Chris

Oh hey also

Could you post some examples of the blue-sky Japanese games you're talking about? Don't say stuff like Sonic, because that's a decades-old franchise that reflects lingering popularity, not modern Japanese sensibility. You're saying that a game with gore "doesn't count," and yet some of the most overtly Japanese games in recent years, like Bayonetta, Demon's Souls, No More Heroes, and so on, are crazy violent constant-insanity gorefests to the max. They may have a different aesthetic to most of their Western counterparts, but they're hardly the blue-sky Sonic the Hedgehog games of yore. Demon's Souls doesn't have the same visual intensity of those other two, but it's also the "darkest and grittiest" of the three by far. Red Dead Redemption, one of the American games mentioned in this thread, is a thousand times less in-your-fucking-face-with-violent-intensity than Bayonetta or No More Heroes. It, as well as other American games mentioned like Oblivion, spend huge amounts of time with the player simply exploring an expansive environment. Sometimes for hours on end, games like those can be experiences that are best described as contemplative, especially if the player desires it to be so, since they are heavily player-paced. I think most of us understand your point in a very general sense, but I think you're picking and choosing both games and actual criteria to construct a more artificial situation than is reflected in reality.

This is the vaguest invitation imaginable.

As far as I know, they didn't add it "back in" per se, it was just always there in the PC one. It's not DLC, it's just part of the game. When I played it, I didn't even realize I was playing extra content.

We didn't have any hand in organizing this one. We're happy to call stuff like this out on the @idlethumbs Twitter if forum users continue to take the initiative.

I don't remember there being any Citizen Kane references.

Gravity Bone is great. You can also complete it in a single sitting, and it's free, so you might as well play it.

That's Jake's "thing."

As usual, people at the meet were the coolest. Thanks for showing up! It was nice to have a relaxing evening after working behind the booth all day.

Thanks! Although while I handled Hold On To Your B.U.T.T.O.N., Jake actually took over editing duties for Games Kasavin, because I was flying back to Boston at the time.

I think he just pitched it but it never got greenlit for production.

I've only really seen the original Star Trek series (and only for the first time shortly before the new movie came out) but I liked it a lot. It felt like it was about ideas to me. It reminded me of the Ray Bradbury kind of sci-fi, which uses a loosely-grounded sci-fi setting to explore concepts and questions. Obviously not every episode was gold, but in general I thought the goal of the show was really laudable. I don't really think stories about people's relationships are particularly interesting unless there's genuine subtext there. Star Trek has a lot of relationships between the characters, but because it doesn't have a lot to really say on a deep level about those relationships, it doesn't make them the central focus. It uses them to provide consistent context and give the viewer people to relate to. It's the reason I don't watch soap operas, which are just about nothing other than characters' relationships. As a comparison, one of my favorite recent movies was A Serious Man. In terms of pure plot, it's pretty much nothing but interpersonal relationships and personal struggles--but there is some heavy shit to think about in that film. It's only about the characters insofar as it is about the themes, truths, and questions that underpin them. In terms of TV, same goes for Mad Men. It's all just people interacting, but that show serves as an amazing microcosm of a dying strain of American culture in the 60s, a strain that is largely absent from historical discussion that tends to focus (understandably) on parallel issues with civil rights, anti-war protests, and so on. I think there's a certain vein of current indie film that falls prey to the "characters and relationships equal substance" line. They have all kinds of characters and relationships, but they don't genuinely illuminate anything. That's just the general feeling I got from Firefly--that I could spend episode after episode watching these people fly around in space and talk to each other and probably shoot some guys or whatever, but that ultimately it wouldn't really leave me with anything. I could be wrong, but I already wasn't enjoying the dialogue or basic trappings of the show, so it would have been a really hard sell for me to keep going.

I guess that's part of what I don't like about it as well. If it's not really about being in space or being about technology, why does it take place in spaceships on space? One reason I love Moon (for example) so much is because it IS about technology and space and so on--while ALSO being a very human story. I don't like sci-fi that's just about spaceships and lasers, but if it's going to all take place on spaceships and other planets in outer space and stuff, I feel like it should be about that somehow. I love the old Star Wars movies because they feel to me like they have this entire unique aesthetic all their own that utterly demands the setting; the new Star Wars movies, and Firefly, don't feel like that at all to me (I'm not claiming Firefly is equivalent to the new Star Wars movies in other respects). Moon and Star Wars fall on radically different parts of the sci-fi spectrum, but I love them both, because to me they both justify pretty much everything about themselves. If Firefly is really "just people and their lives," would it stand up if it were just in a normal place and not sci-fi? Would people have watched that show? To be fair, I'm sure the people who enjoy it would say yes, but it definitely doesn't for me, at least not what I saw of it.

