Chris

I don't really; I had never played Rocketman or Man on the Moon before. I'm not sure I'd ever played Space Oddity all the way through either. (Also thanks!)

Yeah I think if you subscribe to a channel you can have it alert you.

Infinite is set in 1912 or 1913, but the fictional Columbia was constructed around when the Chicago World's Fair was held and is intended to be a fantastical representation of the kind of intense industrialization and innovation of which the actual World's Fair was emblematic. Devil in the White City was definitely read and frequently discussed by many at Irrational. I share Greg's distaste for the Holmes parts of Devil in the White City, but I thought the parts about the construction of the fair itself were fascinating. That's entirely due to the recounting of the history rather than the skill of Larsen's retelling, but I'm glad I read about it at least. I agree the invented interiority was total garbage. I never heard Against the Day mentioned in any context during my time at Irrational, despite it being brought up a number of times by journalists and other observers.

Mantel has stated (and it seems her assertion is generally accepted) that she did exhaustive research, deferring to history when the facts were known and filling in the blanks when they were not. Of course, that's still a lot to fill in, especially with respect to Cromwell's interior life and with respect to specific dialogue between characters. So you can't really call it non-fiction, but it's certainly overwhelmingly more accurate than something like The Tudors.

Jake was the most despondent about the loss of that episode, because it contained his introduction triumph.

Man I couldn't deal with that show. I watched a couple episodes and just thought it was awful. That's a funny image though--consistent enough with Mantel's telling.

That is an incredible bummer. This is one of the best pieces of historical fiction I've ever read, and that's a big reason why. One of the things that makes it so fascinating and worthwhile is that it reframes Cromwell away from the popular public conception. What is your department? English history?

I think this is at least as true now as it was then, possibly even moreso. Hotline Miami, the original Spelunky, and Gunpoint were all recently made in Game Maker. Unity is probably one of the most accessible and robust 3D game engines ever. The cost of large-scale commercial games has skyrocketed, of course, but an individual person would never have been making one of those a decade ago either.

Idle Thumbs 97: The Dash Rendar Synergy Jake and Sean are joined by Olly Moss and the rest of the population of England during their merry jaunt to the Baftas. Chris was left behind in San Francisco, where he's probably still playing Zuma. Games Discussed: Kentucky Route Zero, SimCity, Thomas Was Alone, The Silent Age, Shadows of the Empire, Assassin's Creed, Pandemic, Twilight Imperium, RIsk: Legacy Guests: Olly Moss, Duncan Fyfe, Lawrence Bishop, Ben Andac, and Alex Ashby Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

The thing is, based on the pretty evident patterns of this industry and the coverage surrounding it, without concerted advocacy it's pretty hard to imagine any significant change in makeup of the bulk of the people writing the reviews and making the games. It's been pretty much the same people with mainly the same general outlook making up the bulk of the discourse for quite some time now, with exceptions largely around the margins.

Maybe it just represents that one guy. That's actually something I think is missing from this game generally--the acknowledgement that not every person with a worldview is either 1) a down the line doctrinaire who takes every single aspect of his or her ideology to the most extreme point, or 2) basically a nihilist.

Oh, the pathos.

It's frustrating to me that Crytek perpetuates the "it's all/just about graphics" meme with respect to Crysis, because I feel the first Crysis game was one of the most interesting FPS gameplay experiences in recent years. I don't think that game is "just" (or even principally) about graphics, regardless of whether the person making the claim intends it as praise or dismissal.

The reason they're white straight dudes isn't to represent actual real-world straight dudes in a legitimate and realistic way, it's because it makes it easier for the audience of white straight dudes to slip into whatever power fantasy or fictional character IS being presented. Edit: oh whoops, I missed a whole page of posts and now this is floating out in the thread without proper context. Oh well. Edit 2: it seems castorp has already said this also.

Yep. Possibly my favorite single asset in the entire game?? God it's so good.

I disagree! To me they were pretty different angles on the notion of conspiracy. To my reading, anyway, Foucault's Pendulum was sort of about while The Prague Cemetery is a more sinister tale about

I don't remember those performances being good enough for standalone music releases. But I did use that arrangement of The Wizard as the basis for the new recording.

Welcome, people!

It's actually all recorded--they aren't new songs, they're better recordings of these songs: - New theme - The Fanboy's Lament - Space Asshole - The Wizard We're trying to figure out how we should actually make the vinyl. It's harder than we expected. It's a bit too long for a standard EP but it's a real waste of a full LP. We're right in the frustrating middle ground.

http://borderhouseblog.com/ ?

Yeah, I got the same feeling. We'll see.

One thing I'll say about our comments on BioShock vs BioShock Infinite: If BioShock had just come out and we were doing a deep dive analysis of it, there are PLENTY of moment-to-moment nitpicks I could bring up, and have in the past. But at the end of the day, that game was successful for me. I felt that way at the time, not just in retrospect. Despite its issues, it ultimately cohered as a work--at least for me. If Infinite had gelled as an overall work for me (for us), I think we would have been a lot more forgiving of its various less-consequential weaknesses, even if we still acknowledged them. But it seemed like all of us were left kind of bummed out by it on balance, even though there are ALSO plenty of individual admirable things about it. Hopefully that makes sense. There's the detailed design critique, and then there's the holistic critique as a work, and they're both valid and have their place. BioShock has gone through its years of design criticism, and for many people (like us on this podcast) it still holds up as a complete work. BioShock Infinite is newly released so it's still going through both of those categories of analysis.

This is just where we fundamentally disagree, I guess. To me, it's not a matter of "fighting the battle." It's a matter of critiquing the game that exists in front of my face. My criticisms of it are not out of a sense of advocacy; they're a direct result of the experience I had while playing. I'm not going to have an opinion about a game and then say "Well this probably isn't the right time to bring this up;" that would be pointlessly dishonest in my opinion. (Obviously if you don't have those criticisms then it's totally fair not to bring them up.) I don't often read comic books or sci-fi or fantasy novels, so I don't give a video game a pass because it's like them; but even if I did read those things, I'd like to think I wouldn't make arbitrary distinctions about what's allowed to get a critical pass and what isn't. The main point where I disagree with you in practice about this specific game (rather than just in a general philosophical way about the role of criticism) is about what Infinite is "trying" to do. I absolutely think it's trying to be more than just another dumb fun video game. To me it feels like a game that's trying to Say Something at every turn (I think Jake felt this way on the cast as well), and say it very loudly, but the thing it's trying to say is, to me, muddled and in some cases actually objectionable. But again, even if it wasn't "trying" to present a nuanced perspective on American racism and exceptionalism, it still raised the topics--a LOT of them, not just passing references--and so in my opinion it's 100% open for critique on its treatment of those matters.

"It's a shooter" means nothing to me in terms of the standard to which the game's material should be held. It's a deliberate work created by human beings; the fact that it happens to be in a genre we call "first-person shooter" is essentially meaningless from a critical standpoint as far as I'm concerned. It's a game. It has creative choices that were made and those should be judged on their own merits, not given some kind of arbitrary pass because they happen to be part of a genre. If you choose to use major historical tragedies as window-dressing for your games--or your movie, or your book, or your opera, or your comic strip, or whatever--you better well earn it. I'm not going to hold your work accountable to presenting a nuanced accounting of the history of race in America if you don't put that shit there in the first place. But if you do, I will.

I don't think that's it for me. Having worked on the game for a while I'm already familiar with the plot stuff you're talking about; but just on his own merits he's still not as compelling a character as Ryan to me.