Chris

This week I watched the original The Stepford Wives, as well as the original TV broadcast of the David Frost/Richard Nixon interviews on Watergate. Both were unsettling, and highly worth watching.

Who even controls the Idle Thumbs Steam group? I agree it shouldn't be invite-only.

This avatar is hilarious to me

I can't wait for someone to edit out the "this is not real" bit and then post it excitedly on another gaming forum.

For the last decade or so I have been slowly crowding the other Chris Remo, some portfolio analyst, off the internet. When I first arrived on these series of tubes, he was the top result. You now have to go three pages deep in Google search results to get a Chris Remo who isn't me, and then after that one result it's more pages of just me.

The Wii version actually outsold the PC version by a LOT as far as I'm aware. It's frqeuently pretty shocking and depressing how few people buy PC games.

Voted, but I think you're screwed. You don't even have a big picture to combat Tim for those who aren't being personally lobbied by you.

I think the spirit of the award is a good one but it seems really poorly implemented.

I've heard more praise for NHL 09 than I ever have for any sports games, both from people who typically play a lot of sports games and those who don't.

Same here. I just couldn't get into it when I tried. It started off really slow and I was talking to a skull, which seemed really goofy, and it just wasn't doing anything for me. Maybe I should try again.

As Jake just pointed out to me, this marks six weeks straight of weekly Idle Thumbs content! What the hell is going on? "Your old Xbox is about to become your new Xbox, but that might mean you just start using your Netflix account again. Special guest Brad Shoemaker of Giant Bomb gently guides us through the minefield of this week's industry scandals, helps us finally close the book on Far Cry 2, and rekindles our love of J. Allard." Games discussed: Rock Band 2 ION Drum Rocker, Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3, Space Giraffe, New Xbox Experience, New Games For Windows Live Experience iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=293436552 RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/idle-thumbs http://www.idlethumbs.net/

Welcome, dudes. That forum artwork is from Dan Lee who used to do all sorts of awesome art for Thumbs.

Far Cry 2 doesn't do much to keep track of the passage of weeks and months, but I really love how much the passage of time within a given day affects your experience. It's a great day/night cycle.

I really enjoyed that perk. It seems a bit like it's sort of a throwaway, since it doesn't boost any stats in the way most do, but it ends up being hugely enjoyable, and it opens up all sorts of other paths to solve problems without needing combat or test-based convincing.

I have female friends who I directly address as dude, and who do the same with their female friends. I don't think it's that horrifying.

Only the first measure of the repeating sequence is identical in note values, and it's still not identical rhythmically, and the other measures are either somewhat or fully different. It's not a particularly unusual chord progression so I don't see it as at all unlikely that someone happened to create a similar melody on top. Stuff like that happens all the time. It's only really evil in a goofy way, and I'd say it's a lot less sinister than, for example, the Carol of the Bells.

What exactly does he mean by that? Those games were both released in 1993. I don't know how far apart they were spaced, but that seems like an odd distinction.

Yeah, but that's not really a big deal, because we already have the pronoun "them" and so on. On an individual basis, "guy" still very much refers to a male.

It's clearly an ironic song, but I don't see the irony in that particular line, or at least I didn't when I listened to it.

Haha, I never knew that existed!

Bah. Man I'm getting so sick of this style of female vocals, of basically just speaking with a melody and adding a tiny little vibrato to the end of some phrases, and starting certain syllables with that little croaking noise. There's no versatility and body to it, and the producer clearly knows it because when they get to a chorus and need it to be catchy, they have to layer and process the vocal track. Also, lines like "I'm not a saint, but I'm not a sinner" should be banned or something at this point. (All this from a guy who wrote a song about a character named "Senor Super Douche.")

Yeah, it really seems like the kind of thing you'd see on children's afternoon programming, or at least the kind of thing I remember seeing on children's afternoon programming when no such thing existed for games.

Hahahahahahah

Sold

Ah yeah, I'm aware of those. I think I alluded to them on the podcast but I may not have been clear in my explanation.