Chris

I'm sure that, like anything else, you can get them cheap. But I've really found that, especially as an adult, it's one of those things that's worth paying more for. You buy it then use it for years, and you have to spend so much time on it. It really makes a difference. I've been traveling a lot recently and have slept on a lot of different mattresses and it's amazing what a difference it makes to sleep on a better one.

Steve made a computer game zone called something like The Journal of Compugraphical Entertainment or something, which he distributed around town in Portland, and he cited that as his experience when he applied to be a contributor to Idle Thumbs back in 2005 or something. His zine had an interview with Greg Kasavin, which we then published on Idle Thumbs.

The whole game takes place in a contiguous space. Time is skipped according to the narrative, but when you have an objective you are free to go anywhere you have unlocked through traversal items like ropes/axe/etc., which you accrue as the game goes on. The demo takes place on Day 1, before you have gained the ability to go outside the critical path, but as the story continues and you have access to more paths, you can go to areas before you are required to by the story, find side areas, find shortcuts and alternate paths, etc.

Well I think it's telling in and of itself that there are so many more historical city-builders from Europe, as opposed to modern ones. And most of the modern ones from Europe have some other specific focus beyond simply (build a full-service city from the ground up, starting from a big empty flat plane), although obviously there are exceptions in all cases.

Time progresses according to the narrative, but it is still a global day/night system, so if you go back to another area that isn't along the narrative path, it will still be whatever time of day it is globally. In other words, if there is an area that you are only narratively required to visit once at night, you can still go see what it's like at dusk or dawn or noon or whatever later on, even if the story never actually specifically sends you back there.

I was definitely aware the Skylines devs are from Europe (I know Jake is aware of this as well), but I think given how direct a lift it is from Maxis' game, it's fair enough to interpret the design as conceptually American in origin. It is actually shocking how little this game reinvents the formula from the game that inspired it. (As I said on the podcast, I don't really consider this a bad thing, given what Maxis' game actually did with that formula.)

I think there's a big difference between a word like "gay" and a word like "crazy." "Gay" is a word that has been adopted by the group it is often used to disparage, and is a neutral term that simply refers to a state of being. It can be used as a pejorative, which is to be avoided because it implicitly paints that group negatively by being used to describe things negatively. "Crazy" is not the same. Unlike "gay," "crazy" is not a word that should actually be used to describe a group of people with a particular intrinsic commonality. You should not refer to people with mental illness as "crazy," because it is slapdash and negatively tinged. But if you then should not also use "crazy" in OTHER contexts because it HAS been used in those improper contexts, does this then mean that the word is simply stricken from the language among people who want to be respectful? It's hard for me to buy that.

Idle Thumbs 199: Bogost in the Shell The old becomes new, in a pod cast by two, as a title once lost becomes found. Chris and Jake plunge in to the new Darkest Dungeon, and Besiege delights as it confounds. Sean joins Chris and Jake before the ad break, and Gex lore is run into the ground. Things Discussed: Darkest Dungeon, Besiege, The Order: 1886, Captain Forever, Captain Forever Remix, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Nickelodeon Listen on the Episode Page Listen on Soundcloud Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

It changes the game in that you have changed what conversation Henry and Delilah have. It may also change future conversations that have their own conditional outcomes based on things you've said in the past.

While it's true that dialogue is a big part of the game, exploration and traversal and progression through a story are also important parts--and every single time there's a prompt to reply to Delilah, you can always simply choose not to respond, and the game considers that a valid response, with its own authored content.

Correct.

How's everyone's life going?

You probably already realize this, but it is worth noting that it doesn't really have to matter to you because your specific gender and sexuality are the least questioned/disadvantaged ones (same with me).

Idle Thumbs 168: On Blade Things have really gone to hell. It's all a big cacophonous mess. Sean and Danielle gave up the podcasting for a life of dealing drugs aboard a cruise ship to a man who worships John Madden. Jake just plays the same old games every night, a worthless old man. Chris... well who can even tell anymore? Yeah I know. Very, very off blade. Games Discussed: Velvet Sundown, The Last Of Us: Remastered Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

That makes sense to me—I didn't mean to imply that all trans people would have physical transition as an automatic goal. I just mean, the thing that causes their identified gender to be one thing and their originally-assigned gender as another was that the assignation was based on physical characteristics.

I apologize if this question is stupid for some reason, but what are some cases where this doesn't map to genitalia? (I'm not saying there are none, I just don't know.) Isn't that how your gender is assigned at birth, and therefore what causes the assignation to match or not match to your internal conception of yourself? I could imagine that an example of this would be people who are born with sex organs associated with more than one gender, but I imagine this is statistically relatively uncommon and your post makes me think that's probably not the only case you mean.

Welcome new folks!

I've spent a decent amount of time in the UK and tend to follow UK politics generally, and while the countries definitely have differences in approach, I think each country's particular brand of populist political journalism leaves a lot to be desired. Unfortunately the interviews that I think are the best tend to be a little harder to turn into sensational headline-grabbing affairs.

Yes.

As a short person, I can assure you that it is not.

Hello, new people!

I think there's something of a difference in that when I played those old 2D games when I was younger, I basically didn't even NOTICE all that UI crap. I just ignored all of it, didn't perceive it at all while playing. I think that feels pretty different to things actually existing in the 3D space that you are navigating.

I have no actual knowledge about this but I wouldn't be surprised if that story were simply made up by some localization employee at Nintendo of America. That seemed pretty standard for instruction manuals at the time.

I don't have any ability to prove or disprove any developer's motives for doing something, but that kind of metric is definitely easy enough to track without hooking into a player-facing system. It is arguably easier to piggyback on Valve's (or whoever's) existing API, and I guess on consoles developers are probably more limited in their ability to send data back to servers they control, so maybe that is the reason. But if acquiring player metrics were my main goal, unrelated to player-facing notifications, I think I would just implement a basic metrics-gathering system in the background.

Well, he did just say it would get expensive, not that it isn't possible.