She's not "just a woman." If it were a male character of otherwise similar qualities, I would feel precisely the same way--and indeed I often do about a lot of fantasy and sci-fi stuff, usually the kind of stuff that spans a dozen books in a series, which is (among various other reasons) why I've pretty much entirely stopped reading and watching most sci-fi and fantasy. It's one reason I don't find superheroes interesting, and elves who are described as killing forty guys effortlessly with a sword, or whatever. There are a million examples. I just find that stuff too ridiculous to enjoy. The main exception is video games, but in those cases what I enjoy about controlling a powerful character (which is almost every character in every video game) is the mechanics involved, and rarely the fiction. It's one reason a game like STALKER speaks to me so strongly, I think; your character in that game, while ultimately still endowed with the trump card of being in the hands of the player, is for the most part on the same playing field as all the other characters in his situation. It's not a hard and fast rule to me. I love, for example, the Indiana Jones movies (the first two anyway), even though Indiana Jones is clearly superhuman relative to all the Nazis or whomever. But it's the context that's important, and it's a very different context. I'm still not into most action movies. I don't want to imply this is the only thing I didn't like about Serenity and Firefly. I really can't stand the writing and general cadence of speech. That seems to have been discussed earlier in this thread though.

I don't think I had ever even heard of him before everyone started talking about Firefly, which in turn I hadn't heard about until it was canceled. I watched the first few episodes at a friend's insistence, knowing nothing about the show, and didn't enjoy them at all. Then when Serenity came out on DVD, I was again persuaded to give it a shot, and I absolutely hated it. I haven't seen any of his other stuff, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but based on how off-putting I found almost almost every aspect of Firefly and Serenity, I doubt it's worth trying to find out. I genuinely don't think I had any preconceptions about Whedon since I was essentially unaware of both him and his entire body of work before I saw Firefly. I'm sure I had heard of the Buffy show but I didn't know anything about it. If I had to think of just one example that communicates the general kind of thing I found really cringe-inducing about Serenity, it would be that young-looking girl who kicks everyone's ass, whoever that was (I don't remember if she was in the Firefly episodes I saw). It's exactly the kind of unbearable nerd-pandering that basically makes something unwatchable for me. That's not to say if her character weren't there that I would have enjoyed it; that's just a concrete, easily remembered thing that pops to mind.

I absolutely despise Whedon's work. He is one of very few writers whose work I dislike so much that I actively avoid it, rather than simply not making an effort to see it. And yeah I think Brad Pitt is a good actor in this universe already!

I really hate that other universe too.

I was aware that Star Wars was a thing but I had never seen it and I didn't know much about it really. I also played Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis before I saw an Indiana Jones movie--started it, anyway. I saw my first Indiana Jones in the middle of my playthrough. I also played the Blade Runner game before I really saw Blade Runner. Technically I had seen Blade Runner when I was recovering from surgery in the hospital full of morphine, but it was a very hazy, drug-addled experience, and I didn't retain much of it in a concrete sense. I also played Chronicles of Riddick without seeing the film, and have still never seen either of those two movies (or however many there are). And yeah like others same goes for Metro 2033, The Witcher, etc. I'm sure there are more. I also played Monkey Island before riding Pirates of the Caribbean. OHHH

They say it's our birthday "First Annual Year" The Idle Thumbs podcast turns one year old on Saturday, and to celebrate we bring you a regular episode. This week we wipe a curmudgeonly tear from our classic PC gaming eye, and find yet again that making fun of something we thought could never exist only seems to bring it to life. Plus: "Video game stories are serious business," says madly hopping, car-flipping, building-smashing man. Games Discussed: Red Faction: Guerrilla, The Ripper, Tales of Monkey Island, Metal Gear Solid, Mass Effect 2, Stargoose

It's actually primarily a result of the specific process they used; it wasn't really a deliberate creative choice or precisely a product of the time period itself. They used entirely proprietary tools to handle the rotoscoping and film transfer process, and it took a vast amount of time to complete each animation frame.

I'd take that.

Shawn isn't a community manager and never has been. As of several months ago, he became a designer, after spending a good amount of time during his first year and a half or so learning the design tools.

He'll still be handling some episodes; we'll be trading off in a fairly casual way. We figured it made sense to keep both of our names mentioned in every episode, regardless, for consistency's sake.

Shawn Elliott isn't actually in this...........except to say "and I'm Shawn Elliott." :tup::tup: