don't agree. But of course I also don't hold this kind of shit against anyone personally. It's just the internet!

God, what a shitty passage. I think my favorite sentence is "Robert Langdon realized today was going to be a day of endless surprises," which sounds like the ending of a children's book.

I understand that and appreciate it, particularly about GTA4, and I've spoken about it a great deal on the podcast before. But that observation of America is still not one that's particularly uncommon or unobserved elsewhere. I'm not saying it isn't good and fun, but I definitely maintain that the hyperbolic praise of Rockstar's keen social commentary is frequently overstated.

Yo! Welcome!

The Martian Chronicles

I'm reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose right now, and it's fantastic so far. I'm 150 pages in, which is about a third of the way. The conceit is that it's Eco's Italian translation of a French translation of an original Latin text written in the 14th century (obviously, I am reading the English translation of it), and it's really cleverly done. Despite being fiction, the amount of obscure historical religious detail is really impressive, and the characters are really well-defined -- both elements of which really highlight the shittiness of Dan Brown's cheesy ripoffs in setting and plot.

That technique always looks so shitty. But even in general, the black outlines are rarely done well. When you're dealing with a solid-color element like that, and having it be so relatively thin compared to the geometry it's up against, you're just asking for crappy-looking aliasing and inconsistency.

I don't see what point it is to keep citing Wikipedia if Wikipedia is simply wrong on this matter. It's ridiculous and patronizing to say "Well, Wikipedia says this, so it sounds like you're just being pedantic about it, but I'll humor you and you can call it something else if you want." All I'm saying is that it IS something else. I really hope we don't reach such a level of casual reliance on Wikipedia that people can actually change the meaning of words by changing their Wikipedia entries. Your personal taste is fine. I don't mind if you're making a judgment or declaring personal taste or what, I just take issue with constantly citing Wikipedia as an authority when the whole point of Wikipedia is that it doesn't need to be updated by an authority to be changed. Wikipedia is super useful for a number of reasons and I use it all the time, but unfortunately it's not definitive.

It's not a form of cel-shading, it just sometimes accompanies it. Wind Waker is a true cel-shaded game, and there are no black borders at all as far as I recall. The two stylistic choices are totally unrelated. Wind Waker has cel-shading without borders, and Borderlands has borders without cel-shading. In fact, I'd guess the black border is used more on NON-cel-shaded games, if anything. I don't know why they're so strongly associated in people's minds, because they're both pretty specific visual looks and they're quite different. I think people just lump them all into one big "comic book" category, but they're such incredibly different takes on it that I wish they weren't conflated so often. (And that said, "cel-shading" doesn't even refer to comic books, it refers to actual cel animation, as seen in 2D Disney films and the like. It's not hard to remember what cel-shading means if you think of it in those terms. That flat-shaded, non-gradient look is necessary in 2D animation for efficiency and consistency reasons.)

Haha, this slogan is amazing.

No. Prince of Persia isn't cel-shaded either. Cell-shaded is when the shading is basically flat, when there's a really sharp contrast between the lit area and the unlit area. Borderlands uses the same kind of gradual, softer, traditional shading most games do. It just has a colorful high-contrast palette, black outlines, exaggerated character proportions, and so on -- the same stuff POP does, although POP has less exaggerated proportions.

It's not cel-shaded. But I like the new look. I think it gives it an identity it lacked before. I'm not crazy about the black outlines, but other than that I pretty much like it.

I actually own it and haven't gotten around to playing it yet. It's hard for me to get into that kind of console/PC-style game on a tiny screen with fiddly controls, but I will try to give it a shot.

How would you not simply read that line as "The usage of BitTorrent as practiced on The Pirate Bay is illegal"? That seems like the simplest, most straightforward interpretation of the sentence. Yes, that might be redundant--so? I admittedly don't know much (anything) about Swedish law, but courts are constantly making redundant statements; that's why precedent is used so frequently. This court wasn't creating legislation or something, it was passing a judgment on a case. And since it was specifically the four defendants on trial anyway, from what I can tell, I don't think this ruling even goes beyond those people. The idea that Blizzard's going to have to start looking for a new way to distribute Swedish patches seems unlikely. What about all the non-vapid movies, made by creative, hardworking filmmakers? I'm not trying to be trite here, I'm being serious. Do you seriously sit there and pump your fist when somebody downloads movies you don't like and sticks it to the "man"? And though I think Shrek is complete garbage, if somebody actually enjoys it and wants to watch it, should its vapidity be justification to rip off the people who made it available? If it's so terrible, people should just not watch it. What does that have to do with anything? Should legal affairs be conducted purely in a way that the "average citizen" is cheering them on? How would that even work? It's hard enough to just keep shareholders happy.

Why, does Blizzard distribute torrented patches through The Pirate Bay? Why would "usage of BitTorrent at The Pirate Bay" have any impact on Blizzard? Unless I'm reading the story incorrectly, it's referring to a specific setting of BitTorrent usage. Using a pencil isn't illegal, but using a pencil to stab someone (or commit copyright infringement, I guess) is.

Hello there!

Well sure--making anything good and implementing is not easy. But stuff like Kismet in Unreal Engine 3 goes so far in at least weakening the barrier between idea and implementation. It's an amazingly good tool. Obviously, making a full game with lots of stuff in it is an immense undertaking. I was specifically comparing modern tools to older tools though and just speaking relatively. There's definitely a difference in efficiency between different toolsets (and I think the vast acceptance of Unreal Engine 3 as a licensed engine speaks at least partially to that). Not all of them are equal when it comes to usability. Making something good is going to be difficult no matter what, but it can certainly be more or less frustrating from tool to tool.

Henry Hatsworth becomes hard as shit and will make you hate it and Kyle Gray and yourself

Thanks, guys! Welcome!

Funcim isn't "just the publisher," Funcom is the developer and publisher, as it was of Conan. Surely there's a lot of disparity between the teams, but it is the same company in each case. They hardly have to loach their own existing employees.

Well, I think there's a difference between "reviews" and "criticism." I think that criticism very well could take into account the fact that Apocalypse Now almost killed Francis Ford Coppola. Criticism isn't objective, it's holistic. Criticism, used in the context it's used in the phrase "film criticism," can really take anything into account -- the critic's own life experiences, the circumstances surrounding the creation of the work in question, and so on. If you're reviewing something, which has a much more objective aim -- something that deals purely with a final product and usually issues some kind of recommendation to the reader, numerical or otherwise -- then ideally yes you would keep those two sides separate. That said, that's not usually practical in the games industry or most other entertainment industries, because most publications that both report on the thing and review the thing don't really have enough budget or resources to maintain dedicated separate staff for both goals.

Well, that specific half of it wouldn't be irritating if it weren't for the half you cropped out.

I had a great time one evening playing a bunch of bonus songs totally cold with friends--we'd heard hardly any of them, and it was a blast just "sight-reading" our way through, especially for the singer. It's irritating that (presumably different) people are equally loud complaining about too many mainstream tracks in Rock Band, as those who complain about there being too many songs they've never heard of in Rock Band. There is a ridiculous spread, and the DLC library increases it even more.